“Even a Blind Man Knows When the Sun is Shining”

O C T O B E R - have you been enjoying this month as much as we have? It has been such a pleasant ending to our growing season. Here in Bend, Fall went all out with vibrant autumn leaves and was unseasonably warm yet honestly, delightful. The autumn breeze, the sound of the fallen leaves, and all of the fall produce available has made this The Perfect Fall. Our first frost also came in surprisingly late too. The past three years we’ve been farming the first frost arrived before mid-August. This year, our first frost was the last week of September. Then a couple of days afterwards we were in 80 degree temps again.

Although we have had favorable weather, the forest fires were in full force this year. Specifically Central Oregon had the worst luck with the smoke. There were several times where we clocked in at the worst air quality in the world. It seemed we had multiple days of thick smoke hovering right above the farm. Harvesting was difficult, the market was slow and we had to buy respirators to work outside. The new normal for west coast farmers.

The season really flew by this year, maybe because of our late start we had from the extended six-month long, cold winter. Our fingers are crossed that doesn’t happen again, but it seems every year is a surprise of some sort of extreme weather we have to work around. It, as you know, isn’t just a problem here, it’s happening all around the world. This summer was the hottest recorded summer on Earth since they started recording temperature in 1880. The United States experienced 23 separate billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in the first eight months. That’s just in the US.

Reversing climate change and doing our part to reduce our carbon footprint is a big reason why we decided to go into farming and have chosen to farm the way we do. When carbon is in the ground, it helps Earth hold some of the heat it receives from the Sun so it doesn't all escape back into space. When carbon is released into the atmosphere, it creates greenhouse gasses that make the temperatures go up. The time is now that we all need to take action on how we can make an effort to reduce climate change. It definitely will make farming a lot easier. :)

We are excited to say we just wrapped up the CSA and Market Season! We have just one more market we are participating in which is an End-of-Season bulk-buying farmers market called Central Oregon’s Fill Your Pantry which is happening on 11/11.  So we celebrated to, “a month of relaxation” then had a meeting about our Fall chores, things that need to be accomplished before it’s way too cold to work on the farm and shortly realized we were actually not relaxing at all. Closing the farm entails: planting garlic, digging up and storing dahlia tubers, removing annual flowers, running wheelbarrows of compost on ALL the beds, tarping beds, removing tomato plants, winterizing the irrigation, removing drip tape, organizing, weeding, etc… Oh, and we plan to break ground on as many as five new plots in our front field.

So still lot’s going on, down on the farm.

This season was a sure confirmation that we need additional labor next year. We had an awesome part-timer who always did a great job and worked their ass off and we are so grateful to have their help. But for us to take on so many tasks, especially when you're growing 200 different varieties of plants, it was difficult to find the time to get it all done. This year, we were OVERLOADED. From Seeding, to planting, to marketing, to managing the CSA, succession planting, to the chickens, to harvesting, to weeding, all the things, it was a lot. Prepping for Farmers Markets is a lot of work too. It consumes a lot of our time which we could otherwise be using working on the farm. Since we had made that last minute decision to do the Bend Farmers Market, our schedule was very tight. So next year, we are changing our schedule to accommodate more farm time AND more free time : )

We are working towards a Monday through Friday work week. Instead of participating in two seasonal markets we are going down to just one and hopefully selling enough CSA Memberships to equate to the sales we were making at the Saturday market. We are changing our CSA Pick Up days to Tuesdays and Fridays, which would make our big harvest days on Mondays and Thursdays and then we would go to market on Wednesdays. Sounds perfect! We hope… To make all this happen we will need to go up to two Part-Timers and one Full-Timer, plus some small positions we will be hiring as a Work-for-CSA-Trade such as Harvesters, Weeders, Farm Organizers and Irrigation Specialists. Email us if you know someone that would have any interest in working with us next year for these positions for hire or work-trade.

