Makeshift Farm

06/05/2025

Lots of leftover seed potatoes after planting, available now at the barn! Occasionally will have leftover seedlings available as well for the next couple of weeks, probably.

Potato seed from The Maine Potato Lady. Varieties include Dark Red Norland, Satina, Superior (all early varieties), and German Butterball (so good!), Desiree, and Rocky Russet (all later varieties).

They're out of the cooler now, so they need to get in the ground soon!

*Suggested* price on potatoes is $1.00/lb for 20+ pounds, $1.50/lb for less than 20 lbs, but it's a pay-what-you-can thing, so... pay what you can! Main thing is to see these spuds get in the ground and ultimately feed more people!

Have a few bags in the barn, but bring your own container if you can

Veggie seedlings always in flux - just some extras left over from planting that are being given a second chance before hitting the compost pile! Head lettuce, brassicas, sometimes melons, cucumber, zucchini, currently some peppers and tomatoes that are looking pretty hungry... Some of these plants are coming out a bit leggy, but they should do fine. All in soil blocks, so just grab a scrap piece of cardboard from the table to carry them :)

*Suggested* 25 cents each for the seedlings, but again, just want to see them get in the ground, so do what works for you!

All self serve at the farm until it's gone, come anytime dawn to dusk. Set up just inside the big front door of the barn. 734 Tonis Road, Derby. If you know how to get to Skyline Holsteins on Nelson Hill, you go there and get on Tonis Road, then keep left the rest of the way, park at the barn just beyond the high tunnel.

On your way out, do stop at Skyline Holsteins to get some of their food too! Raw milk, beef, eggs, maple and more!

CSA shares with Makeshift Farm also still available! Email the farm at [email protected] for the details!

11/27/2024

Still have plenty of (Turkey Day essential) veggies available in the farm stand! 734 Tonis Road. Head to Skyline Holsteins, (grab some stuff at their farm stand too!), head down Tonis Road, keep left at the fork and you won't miss it. Self serve out of the walk-in cooler. Cash, check, Venmo all good payment options. Open daily from 9:00-6:00!

11/22/2024

Going to try out a self-serve farm stand here at the farm! If you're seeking local vegetables and don't mind venturing into a (nearly) frozen cooler to find them, this might work for you!

Open every day from 9:00-5:00 until we start to run low on things. We have potatoes, winter squashes, onions, parsnips, carrots, cabbage, and a few hot peppers that have somehow managed to keep for the last few weeks!

Bring your own bags/box, but we do have the rolls of small plastic produce bags available, if desired.

Cash, check made out to the farm, or Venmo are all good payment methods 👍

Farm is at 734 Tonis Rd in Derby. Google can send people into a nearby swamp depending on where they're coming from. Just make sure the route brings you past Skyline Holsteins on Nelson Hill Road, and stop there too before you head home! We especially enjoy their raw milk... you get to feel like part of the team every time you pick up more milk and RETURN YOUR GLASS JARS from the last visit, which is a GREAT feeling! (please keep returning or paying for those jars, friends! We gotta do what we can to keep a farmer's stress to a minimum!). So the milk is great, and they also have eggs, beef, maple products, sometimes baked things and honey! And they're good folks!

Pics give you an idea of the layout for the Makeshift Farm veg "stand" just down the road from Skyline Holsteins. Email [email protected] with any questions!

05/18/2023

(I guess I just need a reason to complain to get posting on social media again...)

Have been anxiously checking the forecast lately to find out when we *might* get even a 10th of an inch of rain, but the freez-y nights have been an even bigger concern this week, and last night was the real nail biter.

The National Weather Service sometimes describes the weather as "fair", as it did last night, and I'm not really sure what that means in the meteorological sense, but I know it's definitely not "fair" in the moral sense.

But ah! Sun is coming out! We'll know better soon what the damage was! ☀️😊

Hope all our farming friends are managing ok!

03/10/2023

"....'it’s a hell of a lot easier to just say, listen, food is free.'”

Yeah 🤷‍♂️

As a farmer who's engaged in the very broad, often contradictory and multifaceted effort to transform the way we organize our lives and systems around food, I often experience some cognitive dissonance when having to work in the realm of market-based valuation and production of food while simultaneously holding in my heart a firm belief that food is a basic need, and that it should therefore not be valued as a commodity...

Recognizing that keeping the budget "balanced", or "running a successful business" might be all that can be reasonably expected of farmers in this system, I feel like it could make a big, *practical* difference when actors in the food system (and that's all of us) think, speak and act, whenever possible, in ways that place greater emphasis on the value of food as a basic need.

