Patch Farm

06/30/2025

Anyone trying to reach BrennaMae - phone is still not working, please e-mail [email protected] for contact! Thank you!!

06/26/2023

We are so thankful for the wonderful work done by the fine folx at Barncats LLC ... we don't have to worry about falling (us, or the animals!) through the floor anymore!
It was awesome to see the underbelly of our 200+ year old barn, and also how gosh darn quick these guys got the work done.

02/05/2023

01/02/2023

Winter work is small and detailed… the plants I work with become fewer and fewer. This giant arugula plant brings me so much joy… it is tucked right at the entrance of greenhouse 1, about 6 inches away from the not-so-baby-anymore arugula that is (over)growing like a w**d because of all the warm winter weather.
I love looking at this plant… it’ll live here until someone else accidentally harvests it, pulls it up, or the winter weather brings it down. Perhaps in the spring it’ll bolt and I’ll see it develop all sorts of hairy trichomes and eventually go to flower… then seed… and I’ll have a whole slew of arugula plants causing a ruckus in the front of the greenhouse.
Who knows?

12/12/2022

The kids love taking a drive to look at the beautiful lights!

Forms will be available at the Town Office, a few at JimBob's and a few at the Post Office, or you can email the Town Manager with your information (Contact Name, Street Address. Phone Number and E-Mail).
Details for the Christmas Tree Lighting Contest are below

07/28/2022

Today we harvested Ainsleys rye!
Okay, it was actually “my” winter rye - we seeded it last fall as a cover crop in our no-till beds. Most of this stand was crimped and tarped ages ago, but Ainsley requested we keep a section that she could use. She fully intends to make this into a load of bread - and I’m going along for the ride! We have a long way to go - it’ll dry again to make it easier to separate from the stalks, then we will figure out how to hull them before grinding and ultimately making bread. I’m not a bread baker, but I do love rye - and my daughter. Letting her guide her learning has been such a cool thing. With this project she is learning natural science, mechanics, patience, and (soon: if all goes well!) baking. She’s doing some research (really, she’s asking me to research but she sits next to me as we paw through books or the world wide web!) and lots of hands on stuff. She shares her findings with others… and also she sometimes forgets! Things go wrong! Which is OK, too, because then she will learn how to solve her failures for next time.
So here is to future bread and the quest for knowledge (and everything in-between)!
🍞🍞🍞

07/18/2022

Hello to my fine feathered friends!
It’s not often I ask for my photo to be taken, but I’ve been so! enraptured! with our lettuce this season that I had to have a photo with some of it. For reasons known and unknown, I’ve had a few wonky years of lettuce growing. This season I let go of some succession planning stress and I just said, “seed whatever you want, whenever (aim for 2-3 weeks), and put it wherever you can in the field.” I’ve always struggled with these kinds of crops - where to put them, how to fit in small quantities (but often)… so I just let it go. Now I’ve got lettuce inbetween celery and celeriac, flanking several successions of tomatoes, surrounding melons (okay, those got cut out as the melons began to crawl) and now between our parsnips beds. It’s a bit haphazard, and very unlike me to proceed without a plan, but it’s been liberating and I think the lettuce can sense that. It’s sweet, crunchy, and always semi-shaded and occupying otherwise unused ground space.
Win, win, win all around… and ( like my grandma says:) I am just tickled!
This here is Magenta, a summer crisp stunner that makes for stellar BLTs (seeds from ).

07/07/2022

I love sharing food.
Perhaps it’s one of the reasons I love farming - or (and I am paraphrasing here) as says “food lovers gravitate toward farming.”
So sharing lunch with our crew is one of my favorite times of the day. Some days we are exhausted, just putting calories into our bodies to sustain us for the remainder of the work day, and other days we chatter and praise the chef. Some days the myriad of the farm kids chow down on what’s on offer, and other days they toss it aside and look to the snacks their mamas have brought… just in case.
This was a lunch of rice+garlic scapes, chopped grilled country style ribs, scrambled eggs and veggies wrapped up in the sweet crunchy leaves if a tokyo bekana. 🥒🥕🥬
We’ve got such a wonderful crew of folx this season, it’s much like just hanging out having lunch with a group of friends.
So here’s to what brings us together - food in our case … and perhaps the love of kids.
Thank you Peyton, Kasey (+lil Birch), Jess (+lil Penny), and Anna (+ lil bebe to come!). Not pictured: Zoe, our data wonder woman, farmer Brandon, Finnian, volunteer Katie and my mom, Nancy. Honoring Sara (+lil Fera).

06/13/2022

Raising animals ain’t always the funnest, most bucolic thing. But it is darn beautiful - even the gory bits.
❗️Warning: second slide is graphic... and so is my description❗️
Today I did animal work with Peyton - Brandon tweaked his back so he’s off duty, lest it get worse. First, we had the pleasure of moving our goats to a new spot, where they pranced and were joyous in their new pasture, filled with tender clover heads and juicy field ferns.
After that, we headed to pig town: we moved a batch of feeders, gave them new (more human hands off!) water and food systems to learn and new wallows to cool off in.
Then, we castrated the new piglets. This job is so unfun. It involves catching piglets (and even smart ways of doing this are unfun), wrangling them, then literally cutting into them and pulling out their testicles. We do this while the piglets are yelling (sometimes they are silent) and while the mama paces and barks, waiting for us to return her brood.
We try and work quickly, effectively and with compassion, but it is a tension filled job. We sweat, get covered in mud (read: pig poo), blood and iodine... we root for one another (the one doing the incisions and the one holding down a ball of muscle... aka: piglet) and apologize to the piglets when we take to long, or something goes amiss.
Why do we do this? Because if we leave their testicles in two things can happen: their meat tastes off (it’s called boar taint) and they can accidentally impregnate their sisters, or cousins, or mamas... or really any female hog on the farm - and that’s never good. Yes, we can kinda prevent the impregnating by keeping the females and males separate, but that boar taint is hard to avoid.
We want our meat to taste good - we want it to sell, we want customers to return, and we want to feel 100% awesome about our product. So we castrate.
When we are done with the job we often laugh and let off pent up tension.
Today we laughed extra hard when we saw where some of the testicles landed (we toss them to the woods for the woodland creatures to enjoy). We gotta find joy in these tasks. I find the second photo beautiful. It’s real, and it’s part of farming and good food.

06/06/2022

Red clover harvest has begun in earnest!
Usually I spend Mondays doing farm admin work - weekly to-do lists, catching up on emails, payroll ... but today the fields just called and so I scooped up the kids and we headed to our back field for a morning harvest of red clover. This is an easy harvest to pull the kids into - it’s beautiful, wading through the tall luscious plants getting after deep purple/red/pink blossoms. It’s also delicious - whenever we accidentally pick an overripe blossom, we snack on it - using our teeth to pull out the flowers and nibbling away on the honey sweet blossoms. Finnian loves the clover, but today he gravitated towards the vetch just starting to flower, and the yellow buttercups, filling the bottom of his basket with long stemmed blooms that he will tuck into a mason jar in his bedroom to enjoy looking at before his nap (or, he will forget them at the bottom of his basket, and just brush them out before his next harvest).
This morning we shared the field with fat bumble bees, little flies (to quick for me to identify!) and swallowtail butterflies (among so many others unseen and unknown to me!).
My mom will dry this red clover and then we will sell it at our farmers markets, farmstand or though our friends at and .
💚