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

Schedules...

I find it VERY helpful to have a schedule when I need to get things done. So, just to get a better idea of what goes on around here, this is my schedule in-the-making:

5:00 am - Wake up, get breakfast

5:30 am - Go outside, do heavy work (raking beds, rototilling, mowing) before it gets warm.

8:00 am - Do transplanting, sowing, weeding, or other less strenuous work as the day gets hotter.

9:00 am - Water the seedlings and the hoop house plants as the sun has probably dried them out by now. Take a water break!

9:30 am - Continue with the lighter work.

11:30 am - Come inside. Make lunch, wash dishes, and do other indoor things as necessary. Perhaps write a blog post.

Sometime between 12:30 and 1:00 pm - Back outside! More lighter work. Nowadays its generally a lot of transplanting... later in the season it will probably be more weeding and pruning, and then harvesting and cleaning!

My afternoon is flexible. I might have other jobs to do or things to get done (you know... with my other life). But if I am on the farm, I will generally just be doing whatever needs to get done. Today it was transplanting more onions. (SO many onions!!)

Around 5:00 pm - As the day starts to cool, I can resume doing heavier work.

6:00 pm - The sun is no longer directly hitting the garden, so I give everything a good soak of water for the night.

8:00 pm - Time to bring in all the tools and equipment from the field and put them away for the night.

8:30 pm - It's probably dark, so it's time to head in for the night!

Obviously, these times are going to change as the days get shorted and longer, but thats the gist. More photos coming soon, I promise! Things are crazy right now, and it takes three days just to finish a post. But I'm serious, I HAVE pictures, I just need to get them up!

~Terra

Dan Learns Time Management

I consider myself to be an organized person. I keep my living spaces neat, I arrange my possessions into categories, I wash my clothes with like colors. However all of these are spacial organizations; when it comes to organizing and managing my time I'm a mess, and as luck would have it I'm rapidly learning that farming draws heavily upon that very skill. So I'm presented with a choice: give up on being a farmer and take on a job where my time is organized for me or learn better time management. So far, I've opted for the latter.

This weekend presents an interesting time management challenge. If all goes well, I'll be up at the farm for two days, working on all the various things that need to get done, by myself. Terra, who has enough on her plate with school work, won't be around to help this time. Compounding the challenge is the fact that several things need to happen in a specific order. If all goes well, the end result will be our first round of plants in the ground, but between now and then is a juggling act of testing, improving and conditioning the soil. In order to make sense of this process, and accomplish everything in the time that I have, I did something I rarely do; I made a schedule.

It's a little strange to me: all throughout my years in school, I never made schedules. For large assignments I'd let deadlines be my motivator, and had I been inclined I could have plotted a very nice logarithmic function relating the closeness of the due date to the amount of work I did. I'm not proud of this method, and I've handed in some truly dreadful work because of it, but It served me well enough to earn a college degree. So trying to suddenly develop better time management skills is exercising a part of my brain that hasn't gotten nearly enough attention in the past. And it's actually a pretty good feeling.

-Dan