So, Emily, what have you been up to these days?

Oh, you know, not much. Still working on Boerson Farm. Lots of weddings to go to this summer, and I worked at a few, too. Oh yeah, I’ve also been getting my farm ready.

Are you living there yet? What’s the status?

No, I’m still living in Princeton, but I’ll be moving down to Avoca full time at the end of October. This summer has been full of lots of bureaucracy, plus a bit of fieldwork. I’ve plowed most of the beds I’ll be planting in the spring, and just this past weekend tilled and seeded some cover crop to “put them to bed” for the winter. In mid-October, I’ll plant my garlic (about 3500 cloves of 20 different varieties) and strawberries.

Where are you moving at the end of October, exactly? Like, do you have a house?

I’ll be living in a 100-year-old brick farmhouse on a hill. It was a weekend home until my aunt and uncle decided to build their own house on another part of the property. They live there full time now, but it’s either a 3 minute drive around the block or a 15 minute hike over the hill and through the woods. The farmhouse is furnished and everything, and there are a bunch of outbuildings from when the farm was a small dairy many decades ago.

So what else will you grow besides garlic and strawberries?

I’ll be growing organic vegetables on about one acre using a bio-intensive raised bed system, meaning my plants will be spaced close together to shade out weeds and maximize yield from a small area. My goal is to have at least two kinds of greens available every week of the year (spinach, arugula, lettuce, salad mix, braising mix, kale, etc.), plus all your vegetable staples like carrots, onions, potatoes, tomatoes, etc. I also plan on establishing some perennial beds of rhubarb and asparagus, a small orchard (about 75 trees), and shiitake and oyster mushrooms. I plan on using a large unheated hoop house (30’ x 96’) and an assortment of low tunnels for both winter growing and earlier summer crops.

And where exactly do you plan on selling all this stuff?

Good question! I plan on starting with a 25-member CSA and two small farmers markets every week. The CSA will be fully customizable - members will still join the CSA by pre-paying at the beginning of the season, but instead of getting a box of whatever I want to give them that week, they’ll get to choose what they get and how much. I’ll send an email out, say on Tuesday evening, they’ll have until Wednesday evening to make an order, and then on Friday afternoon they can pick up a custom box whose value will be debited from their member balance. They’ll get special perks for becoming a member, like a 10% bonus at the beginning of the season, first dibs on special and early crops, discounts on bulk veggies for canning or storage, the ability to use their member credit at the farmers market, and an invite to a super sweet event on the farm every fall.

What about animals? Weren’t you talking about breeding stock and a cow, or something?

Ah, yes, the menagerie. I’ll be setting up shop with 2 (hopefully 3) sows and a boar, which will result in spring piglets. I’ve been gifted a jersey heifer calf for eventual milk (not anytime soon) and I plan on ordering some chicks this fall so they will start laying eggs about the time the first markets roll around in the spring. I’ll also round things out with a few mousers from the local shelter and a puppy!

A puppy? Are you crazy? Don’t you have enough to be getting on with?

Yes, I do, but the puppy is actually part of the plan! It was just born this past weekend - a Maremma, which is an Italian livestock guardian dog. It’s basically the Tuscan version of a Pyranees - big, white, & fluffy. Maremmas are bred and trained to stick with the herd (whatever the herd is - sheep, goats, pigs, chickens) and scare away predators. This pup will live in the barn with the menagerie, at first in a protected pen to get socialized, and eventually among the animals. It’s a working dog, pulling its weight on the farm just like everyone else.

And so you’ll be selling pork and eggs?

Yes, I’ll be selling eggs through the CSA and at the market. The pork is a slightly more complicated matter. At first I’ll be selling the weaned piglets to other farmers in the area and running a small pork CSA. The plan is to find 12 members who would like to split a pig every month. They would get the experience of eating a whole hog over the course of the year without having to invest in another freezer or make a large purchase all at once. There will be a deposit to join in the first month, then a monthly payment when the meat arrives. The price will be a savings compared to retail on local pastured-raised heritage pork, but will come with the convenience of parceled out monthly deliveries. Every box would include some basics (various ground and cased sausages, bacon, ham, pork chops) and a rotating 1/12th (various roasts, ribs, extra chops, extra bacon, etc.).

