SPRING

brings relief to our cold hands, frost-filled beards, and rosy noses. The warm sunlight that pours through the greenhouse walls every morning is captured and held to nurture our seedlings and awaken their embryonic ambitions. Lengthening daylight shifts us out of our restful hibernation to increasingly vigor-filled days of filling flats with hand packed soil blocks, erecting trellis, and tilling the soil that has rested the winter long. Our seeder winds back and forth over our raised beds, impregnating them with lettuce and mesclun mix, fiery mustard, spicy arugula, radishes, dill, and crunchy sugar snap peas. Asparagus spears break through their woody mulch, much like the sprouting garlic, while the strawberry plants stretch out with their miniature ruby bouquets. We transplant our broccoli, cauliflower, kale, and head lettuce starts by hand into the warming soil just before a good soaking spring rain.

SUMMER

transforms. Adolescent plants find their fruiting and seeding forms, weeds take the reins, and warm rains bring savory zucchini, crisp cucumbers, breathtaking basil, cilantro, and leafy green onions. Heirloom tomatoes swell and glow from what were once just late spring blossoms. We walk the fine line of overwhelming ourselves with hand cultivating our sensitive bare soil crops, like baby carrots and beets and letting our "biomass accumulators" accumulate. Sweet corn ears begin to show their browning silks as the wafting aroma of melon announces the sweet settling of summer. Late into the season, we invite our once bounty-filled fields into a restorative state of letting go, drilling cover crop seed into the soil to be reawakened in the spring. 

AUTUMN

is the sweetest season, culminating from the late summer crops (protected under the cover of our high tunnel and Remay), rewarding harvest of long season crops, like parsnips, sweet potatoes, ginger, and celery root, and burgeoning fall crops, like spinach, arugula, broccoli and glorious kale that mature in these cooler
temperatures. At the same time, the threat of hard, killing frost lingers and shapes the way we think and move daily. Carrying thousands of pounds of produce from the field to storage builds both our bodies and
gratitude for the cornucopia the farm creates in a matter of a few short weeks.

WINTER

is undoubtedly humbling here in the North Country. We are consistently challenged by the variability of our winters. Nonetheless, our mild, yet productive summers provide us with the staples of winter squash, potatoes, storage 
carrots and beets. With good storage, we can fill our bellies reliably with these gem-colored fruits and roots, supplying
our bodies with much needed vitamins, minerals, and complex carbohydrates. The rich scent of crushed garlic 
in the kitchen becomes familiar and expected, while other alliums, like shallots, onions, and leeks fill out the flavor profile of favorite soups, stews, and roasts. In the early months, we'll tromp through knee high snow to cut hardy greens from our unheated greenhouse.