2 Days. 7 Farms. Lots of Inspiration.

Old barn at Imladris Farm ... goats and chickens inside.

For the past two days, the annual Family Farm Tour has been afoot. The tour is sponsored by our beloved ASAP, and features farms of all sorts. So, Ali and Nicole and Christopher and I packed up our farm family and headed out down the highways and byways of Western North Carolina to explore some small farms.

It was exhausting and amazing. We visited Gladheart Farms, Imladris Farm, Flying Cloud Farm, Firefly Farm, Mountain Farm, Arthur Morgan School, and Mountain Gardens. We returned home inspired.

To top off the weekend, Christopher cooked up an incredible meal of the last of the fava beans and the first of the summer squash sauteed in butter with garlic and walnuts and served with a goat's milk white sauce over gnocchi. It was perhaps the best meal he has ever prepared in all the time we've known each other. I cracked open a bottle of sparkling Lavender-Rosemary mead I made last fall and drank it ice-cold with the aforementioned feast, and we gave thanks for the rich community that we live in, and the gifts of our own garden.

Here are some highlights of the tour:

Michael Porterfield at Gladheart Farms. Gladheart grows vegetables which they sell wholesale and through a CSA, and also has a small number of dairy goats and laying hens. All of their diesel equipment is run on biodiesel made on-site from recycled waste oil, and their hoophouse is heated using biodiesel too.

Christopher and goat friend at Gladheart.

Gardens, barn, biodiesel production facility, and chicken tractor at Gladheart.

View across fallow fields at Flying Cloud, a Fairview farm that runs a very popular CSA and always generates a long line at the farmers markets.

Tops of sweet corn visible through the packing shed window, Flying Cloud.

Fall starts in the hoophouse, Flying Cloud.

Christopher tries out a homemade planting contraption at Firefly Farm.

Border collie pup, Firefly Farm

Poultry at Arthur Morgan School, a Quaker-oriented school for grades 7-9 with a work requirement for students.

Grape arbor shading south-facing windows at Arthur Morgan School.

Shitake logs at Arthur Morgan School

View into the vegetable garden, Arthur Morgan. Jerusalem artichokes in the foreground; passive solar greenhouse in the background.

We ended the day today at Mountain Gardens, the woodland "paradise garden" of the amazing Joe Hollis. Joe and his apprentices cultivate 500 species of edible, medicinal, and otherwise useful plants on about two acres.

Wineberry trellis, Mountain Gardens.

Cob house built for under $100, Mountain Gardens.

Loveliest outhouse around, Mountain Gardens.

Cob cactus cultivation wall, Mountain Gardens.

Dried herbs, Mountain Gardens.

A small portion of the vast array of blend-your-own tinctures available at Mountain Gardens.

So long, Spring, we hardly knew you

An unusually cold winter followed by an unseasonably hot spring has made for a strange start to the warm-weather gardening season.

Temperatures have been holding steady in the high-80s to low-90s for a couple of weeks now, and there is no end in sight--very unusual for western North Carolina. We're all a bit peaked and many plants that usually bloom all summer (foxglove, valerian) are fried.

Summer Solstice was on Monday, and yesterday I took most of the spring peas off of their trellises (one of many wheelbarrow-fulls pictured above) to allow the cucumbers to bust a move. It felt like a fitting garden transition for Solstice time.

It's summer for sure now. Squash. Cucumbers. Green tomatoes and peppers on the vine. Wilting, bitter lettuce. Browning peas. Blown-out arugula and mustard all gone to seed.

I'm learning how not to hang on too tightly to the things in the garden that have slowed their production or passed their peak. It's such a straightforward lesson from the garden, one that lends itself so easily to allegory: the things we can't let go of start to taste bitter and feel tough in our mouths. Time to sweep out the old and allow room for what's next. In this case: cucumbers.

Creature Comforts

File under: Things we wouldn't get to do if we had a Big Farm. Rescuing woolly worms. A photo from late winter/early spring that I meant to post back then but lost track of.

They were everywhere! We tried to relocate them to alternate warm spots whenever our gardening activities exposed them.

Given the onslaught of insects we've been encountering lately that DON'T bring a smile to our faces, it seemed appropriate to remember the sweetness of discovering sleeping woolly worms in the garden.

Kind Words and Pretty Pictures

My friend Dana put up some beautiful photos of our place this Spring (including this one at left) and some very kind words about our homestead on her absolutely delightful blog, "Dana-Dee," which I regularly read aloud to Christopher in the evening.

Ms. Dana Dee has an incredible eye for beauty, a fabulous way with words, and all kinds of useful and unusual skills (hide tanning and bird taxidermy and choreographing dance routines to be performed in unexpected public places all come to mind). She is an excellent cook, a knowledgeable herbalist, a gifted gardener, and a general all-round star. Tender-hearted and whip-smart and goofy as all get out, she is one of the funniest people I know and a very fine singer and dancer.

Here's the link to Dana's sweet-as-pie post about our place with lots of gorgeous pictures of little details. I sure am grateful to Dana and to Ashley at Small Measure for their words and for taking the time to capturing images and impressions of this place, especially since I've been neglecting my documentarian duties since in the frenzy of garden work and general Spring madness.

