Oakhill Organics

The sheep gathered along the fence this afternoon, to munch on the pea plants we tossed over the top.

Today Casey I picked the last of the peas in one of our greenhouses. The two rows of plants had long ago outgrown our last trellis line (which was at the top of the posts) and was falling over in the paths. We carefully lifted up each section to pick the remaining good peas and noted that the plants were starting to dry down and yellow, and most of the peas were at the very ends of the plants. Sure signs that the plants were ready to stop putting on fresh new green peas and would start “maturing” the peas they’d already set — given that we’re growing these particular plants for fresh eating, edible-pod snap peas, that meant that their time with us is done. Unless we wanted to grow seed, we wouldn’t be excited about the next stage.

So, after picking, we began pulling down the trellis lines and hauling the still green plants out to the sheep and goats, which are pasturing nearby. They happily ran to our piles of pea plants to munch on the nutritious plant matter left there. We are always so happy when we see parts of the plant that we can’t “use” as human food be so heartily enjoyed by farm animals in this way. There’s a profound sense in that moment  of the farm being a complete system, with fertility cycling in and out of the ground (up through the plant and back down through the manure — with a lot of sun ray goodness in between).

We will miss this experience next year.

Because, also today, I realized that we have a plan for every single animal left on the farm. The last of the hogs left a few weeks ago (more bacon and ham coming to the storefront soon!); two beef animals and three goats leave in early June; one more beef animal and our sheep will leave in late summer; our flock of laying hens will leave in November. Most of these animals are leaving our farm via the butcher, to be turned into nutritious food for our customers. But two of the oldest ewes will be returning to their earlier home on my parents’ home, to live out a happy, spoiled retirement in the cherry orchard.

For the first time in four years, there are only full grown animals on our farm and no baby animals who will grow up and stick around until future years. There are no chicks, no piglets, no lambs, no kids, no calves, no turkey poults.

We’ve been vague until now about what exactly we are doing with animals on our farm. We knew last year that we wanted to scale way back and slow way down with what we are doing, which is why we intentionally stopped breeding any animals toward the end of last season. But I don’t think we knew until perhaps even today that we were truly done with animals on this farm.

I should always add the important (and very true!) caveat: for now. We are done with animals on this farm, for now.

For Casey and me, coming to this decision took time. There are so many wonderful benefits to having a mixed animal and crop farm. We have relished many parts of this experience. We have especially loved providing a reliable source of grass-raised meat for our customers and our own family.

But this will be our fifth season having animals on our farm, and at this point we feel like our farm needs a break. The tricky thing about raising animals (especially when breeding them as well) is that there are no built-in breaks. There are seasons to the work, but there are always animals to care for in every season. And, they need tending every day. In this way, raising animals is a profoundly different experience than growing crops.

We knew all the challenges of raising animals before we jumped into it — that’s why we waited six years to give it a try! In those early years, people often asked us why we were raising vegetables and not animals, and I’d joke: “Lettuce doesn’t run away!” It was a glib response that was also true.

I don’t feel like I can say that any part of the animal raising experience really surprised us, except that I don’t think we were quite prepared for the weight and the gravity of the work. When dealing with other sentient, living beings, farming takes on a different level of seriousness. Working with them is also inherently a higher risk activity as well — well designed handling systems can help here, but ultimately they only buffer the farmers from the risk rather than eliminating it. Turnips don’t kick farmers in the head; cows can and do and have. Meanwhile, the inevitable losses from our mistakes or natural happenings weigh heavy on our hearts. There’s an emotional and physical toll we have never experienced while growing fruits and vegetables.

And, I have to admit, the double whammy of raising animals and raising children is a profoundly exhausting emotional set of endeavors!

There are other practical considerations too — profitability, butchering logistics, feed sourcing, etc etc etc. Rather than going into too much detail, I will just summarize by saying that good farm-produced meat and eggs and milk really does need to be at least as expensive as it is, and probably should cost even a bit more!

So, again, we feel ourselves cutting some of those metaphorical psychic “strings” I spoke about in an earlier newsletter this year. Or, at least, preparing to cut them at the end of this year. Although at this point, each set of animals that we load to leave the farm represents a cut string I suppose. We see them off with gratitude in our heart for what they have contributed to this place and to our bodies and to our customers.

It’s funny to be writing so many newsletters this spring along this theme of scaling back. It’s a fun topic for us right now and one that we see playing out in other people’s lives now too — in fact, I am leading a panel discussion on the topic of “scaling back” at a farm conference this fall! Yet, each time I sit down to write a newsletter like this, I do marvel at how there can still be more things that we are cutting back on. I suppose that just goes to show how very much we have been doing out here in recent years, with 100 acres in our management and every kind of crop and animal in rotation on that land and many more hands helping with all of it! And, when I look at what we are doing each day, what we are harvest, what we are growing — it is still so rich and diverse. And becoming so much more fun every day for us as we bring it back to a family scale.

A CSA member pointed out to me this last week another really positive point. Each time we cut back on something, such as producing animal products, we open up a niche for another farm. Amen amen amen. I love thinking about this, and knowing without a doubt that other farms are also growing and changing and adding enterprises and experimenting, and that there will be another farm (or several) out there who step up next year to grow healthy animal products for us all. I am already grateful to them.

And, one last word about animals products as a whole, and specifically meat. As an adult, I have never eaten meat casually. In fact, for the first six years of Casey and my married life, we didn’t buy meat for ourselves to eat, because, well, it’s an emotionally and spiritually heavy thing. At the time, we didn’t really know yet about farm-raised meats, and we certainly didn’t want to participate in the factory farm machine. We began buying meat again when we moved to Oregon and met animal producers and visited their farms. The question of “to eat” or “not to eat” with meat is so big, and I can’t really begin to tease out all the ethical, health, ecological, and spiritual questions about it in one newsletter. I think that in general, the decision is more complicated than most vocal parties allow, and there is no easy answer. Our being humans in the world who eat food has an impact, and it’s truly hard to get out of that!

But I want to say that after living in intimacy with domesticated animals for the past five seasons, our respect for life and the gift of life and the gift of nourishing food has grown deeper and deeper. The significance of it all is something we can never ignore or forget — the gifts are so a part of our every cell (literally) that we live with all these animals in us. As much as I, personally, feel that healthy animal products are an important part of my diet, I also feel the weight of that choice too. There is a huge responsibility to live a life that is worthy of what we take in each day.

So, to that end, I want to close with one of my favorite Wendell Berry poems. Long ago, when we lived at Holden Village, this was printed on the laminated “grace” cards that were on all the dining room tables for use before meals. But it’s actually intended to be a prayer for after eating (as the title indicates), and it’s one that I try to reflect on as regularly as I can after my own meals:

Prayer after eating ~ Wendell Berry

I have taken in the light
that quickened eye and leaf.
May my brain be bright with praise
of what I eat, in the brief blaze
of motion and of thought.
May I be worthy of my meat.

Enjoy this week’s vegetables! (And whatever other nourishing foods you might eat too!)

Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla

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Meat — what’s coming up:

Just so there is no confusion, we will still have meat on the pick-up through the end of this season! (As well as filling a few individual orders.) There should be a plentiful supply of meat in the freezer at all times. If you’d like a head’s up of what to expect, here’s a rough outline of what we’ll have and when:

• Now — ground pork and chops
• Soon — bacon and ham
• Late June — ground beef, goat (ground and cuts)
• Early fall — ground beef, beef cuts, lamb (ground and cuts)
• November — stewing hens (these will be available for purchase at the final CSA pick-up as well as the two Holiday Harvests at Thanksgiving and Christmas)

If there’s anything you’d like to reserve in advance, please let us know so we can try to insure you get what you want!

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Meet this week’s vegetables:

• Strawberries
• Radishes — The first of the radishes from the field! Radishes are typically the first of the first field-grown crops each spring, and they always seem like an important milestone in the year. They also happen to be delicious. We ate some with lunch. I sliced them a little thick and we used them to scoop up bites of chicken salad (like a cracker). What a spring treat!
• Sugar snap peas — It’s highly likely that these will be the last of the spring snap peas! It’s been a beautiful abundant few weeks of peas! Enjoy the last of it! (And more good things are coming up soon.)
• Fava beans — The fava beans are now developed enough that they are great for shelling and cooking as just the inner bean! Some people like to go the extra extra mile and also peel off the white skin on each bean. This is optional — traditionalists swear that it makes for the best flavor (and color), but it’s extra work that you shouldn’t let get in the way of enjoying your fava beans. Once you have your shucked beans, what to do with them? We like to boil them for a few minutes so that they are almost all the way cooked (it really doesn’t take long) and then finish them in a pan with butter and green garlic. They’re great tossed with pasta (that’s very traditional) or mixed into cooked greens or just served on their own with salt.
• Zucchini
• Broccoli
• Cabbage — We have both “regular” cabbage and also “Napa” cabbage (which is actually more closely related to turnips and mustards — great for stir fries and Asian flavored ginger cole slaw).
• Chard
• Winter squash
• Potatoes
• Garlic scapes
• Green garlic

And this week’s extra goodies from the farm:

• Eggs — $6/dozen
• Pork chops — $12/lb
• Ground pork — $8/lb
• Pork organs, fat & bones — $4/lb

Eggplants growing in the field, just a few days after planting.

