The Good Ground Natural Farm

08/20/2026

07/01/2026

This is a huge setback to our original vision of a diverse, locally marketed farm with a market garden as the central component.

The irrigation pond we dug last year is loaded with E.coli (over 1600 CFU / 100mL, or very high). Thankfully, we discovered this just before we started selling any vegetables, but it meant that all the growing crops had to be tilled under.

Right now, I actually don't have a solution. I'm thinking through various options:
Treatment - hard to design a system that is food-safe but doesn't negatively affect soil biology
System redesign - use drip tape (similar to soaker hose) instead of sprinklers. The tradeoff is drip tape is much slower to work with, and I still can't grow crops that would be contaminated by the water. Tomatoes, peppers, etc. would be fine, carrots, beets, onions, and even low growing lettuces would be high risk.
Drop the market garden - focus more on animals and tree crops (fruit and nuts). The challenge here is I don't really have enough land to do animals alone profitably, and tree crops is a very long-term development. Trees were on my radar anyways, but the vegetables were supposed to cashflow the short-term.

The hard truth:

I'm not sure what the future direction is yet. Any water treatment ideas (including the weird and wacky) are welcomed, as well as other thoughts.

For this year, we are still committed to the animals we have (pigs, cows, egg laying chickens, and meat chickens). All are doing quite well, and are not dependent on the pond for water. Next year is far less certain.

Side-note: we still have pork available for order. We also have pastured eggs available, and we can sell a few meat chickens later this year. Let me know if you're interested.

Thanks for your support!

05/28/2026

More challenges…pigs this time…on the plus side, this is making us consider breeding our own animals.

05/28/2026

Just some clover doing its thing repairing the soil…and looking beautiful while it does it…

05/25/2026

I thought this was cool - my pole beans still in pots are trellising each other. One vine on its own can’t grow very tall, but by supporting each other, they can grow a lot taller. I’m sure there’s a metaphor somewhere in there for something, but it’s Monday morning…

05/24/2026

The result of our seedling challenges: spending time taking seedlings out of pots, and turning them into compost 👎.

I spent a few hours today dumping tomato seedlings. It was definitely demoralizing, but we took away a few lessons:

1. While it’s possible to grow a seedling to maturity in a small pot, it takes very finally tuned nutrition, which is very hard to achieve on a small scale.

2. It’s a far better idea in our market garden context and for our sale to start the seedling later. A small and vigorous seedling will out perform one that is large but stalled once it goes in the ground.

3. More marketing and/or decreased production, so production more closely matches the size of our customer base. Grow with increased demand.

Yes, we’ve made significant improvements from last year. While it feels a little like it’s two steps forward and one step back, we’ve gained valuable information - things we can implement over the winter in time for the start of next season.

Besides, now that the weather is warming up, we’ve got gardening to do, and chickens, pigs, and cows to take care of. All part of the journey…