Spring spring spring!

Spring greetings to one and all!

The Village Farm people have been busy these
days of early spring. Joseph, Ben and Prentice collected some sap from the maples across the street in the Pleasant Hill Cemetery and boiled it down outside. It is dark and delicious. As you can see, Joseph was amply prepared for anything that might happen while tending the sap.


Sorry about the funky formatting in this blog. It seems to be beyond me to get the pictures and text exactly where I want them.



In March, Prentice and I took an excellent workshop on farm business management with Richard Wiswall of Cate Farm in Vermont. We got a lot of gems from Richard and from his new book including a renewed appreciation for
1. A clean office and desk (not perfected--yet!)
2. Dropping low-profit ventures (pork) and picking up high(er) profit ventures (seedlings)
3. THE FAMILY FARM. We are the real deal. Here is a picture of Prentice filling out our MOFGA organic certification paperwork. (It seemed like 200 pages of it.) Oh, and Ben is by his feet but not in the picture.


Our (new) greenhouse is up and going and I will have some luscious green seedling pictures to share soon. The morning we put the plastic on got a tad windy as we were buttoning up the sides. Some great neighbors helped lay the two layers of plastic on and Andy Smith even came out from Colby. Did we tell you that he will be joining our farm crew for a second season? We could not be happier about that!

We are still enjoying many fruits and roots of

last year's harvest. I put parsnips and peas in the red lentil curry this evening. The freezer is still green with spinach, broccoli, beans and peas frozen last summer and there are still carrots, beets, potatoes, cabbage and bottled kim chi coming out of our root cellar = the cemetery's crypt/tomb.

Word is getting out that we are using the crypt as a

root cellar. A fellow called this week to come photograph our vegetables in there! Sure!!

I am reading Michael Pollan's newest book,

Food Rules, in preparation for a talk I am giving on being an organic farmer and the environmental attributes of local food. What a great hero for the good food/real food/local food movement he is!
Three cheers for Michael!!

Many CSA members have signed up or let us know that they will be signing up for 2010. As always, your recommendations to your friends, family and coworkers are the best publicity for our farm. We are aiming for 50 households this year, so point folks to our website or call for a brochure. We are looking forward to growing food for our community for another season.

All the best from Village Farm,
Polly