Dancing the Land Farm

07/25/2026

This is just a flower appreciation post. My tiny-to-me flower patch is a place that keeps calling me back into my body. These days can be so very full of bad and worse news, so many things are on fire, there is so much hurt and harm that needs healing, and heartbreaks that need grieving but grieving needs time and more and more keep coming, and money is hard, and every day demands so much, and we're all in it up to our eyeballs and it can feel so desperate and overwhelming. But I come out here and walk these rows and the noise stops, and my body calms, and then the solutions and strategies show up and hope returns. Not the kind of hope that keeps me showing up shiny to the grindstone everyday just to fall into bed dull and worn, but the kind that makes underdogs win. The kind that brings rain when the forecast is all dry heat for weeks. The kind that reminds you of who you are at the last minute and only then does a deep, old strength rise up inside you. The kind that is maybe more luck and longshot than reason, but if you don't try it'll never happen, and sometimes when you shoot for the moon, you make it.

It's so easy to say a little flower garden is silly and superficial while so much pain is everywhere we look. But we all need rest, we need places to let our armor down, to digest, reflect, and consolidate before we can respond with any kind of sense.

We all need moments to remember who we are and why it matters that we stay in the fight, or we'll surely lose ourselves, and the fight.

All those folks saying we're not mad enough and then listing yet another atrocity--no, we're plenty mad, but we can't get soft enough. We're too full. We're not able to be quiet enough to hear the wisdom we need to meet the moment, because wisdom isn't going to yell like anxiety does to demand our attention. We're not calm enough to let the solutions emerge from that place good ideas come from. We're not grounded enough to be strategic, and clever.

But here, I can be. Here it happens. My bare feet on the pathways, my shoulders remembering every staple in the landscape fabric, every seed sown, and every plug planted now blooming. And I wanted to share that with all of you.

07/21/2026

She'd made a little leaf pad for him to sit on because weeks ago I explained that the salts on our hands can burn their porous skin. But he was so tiny and sweet she just had to show him to me, so she had found a solution in that little burdock leaf. She'd run over with her hands curled around a hollow space between her palms. When she opened them, he was sitting there right in the middle of the leaf like a miniature statue of a toad. He leapt right as I tried to snap the photo.

07/11/2026

Oh hi! It's been a full but very sweet start to the growing season here at Dancing the Land. We just opened our CSA this week and our farm store is now open to the public!

So🌿🌱🍃 many🍀🥬🥦GREENS!
But warm-season things are just around the corner! I've never seen our high tunnel look so dang good! 🍅 🥒 🌶️

I gotta say, if any of my farmer friends are debating whether or not taking time off is worth it or possible: DO IT. If you feel like you need it, just do it. I wish I could accurately describe the contrast between farming through exhaustion year after year vs. starting a season without the spectre of burnout still rooted in from the season prior, and the one before that. It's wildly different.

There's space in my thoughts to access the fullness of my experience and wisdom. There's foresight and energy to tend to things before they're on fire (metaphorically, mostly). There's room to rethink patterns and systems that felt immovable. There's something crucial in the re-choosing. Physical, emotional, and familial boundaries feel stronger and like we're so much better at not mining the future for energy to get through the day.

Did money get scary-tight during our sabbatical? Yes. But it was still worth it--not enough space here to talk about it well.

We're happier. We're physically and mentally healthier. And it's so different and so good to be back at it, by choice.

I've lived by my own terms for so long now it's hard to imagine otherwise, however, now that we took necessary time to tend what was raw and ragged, I can see that when I was exhausted and running and grieving (still grieving, will always be, not a problem to fix 💚) and trying to do everything regardless, I wasn't actually living. I was just caught in endless loops of reaction and collapse carried forward by crisis. I had to stop, digest, and become. I had to become the story I'd lived. Not just remember it, not just carry it, but become the person my life determined me to be.

Because when we become, we don't have to laboriously carry it all around any more. We just are. All those stories alive in me, giving the spark to my motion, my choices, touching the world around me.

05/23/2026

05/19/2026

There was a Redwing at the feeder in the front garden today, several maybe. They came in close, while I was in the yard, and made a ruckus. Not their usual trill, though that, too, but mostly a high pitched keening--at once joyful and grieving.

The day was grey, but it didn't matter because right now we live by the light of this glorious crabapple tree--the one my father gave to my mother as an anniversary gift before I was born. She is incandescent. She soaks the air in softness and shines in the windows like any celestial body. The Rains have come, thank goodness, and they've been soft, gentle. They soak the earth but do not shred the petals. So I still had light to see the Redwings. They woke early, and were the last to leave the feeders at sundown. Calling, calling, flitting from flower-laden branches to the feeder and back again, tossing seeds to the chickens below and laughing, calling, calling.

A year ago today, the Rains came and they stayed for three days and held us as my womb bore soil. Such a holy thing. Such a bright, brief, unbearable, beautiful thing.

As we get older the anniversaries pile up, don't they? The year becomes littered with notations: comings, goings, and coming-goings. I suppose I don't really mind it, not that it's a worthwhile thing to form an opinion about inevitables, but nonetheless--it feels like a room with pictures on the walls. Warm. Home.