Unlike most garden hobbyists, we are planting something out here in almost every season. We have to keep planting in order to supply our CSA with fresh produce almost year-round! However, there is still that week or two in the late spring when we feel like we “put in the garden” in the more traditional sense.

This last week was the peak of that summer planting action. On Friday alone, Casey and I sowed and transplanted half an acre of summer season crops: sweet corn, winter squash, zucchini, green beans, cucumbers, peppers, tomatoes, eggplant, and so much more. On Monday, we put in another 14 rows of potatoes with help from some CSA members. These are all crops that grow and mature during the main growing season of summer. Many, like the winter squash and potatoes, will get stored for use all winter — but they still grow during the summer.

Yes, the focus of May is definitely on ground prep and planting. We see it all around us in neighboring fields, as people put in their corn and kale and green beans and more. Brown fields are showing tidy lines of green as the newly sown seeds emerge.

May is also a funny time of year — the rate of plant growth is speeding up, but we’re still used to the earlier weeks of spring when growth was almost painfully slow. Now we look at a new kale planting and wonder how long we’ll be able to pick it for the CSA — the answer is that it will likely be sooner than we expect, because we’re still somewhat “calibrated” for the slower part of spring. This is the time of year when CSA farmers across the country start feeling the nervous jitters in their stomachs because it just doesn’t seem possible that all those little lettuce and kale plants will be producing in time for those early June shares.

Of course, we’ll already well into our CSA season, but the transition from our over-wintered/storage/greenhouse crops to field-grown spring/summer crops still inspires some of those same May tummy jitters. Even in our 13th year of farming, spring is still a surprise in this way — how May arrives and suddenly leaves arrive in profusion and plant growth takes off. The rapid growth will continue for the next few months as we watch our own lines of green grow and grow.

So far, only a few of last week’s direct-seeded crops have emerged. The calendula was up first — such a vigorous flower. We sow calendula and phacelia flowers inter-mixed with our vegetable crops in order to provide food and habitat for important beneficial insects that prey on other insect pests. We have seen a huge difference from their presence in our fields (most especially when we sow them in with our Brussels sprouts plantings, which are prone to being over-run by aphids). But we also enjoy their beauty. Calendula blossoms are a cheerful orange smile, and phacelia unfolds its long periwinkle spiral blossoms over a long period of time (pollinators of all kinds love phacelia blossoms). Both will end up in our house in bouquets once they are blooming!

This afternoon, after the CSA harvest was in for the day, Casey and I began one of our favorite annual tasks — thinning the apples in our orchards. As the trees have matured, this task has become bigger and bigger! But it’s delightful work to stand in our now very leafy and verdant orchard and carefully pick off all but one apple on each spur (the little woody bit of branch that produces apples each year). Doing this helps ease the disease pressure on the fruit and allows each individual apple to grow bigger. We’ll be working on this task off and on for many days. Thankfully, as I said, it’s very pleasant work and something to look forward to. It’s also satisfying to look at a tree that is loaded with thinned fruit and imagine the bins and bins of apples that we’ll pick from each tree. Yum!
We’re always looking ahead around here. The work of the farm is such an endless cycle — we find ourselves enjoying the harvest from one season while we plan ahead for harvests two seasons later (whether that be in the form of planting or thinning fruit). The cycle of seasons propels us forward. Here we g(r)o(w)!Enjoy this week’s vegetables!Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla~ ~ ~Meet this week’s vegetables:StrawberriesSugar snap peasFava beansCauliflowerFennel bulbsChardZucchiniWinter squashPotatoesGreen garlicGarlic scapes

— These are the fun “twirly” bits of green that grow out of the top of some garlic varieties in the spring. They are tender and delicious. You can chop them up (all the way to the little bit at the top) and add them to sautéed foods or to salad dressing … or just roast them and eat them!

And this week’s extra goodies from the farm:

• Eggs — $6/dozen
• Fresh pork — We just picked up a new batch of fresh pork cuts from the butcher this week! This is our last pork for the foreseeable future. We have available: pork chops ($12/lb) and various bits for roasting: shoulder roasts, shanks, etc. ($8/lb). We also have organs and bones available ($4/lb). (Yummy bacon and ham coming soon!)
• Bratwurst! — Artisan-made without any added nitrates or sugars. $12/package (one lb packages). Only a few packages left!

Picking peas this afternoon.

So, I’ve written before about what our farm looks like now that it’s just us doing all the work. Folks, it’s getting mighty relaxed around here. It’s all summer style now that the sun has arrived.

For years, we’ve implemented a fairly strict dress code. For safety and efficiency reasons, we’ve always required that every single person working on the farm wear long pants and sturdy closed toed shoes at all times. Certainly not every single activity technically required this gear, but we figured that it’d be too complicated to have employees trying to gauge that for themselves all year long, especially when newer folks might really not have the experience to make that call. Overall we felt most comfortable knowing that basic precautions were being taken to keep a person’s body safe.

Of course, we had to do the same — long pants and closed-toed shoes at all times, for all tasks.

Guess what? We’re not doing that anymore. When appropriate, yes of course. But is it necessary to wear these protective garments when standing up picking peas for the CSA all afternoon? Nope. So, there I was, picking peas in the greenhouse in my favorite sandals and my favorite summer shorts (which I’ve owned and worn for literally two decades now) when I got a text from good friends saying they were headed to our Grand Island swimming spot for the season’s first splash and would we want to join.

At first, my answer was, sounds great but we’re picking peas. But then I realized how very hot I was. And sweaty. And look, we were almost to the end of our primary rows. And certainly we could pick the other greenhouse tomorrow morning. And really how can we say no when good friends are driving all the way out to Grand Island to go swimming?

So, we rushed to finish the last peas in our rows, jumped in the car and followed our friends down to our river spot for the very first spontaneous swim of the year. The adults all splashed in together, diving into that cool water with great joy.

More river swimming is in our future. It’s one of our favorite parts of living on the island. Almost ten years ago, Casey and I were in the closing period on this piece of land and still weighing whether to ultimately buy it. Our realtor had written a sales agreement that allowed us a lot of legal ‘outs’ if we got cold feet, and oh we were feeling the anxiety that comes with buying land (at the young ages of 25 and 27!). We were realizing that it would be a huge responsibility and we were scared about all the possible challenges and hardships. After falling in love with the land initially, we were focused on all the minor negative issues we’d have to deal with.

Then, during a blazing heat wave, we wandered out here to escape town and made our way down to the park. We sat there in our work clothes then and looked at that water for a few hot minutes before we finally waded and then dove in. The relief was total and complete and we realized then that YES we want to live here and be close to this river.

We still feel grateful every summer for our proximity to the heart of this valley, to the snaking green water that brings life to everything verdant growing here.

So, it was totally worth finishing our work early today to celebrate the beginning of what we call “river season.” It was really the first time this spring that I’ve even considered river swimming. As nice as it’s been at times, it just hasn’t been an overly hot spring. But we’re well into May now, and in true Willamette Valley fashion, we’re seeing our first glimpses of summer. Of course, May’s version of summer is much more verdant than the August version, keeping it distinct and making it overwhelmingly lovely. Really, I keep looking out our window at all the new green foliage and lush green grass and thinking, “This is so beautiful. So so so beautiful.”

Tomorrow we will head back out to finish the harvest, likely wearing sandals again. Summer style.

Enjoy this week’s vegetables!

Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla

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Potato planting party next Monday, May 16! Come join us on the farm between 4-6 pm to plant potatoes. This is fun, easy work that most people can do (the work is easy, but please be aware that the ground in our fields is uneven). You can wear sandals and shorts if you want! Kids are welcome to come help (with parents, of course!). After we’re done, join us at our house for a potluck supper! Bring a dish of food to share and a plate and utensils for yourself to eat on.

Directions to the farm from McMinnville: Take HWY-18 to Dayton. Drive straight south through Dayton and stay on Wallace Rd / HWY-221 for about seven miles. Turn RIGHT onto Grand Island Rd. After the bridge, turn RIGHT onto SE Upper Island Rd. Our driveway is the first one on your LEFT. We share the driveway with our neighbors, so please park on the RIGHT side of the driveway.

