Inspiration

It's been four days since we got back from our weekend in Corvallis, and I am still buzzing. Last Saturday we attended the OSU Small Farms Conference- 600 people all gathered in one place to talk about small family farms, farmer's markets and the challenges and joys of running a small farm in Oregon. It was great, especially the opening talk by David Mas Masumoto, author of ' Epitaph for a Peach' and 'The Wisdom of the Last Farmer', which I look forward to reading as soon as Packy is finished with our new (signed!) copy.

We had never been to the OSU Small Farms conference before, and it was such a good experience for us both that we will definitely be back. It was great to run into so many friends from the North Coast food and farming community there, and to meet up with fellow farm enthusiasts from all over the state.

One of the best things was seeing how many other first time attendees there were at the conference. Interest in farming is exploding in Oregon, especially among younger people- I've heard that our state is actually seeing an increase in the number of farms in operation, running against a declining national trend.

Even better than Saturday's experience was the gathering we attended on Sunday sponsored by Friends of Family Farmers.

The Farmer and Rancher Delegate Meeting to discuss the Agricultural Reclamation Act has to be one of the most inspiring days of my recent life, as well as one of the best run meetings I have ever attended. (And given that this was a meeting of 60 or so highly opinionated farmers and ranchers, that's really saying something.)

The best description I can give for what this was all about is in the words of FoFF themselves:

On February 28th, 2010, we will host our first Farmer Delegation in Corvallis, where a cross-section of family farmers will come together to establish a statewide platform for food and family farming in Oregon. Through this process, the Agricultural Reclamation Act for Oregon will be written. Our combined strength, represented through this document, will put family farms first, and ensure that public officials hear and understand the needs of farmers who are practicing a type of agriculture that respects the land, sustains rural communities and contributes to the states economy.

You can go and watch this short film that FoFF made about the process to learn more- if I was tech-savvy enough to embed the video I would, but I'm not, so you'll have to just follow the link.

It was a phenomenal day- great discussions and debate about some of the biggest issues facing small family farmers all over the state. There are a lot of seriously talented and smart people farming in this state, which gives me great hope for the future of small farms in Oregon. I have never felt so sure of my decision to become a farmer, and of the importance of that work to the communities we farm in as I was that day. When we were all asked to come up at the end of the meeting to sign our names to the ARA declaration, it was pretty powerful stuff. I will admit that that was not just a speck of dust in my eye- I was genuinely moved by the courage and determination of all of the people in that room to find a way to continue farming and providing healthy food for our local communities. Packy and I both came away so fired up, and determined to find a way to get our farm up and running again. We had a lively discussion throughout the long drive home to Olney shifting between the ideas and questions raised at the meeting and our plans for our farm's future.

Many thanks to all the hardworking people at FoFF, both staff and volunteers, for organizing the meeting and for pulling the whole day off so brilliantly. You are all amazing.

Thanks also go the the Astoria Co-op for helping to sponsor the event when they saw that we were attending as delegates from the North Coast. Their commitment to supporting more local food production in our community is so encouraging, and we hope to be able to supply them with great locally grown stuff in the not-too distant future. (Maybe even some edible plant starts this year, if we can get the greenhouse rebuilt in time.)

Getting ready for more seedlings... you can never have enough!

It was more than a little hard for me to come back down to earth on Monday morning, get in the car and head off to work to help make sure our mortgage gets paid. We still have a long way- and several thousand feet of elk fencing- to go before we can truly start farming seriously, but for a couple of days I got to think of myself as a farmer again, and to remember why I love doing it so much.

Which is why I know that I will find a way to make our farm rise again- I can't not do it.

As hard as the work is, I have never done anything so satisfying in my life.

Little do The Elk know that they are standing smack in the middle of our future orchard.

We need SUCH a huge fence.....

Discovery

For any gardener, one of the most delightful aspects of getting to know a new growing space happens in the first year you live on your new property:

Discovery.

When we moved here in October of last year, things were pretty much dying back. The leaves on the trees were almost gone, the rose was covered in rose hips and whatever plants had been planted to cheer the place up and make it attractive to potential buyers figured that their work was done, and had long since given up and died off.

