Beginnings

(from June 19, 2021)

Winter Sister Farm

Summer Solstice 2021

Hard at work or hardly working.

Dearest most patient newsletter subscribers,

You probably clicked our little newsletter link back in January, when we were studiously crop planning and making spreadsheets for almost everything we did. We even had the mental space to reserve a website domain and put a pretty picture on it and suddenly we were a real endeavor, if not quite yet a real farm. You might have thought, back then, that you were signing up mostly for brief and cheerful farm updates about when our first harvests would be and how to eat the food we would supposedly be growing. So! The brief and newsy bits!

We plan to open signups for a small number of winter veggie CSA shares in September! Info on pricing and structure will be available then. Our distribution season will be mid-December through mid-June.

We also plan on offering whole, half, and quarter lamb shares in the fall! Info on that will also be forthcoming.

These are all true things. But I’m here for more than just the true things. I’m here for the half-true and the maybe-true and the could-be-true-but-needs-more-research (Anna’s specialty) and the not-true-even-though-your-feelings-say-otherwise (my specialty).

So in the spirit of the newsletter as a little genre all its own —inspired by the sweet musings of Anna’s mentors/dearest friends and my (Sarah) farm crushes David and Kayta at Green Valley Community Farm, from the gorgeous snail mail newsletter my friend Nina sends out sporadically to friends, from my favorite curatorial newsletter by the writer Ann Friedman— I was sort of excited to sit down (I love sitting down!) and muse (I love musing!) about this process of starting a farm business with my sister, about how much we’ve been doing (so much, right?), about how we are getting to know the land.

Only, gosh it’s hard to actually do it. I meant to write a newsletter for spring equinox, but then I didn’t and a month went by and then another one and Anna turned 30 and then now here we are. A lot of the things on our “start a farm” checklist have gotten mostly done—the irrigation lines are in the ground, the sheep got sheared, the fence is 80% up—but it feels like no project has gotten completely done. The final irrigation risers aren’t glued yet, we still have bags of wool in the barn, and there is one last stretch of fence that just keeps not getting stretched. In fact, I wrote that sentence back in May and now we are closing in on summer solstice and that list of unfinished projects still holds true. 

I mean seriously, why haven’t we gotten that last stretch of fence up? 

I wonder when we will catch up, and then I realize that we never will, and that this is what farming is. We are beginning a thing, not finishing one. To catch up would be entirely beside the point.

Delightful crew of women getting the potatoes in the ground

I wonder, a lot of days, whether I am really ready to never be done. Will I be able to remember that thing about the journey not the destination? In so many ways it feels like this piece of land has been the destination for so long, the site of years of planning and dreaming of this someday farm Anna and I might do together, the subject of so many hours of schemings about who would do what, what to grow, what not to grow, where the animals would fit, how much money to spend, whether we would even get along.

And now here we are and it’s not exactly as, like, tidy as I’d dreamed. Don’t tell Anna that! It’s not not tidy. We have our field divided into (almost) square blocks! All our beds are (almost) the same length! We even have labeled buckets for our irrigation parts! It’s just that even after the hours and hours and years of planning and talking, I’m still always thinking “wait wait, dammit, I should have done that exactly the opposite way!” It’s still nearly impossible to actually fully check something off the to-do list. So, this farm will only ever be as tidy and complete as my brain, and that’s

Well.

Summer is about to begin, and I’m extremely grateful that summer doesn’t mean quite the same thing for a winter farm as it does for most every other farm, though it still means quite a lot. Our storage crops are in the ground and thirsty for attention. We have a field full of pigweed and a hungry flock of sheep who are a bit unsatisfied with the drying grass. We are even starting to seed the overwintering brassicas that we won’t harvest until next spring. It’s beginning. In the midst of all the beginnings, we have to take our endings where we can get them. The end of the day, the end of a row, the end of an argument. The other day I put a gate back on its hinges that had gotten knocked off months ago. It took ninety seconds and felt like the biggest accomplishment in the world.

Thank you, lovely friends, for subscribing and reading and being interested! 

Love,

Sarah

The sheep living their best lives in the heat wave.