And it may not look like it from where we're standing now - probably it would be confusing and messy to start practicing ways of valuing food that suggest such a radical transformation in our existing systems (there's no such thing as a *cost* free lunch, after all, right?) - but then again... it could also be "a hell of a lot easier," if we keep at it.

Vermont’s public schools started providing free meals for all students during the pandemic. Last spring, the Vermont legislature created the Universal School Meals Program and funded it for this school year. Lawmakers now have a chance to make that change permanent. It would help everyone involved...

01/04/2023

2023 -- Time, right!?

One thing that's helpful about growing vegetables is you can mark the passage of time with the way different crops fit into the growing season. Most years, when the calendar year goes up by a year (and I notice it's usually just one number higher per year), I experience some sort of fear of whatever turmoil lies ahead. Keeps me grounded to remember that we'll be putting onion seeds in dirt soon, and that they most likely will pop up the way we'd expect.

At the same time, I must insist that we'd be missing something if we just bury our heads in the sand and pretend this is just the start of yet another successful season that lies ahead. "Cheers, everyone! We're doing GREAT" 🥂

Sure there's a seasonal rhythm to things, there's repetition, and that's part of what we celebrate with the coming of a new year on a farm, but it behooves us to remember that there's a great deal of uncertainty in the mix with this work, too. Despite there being some inspiration and hope in that act of replanting the onions for another bountiful season to come, we remain very much tethered to a vast economic system that causes immeasurable harm, and our efforts to work around and/or transform that system are bound leave us feeling uncertain about what to do.

But yes, we're gonna plant the onions for people again, and we'll grow them with tremendous support from the same economic system that we seek to transform, and we're doing it unapologetically and... unironically! (actually can't promise that).

And we're gonna feel lost.

On a more hopeful note, maybe a resolution for the new year is to remember that making an honest effort can feel good, and that it probably will be messy, or even foolish! Can be hard for me to do sometimes, especially on days like this - short on hope, a cold fog hanging in the weirdly mild and humid January air as though death itself were bearing down on us..

Speaking of hope and resolutions, though, let's also resolve to keep reaching together for a community that's built on participation, belonging, and curiosity in conflict, recognizing that individual efforts will only get us so far.

Onward! And, here's to those onions 🥂

12/19/2022

Some things have sold out, but we have plenty more *sweet* storage carrots, red and yellow storage onions, and green storage cabbage! (Prices in photo).

Free local delivery (within 30 miles) available for orders of any combination of these veggies totalling 40 or more pounds! Call your neighbors, see if they want to split an order to get some veg for the holidays!

Farm is also open for direct sales of any quantity of these things. Email the farm if you're not sure about directions ([email protected]). Located on Nelson Hill in Derby.

12/06/2022

Thanks to everyone who came all the way up the hill for vegetables a couple weeks back! The piles in the cooler are noticably smaller, but we barely made a dent in the carrots and onions!

We'll be available at the farm this week for bulk sales (any quantity), Wednesday - Friday, 9:00-6:00.

Going to try offering an ordering and DELIVERY option starting this week! Here's the deal:

Orders available for anyone within a ~30 mile radius of Nelson Hill in Derby.

Orders must be at least 40 pounds for delivery, but they can be any combination of carrots, beets, onions (red/yellow) and cabbage (green storage only).

40 lbs is a lot of vegetables for one household. If you have cold storage, that makes it easy. These things should store for weeks or even months at temperatures between 32 and 38 degrees. If you DON'T have cold storage, but you DO have neighbors, another FUN thing to try would be talking with your neighbors and seeing if they want to share a 40 pound bag of carrots, or maybe 20 pounds of carrots and 20 pounds of onions! Or, heck, go for 40 pounds of carrots and 40 pounds of onions!

Email the farm at: [email protected] to place an order. Include your address, phone number and quantities for each item (again, 40 pounds of any combination of beets, carrots, onions and cabbage qualifies you for a delivery). We'll get in touch either over the phone or through email to arrange payment and delivery.

11/20/2022

It's cramped in the "cooler" (now more of a "heater"?), but we're open!

It's that time of year when people get together and make really good food, and it turns out some of it can be grown and sold right here in our own town! In November! I mean wow!

Come get some vegetables! There's also meat, eggs and really good raw milk next door at Skyline Holsteins! We're working on avocados and mangoes for next year 😉

Hours this week are 9:00-7:00 from now through Wednesday! Come say hi! Maybe help us clean some of the ~2000 lbs of onions that are stacked in the cooler 😅

Message the farm if you're uncertain about directions! Google doesn't know everything yet!

11/10/2022

Hours this week for bulk sales at the farm are Friday-Sunday, 9:00-7:00!

Get in touch if you're not sure how to get to the farm. GPS might send you into a bog 🐸

11/08/2022