We are reapplying for the NRCS Grant to get two more caterpillar tunnels for the main garden. This was the grant we applied for last year but did not receive so we ended up buying a caterpillar tunnel out-of-pocket. That tunnel though has already proved it’s value. We flipped more beds and harvested more food in that tunnel than any other location on the farm! Tunnels are imperative to have a successful farm in Central Oregon due to the weather, however it also is helpful to prevent pests. This season we had a lot of crop loss due to pest damage. We are currently warding off gophers, but our number one pest in the farm is a family of deer. We lost entire beds of lettuce, cabbage, strawberries, raspberries, and some kale. They eat the tops off our carrots while the gophers eat the bottoms. Hopefully if we receive this grant, we can have more protection on the crops that the deer like to eat by having most of those crops in tunnels.

Our substantial goal for 2024 which is to get the South plot in our front field in production. We understand the work it will take but we know we need to utilize that land and get food on it. The soil up there is actually wonderful - we grew our winter squash, melons and potatoes out there and all of those crops did very well. Still in development what will be going out there, but the idea is to make it look pleasing for our neighbors and CSA Members as they roll up to pick up their CSA Shares. We really never wanted to farm on more than two acres and the garden we are farming on now is the perfect size for us. But circumstance landed us to rent this additional farmland and it would be a disservice to leave it barren for the time we’re on it. So if we are going to do it, we should build it up sooner than later.

Now that we have weekends free it would be wonderful to utilize them for farm events! We are not 100% certain yet as to how that looks nor the logistics/ legalities to make that work but something we are exploring for next year.

We have also added 60 baby hens to the flock. This time, we opted for more hens that lay different colored eggs such as Dominant Black Copper Marans, they lay the darkest brown eggs, Novogen White layers, more Colorpacks that lay from blue to green eggs and Easter Eggers which lay bright blue. We haven’t noticed  a difference in the taste of the eggs from one color to another, but we do notice a difference in customer satisfaction. People really like rainbow eggs. It’s not something you can find at the grocery store which makes it that more special. This addition will increase the amount of egg add-ons available for our CSA Members.

As we finalize this growing season we reflect on all the things we did wrong. We can be pretty hard on ourselves as there are so many things that cannot go your way when you are working with plants and weather. But we should also pat ourselves on the back and realize all the things we did right! We successfully completed the season and even though our expenses went up this year, we still broke even. We are non-stop brainstorming ideas with each other on how to improve next year. Working smarter, not harder. How can we set ourselves up for success without investing too much time on failures?  For one, we are getting ahead of the game and buying transplant plugs for crops we normally seed in the early months of December through February instead of raising them in our nursery all winter and preventing them from dying from frost. We plan to rebuild our Prop House and improve the structure and location so next year it isn’t damaged from the heavy winds we experience here in Central Oregon. We will also be making some considerable improvements to our irrigation systems in our main garden and the front field to help with watering.

ALWAYS LEARNING. ALWAYS IMPROVING.

Once we head into our winter stage we pause on our physical labor job and start  our work-from-home gig.  A lot of people think we are completely off until March and do whatever we want until then, but, we’re still working. We sleep in and go to bed early, but it honestly evens out from the dawn to dusk lifestyle we’re used to having during the summer months. Farming comes with a lot of freedom when you're working and when you're not. We are grateful to never feel like we are actually working and rather feel more like we are living.

Expressing gratitude has been something we try to exercise more often. It’s difficult in today’s world to exercise, especially when everywhere we are experiencing social, political and religious division and capitalism reigns supreme.

We are very grateful that we are sliding into our fourth growing season! We are grateful to have support from other farmers that want us to be successful. We are so grateful to our community for choosing us to grow their food. We are grateful to have beautiful farmland available to lease in order to provide organically grown food in a time where farmland isn’t attainable to purchase on a small farmer’s wage. Although we face these obstacles, we live a rich life at the farm and in our community.

We appreciate you taking the time to read our Newsletter and hearing about our farming experience. We hope that it inspires you to want to support small farms in your area or even start a small farm yourself! For now, we’re taking a break from the Newsletter for a few months to prepare for our most amazing growing season yet in 2024!