There are a number of older trees and shrubs around the house, some of which I am excited about, and some not. I love that there is a huge lilac right by the back door, and the tulip magnolia is covered in velvety buds- I can't wait to see what it looks like in bloom. I've never been a big fan of rhododendrons, but as they are the quintissential Northwest flowering plant that deer and elk don't eat, I am working on developing an appreciation for the three we have inherited- I just hope they are not that cloying pink one.

The big surprise so far has been this tree that we thought was possibly some kind of purple beech. We had only ever seen it in leaf, or without leaves. There was a huge, beautiful purple beech tree near our old farm in Seaside, and I suppose my mind just associated 'purple leaves' with 'purple beech'. It's a good thing I'm not an arborist.

Years ago, back when I was still fairly intellectual and read things other than seed catalogs and books about propagation, I read a book by Nikos Kazantzakis called 'Report to Greco'- not in the original Greek, I'm not that good. I have always remembers this haiku that he wrote in that book:

"I said to the almond tree,

"Sister, speak to me of God,

and the almond tree blossomed."

I'm not a particularly religious person, but the morning I walked out of our back door to see that tree blooming, backlit by welcome winter sunlight, I really got it why people are. I could almost hear that choral note sounding around me, which in Western pop culture is always the signal that something miraculous has happened.

Or that the credits for Star Trek (original version) have just begun.

We are off this weekend to attend the OSU Small Farms Conference in Corvallis on Saturday, and even more exciting, we are North Coast delegates to the Friends of Family Farmers 'Agricultural Reclamation Act' gathering the following day. I know we will come back inspired and even more determined to make our farm a success. I will let you know how it goes...

...and when Packy got close to the tree, he realized that it was

humming with happy honey bees.

Reassurance

I've gotten a lot of questions lately from concerned customers and friends about plant starts. "What do you mean, you've moved the farm?!" said the guy ringing up my purchase at Costco the other night. "I just got my garden all sorted out and ready to plant this year, where am I going to get those tomato plants?"

It's going to be OK.

We have to take a short trip to visit family this weekend, and as soon as we get back, the seeds are getting started. (It seemed a bit much to ask the lovely person staying with the cats to also babysit several hundred seedlings as well.)

It won't be as big a selection as we've done in the past, but all the North Coast tomato favourites will be there: Stupice, Sungold, Paul Robeson, Black Cherry, Yellow Pear, San Marzano, and several others that I am blanking on right now. It's terribly hard- the seed catalogs have been SO tempting this year, and I am trying hard to maintain some self control.

We'll have lettuce, spinach, peas, beans, greens and an assortment of other veg plants, as well as the flower and herb favourites- calendula, poppies, nasturtiums, cerinthe, cilantro and basil too.

It won't be the same, but it will be better than no plants at all. I've got to get poppies and calendula growing here as soon as possible to start building up the seed bank in the soil. Things were just getting perfect at the old farm with plants sowing themselves (mostly ones that I wanted) and I just cannot imagine not having poppies growing randomly throughout the farm. I am interested to see what comes up here this spring, but I fear it is mainly going to be some morning glory right around the house, and Canada thistle in the pasture (right where we want to put the orchard). Ugh. I don't see many bulbs at all- I will miss Mrs. Ostman's daffodils.

We've been spending time walking the property, figuring out what will go where, and if that makes sense from a work efficiency viewpoint. We've marked out where the greenhouse will go, and as soon as we get a stretch of dry weather our friend Dan will come over with his tractor to scrape down the site, and we can get it re-built. We're dreaming of adding on to it, on the theory that it was already feeling too small. We'll see if our budget can squeeze out an extra twenty feet of growing space- I will happily live on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches if it gives me more room for seedlings!

Stay tuned.

Eddie the Cat can't wait until we turn on the Indoor Sun again

46 North Farm

After a tremendous amount of talking and searching and way,way too much thinking about what to call our new farm, we realized that there was never going to be a perfect, bolt-of-lightning-out-of-the-sky name, and that it really didn't matter.

In looking for our name, I came across hundreds of farm names, and you know what? They are all pretty odd. Some are boring, some are obvious, some are funny, some are weird, and in the end if a farm is a great farm and has a good reputation, people will think highly of it and the name will just work.

I realize that this statement flies in the face of the work that many highly paid "branding professionals" make careers out of. I don't mean to claim that if we had fixed upon 'Rabid Flying Killer Squirrel Farm' as a name, we might not have someday come to question our decision! But I think that as long as your farm name isn't too offensive or bizarre, then it's up to you to make it work and make people connect to it and remember it.

