Category Archives: Updates

Updated farm website

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I’ve been meaning to make some changes to our farm website for a while now, and finally got to it Tuesday morning while listening to the Inaugural Proceedings. It’s not a major redesign, but some language and content have been rearranged or added to better represent the farm’s public face.

Changes include:
- Redesigned Growing Information page with new planting maps of all our fields (these are already out of date but will be redone when our seed orders are finished). Intend to post all seed varieties we’re growing this year, along with their source, when the order is finished.

- Reworded Front Page to better capture the philosophical focus of the farm

- Removed Natural History page and rebuilt it into a new Explore the Farm page, which tours many aspects of our current and future diversified operation.

- Redesigned and simplified the Food & Cooking page, which was a bit unruly before. Consolodated the previous brain dumps on cooking philosophy into a shorter and more coherent statement, and started to include links to recipes from the blog rather than posting them separately here.

Perhaps most exciting for us, I finally began to put up the first parts of our Landscape Change photography series, in which we’ve established photo points around the farm and taken regular 360 panoramas to document seasons and farm work. We have close to 30 of these points, but will only post a few online for reasons of server space. The first two are up as part of the Explore the Farm section; click the Changes tab at the top of the page or follow this direct link.

I want to write a more complete post on this project soon, but at least go enjoy the preliminary results at the links above. And as always, feedback is welcome. If you don’t see something you want to know, have questions about what’s there, or criticism of the content, I’m happy to listen and answer.

December update & preview

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If you’ve noticed the blog take a sudden swerve into lighter topics, there’s a reason. I’ve been out of town for most of the past several weeks. Many members of my family have been taking turns travelling to North Carolina to take care of our ailing parents/grandparents, and my turn came in late December. I had to leave Joanna to manage everything here as well as her full-time job, so I wrote up a bunch of simple time-insensitive blog posts for her to toss out every few days (I wasn’t sure of my internet access or time availability during the trip).

I am back now, with a lot of built-up ideas and commentary. Over the next few weeks, I plan to discuss the Vilsack Ag nomination, more on organic certification, several small-farm relevant news stories, and more. In particular, I plan to discuss several lessons and experiences learned from having to shop at and cook from regular grocery stores rather than our own food; it’s been years since I had to go to a conventional grocery store for anything beyond orange juice or the occasional toiletries, and the experience was, well, enlightening.

I also plan to catch up on the What We Eat series, for which Joanna has faithfully kept records but did not have time to post. At some point there will be three or more of those in a row just to catch up. I have no idea if readers really care about that series, but I’m really enjoying it as a way to prove that locally grown food products can be the foundation of a healthy, diverse, tasty diet year-round. If nothing else, I want it as an archive of menu ideas for future years when we’re selling at market year round and customers want to know what they can do over the winter.

May you all have had a Merry Christmas or whatever you feel the need to celebrate. I’ll leave you with a photo of my best Christmas present; a third year in a row of appropriate conditions for pond hockey on-farm; something I thought I’d have to give up upon moving from Vermont long ago. If anyone out there is a hockey player, get in touch, as I’d love to build up a collection of folks to come play when conditions are right. Skills are optional; love of the world’s greatest sport is not.