So, um, aren’t you broke? How are you going to survive all winter? And this all sounds expensive…

Why, yes! Thanks for asking. Well, I’ll be getting some kind of winter job when I get to Avoca. There are plenty of options in that department, so I’ll be able to pay the bills this winter. And yes, the start-up will cost some money. I’ve applied for an FSA micro-loan to cover some of the equipment I’ll need, and the USDA has a grant program to assist with the purchase of a hoop house, so I hope to take advantage of that as well. Should one or both of these fall through, there are other loan options available. I’ve also worked a bit of over-capitalization into my plan, so if I need to I can modify my plans in more of a “bootstrap” direction.

So, when can I visit?? Do you have a guest room?!

Yes! Please come visit! I have lots of room, and love to cook for company. If you get in touch with me, I’ll add you to the list for my private B&B situation - this basically involves signing up on a google calendar for one of my guest rooms, and pitching in on a project when you get here or tossing a few bucks in in the till should you prefer a more relaxing stay.

Are there other ways I can help without actually having to come to Wisconsin??

Well, first off, you should want to come to Wisconsin! But if you just can’t make the trip just yet, there are a few ways you can help:

Contribute to the perennial fund, which will be used for the purchase and maintenance of trees, small fruits and herbs.

Donate

Buy a CSA share for the local food bank. You’re too far away to enjoy my veggies, but you have a few bucks to spare and think more people should have access to local organic vegetables? You can buy a share that I’ll deliver to our local food bank all season. (This option available in March.)
Buy one of the books on my Amazon wishlist. I'll slowly start adding more non-book items over the winter. Think of this as my farm registry, with my sincere promise that if I ever get married I will never register for anything again!
Or, if you’re as broke as I am (hi there!), I would love it if you would share the link to my website with other people who might find it interesting.

You know, I have to say that this is an odd way to use that anthropology degree from Harvard.

Yeah, not the first or last time I’ll be hearing that.

Will you at least be posting more often now?

Yes, I plan on it. Since I won’t be working on two farms and driving at least two hours away most weekends, I should have more time for things like writing.

You know, it was really great to catch up this way! We should do this more often.

For sure! And next time I’ll try not to just go on about myself so much.

Fat chance!!

Haha!!

Byeeee!!

Laterrrr

Mat moving the first two varieties of garlic.

Some of my seed garlic hanging in the corncrib.

Last week brought one of my favorite tasks on the farm - the garlic harvest! Though garlic is only one of many crops that grows underground, for some reason it always seems so magical to me when you pull them out and see the nice big heads. I think this must have something to do with the fact that they’ve been in the ground since last October - they were planted a whole NINE months ago. They were in the ground when the windchill reached 26 below in January, and they still managed to poke their little green shoots through the straw mulch this spring. Anyways, last fall I amassed a small amount of sixteen more varieties of garlic apart from the four the Boersons grow. I started a spreadsheet to keep everything straight, and then I planted a whole 200-foot row in addition to the other six that made up the main garlic crop. So the afternoon before a whole crew was due to assemble to harvest the garlic, I grabbed a notebook, baling twine, tape, and a marker and set about pulling up my test plot. Making my way through the varieties, I counted how many germinated, how many were seed-worthy specimens, estimated the average number of cloves per head, etc. When they’ve hung in the corn crib long enough to have dried out, I’ll cut them down, weigh them, label them, and taste them. I’ve already decided that one variety didn’t perform well enough to grow again next year, and I’m on the fence about another. In October, I’ll take out my bagged and labeled seed garlic, pop all the cloves off the stem, then plant, mulch, and label my beds. A year from now, I’ll start the process again, and no doubt I’ll still find myself amazed to pull a fully formed head of garlic where last fall I left just a small clove.

Young Two-Spot in profile.