I so much appreciate the perspective I gain when friends and family visit -- their presence reminds me to pull my head up out of the weeds and seeds and look around at this beautiful place that I am so lucky and grateful to call home.

Bustling

I have been spending as little time as possible inside these days, hence the lapse in posting.

Thanks to Ashley over at Small Measure for picking up my slack and documenting some of the happenings here at Red Wing Farm! It's such a complement to see glimpses of our little homestead featured on Ashley's lovely collection of writings on "homemade living."

Pictured above: Blauwschokkers - Dutch Blue-Podded Peas. Seeds available from Seed Savers Exchange and Local Harvest.

The garden is lush, with something new bursting into bloom or shooting out of the ground every day. Some early spring vegetables are already past their peak (winter greens) and others (peas!) are coming on strong.

And we've entered the period of what I think of as "vegetable ephemerals" -- those special treats that are only available for a short window of time. Garlic scapes. Fresh fava beans. Sugar snap peas. And soon, since the first potato flowers appeared yesterday, there will be new potatoes.

Lettuce and borage.

Sugar Snap Peas.

Celery, purple onions, mustards, arugula.

It's also an exquisite time of year for the medicinal and culinary herbs and perennial flowering plants, which are in full leaf by now with many starting to flower. The medicine garden is bursting with blooms: valerian, foxglove, chamomile, feverfew, thyme, yarrow, meadow arnica, rue, columbine, Chinese red sage, skullcap, peonies, lavender, rosa rugosa, motherwort, and love-in-a-mist.

Rue, meadow arnica, and elecampane.

Feverfew and chamomile.

Skullcap.

Chaste Tree and Love-in-a-mist.

Foxglove.

May has just bustled right along with tailgate markets, teaching gardening classes, farm interns moving into their quarters and starting work, and lots and lots of planting.

I look forward to more time for writing and documenting things once the spring rush is past. Perhaps this is a fantasy since my day job is ratcheting up as political campaign season gets underway. I always feel like there is a slower time in my life just around the corner, but it rarely works out that way.

This evening will be a nice respite, though: our intern Nicole is "coming over" (walking down from the schoolbus camper) for a dinner of risotto with homegrown fava beans and garlic scapes, wild lambsquarters, and homemade hibiscus mead. Mmmmm, spring!

Looking into the garden...

Volunteer magenta spreen lambs- quarters

Fruition

Our first tailgate market of the season was yesterday afternoon, and it was fabulous.

I harvested greens all morning while Christopher washed and prepped produce, dug spring garlic, and loaded the truck.

It's nice to feel like all of the gardening madness is coming to fruition a bit already, with so much food coming out of the hoophouse and kitchen garden beds that we had a bountiful offering at the market.

We sold out of pretty much everything, and loved connecting with the other vendors, friends, dogs, babies, and customers. A cheese and scallion scone from the Herban Baker with a dollop of Wild Ramp Goat Cheese from 3 Graces Dairy topped off the day.

More photos of our spring harvests are on our farm facebook page.

Today the rush continues: after I squeeze in a little non-farm work this morning, I'll be back at it in the garden, planting potatoes, giving all of the seedlings a little fish emulsion/kelp snack, potting up perennial herbs for the herb festival, and watering, which is a monumental task at this stage with all of the thousands of thirsty plant babies in the hoophouse. But yesterday it was nice to pause and reap the rewards.

Sorrel

Spring Garlic

Heirloom lettuce by the head

Spring mix

Kale and Stinging Nettles

Spicy Mustard Greens

Deep In the Thick of It

The season of spring busyness continues!

After a week of cramming in farm and garden work in between taxes, grant reports, and meetings, the next three days are all about the garden.

Genovese Basil seedlngs perched above French heirloom lettuces

Arugula and Mizuna

Today I'll be trellising heirloom blue-podded shell peas (Blauwschokkers, to be exact), planting Red of Tropea onion seedlings (beautiful Italian heirloom red bottle onions that we started from seed back in February), building a bed for brassicas and shallots, pinching flowers off of all of the winter greens that are trying to bolt, cutting potatoes into chunks for planting tomorrow, potting up sorrel plants and Canturbury Bells for the herb show, and watering everything. The watering of everything takes about an hour a day at this point, which is entirely inconvenient but essential.

Onions!

There are thousands of baby plants growing in the hoophouse, on our porches, on our kitchen counters, tucked into every available cranny. Winter-planted lettuce is growing to gargantuan proportions in the unheated hoophouse, spinach and beets are doing their slow and steady thing, chard and collards are kicking out the jams. In other words: it's Spring! Plants are doing what they do best in Springtime: putting on some serious growth.

Italienischer lettuce

This goes for all plants, including the plethora of weeds and wild plants that are sprouting up everywhere I look. Some of these wildsters I'm happy to see: beautiful medicinal agrimony, nourishing dandelion, prolific creasy greens, medicinal nettles. Others I have a love-hate relationship with -- blackberries, lambsquarters, wild onions. I'm grateful for their gifts of food and medicine but I'm tired of pulling them out of my lettuce beds. So I pull some and leave some and turn loose of the ridiculous notion that I can control the force of nature that is plant life.

It's a good metaphor for life in general for me these days - I'm deep in the weeds, best to just take a bite here and there and relish the chaos!