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CSA payments due next week! If you haven’t paid your next CSA payment yet, please do so by next Thursday, May 19. I emailed statements last week that include your total due, but if you have any questions please email or ask me at pick up.

~ ~ ~

Meet this week’s vegetables:

• Strawberries — They’re back! One pint per share again this week!
• Sugar snap peas
• Fava beans — The first of this year’s fava beans are ready! These fava beans have beans inside, but they are also still tender enough to be roasted or grilled and eaten whole. If you’d prefer to just eat the beans, you can do that too! (But don’t try to eat the beans whole raw! The outer skin is only tasty or edible when cooked at high heat!)
• Broccoli/cabbage/cauliflower
• Kale
• Rainbow chard
• Fennel bulbs
• Zucchini — One of our standard ways to prepare zucchini is on the stove top. I start by sauteing chopped green garlic in butter, and then add chopped zucchini (and more butter) with some salt. I turn the heat up to medium high and cover the pan to let the zucchini begin cooking. They will release some liquid at this point, which helps with the cooking too. If I’m making this dish as the base of our meal, I’ll add four or five medium-to-large zucchinis to the pan (it’s a big pan). Lots of butter helps to cook that much chopped zucchini without it sticking too much. I stir regularly and cook covered until the zucchini is looking mostly cooked and there is liquid in the pan. At that point, I remove the lid and turn the heat down to medium and let it continue to cook until more of the liquid is gone. I love adding chili powder or tumeric (and plenty of salt) to provide flavor. Toward the end, I’ll add chopped cooked meat (today it was turkey) and let all the flavors blend. For us, this dish will serve as a main dish. With enough butter (we love butter) and plenty of cooking time, it all becomes so satisfyingly like comfort food. It hits the same spot that a big plate of butter noodles does. Except that it grows on our farm! (So far, we haven’t found a noodle plant, although we do want to try again this summer making noodles from zucchini and other vegetables with a spiralizer!)
• “Winter” squash — We’ve decided that we should rename this category of squash “storage” squash to distinguish it from zucchini and summer squash, which are different in that they need to be eaten soon after picking (because they are still green rather than ripe). Because, at this point calling it “winter” squash feels pretty inaccurate since we’re well past winter and still eating it! We ate the sweetest butternut squash of our life today at lunch (along with our sauteed zucchini and turkey).
• Potatoes
• Green garlic

And this week’s extra goodies from the farm:

• Eggs — $6/dozen
• Bratwurst! — Artisan-made without any added nitrates or sugars. $12/package (one lb packages).
• Pork — We have a few remaining shanks for $8/lb. More pork coming from the butcher soon!

Dottie watches the May pole dance from atop Casey’s shoulders.

When was the last time that you sang and danced with other people to celebrate some part of our shared human experience? Perhaps you are like many Americans (I have observed anyway) and cringe at the very thought of public singing and dancing! Or, perhaps you are like me and can say: Oh yes! I have celebrated in that way very recently!

Last week, the kids and I got to dance and sing with friends multiple times. Our homeschooling group hosted a folk dance teacher at the library for a very fun afternoon of dances from around the world. They were mostly very simple so that even the youngest kids could participate on some level, but there was great joy to be had even in those simple dances done together with friends. Even just holding hands in a circle can feel so magical.

The resulting woven pattern on the pole!

Then, on Friday, we hosted a little gathering of friends here on the farm for an early May Day celebration, including a May pole! Actually, we had two May poles: one for the little kids who really just wanted the joy of waving a ribbon around in the air without any direction about how to dance, in what direction, or whatnot. Then, we had a larger pole for the bigger kids and adults, who very carefully learned the simple weaving dance and then danced those ribbons into a beautiful pink and green pattern. I loved watching the delight on the faces of everyone as they danced cooperatively in the evening light (graced by a rainbow, no less!). How often do we Americans get to experience our relationships in quite that way?

To me, it feels that our natural opportunities for such exuberance are limited in American culture today. Even within some places of worship (which are the last bastion of regular singing in America), truly communal singing has been replaced more-or-less with spectator appreciation of a musical show on a stage. Certainly there are still communities of singing and dancing — people can sing in choirs or join square dancing groups even here in McMinnville. But these feel like sub-cultures that people must actively seek out. And, on some level, the participants generally have to start with a sense of confidence about their singing or dancing. How often do we hear people protest that they just cannot sing or dance?

Ah. Of course, we cannot do what we don’t do. No doubt!

But within the context of human history (and prehistory), our culture is an anomaly. If we travel outside our narrow band of time and space, we find that humans interact with each other and with their places through song and/or dance — to worship, to celebrate, to mourn, to pray, to connect. I think that the magic of song and dance is that they can bring a larger group of people together into a single purpose. Certainly, there is no way for 16 people to have a truly meaningful conversation that involves everyone. But, when those 16 people, ages 8-40+ join around a May pole, they can each hold a ribbon and interact with each other in a way that builds bonds and has fun and is quite egalitarian! Connection happens in a way that is different than our normal day-to-day verbal communications. Some people might say it transcends simple human conversation. I’m not sure I’d put that value label on it, because we still need other forms of connection too! I just think that as a whole our society has lost sight of the community building that comes from these kinds of activities. Watching a beautiful performance can be transformative in its own right, but I think we also need to be part of groups that make music, sing or dance too at times. I think it’s an important part of being human and connecting with each other.

The human body is an instrument. We weren’t born an instrument in order to just perform for each other; we are born with this beauty inside our bodies so that we can connect with each other.

Why write about singing and dancing in a farm blog? Because, for me, it is all related. We started this farm ten years ago this spring primarily because we wanted to connect. We wanted to connect our bodies and spirits to the land, to work, to our food, and to people. Those drives are still here, inspiring everything we do. And as the years have gone by, I’ve worked intentionally to keep pushing on those values, seeing how much more fully we can embrace and live those ideals. And, for me, these turnings of the seasons have always called for celebration. For observance. For marking. It’s part of why I write this blog, to document the daily ordinary and extraordinary that happens here on the farm as we walk through each season again and again.

But all along, I’ve also wanted to sing and dance those stories too. That wasn’t part of my upbringing — our family didn’t go to church or sing as a part of our family culture, although I sang at camp and at my private Catholic school. Living at Holden Village was an early inspiration to Casey and me as well, since it is a community that celebrates daily worship every evening and incorporates song into many other parts of life as well (all of it in the context of an amazingly beautiful and profound mountain setting!). But how does one make such things happen in places where they are not? (Which is most places these days.) That was a question in the under-current of my mind. It was a longing buried well below many more urgent questions, such as How Do We Start A Farm Anyway? But before we left Bellingham a decade ago, I ran across a little book about celebrating festivals with family, and I bought it, not really even having a clue how to implement such ideas in my own life.

It has taken me more than ten years to begin to answer this question. Ten years of growth in so many areas of our life here on the farm. But I had had enough experiences to want to keep seeking more of them. Experiences with vulnerability and beauty in community — people reading poetry by firelight, contra dancing after a wedding, singing Christmas carols with friends. But, I’ll tell you what — it probably won’t surprise you at all to learn that sometimes getting folks to sing or dance can be really really really hard. Again, so many of us are completely out of touch with our bodies as instruments of beauty and connection. We have come to see these activities solely as performances, best left to the professional and gifted!

I have realized in the last ten years that in order to get my friends to sing and dance with me, I had to grow a lot in my own confidence in my body as an instrument of connection. Certainly, some of that was just getting to be a more competent singer (thank you McMinnville Women’s Choir and its director Betty Busch for helping with my humble growth in this area!). But, just as much, I have had to watch carefully as other people create safe places for activities and lead others into those connections. Again, at choir, but also at places of worship and other community events (including the homeschooling folk dances!). (Teachers also do this important work every day as they ask groups of students to grow in their understanding of concepts through discussion — another vulnerable type of sharing activity!) What simple activities can lead us beyond our initial nervous “cringing” into the beauty of connection! For me, the May day gathering was the culmination of ten years of growth into a role where I can make a vibrant community vision come alive.

We need more people to have that vision and more people to grow in that role. Many more. I’m not sure what kind of impetus it would take to lead a large scale revival of group singing and dancing in America. Even just half a century ago, people still sang and still danced. And now … not so much. (Especially not on the secular west coast. I think pockets of musical culture still exist throughout the country.)

I’m not the first nor the last voice to rally for a revival of regular group singing and dancing in America. At the end of the 20th century, folk musician Pete Seeger joined up with music educators to put together two books titled, Get America Singing … Again! As music programs get cut from school budgets and more and more parents raise their kids without singing in the house, how do we revive what is a core of our human experience? Where does one begin?

