It was a long wait to finally get my hands on an electric truck, but there’s no disappointment here. The 2022 Ford Lightning joins our household fleet to replace my not-so-old gasoline fueled truck. With its retirement, the only gas we need now is for the lawn mowers and the tractor. I look forward to transitioning those some day, too. This truck is truly awesome. It’s super quiet, extremely powerful, well built, inexpensive to fuel and maintain, and very useful on the farm. I’ve had it for ten months and 12,000 miles already with off-roading in the snow, weighed down with payload, towing traile

If you’re familiar with our farm, you probably already know that a major part of our plan is thinking about the whole landscape holistically. We don’t just plant Christmas trees, we are stewards of an ecosystem. More of our land is fallow, or in cover crops than is planted to trees. There are pockets where we plant throw native perennial seeds with abandon. Come winter when the farm is mowed and cleaned up, you’d never guess just how wile the place was just a few months ago with fawns hiding in the grass, coyotes looking for mice, fox saying whatever they say, bear snacking on berries, and bobca

Often we plant sunflowers fro fun as a cover crop. This year we experimented with making a more permanent bed for cutting sunflowers. Surprisingly, we had very little sun and a lot of rain this summer, so our sunflowers were late in maturing but we still had a nice field of flowers. Look for some future planting improvements and growth. These photos are from the he moment the flowers started to open.

May 20, 2023 On this spectacular spring Sunday afternoon, I find myself relaxing after a two-week whirlwind of farm work.  Two important things stand out about this moment: one, that I am relaxing, and two, that I am relaxing. Uh, what? As some of you already know, I fell from a roof in February.  As startling as a fall can be, that landing can be the real surprise.  In my case, I was exceptionally lucky to meet the ground with some grace. Three months later, with one six-inch surgical screw, five healed fractures and many hours of physical therapy under my belt, I can lounge in the