With all this winter rain, we are learning where the wet spots on the property are...

So thanks to my brother-in-law Andy, cartographer with the U.S. Census Bureau (it is so cool to have a professional map maker in the family- we always know just where we are), we were able to agree upon a place-based name that no one else had yet registered the domain name for, 46 North Farm. Our farm's location is at roughly 46 degrees North (latitude), and 123 degrees West (longitude). There are minutes involved to make the location more exact (why are they called minutes, Andy?) which I believe are somewhere in the comments section of the last post, if you really need to know exactly where your fabulous heirloom tomato plant will be grown this year.

Yes! We are going to grow some plant starts this year Not many, and we probably won't do any markets- maybe one or two days depending on our schedules. We are talking to the Astoria Co-op about selling plants at their store, and if that doesn't work for you, we will figure out some way to get you the plants you want. I think we've figured out where to re-build the greenhouse, which will start happening soon, but in the meantime our basement is going to become the grow-light capital of Olney.

It will be a much shorter plant list this year, because we just don't have the time to do a huge run. But we will make sure to grow all our best and favourite varieties of tomatoes, lettuce, peas and beans, leafy greens, herbs and flowers. If there is a particular variety you want to make sure we are growing, ask for it now while there is still time to order seeds!

I'll post a plant list soon. In the meantime, stay warm and as dry as you can, and savor the longer days. Spring will be here before you know it.

Coming to this site soon: Greenhouse 3.0 (Or would it be 46 North Farm's Greenhouse 1.0?)

The Farm Formerly Known as Ostman

New South Roof! Our resident Nisse managed to hold the good weather for another week, so Tim and his crew blew through the barn's south side roof in a couple of days. Unfortunately we weren't able to document it due to our Real Job commitments during daylight hours- but it is Beautiful to see it DONE.

I agree with what Shakespeare was getting at with his "What's in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet" comment. Fortunately for him, Mr. Shakespeare never had to deal with modern marketing issues like domain name availability.

When we decided to leave the land Ostman Farm lived on, we knew we would be leaving the name behind as well. We called the farm that in honor of John and Hilma Ostman, the land's original farmers, who ran Ostman's Dairy there from the thirties until sometime in the early sixties. We are not related to the Ostmans or their descendants except by friendship. The idea of keeping the name– even though we are now reasonably well known on the North Coast by that name– always seemed weird and just wrong to us. If we ever started a new farm, we knew would start over with a whole new identity. Possibly not the smartest marketing move, but the only one that we could live with.

Up close, the roof is incredible, but even standing twenty feet away you can smell the fresh cedar shingles. It is a wonderful scent- to me, it smells dry and safe and secure.

So here we are! New land, new farm, new barn with gorgeous new barn roof. So our new name is now.... hmmm.

Originally, when we first tried to buy this land back in the summer of 2008 and had to call it something in our business plan, we were calling it Home Farm. Simple, easy to remember, and meaningful. While trying to work out how to run our farm on land we were leasing from someone else, we had come to understand that essentially what we needed was a place to call Home. A safe place where we could put down roots, both figuratively and literally, and know that we had some say in what would happen to those roots in the future. We wanted to spend years getting to know a piece of land- how the sun moved across it, where the water went, what wildlife lived there, when the migrating birds arrived and left. I wanted to spend time building our soil, watching the plants respond year after year, and someday, hopefully late in my nineties, I wanted to just keel over while picking green beans in the sunshine. Just toss me on the compost pile, I will have died content.

I had always liked the simplicity of how in England, the Home Farm was the name given to the farm near where the local landed gentry's estate was, and was where the household would get their eggs, milk and produce from. It's almost a generic term for a farm in England. Simple. Easy to remember.

Unfortunately in this age of online marketing, no small business that wants to be even reasonably successful, farms included, can be without the obligatory website, blog, e mail list and possibly facebook page at a minimum. I don't think our farm will twitter, except in the traditional sense when the migratory song birds are moving through. But the rest of it? Working on it, as much as we are working on getting the greenhouse and the rest of our plants moved.

When you fix on a name that is so simple, and already very much out there in traditional usage, you can be pretty sure others will have gotten there before you, and such is the case. There are several Home Farms, (even the Prince of Wales has one), and on top of that, someone is squatting on the domain name. If we had an extra $40k to spend on homefarm.com it might be something to consider, but I would rather put any funds we have into rebuilding the farm itself.

