Ice Storm

January finally brought some badly needed precipitation. As you can see below in the strawberry picture, our soil was starting to dry up and crack from lack of rain. It rained freezing rain Monday night and Tuesday it sleeted and later snowed. Ice formed on everything above ground and a thin layer of snow blanketed the ground. Jeff's fields glistened with so much ice it was nearly blinding, and the fresh plowed ground looks like a frozen ocean under the snow. Unfortunately, all that wintery mix only amounted to about 3/4" of precipitation so January was a dry month.The month of January usually provides 1.5 inches of precipitation, and until the ice storm we had none.

Just imagine, soon we'll be planting into this soil. I've put in my two weeks at my winter job, and on February 9 I'll be back out at the farm full time. Wahoo! I'm really looking forward to having the time to devote to getting the farm up and running for our first full season. I also hope that I'll be harvesting as early as February if the weather warms up soon enough. We have overwintered quite a bit of spinach, some turnips, and some carrots.

Farming in January?

I thought I might share with you what is going on at the farm in late January. There isn't much, of course, but the farm isn't desolate. We have a cover crop of rye over about 1/2 Acre where we will probably plant our tomatoes next spring. It is our pride and joy because it is the only bright green on the farm this time of year. That is Chelsea gathering her thoughts after a day of hoeing in the strawberries. The rye isn't very tall now but later in the spring it will really take off, it will be up to her waist at least. Sometimes it grows up to 6 feet tall!

Speaking of Strawberries, here is a picture of our strawberries now. They certainly aren't anything to brag about, especially because they have so much freeze damage (the brown leaf margins) but we are proud of them anyway. We planted 4300 of them by hand with the help of 6 of our generous friends in October. The plant you see has been in the ground for three months. It has not grown much above ground, but it has developed many more roots underground to prepare for the coming season. You can see the soil is cracked around it because it is getting dry. We already rolled up our irrigation hose for the year so it won't freeze and burst, so we are just hoping for rain. So far we haven't gotten any rain in January and we were behind in December, so this year may start off dry.

-Don

Sunset Over the Farm

Last Thursday, Jeff asked me if I could go hay his cows so I went out to the farm after work. I have a winter job that is about halfway between our house in Tulsa and the farm in Bixby so it isn't a big deal. Except that it was really cold and windy that day. Before I cranked up the Allis-Chalmers I thought I'd try out our brand new digital camera in low light. I got a few good pics of the sunset over the farm. This one is probably the best.

And by the way, even though I spent my sunset time taking pretty pictures. I got all the hay out before it was too dark to see.

Bringing a Slogan to the Table

Hey Ya'll,

I'm writing to bring you two pieces of good news: 1. We finally picked a slogan, and 2. Our season officially ended two weeks ago. We'll start with good news #2. The end of a season can mean some bad things such as: dead plants, freezing days, darkness, no sales. But it also means a few good things: REST, sleep (is that redundant?), planning, networking, building, etc... Needless to say, we harvested our last big Oklahoma Food Coop order of spinach and turnips just in time! Spinach and Turnips are some of the hardiest vegetables around. They withstood temperatures as low as 23F (maybe lower?) this December without losing quality. But the night after we harvested, it finally dropped to 16F and that was the end. Amazingly, the plants are still alive, its just that they are too damaged to sell.

Good news #1 is that we picked a slogan. We hope you like it. We worked hard on it. We have at least 6 pages of brainstorming. Lists and lists of words and phrases. We even created a scoring system and rated each slogan. Of course, we came up with some funny ones that I have to share:


Hot Fields, Sexy produce

Inexperience in Action

If We Can't Do it, No One Can!

Yes We Can!

I think that last one is trademarked:) We decided to go with a slightly more reasonable one: "Bringing Sustainability to the Table". Hopefully it gets the point across.

We don't really know what to do with ourselves now... our plants are dead, we finally picked a slogan, and it's freaking cold outside.... but wait... I remember now... we have to build a pond (or a well?), weld some implements, fix a tractor, build a harvest wagon, vegetable cooler, and shed, order seeds, come up with some marketing materials, finish our planting calendar, plow up a few more acres.... I think we'll find plenty to do until February 15th!

Thanks for reading; I hope you all are having a wonderful new year. The days are getting longer!!

-Chelsea