Tandem Farms

04/19/2026

The tulip polar bloom is finishing up a month early here in North Carolina. Again.

06/16/2025

Fathers Day weekend honors fathers of every variety.

04/27/2025

The tulip poplar trees are finishing up … a month early. We have seen them and other spring plants blooming earlier and earlier for years now. We all know about many of the big changes due to climate change, but then, spotting the final blooms on a poplar tree reminds us that the changes are across the board. Total. Everything is changing.

03/27/2025

Farm Log

We've lived on this particular plot of land for just over 10 years. We keep track of most things in a spreadsheet as makes sense to do, but, just the other day, we had an inspiration: Ships captains keep a generalized log, and it's very likely many of them still use paper log books. (Nothing's more permanent than paper and ink.) Well, why not do the same with a farm as well? Or even a household?

So, this week, Todd slammed together a desk easel from scrap lumber, then wrapped a quality notebook in a leather cover, added a nice pen and picked a lovely traditional ink. And here we go! A Farm Log that sits ready right next to the front door.

But this log book needed a bit of prep-work. Since we've occupied this farmstead for over ten years, Todd and Monica decided to sit down and put together a summary timeline. With that in hand, we primed the log book with events and thoughts from 2014 to today. The Farm Log now contains a relatively complete and contiguous context and sits ready to document the future—farm happenings; home happenings; life happenings.

Pretty cool.

02/20/2025

Snow day …
On a farm means a few hours in the morning ensuring animals have water and the electric fence remains somewhat functional. It also means enjoying the beauty of Mother Nature.

08/04/2024

You may think you know every inch of a property, and yet there are always more "treasures" to be found …

This precious item was discovered just the other day. Is it an inspiring prompt for farm poetry, or is it nightmare fuel? You decide. We upended it and turned it into something that may invoke references to a certain film from a few years ago or maybe just terrify the farm cats.

06/21/2024

The pond was rather lovely yesterday. It always is—but… At first, we thought this was fog coming off the water, but that's not something you normally see at 86 degrees outside. Instead, it is some sort of debris, or maybe algae forming since we haven't had rain in a very long time. We're not sure. Regardless, we thought it looked pretty cool.

06/01/2024

Sometimes, we all need a little help from our friends.

04/29/2024

Just a Monday.

We ran around the farm today and took a few photos. Every day promises to be an adventure of little discoveries.

- one of our mulberry trees coming into fruit
- box turtle
- the fox den seems to be in full operation
- carolina wren chicks
- a random piece of toy-something from who knows when/where
- blurry photos of a persnickety carpenter bee as I tried desperately to get a picture of the dude
- two entrances to a groundhog den. He's a pretty chubby guy
- and a photo of the groundhog. It was taken a good distance away and is therefore fuzzy

04/22/2024

We all kinda intuitively suspect this to be true, but it is really great to see real science finally getting behind it. The same thing is happening with so many other animals as well. Even plants. (We now know that trees and other plants communicate with each other.)

Fascinating work.

A group of prominent biologists and philosophers announced a new consensus: There’s “a realistic possibility” that insects, octopuses, crustaceans, fish and other overlooked animals experience consciousness.