Farm Happenings

Weather: Cold, mostly, but we had an interesting warm spell last weekend. On Sunday, Chris left the farm for town at around noon with plenty of mud clinging to his shoes; by three, when he returned, the ground had already refrozen. Monday morning treated us to huge, fantastic sundogs that lasted for much of the morning. Wednesday morning dawned clear and white, with giant snow flake crystals that glinted in the sunlight- beautiful snow-plowing weather! Forecast snow for Thursday night means that Chris is planning to head up to stay with friends at Gardens of Eagan in Farmington, where he’ll plug in the truck to keep everything at the right temperature and hopefully miss the worst of the weather.

Comings and Goings: Chris’ mom, Karlla, came to visit from Seattle last week. She and Chris spent most of the week overhauling the bookkeeping system (Mom’s a QuickBooks wizard) to provide better, more intuitive data entry and feedback. Chris attended a class on financial record keeping and decision making with the Land Stewardship Project in Rochester, and went to a meeting at Featherstone Fruits and Produce in Rushford to discuss alternative transportation and distribution systems for local farms moving vegetables into the greater Twin Cities area.

What We Did: Sarah began the long process of inventorying all of our supplies in the packing house. Since we can pretty reliably predict what we will use over the course of the summer, a good inventory helps us avoid emergency shortages when the heat is on. She and Brenda also began cleaning and oiling all of the handtools, soaking the heads in buckets of water to tighten them to the handles (a good trick I learned from Grandpa Blanchard. Grandpa farmed tomatoes for two years near La Grange, Oregon, taking them over the Wallowa Mountains into Pendleton. This was back in the thirties. I never heard him swear except when he told me this story, which he concluded by saying, “It was a hell of a way to make a living.”)