My seed garlic is not the only “seed” I’ve begun to stockpile in anticipation of my move to Hazel Hill Farm this fall. This other seed stock, however, is of the four-legged variety. Besides my vegetables, another component of next year’s farm landscape will be three sows and a boar. One of these sows is already a full-grown, proven mother who’ll be coming with me from the Boersons’ as part of my salary. She’s a Large Black Hog (LBH), a rare heritage breed that originated in England and is recognizable by its long body and big floppy ears. My second sow is still a gilt - the name for a female pig that has yet to farrow, or have a litter of pigs. She’s a Mulefoot hog, an even rarer breed, this one notable for its distinctive uncleft hooves. My third sow is TBD, but will be a Tamworth, because my boar is a Tamworth. When you say boar, a huge, fearsome pig with big tusks comes to mind, but mine is a newly-weaned pig pushing 50 lbs. He’s the stoutest fellow from a healthy litter of twelve, and has been named Two-Spot by young Shep, an imaginative but very literal namer, because of the two black spots on his rear end. With three different breeds of sow, this means that by replacing the boar every year or two, I’ll always have two different crosses and one purebred pair. So-called “hybrid vigor” means that the crossed pigs will be a bit stouter and grow a little faster than their pure counterparts, and having a pure line will mean I can grow my own replacement stock. Rotating boars between breeds means that I can constantly be improving my stock, a process aided by the fact that a pig has a relatively short gestation period (under 4 months) and can be safely bred at a relatively young age (around 8 or 9 months).

My plan with the pigs is to sell both feeder pigs and a few whole and half hogs in the first few years as I rotate them through the overgrown pasture and scrubby forest. As I improve my infrastructure, my plan is to breed selectively for traits I want, improving my herd as I start to grow out more and more pigs to full size, offering pork shares perhaps as early as the second year. In the long term, my goal is permaculture prosciutto and other dry-cured meats, in which the pigs I have bred specific to my farm with eat only food grown on the farm, and will be cured on-farm, resulting in a hyper-local artisanal product with potential for shipping and sales to high-end meat and cheese counters across the midwest (Zingerman’s, we will meet again!). This is many years in the future, however, and in the meantime, my breeding stock is growing in leaps and bounds.

On the farm, too, things are shaping up. I’ve been making the 2-hour commute pretty often this summer, and the late summer and early fall will see more and more frequent visits as I continue to break sod, get my barns ready for animals, and try to complete as many building projects as possible before the ground freezes for good. Things are coming along nicely, and I’ve even gotten the paperwork ball rolling on things like organic certification and a low-interest microloan from the FSA (Farm Service Agency). These things too feel almost like seed stock for the new farm - a little piece of paper now that will enable big things later. Besides the Boersons and my own family, there have also been a few notable contributions to my “seed stock” that have bolstered both my confidence that I’m trying to do something worthwhile and that there are amazing people out there who believe I am onto something. A few weeks ago, an incredible family I know in the area called and asked if I would consider house-sitting during their vacation in exchange for a young Jersey heifer calf. Having already decided to keep her older sister, they couldn’t see into keeping a third cow, and was hoping she might be useful in my growing menagerie. It was a great call to get, and I would have fed their animals and watered their garden for much less!

In a similar vein, a longtime family friend emailed a few months ago with another extraordinary gesture. She had been following my farming journey through the blog and had decided that she would like to contribute what was left of a memorial fund for her son to the farm. He would have really appreciated what I’m trying to do, she told me, and she thought it would be a fitting use of the funds. I was blown away by the gesture, and knew I had to come up with a fitting way to use the money so that it didn’t just disappear into the stream of cash it takes to start up a business. I decided to deem it the “Perennial Fund,” and use it to establish the perennial crops on the farm that would have taken a backseat to other faster-bearing investments. This way, an important facet of the farm would get a jump-start, and there would be a lasting and tangible way to honor this amazing young man on the farm. The rhubarb, asparagus, berries, and nut and fruit trees will yield for years to come, and might otherwise have been postponed or done halfway. If you’d like to contribute a few dollars to the Perennial Fund for Hazel Hill Farm, you can click the button below.

Donate

Acorn, bean, sunflower seed, popcorn kernel, apple seed.

Seed garlic, breeding stock, seed money. The imagery and symbolism of seeds has always captivated me - the sheer potential encapsulated in such a tiny package, the resilience, the stored energy, the connection with the past and the future, the portability and prerogative to exchange information. In these dog days of summer, when the sun bears down hard and the plants are bearing heavily, the emergence of the garlic makes me feel supported by the earth itself and gestures like these make me feel supported by the community of people I have around me, near and far. I am working harder than I have ever worked before, and will only work harder still as Hazel Hill springs into being, but I go to sleep happy and exhausted and wake up energized and ready to do it all over again. Gathering my seeds, saving them, sowing them, giving thanks.

Just a Farm Journal