Goodness!  Between preparing for the Winter CSA and preparing for this new baby, posting has been a bit light around here!  Here then are a few recent scenes from the farm to tide you over till we get back on track with the daily photos.

Our days are full and lovely, and we cannot thank y’all enough for making this life possible for us.

Autumn’s temperatures bring with them a host of cool-weather crops we look forward to all summer long: kabocha squash, broccoli, Red Russian kale, Honeycrisp apples…

(Speaking of apples, this mama-to-be is seriously craving some pie.)

You might not think of lettuce as a fall crop, but here in Virginia, it is way too hot to grow the stuff during the summer.  So it’s always such a delight when the temperatures turn and we can grow our lettuce mix again.  It’s sweet, tender, and gorgeous as all get-out — and it’s in your CSA shares this week.  Enjoy!

Yes, indeedy!  Garlic is one of our very favorite things to grow and to eat, but we didn’t grow it this year — we were still farming full-time up at our old place in Northern Virginia during garlic-planting time last year.

But Claire and Shannon spent the better part of this gorgeous, gorgeous autumn day putting 150 pounds of beautiful seed garlic in the ground.  We’ve tried out a few varieties over the years, and our very favorite is a hardneck variety called Music.  It’s the only kind we grow now.  It has beautiful purple-white cloves and a strong perfect garlic flavor, and keeps very well.

We’ll have lots more to share about garlic next spring and summer!  And it will start appearing in CSA shares sometime in July — if all goes well, it will be a weekly staple till the end of the season.

As someone who would sooner give up the air she breathes than give up garlic, this is a very good thing.

Seriously.  I do not know where we’d be without these two.  Shannon and Claire both arrived at Frog Bottom this spring, from locales and lifestyles far more cosmopolitan and sane, and took to life and work here at the farm like ducks to water.  They arrive every morning full of vim and vigor.  Their sweet humor and incredible work ethic make this a joyful place to live and work — and, quite concretely, make it possible for us to farm.

It’s impossible to imagine our first year here at Frog Bottom without these two wonderful women, and if it’s okay with everyone, I’m just going to stay in denial a bit longer that they’re leaving us in a few weeks.

It’s with gratitude that we’ve been enjoying some fine roast chicken on these recent chilly nights.  We eat this chicken and think of the good weather, the uninterested predators, our kind neighbors, our rockin’ farm crew, and this lifestyle which allows us to produce so much of the good food that nourishes us.

If you feel up for it, follow a bit of the journey these chickens made by clicking here.

Are you looking for some good folks to buy good meat from?  For now we’re only raising enough meat for our own little family and workers, but here in Pamplin we’re lucky to live near two great families who raise pastured animals on a small-scale commercial level.  Check out Ault’s Family Farm & Apiary and Consider the Lilies Farm.

And that means a big ole CSA harvest full of roots and greens!  Three cheers for Claire, please, who’s washing off these gorgeous Easter Egg radishes on a very chilly morning!

We got started in farming by first spending several years working for other farmers.  This is definitely the path we recommend.

(You can read a bit more about our thoughts on “good, on the ground, in-the-mud-and-the-muck training” over at the profile Serious Eats did on us last month. We were honored to participate in their Meet Your Farmers series and I can’t believe we’re only remembering to share this with y’all now!  Can I blame pregnancy brain? Winter CSA preparations? Learning how to milk a goat?)

After learning from some incredible folks who had figured out how to make farming a viable and sound career choice, we started our own farm in 2006, on land we leased from Susan and Chip Planck of Wheatland Vegetable Farms.

(Since we’re sending you all over creation today, why not read this Washingtonian article, which profiles the Plancks as well as some of our other good farm friends from Northern Virginia?)

We sold at DC area farmers markets for three years before buying Frog Bottom.  I suppose we thought we’d always make our living this way, by growing for market: working those fields in all kinds of weather, rising before dawn on weekend mornings, laughing and learning with our customers, packing up the truck again at the end of market, and heading back to the farm to do it all over again.

We love doing that, and thank goodness farmers markets are still a big part of our lives!

What we didn’t know back in our Northern Virginia days was how much we’d also come to love the CSA approach to growing vegetables and getting them to folks.  We decided to add a CSA to our farm when we moved because it seemed to make good business sense.  We were leaving a major metropolitan area for a region with smaller cities, and it seemed smart to offer different ways for folks to access our vegetables.  But we’d never actually run a CSA before.

Well: we love it.  We love being able to plan well in the winter and spring.  We love the security.  We love the sense of adventure and fun our CSA members bring to eating.  We love how connected we feel to y’all.

We love it so much that we decided to offer a Winter CSA this year, and a much bigger Summer CSA next year.  And that’s what Ali is up to in today’s Daily Farm Photo.  We’re going to be renting some extra land from some wonderful neighbors (and CSA members!) next year, and we’ve just started the process of preparing that ground.  We’ve plowed it and tilled it, and we’ll probably till it once more before putting in a winter cover crop of hairy vetch and rye.  This cover crop will do all kinds of good things to protect the soil and get it ready for vegetables next year: prevent erosion, maintain moisture, suppress weeds, and turn atmospheric nitrogen into nitrogen our crops can use.

Beyond the new field you can see one of our current fields, growing some of the delicious cooking greens that have already started showing up in your CSA shares.  The weather is turning, and those greens only get better after the frost — yum!

Another beautiful early autumn weekend, and another potluck and farm tour full of laughter, good cheer, and a pint-sized harvesting crew.  You can see from the photo that the patch where our winter squash sat growing all summer long has been cleaned up.  What you can’t see is the cover crop of barley and hairy vetch that we planted in the middle of last week.  With a little rain it should germinate soon.  It will keep our fields healthy during the winter by preventing erosion, keeping moisture in the soil, and converting atmospheric nitrogen into nitrogen next year’s crops will be able to use.  In the spring we’ll turn it into the soil before planting something new there.

Yesterday it was our great pleasure to be joined at the farm by some members of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church.  This community has been enormously supportive of our farm since our first days in the Richmond area.  Early this spring, we spoke at the church about our CSA program and about farmers markets — about the concrete ways that buying from local farmers keeps families like us solvent, keeps rural economies strong, and keeps urban communities vibrant and healthy.  We sell our vegetables at the Market at St. Stephen’s on Saturday mornings from 8am to noon.  St. Stephen’s is also the site of our largest CSA pick-up, on Saturday mornings during the summer and on Wednesday evenings during the winter.

It’s really quite impossible to imagine our farm without their support.  Thanks so much, y’all!

Fridays are always a big harvest day for us.  On Saturdays we sell at two farmers markets in Richmond, and about half our CSA customers pick up their shares on the weekend as we well.  Here you can see Claire picking turnips and radishes, bunching as she goes.  It’s certainly a joy to harvest on sunny, crisp, breezy days like this one.

Aaaahhhh.  While we love the rhythm of our normal days here on the farm, and thrive on the time with y’all at market and at our CSA pick-ups, it feels so wonderful when the twain meet!  It was a delight to see our veggies in lots of creative dishes, but a greater pleasure still to sit in the sun and stroll the farm with so many kind souls.  We aim to do this lots more next year — hope you’ll join us!

Lots and lots and lots more photos below!

A note to parents: I didn’t check with everyone before posting these.  If for any reason at all you’re not comfortable with photos of your children being on our website, just let us know, and we’ll take them down, no questions asked.

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