Looking for a New Name- Tall Trees Farm?

So we now find ourselves playing a verbal game all day long. Name that Farm! We've been through some of the obvious choices. We could name it after ourselves, or a combination of our names. Retzlaff Farm? Too hard to pronounce. Coleman Farm? People will think we sell camping supplies. Retzman, or Coleoff Farm? Not quite right. Teresa's Farm? Packy's Farm? TP Farm? Definitely not. There isn't a creek running through the property to give us one of those obvious landscape feature names like 'Circle Creek Farm'. We do have a unnamed gully cutting across the pasture that runs seasonally, but 'Seasonal Gully Farm' just doesn't sound right.

What about where we are located- 202 Farm? (We are on Highway 202.) Kind of bland. 9 Mile Farm?(We are just past the 9 mile marker.) Aside from being an oddly popular word combination, (and the name of a Canadian pop band) we don't want to be confused with the Nine Mile Point Nuclear Reactor.

Olney Farm? Olney is the name of the area we live in- not a legal town with it's own post office and such, but there is The Olney Store (with the Big O Saloon next door), and the Olney Grange already out there. Would the Olney Farm be unique enough? Apparently not. There is already an Olney Farm- a fifth generation pony breeding farm located in Maryland that has the domain name olneyfarm.com nicely tied up.

We love wildlife- what about naming it after some bird or animal that lives here (that we are not planning on driving away). Packy is very stuck on Kinglet Farm, because during all this freezing weather, we had little kinglets flying into our enclosed porch looking for warmth, and banging on all the windows trying to pick bug remnants out of the frozen cobwebs. But to me that is way too close to Kingfisher Farm, the legendary organic farm that Jeff Trenary runs down in Nehalem.

Olney Elk are bold as brass and take no crap from anyone.

We are going to need some serious fencing if we are

going to be good neighbours...

40 Elk Farm? We've now met the herd, and they are a somewhat daunting prospect as neighbours. But will people think we raise elk for meat? We'd love it if some beavers would take up residence down in our seasonal gully, so what about Welcome Beaver Farm? Yeah, get your minds out of the gutter. See? This isn't easy. Plus we run the risk of alienating all the University of Oregon Duck fans. The Beaver-Duck rivalry in Oregon is fierce, best not to wade into those waters. Wildlife names can be tricky. We haven't hit on one that is just IT.

Plants? We have a lone apple tree (possibly crab apple) on the property from an earlier agricultural time, so I thought about Wild Apple Farm, which I like and of course Packy doesn't. However, it's irrelevant, because the domain name takes you to a weather site in Maine. (?!? More squatters, I think.) I kind of like the idea of using the word 'wild', so what about Wild Roots Farm? taken. Wildroot? taken. Wild Life Farm? Takes you to a family website with lots of photos of their travels.

Packy liked the idea of naming the farm after our newly discovered Nisse, in hope that it will continue to do good work on our behalf, but guess what? Nisse Farm? Taken.

I thought about a comment someone made to us when we described all that was going on with our farm. "You sure do have your hands full!" "Hmm", I thought. "Hands Full Farm?" Already taken. But not Full Hands Farm, so that's still on the table, although Packy isn't keen on it. He might be persuaded if things get desperate.

Full Belly, Full Moon, Full Harvest, Open Hands, Four Hands, Many Hands, Clapping Hands, Wild Moon, Harvest Moon, Wild Harvest... taken, taken, taken.

It's a good thing we've never had kids. They probably would have spent the first 18 years of their lives being known as ' Hey You' or 'Number Three'.

How is it that we can immediately come up with snappy names for our cats, but not for our farm??

Got any Farm Name thoughts? You may as well toss in your two cents. Maybe we can figure out a prize for the winning suggestion.

Even if we don't have a new name, we have a New Barn Roof.

In late December on the North Oregon Coast, that is even better.

Appeasing the Nisse

We've been so consumed with thinking about how much we wanted to buy this farm- needed to buy it, if we were going to be able to someday continue farming. So many times the deal seemed just impossible. We kept trying to give up on this place and find somewhere else, anywhere else, but this farm kept calling to us, and we both just had a strong feeling about it being The Place. Even when we'd given up on it completely, we still thought of it as ours.

