What Did We Do?

As I sit down to write this, there is one more week left of our apprenticeship! I'm looking at the fall colors on the orchard and the lower field through rainy windowpanes. It's quite cold outside and I'm happy to have a cup of tea and a pumpkin cranberry biscotti I baked this morning to enjoy as I write this conclusive post.

What did we do? What did it look like!? What did it feel like and what did we learn? I hoped for so much for this blog. Alas, when it gets down to it, words don't seem adequate to capture all we've done this past growing season. And I've continued to be stumped as to what information is going to be relevant and compelling for those who might be reading this... Plus the fact that farming is actually hard physical work: At the end of the day, I never found sufficient energy stores to synthesize our experience into bite-sized bits.

(sigh)

So what do we say now? What's the sum up? It's been simply beautiful. That's it. And we want more of it. We know that we have a lot to learn still about growing and we want to continue this as a labor of love. Our plans are to lease a piece of land and start to grow a half an acre to start with, optimally with enough room that we can scale up in future years as we desire to do so. We hope to integrate the favorite elements of our collective experiences with what we've learned over the growing season. We don't know what that looks like exactly, so our adventure happily continues!

I won't be writing more blog posts here. If you want to stay in touch with us and find out what we're up to, I am liking being on facebook... If we're connected there, we'll be able to find what's going on for you, too! But blogs and social networking are both more than a little limited and our hope is that we can create a welcoming home where we can fix meals from our own garden and have our friends and family come share with us at our table...

Thank you for reading this and for your interest and support in our adventure! We hope to hear what good food and gardening and growing means to you!

Dana and Brian

What Are We Doing?

Happily, our little macbook has been resurrected and we now have a connection to the real world.  

Hello.

Now, what are we doing, exactly?  What does a day in our yurt life look like?  What does it look like to farm*?  

There are a bazillion** things that need to be accomplished in a week, all varying as the season progresses.  So it's actually quite difficult to list what we do in a typical day. However, all of our activities seem to fall under the three following categories: cultivating the soil, planting, and harvesting.  This sounds simple.  It actually isn't at all.  There are so many variables and so many ways that a plant can either succeed magnificently or fail, utterly miserably.  Fortunately, Rebecca and Louisa definitely know what they are doing and the succeeding magnificently part means that what we harvest is far beyond the absolute most delicious things from the ground either of us have ever tasted.  Have you tried Persephone's purple sprouting broccoli?  Or the spinach?  If not, we cry for your inexperience...

We'll tell you more in upcoming posts...  About loving chickens; stacking functions***; how to decorate a yurt; nettle queens; why Dana's banned from any social gatherings; the value of crows; Brian's ability to site Bill Simmons, Nietzche, and Tupac within a two minute span; and more!  

brian and dana at our first farmers market!!!!!  

(check us out saturdays on bainbridge island --- we're there alternating saturdays from 9:00 - 1:00 ---- drop us an e-mail if you think you might be on the island for the market!!!)

brian, farding*

dana, with iphone, tea and porridge in the yurt ---- all is right with the world...

brian with our beloved, warrior macbook in sunny 32 degree weather a few months ago, at the one location where there is a really strong wireless connection 

brian (simmons) and val, our fellow apprentices

rom, the resident peacock

keely, the wonder dog

*To be more specific --- and honest ---- our current skill set puts us somewhere between farming and gardening.  Otherwise known as "farding."  We are humble, aspiring farmers who fard.  A lot.

** "Bazillion" appears to be a technical term on the farm.  

*** Permaculture language!!!

Technology and Dirt

We are about to enter our fourth week on the farm. It's crazy how quickly you can get used to an entirely different way of life. Now, in our universe, dirt is the most important thing. Water. Dirt and water. Good soil is stunningly beautiful now. A month ago, that way of thinking would have been inconceivable.

About a week ago, our macbook died. We wept. (Not really, but it's a total bummer.) How do you connect with the people you care about without a computer? It's comical, but it's odd to realize how much of who you are as a person in the world is bound up in this wee little box. There is definitely a feeling that technology doesn't really mesh with this world on the farm. Is there a hostile relationship between the advancement of techology and cultivating the earth? Not really a new question, but the timing of the demise of our computer is a little suspect... (We are guarding our iphones very carefully.)

All this to say that we really want to share our experience with you and yet all of our pictures are on the macbook... While we are hoping that our macbook can be resurrected soon, the whole forced low-technology debacle seems very illustrative of our experience: we are experiencing how much we have relied on a system that is unseen to us and composed of all these little wires and lines... Be it a computer or a food system or financial system. All this in contrast to the simplicity and infinite complexity of dirt. Our life now is dirt. Very happily.

(Funny to have to borrow a computer to share this with you...)

The First Week

We've had our first week on the farm!  Unfortunately, this will be a pictureless post.  (We don't have all the stuff we need from our condo to load up the pictures we've taken this week.)  Since the pictures to come will describe so much, we'll keep this short.

The good: We love it.  (My heart actually feels like it's singing.)

The bad:  It doesn't seem ideal to be living in a yurt when it's snowing.

Fortunately, Brian is very good at keeping the fire in the wood stove going at the exact optimal level.  And everyone on the farm is generous, interesting, and fun.  But more about them and our activities later.  Suffice to say that the adventure is very, very good.  It feels good to know that we are learning something so valuable and that we have to courage to just go for it.  We've begun, and maybe that's the hardest part. We'll see!

Inaugural Deep Posting!

We are writing this blog to share our lives you with as we embark on our big adventure!  

In a week we will be moving into a yurt, starting an eight-month apprenticeship program on a small-scale sustainable farm on the Kitsap Penninsula, about thirty minutes from where we have been living on Bainbridge Island. 

Woohoooooooo!!!!!

Stay tuned...