THIS WEEK’S UPICK ASPARAGUS AND FARM STAND
May is always a beautiful and challenging month. The farming season is well underway, the fields are being prepared and planted for summer, and at the same time we are harvesting all the spring crops and setting up our upick days. We need some clones to get it all done!
So May is asparagus month and upick is what we are all about! This week we’ll be open Friday and Saturday May 29 and 30 from 9am-12pm. At the farmstand we’ll have our asparagus, beautiful lettuces, delicious hakurei turnips and a few radishes. You probably need some for your picnic.
Asparagus Upick May 29 and 30 from 9am-12pm
https://tinyurl.com/ybsb47wf
Farmstand this week
- Asparagus
- Heirloom lettuces
- Hakurei turnips
- Easter egg radishes
VOLUNTEER
Looking to volunteer at the farm? We're getting ourselves organized to have regular volunteer times. We need help harvesting asparagus, transplanting, and weeding right now. Any and all help is welcome! Can you bring your kiddos? Yes! Sign up sheet link has days, times, and details. :) Sign up to volunteer: https://tinyurl.com/3rczwhhd
ORDER ONLINE at the Washtenaw Organic Collaborative Sunday-Tuesday
The Washtenaw Organic Collaborative is our online market where you can pre-order the best of our fresh produce along with a great selection from farm friends and partners who share our values. Ordering is open Sunday through Tuesday, with pickups on Saturday mornings. Check out The Market to find artisan bread and bakery items (the bialys!!), happy chicken eggs, pastured meats, local honey, body care items, and more.
BLACK LIVES MATTER
We had a sad event at the farm this month when we put up a custom made Black Lives Matter sign one afternoon and within just a few hours it had been vandalized, and caught on camera. Read the story here. It’s hard to describe the different dimensions of sadness for this country that I felt when I saw the broken sign that morning. Afterward, we had some really generous offers of donations to help. If anyone is so moved, I would ask you to please make a donation to an organization in this area that is doing the most to support the Black Lives Matter movement, like Survivors Speak. And to make a donation every time you hear or know about other racist attacks. In the meantime, I’d like to put up more Black Lives Matter signs - is there someone out there who would like to organize a community art project for this? If yes, please get in touch.
Donate to Survivors Speak
Cashapp: $SurvivorsSpeak
Paypal: paypal.me/survivorsspeak
You can also mail donations to Survivors Speak at:
122 South Street Belleville, MI 48111
FARM THOUGHTS
I’ve been trying to figure out the best metaphor for the process of creating a farm - a chess match, or dominoes, or an intense cooperative game? It’s got elements of all of those, but with recursive levels of complexity. It’s a way of thinking and planning, and a set of domains that they don’t teach you in school. Pretty much every day includes both the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. And most days success feels like having the capacity to hold both of those at the very same time.
In May there are a hundred competing priorities between training the new crew, seeding and planting everything for summer, harvesting what’s coming on in the spring, building out critical infrastructure (like irrigation or a new high tunnel), reaching out to customers, preparing for market, keeping the books and doing the payroll, and sequencing all of that on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. The challenge is extreme, and only barely surpassed by the gratification.
But the gratification is transcendent. Finding the ground-nesting killdeer’s four camouflaged eggs and marking the spot to keep from disturbing them. The riot of color and crunch in a bunch of radishes. The rows of baby seedlings lit up like neon in the setting sun. Spotting the first asparagus spear and knowing that you’ve just touched the edge of the tidal wave that’s coming. I don’t know if I could have imagined how those things would feel before experiencing them.
Perhaps an awareness of the entire seasonal crescendo and decrescendo is what defines it best from a new farmer perspective. We’re trying to create a symphony, but have to be philosophical about it because there are just too many heartbreaks and frustrations and forces beyond our control. We know that destruction is a crucial part of creation. There is no life without death. And no light without darkness. Philosophical. Because there’s always hope too. Always the “force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” Always the seed.
I read a quote recently that said - if you can observe and respond, you can be a farmer. I thought that was profound.