Of course, as 21st century Westerners, there are so many ways in which our daily lives deviate from all those who came before. We also are some of the first generations to have a profound disconnect from the source of our food, from the daily work that is needed to sustain our bodies. I’m sure one could argue that it is all connected — we are out of touch with the earth which nourishes our bodies which are the instruments of beauty and connection.

I feel grateful every day that Casey and I are not disconnected from the earth or our food. In today’s era, the work we do seems somewhat unique (although less so than when we started the farm), and yet harvesting food is the work of humanity. We are doing the work that our ancestors did centuries into the past. In this sense, producing food is not something to do because it is our unique calling or fulfills our identity or whatnot — it is what we do to be human. Certainly there has been some liberation to follow other pursuits for people as we’ve needed fewer humans to be involved in the production of food. But for millennia, daily human life focused on food — and then responded to and supported that work through art, music, crafts, spirituality, and ritual. Whether we want to be farmers or not, I think those ancient experiences are still inside us — in our DNA or our spirits or some other part of the human that we don’t even have words to describe.

I think that in many ways, my strong inner desire to sing and dance is a response to these experiences on the farm. They are natural responses to living closer and closer to those shared, ancient experiences of being human. To see spring awaking and want to gather with friends to celebrate every beautiful thing about this new season! To use the physical metaphors of song and dance to live in those rhythms in an intentional way. To respond with active gratitude to the daily gifts of beauty and sustenance that surround us on the farm.

Again, I don’t know what kind of sea change could lead a whole society back to a culture of singing and dancing — this is a bigger question of how we do or don’t physically connect in a digital age! But I know that I can do my part here in my family and community, to join with others who are like-minded or who are willing to stretch themselves and grow. Who knows what is possible if we each follow our inner longings to connect in positive ways? (And of course, I’ve only addressed one level of connection that has been neglected in our society, but there are many others too!)

And, today I have two opportunities for you to connect with your community. First, come join the McMinnville Women’s Choir for our spring concert this Saturday, 7 pm, at First Baptist Church. Tickets are $5 at Oregon Stationers or $8 at the door. And, yes, this may technically be a “performance” of sorts, but our choir sings primarily for the sake of singing together each week (it’s in the mission statement!). I think that this community joy comes through in our concerts and wraps up the audience in that glowing love too. Plus, you may be inspired to join us!

Second, come connect with the earth by planting potatoes here on the farm! I put more info below. After planting, we can connect some more by sharing a delicious potluck meal (a wonderful way to connect that it seems we are very good at here in Yamhill County).

And, for now, enjoy this week’s vegetables!

Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla

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Potato planting party on Monday, May 16! Come join us on the farm between 4-6 pm to plant potatoes. This is fun, easy work that most people can do (the work is easy, but please be aware that the ground in our fields is uneven). Kids are welcome to come help (with parents, of course!). After we’re done, join us at our house for a potluck supper! Bring a dish of food to share and a plate and utensils for yourself to eat on. We won’t make you sing and dance … not much, anyway. (Ok, just kidding — no singing and dancing this time.)

Directions to the farm from McMinnville: Take HWY-18 to Dayton. Drive straight south through Dayton and stay on Wallace Rd / HWY-221 for about seven miles. Turn RIGHT onto Grand Island Rd. After the bridge, turn RIGHT onto SE Upper Island Rd. Our driveway is the first one on your LEFT. We share the driveway with our neighbors, so please park on the RIGHT side of the driveway.

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Next payments due by May 19! I emailed statements to our CSA members this week to remind everyone that the next payment is due by May 19. You can bring a check or cash to us at pick-up, or mail us a check to: Oakhill Organics, P.O. Box 1698, McMinnville OR 97128. If you have any questions about your balance due or your account, please ask me! I can answers questions at pick-up, or you can email: farm (at) oakhillorganics (dot) com.

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Meet this week’s vegetables: (Wondering about carrots? We’re all done with the winter storage carrots and now waiting for the first of the spring-sown carrots. But, here’s an interesting piece of info — we had 40 continuous weeks of carrots before we ran out!)

• Apples
• Sugar snap peas — I feel silly even giving suggestions on how to eat peas, because — um — they’re so good to just eat out of hand! BUT! We have lots of them this week, so here is another of our favorite ways to eat them: roast them! Spread them in a pan without any overlapping with some butter and roast at a higher temperature (425° works for our oven). Stir a few times, and roast until they are beginning to brown and getting crispy.
• Broccoli — Broccoli is another favorite of ours for roasting.
• Fennel bulbs
• Zucchini
• Kale
• Chard
• Winter squash
• Potatoes
• Green garlic — Still wondering how to make best use green garlic? Think it as a giant garlic-flavored green onion or leek and use it the same way. Chop the stalk all the way up to the leaves (then peel the leaves and chop more stalk!) and add to the pan with butter to sauté before adding your cooking greens. Or, for a real treat, lay whole stalks of green garlic on a pan when you roast broccoli or peas. The green garlic will roast up to be soft inside and crispy outside, and you can eat the whole thing!

And this week’s extra goodies from the farm:

• Eggs — $6/dozen
• Bratwurst! — Artisan-made without any added nitrates or sugars. $12/package (one lb packages).
• Pork — We have a few remaining roasts and shanks for $8/lb. We just sent more hogs to the butcher on Monday! And more beef and goats will be heading that way in June.
  

The fields after a big rain on Friday morning.

Just as we were heading to bed last Thursday, Casey and I heard one loud clap of thunder, followed quickly by pounding rain. We have metal roofs just below our window, and the sound was so loud that we really weren’t sure whether it was very large raindrops or hail. A few more flashes of lightning lit the sky, and the rain continued off and on all night and into the next morning — an inch in total by the end of the 24 hour period.

Friday morning itself was set aside for our organic inspection — our once a year visit by an inspector who sits down with us to look through our records and walk around the farm with us. The inspector who came this year has been here many times before and was actually our very first inspector way back in 2006! We’ve learned a few things since then about how to make the process go smoothly (it’s all about the organized record keeping!), so the morning was a happy one as we gathered around our kitchen table drinking hot nettle tea and listening to the continued rain.

We had to delay our field walk a bit as another brief but intense downpour rolled over the farm. But we made it out there and walked the very familiar path around the perimeter of our farm — a smaller route than just a few weeks ago before we dropped so much acreage from our direct management. If you like to know numbers, when I updated our certification map, I calculated that we dropped from 116.5 acres to 25.5 acres (a 91 acre difference!).

This week has been off and on rainy and sunny — so very springlike to us. To me, a classic spring sight on the island is sunshine lighting up vibrantly green, newly-leafed out trees against a background of dark gray rain clouds in the distance. I was struck by the contrasts in that spring sight our first year out here, and it continues to wow me with its splendor.

True to the theme of last week’s newsletter, this week has been full of dribs and drabs of useful work — more transplanting in the fields, harvest, and closing shop and arranging matters on the land we’re no longer farming (there are loose strings to tie up and information to communicate to the new farmers). Already tractors are out there on both of those pieces of land, mowing and spreading manure and preparing for what will likely be an abundant farming season for both farmers.

In the week ahead, we look forward to the start of May (and the halfway point in spring! Whoa! It’s only going to get busier around here!) and the opportunity to do work other than transplanting (now that the transplanting “window” has closed in the biodynamic calendar). On the list is mowing, mowing, weeding, and mowing. And then more weeding. And more mowing.

Enjoy this week’s vegetables!

Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla

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Any last minute orders for pork? Our remaining hogs go to the butcher next Monday. Is there anyone who was waiting to decide about ordering a half or whole animal for your freezer? Let us know this week if we should reserve one for you! The price is $5.50/lb for the hanging weight (which is the carcass before processing — our heritage hogs typically dress out at 50-65 lbs each). We pay for all the butchering costs except for making into bacon and sausages, which you would pay if you want that. Our butcher does a beautiful job with no-nitrate added “curing,” and we can have them make bacon, Bratwurst and/or hams for you if you like (again, you would pay for those costs). Email us ASAP to reserve your half or whole!

A correction: In last week’s newsletter, I invited people to the McMinnville Women’s Choir’s spring concert, but I wrote the incorrect date (which I have since corrected in the post). The concert is 7 pm, Saturday, May 7. Tickets are available at Oregon Stationers now!

Meet this week’s vegetables:

• 

  Sugar snap peas!

