Well it’s been quite the week on the farm. Yesterday, our deeply beloved farm dog Ava went to her final resting place under her favorite tree. I will always cherish my repour with Ava through the last year of what was a decade of love and happiness in the Schmidt household. As a farmer in these times I find solace in one of my favorite philosopher’s writings,
”Everybody should do in their lifetime, sometime, two things. One.. is to consider death. To observe skulls and skeletons and to wonder what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up— never. That is a most gloomy thing for contemplation. But..It’s like manure. Just as manure fertilizes the plants and so on, so the contemplation of death and the acceptance of death is very highly generative of creating life. You’ll get wonderful things out of that.”
-Alan Watts
The current heat wave and wild fires have not only added to the gloominess of this sad week but they are also affecting the plants. Yields are down as plants go into heat dormancy and for the first time this season I’ve begun dealing with a multitude of pest pressure. Organic farms have only a few things in the playbook for dealing with pests, so now I’m starting to put together a plan to deal with some crop losses. Luckily the farm has been in such abundance so far everything should be manageable.
On a positive note, the pepper and eggplant harvest has arrived in full force. There will be a couple varieties of Italian eggplants, green and colored bell peppers, lunch box peppers, anaheims, and jalapenos to choose from.
One last housekeeping note…for the remainder of the season, if you can save and return your cardboard boxes I’d like to reuse them. Now that we are all familiar with covid vectors I’m confident this is a safe practice. These boxes are ordered by the pallet so it would be a shame to have to order more at the tail end of the season.
As always, thank you for supporting our small farm start up.
Matt Johnson
