So here’s another thing I’ve come to love about farming: how the end of the season is about wrapping things up, putting the fields to bed, looking back over all that’s happened, and turning toward reflection and respite. It’s a chance, finally, to see all you’ve done without being in the midst of it.
A few weeks ago the whole team at the farm got together for a beautiful end of season dinner (made with farm produce by Chef Allison at Last Bite Chef!), and had some time to talk about what went right and what we want to work on changing next year. I put together a slideshow of our work, our hands, our faces over the whole season - harvesting spinach from the winter hoophouse, sweet asparagus in May, the joy of strawberries, our first garlic crop, the gorgeous tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers, the flowers everywhere, and the farmstand piled high, our pumpkin wagon ablaze with color, and so many beautiful families.
We started out with a long list of practical things we are proud of, like: our new no-till beds that have transformed the farm into a garden, 2 new high tunnels, an incredible strawberry season, more and better succession crops, our first major prairie burn, huge improvements in our systems for tracking, a super successful first CSA, an increasingly gorgeous farmstand, a fabulous team of diversely talented people and aspiring farmers working well together. And so many more.
We just finished our fifth growing season at Slow Farm and this end of the year reflection made me think back further, to when Peter and I first started the farm and all our fields were just beginning to recover from conventional corn and soybean cultivation. We had no well, no electricity, no fence, no driveway, no nothing except for Peter’s tractor. I watered the first few dozen tomato plants that I grew with water that I brought from home in a 5 gallon container.
I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know how to start a flat of lettuce seeds, or how to get organic certification, or set up payroll and worker’s comp insurance, or harvest carrots, or build a cooler, or figure out what to plant when, or how to hire a strong diverse crew, or how to get wholesale accounts, or set up a farmstand or instagram or a crop plan or a profit and loss statement. I really didn’t know much, and I’m not sure I do now. But somehow the farm taught me. Healed me. Gave me reasons to keep going even when I felt like I was barely hanging on by my fingernails.
And I see it doing the same things to the people who work with us and who come to find our produce and our flowers. Some powerful magic is there. And it will be the work of winter to reflect on all of that and to dream about what might be next.