Earlier, I was singing to the seedings and slipping shells off of sunflower and squash sprouts, when I looked up and saw an elm tree on the north side of the greenhouse, pressing up against the plastic layers, coming in and out of focus. A self-portrait of my inner world today. Lulu's been sick and we've been busy with the spring on the farm. Sometimes we really have to take time to let our hearts speak. Some things speak softly, and slowly. And sometimes we haven't got the time, except now, late at night when we should be sleeping.

By her due date, Eartha Redwing would have been about seven months old today.

I can hardly imagine.

I can hardly not imagine.

05/04/2026

There's been a wild plum thicket along our driveway my whole life, and their scent when they bloom in the early spring is among my very favorites--along with my mom's old buffalo currant, and then, just a little later, lilacs. It roots me into time like any holiday (holy day)--like the return of the redwings and cranes in March, like first night I sleep with the windows open, like the first day we plant seeds in the greenhouse. This smell says it's time to plant hardy things outside. The smell sounds like peepers in the marsh and courting, nest-building songbirds. This smell is the bright, tender green of new leaves. The scent wafts on soft breezes, especially in the evening.

The thicket had been getting old. The trees were gnarled and thinning out, and grapevines were taking over. I was watching my old friends slowly live their lives to the end. But then, a couple years ago, in the thick of one tragedy or another, our lawnmower broke. And because of said tragedy or another, fixing it was not a priority. I think the mower was broken for two years maybe (honestly it still is), before we got one at a garage sale? And in that time, while the hungry jaws of conformity lay dismantled, a whole new generation of young plums grew up in the lee of my dear thicket!

A few old ones are still there, but these ones are flowering in the grandeur of their first big bloom! They are glorious!

04/22/2026

A child and a dog--both very excited about baby chicks. But for very different reasons.

For now the chicks will be in the brooder, until all the eggs in the incubator are hatched. Then we'll see about getting them adopted by a mama hen in the big flock. But Gladys, my would-be mama hen, must've caught wind of my plans and decided she wasn't ready--she hasn't been on her nest the last two days. 🫤

If a hen hasn't been sitting long enough, her body won't have the proper hormonal cues that make bonding with chicks possible, which would spell disaster should we try to graft a clutch onto her. So, we'll see what happens!

I did move the brooder into the greenhouse since the temp requirements are similar enough in both places that they help each other out. And that means I've got soft, sweet peeping as I sow, which is lovely.

That video is my attempt at the excited mama hen clucks that always get her clutch running over to see what delicious morsel she's discovered. She'll always pick whatever it is up and drop it several times until a chick gobbles it up. It's how they learn to forage!

04/20/2026

I've named her Gladys. And she is mean. She's the meanest hen we've had in a long time. She doesn't just peck at me when I'm collecting eggs. She pinches and twists. She goes through sleeves and gloves. And she'll go for me even if I'm not bothering her and only collecting from the nest above or below her. On the day these photos were taken, I thought she was going to go for my eyes! My best bet at thwarting Gladys is a chunky silver cuff from my dear

Gladys is going to be a fierce mama. ❤️

My incubator is about to explode like fuzzy, peeping popcorn, and you better believe I'm going to give as many chicks to Gladys as I can.

I like to hatch out the specific ones I want, then give them in the night to the broody hens that have been frustrated as hell with me when I steal their eggs. But if I don't steal them all, things get ugly (and gross) quick in a big flock of community-nesters. I like the mean ones as mamas best. They're usually tender as can be with their babes, but don't take no s**t from rooster, dog, or raccoon. I've even seen them fight off a hawk attack from above!

I just go in after dark, sneak babies under their skirts, and wait. Usually the mama will start cooing and softly talking to the babies--who in turn will peep contentedly back. Once I hear that, they're usually good to go.

I've done it a whole bunch, and only had one hen refuse her clutch. But she got jealous after I gave her babies to another hen and so they co-parented after that. Brilliant.

I love it because then the chicks have a mama and spend their earliest days learning how to be chickens roaming around the farm within the safety of their mama's orbit, instead of being cooped up in a brooder with lights and Lord of the Flies children-raising-children weirdness. They learn their culture and get to have meaningful relationships. And I don't have extra chores. Brilliant again!

04/18/2026

It was basil!! Huzzah! Seed saving can contain cliff-hanging mysteries on many occasions, but this was a fun one. The rest of this flat, and all the seeds from this batch were an assortment of celosia varieties, so at the end, when all the shiny celosia seeds were sown, I had this little handful of black lumps left. Some of which were most certainly mouse poop--they must've gotten into the bags as they dried down in the greenhouse--but some looked suspiciously like the only other seed I had dried in the greenhouse with those celosia: lime basil.

So I figured, why not try 'em out?

It is indeed odd that the basil seeds would have ended up in the celosia bags, it's hard to imagine mice carrying the tiny seeds around from bag to bag--without just eating them--but that must've been what happened. The basil bag had tons of seeds and looked undisturbed, but alas, mice are very very clever!

Curtis questions my surety about their identity, as "mouse plants have very similar cotyledons."

True enough.