Moving Day!!!

Going forward, we are going to be posting all new blog posts on our webstite: www.cloverlyfarm.com. In addition to the blog, the site also features information about us, our CSA page, and will soon have photos other goodies added to it. Please update your bookmarks.

Website

If you are reading this on our NEW website, welcome!! If you are reading this on our blog, you may want to check out cloverlyfarm.com for more information about the farm.

Getting a website has been a long, arduous process. We're very happy to have gotten this far! I am super excited to start posting information about our CSA, answering questions, and having discussions with people of the community. This is a very large and important step toward getting the word out and becoming more involved with the people around us.

We have given ourselves a deadline to recruit CSA shareholders, which means we have an even earlier deadline of fleshing out the last details of the CSA. There are many questions to answer, such as:

How many shares will we be able to handle?

Where will they be distributed to the shareholders, and how?

How much will a share cost?

How many vegetables will be in a share?

And much, much more.

We were hoping to get more community feedback, but it is a difficult time of year, and we understand that. So, we're going to make our own executive decisions and hope that it suits the community well.

To see all of our plans in their final version, stay tuned for the page "CSA" on our website, coming very soon. This will have everything you may need to know about what a CSA is, how it will work, and what ours in particular will look like. If you still have questions, pop into our Discussion board (also coming very soon. Maybe even tonight) where there will be a discussion regarding the Q&As of CSAs.

Thank you for being a follower of Cloverly Farm. We are really lucky to have people who are willing to stick with us through thick and thin. We hope that the website will offer you much better resources for getting involved and learning about who we are and what we are up to. Please visit and, as always, be sure to give us your input!

-Terra

Videos

You may remember I am somewhat of an artist. I do drawings, found-object sculpture, and small-scale glasswork mostly. Every once in a while I branch out and dabble in something different. Stop-motion video is one of those things that I like to try out once in a while. I made these for a class of mine at school, and thought they were perfect for our mission. So check them out! Let me know what you think. They're kind of silly and pretty amateurish, I admit, but I try to make them fun.

Enjoy!

-Terra

2011 Begins Now!

I wonder how likely it is that anyone is still reading this blog? If you've been checking regularly for updates these last two months, I'm deeply sorry for your ongoing disappointment. If you're rejoining us now, I promise that the updates will be more regular and forthcoming in the future, and if you've just discovered us, ignore all that. This is a highly active blog with a huge following, that you should share with all your friends because it's so awesome! Got that? Good! Moving right along...

The lack of activity on these pages the last two months has corresponded to a lull in our activities in Greenfield. For most of October and November, Terra has been concentrating on school and I've been catching up on personal business in Lexington. We've also both been participating in National Novel Writing Month for the past 30 days, and as of today have both completed that monumental task successfully! The farm hiatus is coming to an end however. Beginning today, we are gearing up for the 2011 season.

Now you might be wondering what 2011 is going to look like compared to 2010, our inaugural year. Hopefully, the answer will be very different. The biggest change, and one you will be hearing a lot about over the coming weeks, is that we will be introducing a CSA this year. We are still in the planning stages for this, and will be making a lot of our decisions about the scope of our farm based on the demand we see and the amount of capital we can raise before the growing season starts. Last year, we successfully demonstrated that we can grow a variety of delicious vegetables. This year will be about turning that effort into a successful business and scaling it up to a point where it actually makes a noticable difference in the larger community.

The first step of this process will be developing a business plan and determining what large investments we will be making this spring. We will need to make equipment purchases and also upgrade our facilities to meet our goals this summer, and we would greatly appreciate feedback and involvement at this stage in order to clarify our planning and give us some concrete data to build upon. I invite anyone who would potentially be interested in purchasing a CSA share from us this season to post thoughts. Specifically, we're looking for what types of produce you routinely use in your cooking, how you would prefer us to distribute it to you, and what you might reasonably expect to pay for it. Information like this will enable us to plan our crop layout and distribution scheme.

Terra and I are both very excited about what 2011 has in store. We had a lot of fun last summer and met some fantastic people along the way, and this year promises to be even better. Please post your thoughts and stay tuned for more!

-Dan

Farming Alone

Things have gotten a bit more difficult at the farm now that Terra is back in school. I've still been making regular trips up to Greenfield to maintain the plants and start packing equipment away for the winter, but the pace of my work is quite different now. I've noticed that it's easier to focus on one specific task for a certain length of time, but when I reach the end of that task it's harder to start another. I am more tired at the end of the day, and I feel as though I've accomplished less overall even if I can pick off specific chores.