  Apples
  

• Sugar snap peas — One of our all-time favorite spring crops has arrived! This is shaping up to be a banner snap pea year. The first picking has supremely satisfying, and the peas are super duper tasty. These are edible pod peas, which means you eat the whole thing!
• Broccoli
• Zucchini
• Fennel
• Kale
• Rainbow chard — Aren’t all the different colors pretty? This chard was the unexpected hit of the CSA pick-up last week and we actually ran out! So, Casey picked more this week.
• Winter squash — Casey and I have been marveling this week at how unusual it feels to be eating zucchini, snap peas, and butternut squash all in the same meal. But we’re loving it.
• Potatoes
• Leeks
• Green garlic
• Eggs — Limit half dozen/share (you are welcome to buy more eggs as well!). Rusty has begun helping us collect and wash the eggs in the mornings. It seems like an appropriate first farm chore for a six year old boy (he has lots of other household chores already).

And this week’s extra goodies from the farm:

• Eggs — $6/dozen
• Bratwurst! — Artisan-made without any added nitrates or sugars. $12/package (one lb packages).
• Pork — We have a few remaining roasts and shanks for $8/lb. More hogs heading to the butcher next week!
• Ground beef — $8/lb

Casey cutting potato seed to prepare for planting.

As Casey and I have returned to being a family farm without any hired labor, folks have raised their eyebrows many times and either said aloud or wondered to themselves: “How is that going to work?”

Hey, it’s a good question. One that I think we’ve been feeling out a bit as we go, although we set plenty in motion to make our 1.5 person farm work. The big picture changes were to cut back on what we’re trying to do — I wrote a few weeks ago about cutting back significantly on our acreage. Our animal operation is much smaller now too and getting smaller (the last of our hogs head to the butcher on May 2). The overall size of our CSA is a bit smaller this year too. All this trimming down on our expectations of the farm means that there is overall less work to do of course, which is good since there are fewer of us out here doing it than in the last seven years when we did have hired labor on the farm.

And, of course, the labor that we provide on the farm is substantially different in quality than anything we could hire. That’s not a criticism of our employees — it’s just the reality of small business operation. The owners will always know the most about the Big Picture and All The Moving Parts and therefore be able to be efficient and productive in their work in ways that folks hired for a season just never can be. It’s just the nature of the system, and one that we are embracing now as we scale back so that the work matches our available labor.

But still, there’s plenty for us to do on our farm! We still have a 90+ member 45-week long CSA! And we sell to local restaurants! And we have animals and perennial fruit to tend! Yes, we have plenty to do.

So, how are we getting it done? What we’ve discovered this year has become a bit of a happy motto for us: We get it all done in “dribs and drabs.” Seriously. We’ve stopped thinking of tasks as Big Things. Planting is no longer a task that piles up until it’s an all day activity. Instead, if Casey has an hour free after restaurant deliveries, he’ll check the biodynamic planting calendar and see if it’d be a good day to go sow or transplant a few rows. Or, he’ll jump on the tractor and work up two more acres of ground. In the morning when he wakes up early before the rest of us (which for Casey means waking up at 4 am), he’ll fill a few flats with soil mix and sow transplants in the kitchen. The same strategy applied to other projects, such as pruning the orchards and managing the greenhouses this winter. Casey even hoes in nearby greenhouses while filling our animal watering tank at the well each morning. Dribs and drabs, here and there, the tasks get done.

It’s been a big shift in how we think about our work, one that really does work best when just the owners are responsible for getting it all done. There’s no time lost in explaining a task or setting up. We know what to do and can just dive in fully for an hour or two. It’s been really satisfying and has kept our work from piling up into daunting, over-whelming lists. Certainly our weekly rhythm still contains a few solid dedicated chunks of time to our regular tasks — Tuesday morning is always spent on restaurant harvest, Wednesday is spent on the CSA harvest, Thursday afternoon is the CSA pick-up. But much of the rest of the time is used in shorter bursts of attention that add up to some majorly productive work!

We’ve been applying that same “dribs and drabs” approach to planting this spring’s potatoes. Since we received them a few weeks ago, they’ve been laid out in indirect sunlight in our greenhouse in order to “chit,” which is a word to describe allowing some light to stimulate the growth of buds at the eyes. This gives the potatoes a head start when they are finally planted, because they are already awake! Once the potatoes were chitted and we had ground available to plant, Casey started watching for “root” transplant days on the biodynamic calendar we use. On Monday, he and the kids made use of the first open window by planting 1250 row feet of potatoes. Today, we went at it again and planted five different varieties in 2500 row feet. We still have some potatoes left to plant, which we will save for the official “potato planting party” coming up (see note below about date/time change!), but we’re getting it done in dribs and drabs in the meantime.

But, speaking of our potato planting party, we need to update our plans! When we originally scheduled it, we read our biodynamic planting calendar a little incorrectly (it was a “root” day but not a transplant day). We don’t really understand it, but we’ve really seen that planting by our calendar makes a profound difference in our crops (which is a topic worth a whole other newsletter), so it’s worth moving the potato planting day to match the calendar. Unfortunately, the new day may be a little more challenging for some people to join us for. On our end, that’s ok! Even if just one or two people come out, we will enjoy their company and appreciate their help! The last two years this planting party was a hoot, and the resulting potatoes grew beautifully and abundantly!

Here’s the new plan:

• Potato Planting Party ~ Monday, May 16 ~ potato planting from 4-6 pm, followed by a potluck supper at our house

Please make the change on your calendar, and we hope some of you can join us! The work of planting potatoes is fun and accessible for folks of many abilities and ages. Kids are welcome (with parental supervision of course!).

Also, while I’m sharing upcoming May dates with you, I also want to invite you to join the McMinnville Women’s Choir for our spring concert:

• Water for Our Soul ~ 7 pm, Saturday, May 7 at First Baptist Church, McMinnville ~ Tickets $5 (kids are free) and available at Oregon Stationers now

I’ve been singing with the choir for two years now (this will be my fifth concert!), and the choir is full of wonderful women from our farm’s community and beyond. We’ll be singing songs from many traditions — all of them inspiring! The concert would make a great Mother’s Day weekend outing for you or your mother (or mother of your children).

Before I sign off I of course should provide a little update on my mom. Her surgery went well last Thursday and she returned home from the hospital two days ago to continue her recovery process. There is still some uncertainty about what comes next, but we are so glad to have her home! Thank you for all your prayers and positive thoughts for our farm family.

Enjoy this week’s vegetables!

Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla

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Meet this week’s vegetables:

• Strawberries — Of course, by now you know what last week’s surprises were: strawberries and zucchini from the greenhouses! (Can I just say how much we have been loving our greenhouses this spring? Overall they don’t represent much acreage on our farm, but they are crazy productive and fun for filling in the gap between the winter storage crops and field-grown summer crops). This week we still have a limit on one pint per share, but we won’t make you choose between strawberries or zucchini this time!
• Apples — We’ve been doing a happy dance in our house lately that this year we had enough apples to make it through to the start of strawberry season. For us (and our kids) this means that we’ve been able to meet our own fruit needs all winter and into spring.
• Zucchini
• Fennel bulbs
• Broccoli & purple sprouting broccoli — Limit one item/share this week! Thank you!
• Kale
• Rainbow chard
• Winter squash
• Carrots
• Potatoes
• Green garlic
• Eggs — Limit half dozen eggs/share (you are welcome to buy another half dozen to make a full dozen! We just want to make sure we have enough eggs for everyone who wants some!).

And this week’s extra goodies from the farm:

• Eggs — $6/dozen
• Bratwurst! — Artisan-made without any added nitrates or sugars. $12/package (one lb packages).
• Pork — We have a few remaining roasts and shanks for $8/lb. More hogs heading to the butcher early in May!
• Ground beef — $8/lb

Winter Density lettuce — a long-time favorite of ours!

Hey there fine farm folks — I’ll be honest tonight. I’m a little more distracted than usual from my newsletter writing duties. Tomorrow (Thursday) morning, my mom will be undergoing unexpected urgent surgery. We only just found out a few days ago, so we’re reeling a bit in figuring out all the last minute details around the farm — who will take care of her chickens during recovery (my dad), who will take care of the kids on Thursdays (a friend) … those kinds of things.

Because of course she is such an integral part of all that happens out here on the farm, and so the recovery period will require some adjustments as we all pitch in. I will be at pick-up as usual for the first couple of hours and then I will probably miss those of you who come in the second half (as I will be headed to the hospital to visit my mom and be with family). Thank you for patience with Casey as he balances his usual CSA duties with mine in that time! We should be back to our normal routine next week (thanks to the help of our friend).

Whew! Sometimes life throws us curve balls, eh? I don’t think anyone on the farm was anticipating such a dramatic upheaval this spring. But of course, moments like this make us so deeply grateful to have each other. And to have our wider community of friends and family who offer positive thoughts, prayers, help, and more. We are grateful!

Enjoy this week’s vegetables!

Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla

~ ~ ~

Meet this week’s vegetables:

• Surprise items — We have two very new crops to share with you — both limited this week because they are just coming on. You’ll have to choose which one you want more (and rest assured, more of both will come in future weeks).
• Apples
• Salad turnips — The salad turnips are bigger than ever! We’ve started peeling the outside of the giant ones so we can more fully relish the tender inside. Remember that the greens are very delicious as well, and we take great measures to deliver them in good condition. They are tender enough to chop into a salad, or you can cook them. They cook down more than some other greens, so either prepare for them to be a smallish portion or cook them with other greens.
• Lettuce OR purple broccoli — Choose one between these two delicious spring crops (and please limit yourself to one total). More to come of both in future weeks, but we want to make sure that the folks who come at the end of pick-up get some too!
• Winter squash — Choose from an assortment of winter squash.
• Kale & kale rapini
• Chard — A fun little fact about the chard from this over-wintered planting: we saved the seed from our plants last year!
• Carrots
• Potatoes
• Green garlic — If you’re new to “green” garlic, let me introduce you a bit. This is a crop that looks a little like green onions, but it is actually young, immature (still “green”) garlic plants before they’ve bulbed and dried down. It’s like garlic, but different too — milder and fresher. Use it as you might any allium crop. I chop it and sauté it in butter before adding greens (or other veggies) to the pan. The smell is divine.
• Leeks
• Eggs! — ‘Tis the season when we put eggs in the veggie line-up! A half-dozen eggs is worth an “item,” and we ask that you only take one of your items as eggs (if you want to take home more than a half-dozen, you are welcome to buy them!).

And this week’s extra goodies from the farm:

• Eggs — $6/dozen
• Bratwurst! — Artisan-made without any added nitrates or sugars. $12/package (one lb packages).
• Pork — We have a few remaining roasts and shanks for $8/lb. More hogs heading to the butcher early in May!
• Ground lamb — $8/lb.
• Ground beef — $8/lb

Tractor implements moved and all lined up in a tidy row — a few there to prepare for selling. Note the newly worked up field in the background!

The anniversary of our farm passed last month with only a minor tangential note in another newsletter. But here it is: as of March of this year, we’ve now been living and farming in Yamhill County for ten years!

I don’t think I could have ever pictured how much would happen in the first ten years of our farm — which could also be seen as the first ten years of our adult life as well (I’ll count the years in school and at Holden Village as our preparatory pre-lots-of-responsibility-plus-a-mortgage years). I also don’t think we could have anticipated how many different changes we would make on our farm, as we experimented with different enterprises and scale and marketing outlets.

A few things have stayed amazingly steady for us: the vegetable CSA, our home here on Grand Island, our commitment to selling only here in Yamhill County, our dedication to organic methods. But at the edges of those core values and goals, many different projects have been tried and many wonderful people have come and gone (off onto their own new adventures). It’s been a wild ride, folks.

This spring, perhaps timed with hitting our ten year mark, we’ve been feeling the “residues” of some of those come-and-gone-again projects and enterprises. Each little or big adventure on our farm has required an investment in infrastructure or equipment, and over the years those things have found their way into our farm spaces. I noted once in a farming article on infrastructure about the phenomenon of simply putting one innocuous item down on the ground, and how it will inevitably become a magnet for more detritus. In that article, I warned about choosing where you place those [inevitable] piles carefully so that they do not become eyesores for yourself, your neighbors or customers! These piles could include anything from old worn out starts flats (waiting to be taken to the plastic recycler), irrigation pipes needing fixing, tractor implements that simply haven’t been used in a few years, bits of fencing, t-posts, buckets, bits of greenhouse poly, and so much more. The contents will vary depending on the farm and its projects and people, of course! They do seem to be an inevitable part of the process, as it were.

But. At some point, they become clutter. And clutter can affect ability to function efficiently and have mental clarity about a space and its purposes. We have certainly tackled many such piles in the past, but at our ten year mark we were feeling a need to deal with more of these things — especially the items that were left-over from enterprises we’re no longer making the focus of our farm. A friend of mine recently spent several weeks camping with her family, and upon her “re-entry” to life on their rural homestead, she described feeling so many little psychic “strings” attaching her to different projects that need her attention on some level — this was in contrast to temporary life in a tent, which only offered immediate needs to be met and none of those bigger nagging kind of work to be done … eventually.

Her image of these “strings” stuck with me and helped me clarify what I was feeling a lot of this spring — certainly we had acquired a reasonable amount of actual physical stuff to deal with. But honestly the stuff itself was not so great — the mental nagging was more related to what it represented … little mental strings still linking us to projects that have passed or that no longer feel like they are consistent with our farm’s thriving present and future. Without a doubt, there is a lot of fun to be had during ten years of a farm’s growth and experimentation, but there are also a lot of leftover emotions from things that didn’t end up being a part of our farm’s long term plan. Pulling back from things can be hugely beneficial, but it can also be hard.

In the ten years that we’ve been operating our business in Yamhill County, we’ve actually seen many similar scaled businesses go through their own reinventions and experimentations with growing bigger — and then growing smaller again. I’m sure these models stand out to us because of their similarities to our own experience, but I think there is probably some natural course for a small family-operated business that involves initial success, followed by healthy growth until the business reaches a point of growth that stops feeling as beneficial — where the business stops feeling like it is the same beautiful sustainable scale that it began at. I imagine this represents a critical point for any business — to choose whether to listen to that message and how to respond.

At our “peak” of our scale, we were actively managing over 100 acres of land and employed half a dozen employees and were balancing many different enterprises (including a raw milk micro dairy, which is a huge enterprise in of itself!). In the last year, we’ve been pulling back from that scale significantly, returning to our “sweet” spot of what feels good for our family (and as a result good for our customers too!). I think part of what makes very small local businesses like ours is the attention the owners can put into their service or product. Now that we have no employees, I think it’s an understatement to say that we are very hands on with our vegetable production! In fact, we touch it all. With our hands. That kind of simple straight-forward business is what attracted us to this gig to begin with.

As we pulled back starting at the beginning of last year, we didn’t want to “swerve” our business too hard in a different direction by contracting too quickly — “over-correct” as one might say. We didn’t want to make too many changes too quickly, including giving up on equipment or land that had been useful to us in those larger manifestations of our farm. We have more distance now and feel more properly settled into the idea of scaling back. So I suppose that’s why it’s only this spring, we’re finally seeing all those “strings” we still have connected to parts of our former bigger and more complicated farm. It feels like the right time to start cutting those, dealing with the literal piles, finding closure in areas where it is needed, and providing ourselves more mental clarity to focus on what we are doing and what we are loving right now.

Also, if I’m honest, we also want to cut these old strings in order to allow ourselves the freedom to tinker a bit more in the future, because really we will always continue to tinker on the periphery of our farm. Casey especially loves the challenge of learning about new things and seeing what might become a long-term part of our farm — and many of his projects have integrated into our farm in delightful ways: our fruit orchards are one example of something he took on as a new enterprise many years ago. And, I’m not immune to the excitement of new projects either — I’ll hold up this year’s cookbook project as a prime example! All these possibilities are part of what keeps us engaged in this farming endeavor, but we also need to clean up old projects before taking on any new ones! As I might say to our kids, it’s useful to put away the toys you are no longer playing with before taking out new ones! Either way, it was time to cut all those strings that nagged on us.

So, this week we tackled our Big Spring Cleaning, which included literal cleaning and moving of Things as well as some Big Letting Go of no longer necessary commitments. Not surprisingly, the cleaning up of The Stuff ended up going very quickly. Once we were acting in something akin to the popular “Konmari” mindset of clearing out the clutter, it was easy to sort through things and figure out where it should go that is not on our property. Some items will be given away to other farmers, some sold, and others just really needed to be taken into town for scrap metal. As the piles started disappearing, I realized how physically small they really were. But they felt huge, because they represented Things We Just Didn’t Need Anymore. Having them sorted through and on their way off the farm feels like the most amazing purge of clutter.

But there were other Big Strings to attend to as well. Notably, this weekend we decided to no longer rent the 54 acre parcel we’ve been leasing since 2012, which made up over half of our former 100 acres. Letting go of that land felt like a hard decision … until we made it. And then it felt like a relief. Our major motivation for holding onto it at this point was simply love and attachment. It’s gorgeous, and we’ve experienced so many things over there. We feel proud that we were able to transition it out of conventional chemical production and into organic growing. It is a giant parcel of Potential, and when we stand there we feel that Potential. It is a palpable experience to stand in the middle of an alive, healthy piece of prime farmland. One just wants to be there, to find out what that Potential can be. But, we realized, it’s no longer our Potential. We don’t see ourselves expanding our land base again in the near future. And so we’ve let it go, with gratitude for what it was for us. We still have loose ends to tie up concerning that land (including the moving of some of our perennial crops this winter), but this summer another farmer will be taking over its management. Can you hear the giant string being cut? Clip clip.

