Weekly Update: May 17

Sometimes writing this is so hard, thank you Jim for taking over for me last week. The things that get me excited are things I never thought of before, and probably don’t make sense if I write about them. For example, I asked for a rototiller for Mother’s Day and was so excited when I got it! And this week, we planted lots of vegetables on one of our sandy loam hills (I can’t tell you how excited I get when I hear sandy loam haha). And, for the second time we got home late at night and found one of our neighbors mowed our lawn for us (I haven’t figure out which one did it this time, but am closing in). How kind is that?

All these things really helped distract me this week, which I really appreciated. One of our daughter’s lives in London with her husband. She is expecting any day now (our first grandbaby). It was a hard week to be so far away with no signs of being able to visit soon. But planting cucumbers, dill, carrots (including rainbow and purple), turnips, beets (including golden), lots of beans, parsnips in sandy loam kept us busy. In fact we’ve been so busy that I really don’t know how we are going to be ready to open anytime soon.

And the question we heard most this week was when will we open? We just don’t know for sure. We have been planning to wait to open until the strawberries are ready, which will most likely be the first week of June. But with Memorial Day coming, I’m dying to open our doors early so everyone can see what we’ve been up to. If we did open early, we would only have limited items: hanging baskets, strawberry plants and lots of greens, rhubarb and Jose’s Spicy Salad mix. So stay tuned. We are so over our heads, but also feeling so incredibly grateful. All our neighbors and friends, family and staff have been incredibly supportive. Thank you for all the honks when you drive by, and stopping to say hi at the Cracker Barrel — really means so much.

xoxo, Kat

This week we moved our cucumber washer/sorter/bagger out of the back of the market to clean and prepare for opening.

The back of the market entirely emptied and cleaned before filling it back up.

Tearing down the old pig pen. This is the best photo I got before we all walked away. Underneath was a skunk and her four babies. She spent the next hour moving them to a new home one by one.

Racing to get the new produce cooler installed and working before our Dept. of Agriculture inspection. We passed!

Corn!

Strawberries! We planted Hoods, Shuskans, Mary’s Peak, Ruby June, Albion and Seascape varieties. I love this hidden field back, by some Sauvie Island Oak trees.

More Dahlias!

Building birdhouses. Some of the swallows were starting to build nests inside the boxes before we even had a chance to hang them up.

So many birds migrating through the farm this week.

The Great Herons have been around all week. Lots of Goldfinches too.

Hawk perch in action.

Our youngest doing some mowing.

Emma and Rebekah from Bee & Bloom delivering two new bee homes. The colonies will be arriving this afternoon!!!