07/18/2022
Our online store opened this weekend for our free form CSA! Check it out at our website. We’re alternating weeks with the Columbia City Farmers Market for the foreseeable future. So CSA this Wednesday 7/20, and market next Wednesday 7/27.
Sending strength to everyone in these uncertain times! Please help and uplift each other, process and organize together, and share love and gratitude…with all life forces! This is a collective experience and good work and intention transcends our own lives.
This was the coldest and wettest spring in this greater area since the late 1940’s and was a humbling second spring on the farm. But we have emerged with a bit more love, clarity, and resilience. One of our favorite successes this year has been interplanting! Another pro to human-scale farming, as plant spacing with a tractor is rigid and space inefficient.
(1) In the late fall/early winter we threw in some cover crop in with rainbow chard that we wanted to save seeds from. This was taken in late spring. The cover crop has now been knocked down to give the chard some space to complete its life cycle.
(2) Celery and green onion. Our first time growing celery here, and we are trying out Chinese celery as well. The celery and carrots definitely enjoyed the wet spring.
(3) Borage and g*i lan. The borage has gotten huge, but the bees love them so we’re happy to share some space. Especially since we felt so bad cutting down our winter cover crop, which was full of life including pollinators and birds.
(4) A little forest of tomatillo, chrysanthemum, and pea vines.
(5) Pole bean climbing a sunflower. Our amaranth has not grown large yet due to the cold weather but we also planted that as a pole bean trellis.
6) Mother Earth’s interplanting of salmonberry and oso berry. We’ll transplant these two to the native hedgerow in the fall. We had a robin’s nest on the porch and the ground became covered in oso berry seeds, so it’s an important food source for birds and is also essential to pollinators as one of the first flowers of spring. Salmonberry is also an important food source for many organisms including hummingbirds, as well as being a traditional food, medicinal, and indicator plant for the Coast Salish and other First Nations along the Pacific coast.
(7) Green lacewing friend on our cover crop field pea flower. Pattern parallels! The larvae feed on many pests such as aphids.
(8) Burying beetle. First time meeting and wow what a special creature! Their flattened antennae tips (clubbed antennae) have increased surface area to increase their ability to smell, allowing them to detect carcasses from 2 miles away. They are known as the undertakers because they will move carcasses to a suitable burial site, remove hairs/feathers while shaping the carcass into a round chamber for food and shelter, then bury it sometimes almost 2 feet below the surface. They also have special oral and a**l secretions that slow decay. They’re unusual as insects because parents will take care of their offspring through the larval stage, feeding them from the buried carcass. “Shockingly, despite its absence from most of its range — plus ongoing habitat destruction from the oil and gas industry and new information that climate change is decimating the species in the southern Plains — in 2020 the Trump administration downlisted the American burying beetle from "endangered" to "threatened" status. The downlisting rule also outlines exclusions that allow oil and gas companies to pursue developments within the beetle’s fragile habitat in Oklahoma.” (Center for Biological Diversity)
(9-10) A couple happenings from not mowing: volunteer nootka rose patch and white-crowned sparrow nest under yellow dock. Short grass lawns generally offer zero food, zero habitat, and instead people use so much water, fossil fuels, and herbicides for their upkeep. “Nature” isn’t some place of pristine wilderness that is separate from human communities—care begins at home. Indigenous peoples have been the stewards of these lands since time immemorial and colonizers committed genocide at an attempt to destroy that connection. The consequences of this bloody history are still in motion, for example with uncontrollable fuel loads spreading destructive fires around the world and mass disconnect from the earth as general society sees its components as profitable natural resources or recreation places. Our number one goal as a society should be to restore Indigenous sovereignty.