We also own 31 acres on the other side of our creek that we will not be farming this year either. Another organic grower is renting that parcel from us. Clip clip.

Which leaves us with the land here on our side of Skeeter Creek — our “home farm” of 17.5 acres, plus a few acres of my parents’ land next door. Which is plenty. I look out my office window now and see the bulk of that land. I have to admit that when we were at our peak of diversity and acreage and labor management, this was my most frequent daydream — to return to farming just our home farm, allowing us to pay attention to everything ourselves. Here we are.

I can’t speak for Casey on his inner experience, but our Spring cleaning has definitely been emotional for me. I’ve been trying to put my finger on exactly what I am feeling, because it is complex. On one hand, there is so much relief and satisfaction coming from dealing with those strings. But with the relief comes a sense that I can only describe as space or emptiness. Emptiness sounds negative, which isn’t how it feels to me. Perhaps it’s the creation of space, both on the farm and in our mental management of it. Things that had been hanging out in my head for years and years are gone (or on their way to being gone). I am very aware of the absence right now. It feels very quiet.

I think the best comparable experience I can think of right now is the feelings I had upon graduating from high school and college. In both cases, there was a minor sense of nostalgia, but mostly I felt such a visceral sense of completion and openness in the future. There was this sense that I had worked very hard in the near past and that that work was finished for now.

But I would also compare how I am feeling to how I used to feel upon moving from one apartment to another — packing up our things and cleaning the old apartment and looking around with gratitude for what came, satisfaction in having our things dealt with, and anticipation for the next thing. I have always found that experience to be strange in how that old familiar place looked unfamiliar without its things, and yet beautiful too in its simplicity. The newly open spaces echo. I think in some ways our farm right now feels both like that old apartment that is being emptied and cleaned almost past the point of recognition and also like the new home, where one expects new dreams to grow and prosper.

Without a doubt, this spring feels like a passage. A transition. One of many in our life, to be sure. And one of many to come for the farm, to be sure. But, here we are, packing up old things and saying good-bye to what has been on the farm and is no more.

In other related news (and surely adding to the emotional experience), in our home life, we marked two important events this weekend. First, Casey finished a little bathroom remodel project that had been on our ‘to do’ list for about nine years. When we first built our house, we used some lower quality materials, and we almost immediately realized that our shower and bathroom fan were not going to work in the long-term for our house. Ultimately it didn’t take but the part of three weekends to replace the shower walls and fan (and fix drywall and paint), but marking it off our mental ‘to do’ list felt huge. Clip clip.

Also, this Sunday evening, an intimate group of friends and family joined us at our church for Rusty and Dottie’s baptisms. Casey and I spent many years of our farming life without a connection to a spiritual community, and it has been wonderful to revive that part of our life in the last year as we began attending Sunday services again at Lumen Christi here in McMinnville. Welcoming our children into that part of our life felt like a significant passage indeed, one filled with love and support.

So, we have had many opportunities for emotions and for feeling a sense of something “new” around here! I think it’s safe to say that Spring is sprung here on the farm — in our fields and orchards, and in our souls!

Enjoy this week’s vegetables!

Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla

P.S. That greenhouse in our opening photo? You might just want to have a peek inside:

Ar! Thar be bloomin’ SNAP PEAS in that thar greenhouse!

~ ~ ~

Meet this week’s vegetables:

• Apples
• Salad turnips
• Fennel bulbs — A new flavor for your plates this week! We love fennel, but I have to admit that this is probably the #1 “stumping” vegetable we grow. By which I mean, it probably elicits the most questions along the line of, “So … what do you do with fennel bulbs?” Here’s what we do, and it’s quite simple. We just treat our fennel like we would any other vegetable in our kitchen. Which means that we chop it up and either throw it in the oven to roast with other items. Or throw it into a pan on the stovetop to sauté with leeks or other vegetables. Or, we chop it fine and toss it with a green salad. I think this is one of those vegetables that maybe just doesn’t really “make sense” until you are familiar with its texture and flavor. Once you are, it seems more obvious how to include it with other food. It brings a unique flavor to dishes that we love (and this is a time of year when new flavors are especially welcome!).
• Head lettuce
• Winter squash — We’ll have a mix available for you to choose from!
• Leaf broccoli
• Kale
• Kale rapini — Enjoy the kale rapini while it lasts. This week’s unprecedented “early April heat wave” will be changing a lot of what is in our fields, including speeding up the flowering process on some of our over-wintered rapini crops. By next week, many of them will be much more mature, and it’s high likely many will no longer be tender enough to harvest for greens. We will see!
• Chard
• Carrots
• Potatoes
• Leeks

And this week’s extra goodies from the farm:

• Eggs — We have an abundance of eggs but a shortage of cartons! If you have a stack of cartons on your counter, this would be a great week for you to bring them to us! Having our members fill their own carton helps us keep our cost reasonable while still feeding our hens certified organic feed! $6/dozen
• Bratwurst! — Artisan-made without any added nitrates or sugars. $12/package (one lb packages).
• Pork — We have roasts and shanks for $8/lb.
• Ground lamb — $8/lb.
• Ground beef — $8/lb

The view from here — so many cherries (and other trees) are in bloom on and all around our farm right now.

Right at this very moment, our farm is in the midst of an epic transformation. After so many days and weeks of wet late winter weather, the sun has come out. And the forecast is for a whole week of this glorious treat.

As I’ve mentioned in recent newsletters, it has felt as though much of the farm is on “pause,” just waiting for this turn of events. Buds were swollen but not yet open all around us. And, now, everything is abloom, and the sky is full of the sound of buzzing in cherry, apple, and maple tree blossoms.

We too are feeling the shift in our work. For weeks now, when folks have (inevitably) asked us, “Are things busy on the farm?” we’ve sort of shrugged our shoulders. Because, well, certainly we’ve kept ourselves plenty busy preparing for the big spring work, but mostly we’ve been limited to the prep work: the greenhouse work, the buried mainline, the continual harvest for the CSA.

But now we’re faced with the real deal of spring: grass to mow, ground to prep, seeds to sow (outside! in the ground!), starts to transplant …

It won’t all happen at once — it can’t! Nor is it all truly ready, but we can see it, like a massive wave rolling in toward us. Thankfully, this massive wave comes laden with sweet smelling blossoms and the promise of so much goodness to come.

We’ve been slowly weeding our outdoor strawberry planting in preparation for one kind of early summer sweetness, even as we work through the final bins of apples stored in the cooler and remaining winter squash in storage.

All ready for some sunny day outdoor adventures!

On the homefront, it’s also time to assess the next season of clothing for both kids — to check out what warm weather clothing is in storage (that still fits!) and what needs to be found and brought home. I’m also thinking about what our home learning will look like this summer. Until recently, I’d been feeling like we might as well keep on with what we’ve been doing, because our mornings spent doing school are truly delightful to us. But as the sun came out, my little farmers expressed a desire to be outside as much as possible. Rusty requested that we eat lunch outside today, and I don’t see this trend ending soon. So, I see that a new rhythm may be welcome for a spell, where we cut back on our time at the table and relish all that is around us outside on the farm and at the river (and move our reading time to the hammock on the porch!).

It’s funny how I still find myself surprised by each new rhythm — how I still can’t always anticipate the way my own inner desires will naturally shift with each new season. It seems to me that there is so much joy in this endless shifting. Even if we wanted to hold on to one moment in life, one season, we couldn’t. Better to savor it as it passes by.

May this week’s sun bring you outside as well. I do believe that these first sunny days of the year are truly some of the best — it seems that the whole world is amazed by the sun’s warmth and glow.

Enjoy this week’s vegetables!

Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla

~ ~ ~

Interested in pork? In early May, the remainder of our hogs are going to the butcher! We still have some available for folks who want to reserve a half or whole hog to put in their freezer. The price is $5.50/lb for the hanging weight (which is the carcass before processing — our heritage hogs typically dress out at 50-65 lbs each). We pay for all the butchering costs except for making into bacon and sausages, which you would pay if you want that. Our butcher does a beautiful job with no-nitrate added “curing,” and we can have them make bacon, Bratwurst and/or hams for you if you like (again, you would pay for those costs). Email us ASAP to reserve your half or whole!