I'm only a slightly superstitious person, but I'm beginning to suspect that there is a spirit that guards our farm, and that it knew that the farm, and the barn in particular, really needed new owners- ones who would love it, and care for it. Maybe the spirit spotted us the first day we walked around on the property. Maybe it saw us keep coming back, over and over, trying to figure out how to make it all work out and thought "Hah! These two will put everything they have into keeping this place going."

Most of the farmers who settled in Clatsop County were Scandinavian, or from Finland, which is not quite Scandinavian but close. So I suspect that what we have here is a nisse (or tomte, depending on where you come from) - a household spirit type of creature responsible for the care and prosperity of a farm. They seem to have a fair amount of potential for mischief, but if properly respected can actually help a farmer get quite a lot of work done. However, if our nisse was residing in the barn, as they seem inclined to do, he had to be pretty damn concerned about whether or not he'd have a home after this winter.

Just about a week ago, Tim and his crew began stripping off shingles on one side of the barn roof. It was right at the end of a wretched two weeks of pouring rain and wind that had soaked and pummeled the North Coast into a soggy mess. But that Monday morning it began to clear, and all this week it has been sunny- cold and frosty, but clear.

The roof was stripped off in a day. Tim and his guys told us that when they were pulling the old shingles off, in places it was almost like scraping compost off the roof, the shingles were that decomposed. It looks like this was basically the original roof that had just been patched and repaired over the years, but never fully replaced. We aren't quite sure when the barn was built, but people who grew up around here remember it being here in the thirties, so that's seventy years old at least.

With half the roof off, the barn began to dry out, and the swollen floor boards of the hay loft settled back down. It was an amazing experience to climb up into the hay loft early Wednesday morning just after dawn and stand there looking out through the skip sheathing at the cold, clear sky. I'm happy to have seen it, and hope Packy can see what it looks like when the other side of the roof is stripped off, (he had to leave the farm in the dark at around 4am that morning to get to the bakery) but then I hope we never have to see it again in our lifetime.

Later that day they began to nail on the gorgeous new cedar shingles. I still can't believe how fast it went, at least the first half of the side.

The top part where the roof curves in the tricky bit- I'm sorry I wasn't here to see them manage it, although perhaps it's better that I didn't see it, it would have been like watching the high wire act at the circus. Very nerve wracking for those of us on the ground- I can't imagine what it is like looking at it from up there.

Another interesting discovery was that the nails that held the skip sheathing to the rafters were mostly rusted away, and they had to re-nail them all to hold the roof together. I keep wondering- what was holding the barn together during this last big storm?? I still can't figure it out. Sheer willpower on the part of our nisse, perhaps. He must be exhausted, and ready to settle down to a nice rest in a finally dry, cozy barn. If he can just hold off the rain for another week, all will be well.

Hopefully he will adapt and protect greenhouses as well, as Packy and our good friend Joe plan to dismantle the greenhouse at the old farm in Seaside this week in preparation for moving it to it's new home.

I'm sure the nisse is already happier, but just in case he's still a bit cranky at getting so wet this year, we'll make sure to leave him the traditional bowl of porridge (don't forget the butter on top) in the barn on Christmas day.

Hey, we need all the help we can get.

This week- the south side gets its turn...

Farm 2.0

On a nice sunny day, everything seems possible

I've been meaning to write a new post for ages and catch everyone up on The Farm Saga- I am so sorry it has taken this long. After much polite prodding from friends, family and loyal customers waiting for an update (thank for the push, Barb!) I am finally taking a bit of time in between bouts of digging up and moving plants to fill in the gaps of the last three months.

The good news? We got the loan!! We own Land!! The Farm that Now Has No Official Name lives on. Well, let's be honest. The Bank owns the new farm, and we are working like crazy to make sure we make our mortgage payments so that we can one day (in the distant future) call it completely ours. We still miss farming, more than we can even begin to explain, but we continue to be grateful for the jobs we have that are allowing us the opportunity to be stewards of our own piece of farm land.

The deal closed sometime around the end of September, I can't remember the exact date. It was all a blur of stress and anxiety. Ironically, I had been invited to address an all day conference on local food security put on by Clatsop Community Action, speaking as a local farmer on the state of farming in Clatsop County.