Because of my experience this summer, I have become convinced that farming at a scale that produces goods needs to be collaborative in order to be truly successful. I'm sure there are cases where one single farmer has managed to produce an abundance of goods and taken them to market, just as there are cases where an individual has made a successful film or staged a play entirely alone. But these are exceptions to a widely established model: in farming, just as in performing arts, the end result is almost always an expression of the creativity, dedication and effort of multiple individuals.

So though I am farming by myself, I would not go so far as to say that I am farming alone. Our garden, which is still producing an abundance of vegetables, has come to this point as much though Terra's dedication as my own, and I should also credit Terra's family, my family, and all the others who have supported our grand experiment this summer. On long afternoons of solitary tomato and bean picking, it is the thoughts of what we set out to accomplish at the beginning of this year, and all the people who got us there, that keep me from feeling lonely.

-Dan

Winding down, Gearing up.

I can't believe that it's already mid September. For me, this summer has been a chaotic blur of farming, working in Lexington, and lots of driving in between. In the last four months, the only time I've been in one place more than four days at a time was when Terra and I were in Maine. So while I'm sad to see the farm winding down for the season, it's also a bit of a relief; I won't have quite so much on my plate in a few weeks time.

Once the day-to-day work at the farm comes to a close, however, Terra and I are going to turn our attention to the very large and involved task of planning for next season, now that we are fairly certain that there will indeed be one. Early on, we decided that this season was mostly about testing out what works and what doesn't, and it has worked out well in that regard. Going into the planning process, there are already a few things about next year Terra and I are in total agreement on (winter squash gets it's own field, for instance), as well as some things that we will be discussing at length and working out some appropriate solutions for.

A few items in the latter category include the formation of a CSA, the future development of the Greenfield Farmers Market, and the scope of our farm come next spring, accounting for Terra's and my living situations. For those of you still reading our blog (I know the updates have been sporadic during the growing season), we'd like to invite comments and active participation as we begin this process. This is going to be a busy winter for Cloverly Farm, and it will be April 2011 before we know it.

Our Routine

So I think we're well established enough to be able to say that we have a 'routine'. Granted, it is always changing. But I thought it was fair to spell out the basics here:

Our most successful endeavor so far has been home and office delivery. It started by calling our friends at their homes and places of work and asking if they, their families, and their coworkers were interested in a delivery. We got a lot of positive responses, and we've made a list of people and places that we visit about once a week. The list seems to grow every week, and now we have three businesses and five homes that deliver to regularly!

How the delivering works: Dan and/or I load all the veggies into the back of the car after making some phone calls to see who is interested in veggies today. Then we drive over, and depending on the place, we bring all the veggies inside for people to browse, or we let people come out to our "portable farm stand" in the back of the car.

We also have done special deliveries, such as meeting people at a public location for a delivery. We really strive to be accommodating (I mean, if people want our veggies, they should be able to get them!) and we've made a lot of progress through this method of sale. Even with the farmer's market and whatever else happens, I still see home delivery continuing to be a big part of our future at the farm.

Other methods of sale? Not as much. We are starting the Greenfield Farmer's Market (or "trial market", this year..) which has not been very profitable yet, but seems to be growing! For the past two weeks, it has been just Dan and I, our small vegetable stand, and a couple posters, but this coming Tuesday holds promises of two more vendors -- one who sells goat milk soap and lotion, and one who sells gluten free baked goods!! I am so excited to see who shows up this week.

And our very last, teeny-tiny idea? We are hoping to get a farm stand. We've called a business with a currently unused farm stand set-up and asked for permission to use it and do maintenance on it. We're still waiting on a reply, with crossed fingers!

AND NOW.... Photos!! Just like I promised!

Here's our very first stand at our trial market!

This is how our veggies stay when they are not being delivered or in any other use. It makes our porch quite lovely!

Here's a dish my mom made from multicolored veggies AND pasta! It was so beautiful, and just as delicious!

Another shot of the stand, with a signage-close up. Dan looks so chill. :)

Our little helpers, displaying our veggies! They are so helpful.

So, I know it's not pictures of the garden itself yet... But those are coming soon! VERY soon, now that I have a useable camera! Promise!

-Terra