~ ~ ~

Meet this week’s vegetables:

• Apples
• Head lettuce — There’s no better way to end a sunny day than with a salad at dinner time.
• Salad turnips — This week’s turnips are even better than last week’s (same planting; they’ve just had another week of beautiful weather to grow!).
• Butternut squash
• Marina di Chioggia winter squash
• Kale rapini
• Turnip rapini
• Leaf broccoli
• Carrots
• Chard
• Kale
• Potatoes
• Leeks/onions

And this week’s extra goodies from the farm:

• Eggs — Our spring supply is still going up! We will likely have them to the end of the end day, so plan for eggs! Yay for farm fresh eggs! $6/dozen
• Bratwurst! — Artisan-made without any added nitrates or sugars. $12/package (one lb packages).
• Pork — Roasts are $8/lb; pork chops are $12/lb.
• Lamb — LAMBCHOP SALE CONTINUES! Lambchops only $8/lb! Ground lamb is $8/lb.
• Ground beef — $8/lb

The beginning! Friday afternoon, and Casey was digging a four-foot deep trench the fast way. Just LOOK at that SOIL — that is why we are here.

I hope no one wasted too much time worrying about our buried mainline project on Monday. We had been planning to work on it that day, but oh was it wet!

Thankfully we saw the forecasts and Casey and my dad got into action a little early so as to take advantage of the [relative brief] dry spell at the end of last week. Casey ran into town after his restaurant harvests on Friday and picked up the trencher and got to work. We weren’t sure how long the entire process would take, and we figured we should make good use of the time we had before the next rainstorm arrived.

You see — we’ve done a few projects around here. We know how these things go. We might make our plans (such as our original plan to do the work on Monday), but certain factors might require us to change our plans. It’s not uncommon for us to hatch a plan, set some deadlines and then set it in motion in advance of our original plans. Often we find that just making the plans concrete and real gets the ball rolling, and making use of that energy propels us forward in a way that wouldn’t happen if we just kept waiting.

And, it’s often good to start early, because there are inevitable unforeseen challenges that will arise. In fact, I wonder if I should call them “unforeseen,” because at this point we do expect the unexpected. Which feels very different than the early days when those inevitable “oops” seemed to stall and stymie us (and we’d often waste a lot of energy wondering why the challenges happened! Now we just know that they’re part of the process!). Some possible examples that we try to prepare for ahead of time as best as we can: running out of materials and supplies (oh, this one is so common!), having a tool or other critical part break during our use, or running into something so beyond the scope of what we could see ahead of time. This last one especially applies when doing a particular project for the first time.

This was our first time installing a buried mainline for irrigation, although Casey’s done plenty of other plumbing and irrigation projects before. As we prepared we knew a few things, including that we wanted/needed to have the right tools for the job. For many years, we did a lot of projects “making do” with tools that were never quite right. When planning to dig a 900-foot-long trench across one’s field, we could spend a lot of time working on the project without the right tool. Or, we could rent the appropriate trencher and get it done quick.

Our first unexpected blip in the project occurred overnight between when Casey started the trenching on Friday and picked it back up the next morning. A gopher found the new trench attractive and interesting and filled in a significant length of the trench with muddy dirt. When laying pipe there, Casey had to dig down with a shovel head that didn’t quite fit into the narrow trench to lift out very heavy dirt, slowing the pipe laying process down considerably at first.

Casey finished installing the final riser at the end of the line just as dinner was ready on Saturday night!

Nonetheless, the trencher dug through our soil faster than we even expected, so that Casey and my dad had the digging finished by Saturday morning, which left them lots of time to glue together 45 20 ft pieces of 4″ pipe and install three risers. As they neared the end of the line, it became obvious that (no surprise!) we needed more pipe than originally anticipated. So Casey returned the trencher and picked up more pipe and finished installing the last section (which fit perfectly!) and riser just as dinner was finished on Saturday evening. The whole project completed in just over a day of work!

Except that it wasn’t … not quite yet! This is where our understanding of the “the process” becomes very important. We knew that until that line was charged and tested, the project was definitely not done. On Monday, Casey charged the line, with the plan to irrigate our lower greenhouses (part of why we’d installed the buried mainline to begin with, since they are 900 feet away from our well and at the end of the new line).

Alas, once the line was pressurized for several minutes, one of the fittings at a riser burst apart. It was a fitting Casey had worried about, as it is the one that landed on top of the gopher filled trench and as a result was not quite as level as the rest of the fittings, making the junction not as strong. And, so he ran back to the store again for more pipe and fittings, and he and my dad dug out a very large round hole around the broken spot, in order to fix the burst fitting and ensure that the new fix could be level.

In case you’re wondering, the fix took about half as long as the initial installation of the line.

A few years back, I think this math would have frustrated Casey and me to no end. We would have seen it as a huge waste of time to spend so many hours on a glitch in the initial installation. We would have wondered how we could have prevented the break in the first place? (Of course now we know, for the most part, so if we ever install a mainline again we’ll have that information. But at this point, it seems unlikely that we will!) After many years of building houses and greenhouses and other things, I think we have finally achieved some calm and can join the contractors in the world in knowing that such things really will happen. And then we’ll fix them. That’s how it goes.

We still need to backfill the trench, but there’s no rush at the moment. The rain has returned, and we’ll wait until our work won’t make a muddy mess.

The mud play begins at a muddy spot by our well.

But, speaking of muddy messes, some kids sure had some fun playing outside while trenches were being dug and pipes laid. They climbed in and out of the trench and made “nests” out of dirt and mud and had more utility sink “baths” than I could even keep count of.

Since Tuesday we’ve been back to our weekly rhythm of harvesting. I think one of the trickier aspects of managing a farm is balancing the ongoing work with the one-time “big picture” projects. They both have to happen, but at times one seems to take precedence. At times, it seems that our ongoing work makes it hard to see how we’d have time to tackle those long-term projects (even when they might offer us almost immediate time saving benefits, such as with this mainline). At other times, it feels as though we can get swept up in big picture changes or projects and feel stretched thin in our ongoing work. This week, the balance has felt good, but we’ve also put in a lot of hours!

But some of that may just be spring. Which arrived this week too, in case you hadn’t noticed. Welcome new season! We will certainly be putting in more hours in general over the coming months, especially once the dry weather does arrive and we get busy with ground prep, planting and weeding on top of everything else. But spring brings with it special renewed energy for completing these tasks too: longer days, nourishing food, inspiring sunny days.

Enjoy this week’s vegetables!

Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla

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Frittata! An easy spring food — Our flock’s egg production is going up, just in time to fill Easter baskets I suppose. This week we went a little crazy in our house with egg decorating, including a lot of blown eggs as well as hard-boiled. After I’d blown the contents out of the eggs, I decided that it was time to make the season’s first frittata! These easy baked omelettes are a perennial favorite farm food around these parts. They’re so simple, so versatile and so delicious.

Here’s our method: I begin by selecting some veggies to cook in a large-ish cast iron pan. What I choose for a frittata will inevitably vary a lot with the season. In the summer, sweet peppers are delicious, for example, but in the early spring we’ll choose sweet onions and leaf broccoli. Rusty and I chopped everything fine, and I sautéed the chopped onions first and then added the chopped greens once the onions were soft (using lots of butter). Meanwhile, Dottie beat nine eggs with some cream and a dash of salt. Rusty carefully poured the eggs into the pan and I worked it around to make sure the eggs were evenly distributed in the pan around the greens. I cooked the pan over medium heat until there were bubbles coming up and the sides were looking cooked (just started to pull away from the edges). At that point, I moved the pan to the oven, where I put it under the broiler until it was browned to perfection on top (spinning in once during broiler to ensure even cooking).

With reheated Marina di Chioggia slices served alongside, our frittata made a delicious lunch! Everyone ate seconds!

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Meet this week’s vegetables:

• Apples
• Salad turnips — These brilliantly white, tender roots are a spring treat. We only grow them in this season, when the weather is just perfect for producing their mellow sweetness. Our favorite way to eat them is just RAW. I repeat — they are so good uncooked! We just slice them and serve them in a little bowl on the table for everyone to nibble on with the rest of their meal. The turnip greens are delicious cooked though. I rinse them again, chop them, and cook them with other greens.
• Radishes
• Marina di Chioggia winter squash
• Butternut winter squash
• Leaf broccoli
• Collard rapini — More of our brassica plants are making rapini now! This week we’ve got bunches of nice leafy collard and kale rapini, which can be cooked just as you would the leaves or roasted in a pan until crispy.
• Red Russian kale rapini
• Chard
• Carrots
• Potatoes
• Leeks

And this week’s extra goodies from the farm:

• Eggs — Try a frittata this week! I, personally, also think that brown eggs are beautiful when dyed for the holidays. The colors come out more muted and earthy looking. $6/dozen
• Bratwurst! — We just stocked the freezer with our second-to-last batch of pork, and it’s all Bratwurst! Artisan-made without any added nitrates or sugars. SO DELICIOUS. Stock up. $12/lb (one lb packages).
• Pork — Roasts are $8/lb; pork chops are $12/lb.
• Lamb — LAMBCHOP SALE CONTINUES! Lambchops only $8/lb! Ground lamb is $8/lb.
• Ground beef — $8/lb