I remember being completely freaked out because our loan hadn't yet closed, although it was at the 'any day now' stage. We had been asked to actually write a letter to the potential lenders explaining how although we indeed had a 'history of farming', and had worked at this 'part time hobby business' of a small farm for the previous almost six years, we had seen the error of our ways, and had now gotten 'real jobs' for reliable income, and only wanted to purchase a house with 18 acres of reasonably well-drained land zoned for agriculture complete with charming outbuildings because we had gotten used to living a 'rural lifestyle' and wanted to continue that lifestyle, but had no plans to actually try to run a farm on the land.

We discovered the hard way that to a bank, 'Farm' is a nasty four-letter word that starts with 'F', and to confess to a 'history of farming' is akin to having a history of illegal drug abuse. Not quite a felony, but not really something to be proud of when applying for a loan.

So, it was more than nerve-wracking to be standing up in public (and in front of press representatives) talking about our farming experiences, and speaking about our hopes for the future of our new farm, and the future of agriculture in Clatsop County while behind the scenes we were desperately trying to look like regular 9-5 working folks who just like to grow an awful lot of tomato plants. Fortunately, the lenders don't seem to read the Daily Astorian, and a few days later we were called in to sign the papers (so many papers!) that meant that the farm land we had been lusting after for over two years was finally ours. Not that we were planning on actually FARMING it or anything. (Insert casual whistling noise here....)

Acres of reasonably well-drained soil- for a farmer in Clatsop County, it's better than gold

It was an amazing feeling- terrifying and thrilling at the same time.

Then the reality of moving hit- not just moving our household, but moving our household AND farm business. All those plants carefully planted years ago that were just finally starting to settle in and thrive, the plant nursery, the greenhouse, thousands of containers, miles of weed cloth and row cover, tools, soil amendments, odds and ends.... it has all been a wee bit daunting. Plus factor in that by the time the deal closed, and we started getting things packed in boxes and ready to move, it was well into October, and the Northwest Autumn Storm Season had begun. It has all made for a most challenging move.

We've been living at the new farm for almost a month now, but are still traveling back to the old farm several times a week, jobs and weather permitting, to continue dismantling the farm and transporting it northward. It is slow going, but we are making progress, and hope to be done by the end of the year. I hate to keep asking you all to keep crossing your fingers for us, but if you could just keep thinking good weather thoughts for a few more weeks, it would really help.

One of the most distinctive elements of this property is the old dairy barn. We aren't quite sure of the date it was built yet- the house is dated to 1926, and the barn most likely dates from sometime in the early thirties, but we are just guessing. It's got beautiful bones, a lot of character and is a apparently a significant landmark in the area. We are struck by how many people know the property we bought, saying "Oh, the one with the cool old barn, right before you get to the Olney Store!" Yep, that's it.

The starry night effect is NOT a good feature in a barn roof

Well, the cool old barn has been in need of some repairs for a while now, especially a new roof. It's been patched for years, and the old owners did the best they could by it, but it had really reached a point of just needing to have the whole thing ripped off and re-shingled. We had hoped to wait until spring to do the job, all the rain we've been having combined with all the holes in the roof has rather forced our hand. It really couldn't get any more wet inside the barn right now than if we take it all off in the midst of a down pour. The hayloft floor is swelling and buckling, and the chances of rot setting in gets higher each day.

So, we're doing it now. Well, WE aren't doing it. We get to help a bit, because we have the coolest contractor in the world who is willing to let us help as much as we can so that we can save a wee bit of money. I know there are some who will think us crazy, but we really wanted to re-roof the barn in cedar, as it was originally. Partly because we want to also build a water catchment system for the barn, but mostly because taking on stewardship of a historic building means something to us, and we want to honor it's history and restore it as much as we can.

Tim Kennedy of Blind Moses Woodworking is just the greatest person, and he seems to be as excited about the barn as we are, which is pretty damn excited. It's wonderful to work with someone who has a passion for their work, and we can't wait to see how it all turns out.

The scaffolding is up, and Tim has just begun tearing off shingles today. We will keep posting pictures of the whole process as it goes along. Keep sending good weather thoughts out way- especially for Tim and his two guys up on the scaffolding!

We have a lot to do in the next month- move the greenhouse, move the final plants, clear out a couple of outbuildings, pick out a new name for the New Farm, and start making plans. Lots of plans. We're tired, but also excited about the future again after such a long time. Stick around- the story is just starting to get good...