All of the windows of our house are open to warm night air. It’s still cool enough that I’m in socks and my pajamas are long-sleeved, but the windows are open as much as a declaration of my faith in the changing of seasons as they are for a good airing-out of the place. I have placed so much hope in the coming of Spring this year! The Chickasaw plums are abloom, and abuzz with their halos of pollinators. The peaches and pears and apples and redbuds and maples are jubilant and painted even before they...

My grandparents had 50 acres in southwestern Ohio.  My Grandfather and Mother were born on that farm.  He raised chickens (rhode island reds), Charolette cattle, and sheep. He had a small apple orchard and boysenberries grew wild along the fences.  Every year he had a huge (about a half acre) garden and grew all kinds of vegetables.  My brother, cousins and I spent our summers there.  We milked cows, put up hay, gathered eggs. tended the garden and canned vegetables.  I learned to drive the tractor in the hay fields at age 7.  I wasn't strong enough to shift but I could...

Monday mornings, Zach and I wake up around 5:30, a couple of doors from one another, dress in more layers than I have the space to describe here, brew our hot caffeinated beverages of choice, throw the day’s cargo (seed trays, boxes, seeds, lumber, irrigation materials, could be anything) into the truckbed with little said, and begin the drive out to west Gainesville, where we stop to pick up Tim at his house, and then Morgan. Zach has oftentimes made cookies, or muffins, and we both bring a thermos of something piping hot and lively to share. The...

When the stars shine during the daylight hours, we don’t feel them, for the closest among them overwhelms the rest. We dream, we imagine, but difficult as it is to acknowledge, we have limited capacities for what we can experience at once; our focus is our reality. I have been experiencing this limit in the past few weeks. It has seemed almost dreamlike in its demand for my focus on the doing of things, the living of life. Nearly too material and experiential to be real. And yet, it recalls motorcycle maintenance, or being here...

When we decided to farm and make a CSA, Zach and I went shopping.  Zach had been reading a book about market gardening, and in it he found this ultra-compelling section dedicated exclusively to a BCS tiller, or walk-behind tractor.  I’d never heard of them.  So we looked into the different models, considered our budget of wait-staff cash tips and credit card hoard, and dove in.  Of course, if something is going to be called a walk-behind tractor, it had better do something beyond just till.  In this case, the BCS has a PTO, or Power Take-Off, which is the...

I want to talk shit.  Not in a competitive sense, but really about the poop itself.  There are few realms outside of gardening in which it is actually acceptable to speak of it.  We might as well jump in wholeheartedly… There is an uncomfortable shuffling of feet that happens around the subject of fertility and what it means to require inputs into the soil in order to grow food.  Whether conventional or organic, the topic is touchy, because there is a certain inevitability of complicity in some unwholesome process of industry involved whenever we begin to use the amounts of fertilizer...