The sheep are getting a snack again. I have a view from my office window and have been working at home a lot this Spring. This affords me a clear view down to the sheep pen and coincidentally a front-row seat to who’s visiting today. There are Martha and Emily, two neighbors with short-legged, big-personality…
Since we are in Poetry Month and Mother’s Day is right around the corner, here’s a poem that I wrote about my mom after visiting her one day last spring. She doesn’t know that I wrote this. Love you, Mum. –Jenn Spring Afternoon Carefully She picks her way Her deliberate pace Not the…
Somehow we turned around and now it’s February, 2016. For those keeping track (and wondering what the heck we’ve been doing), we’ve been busy. Seriously, it’s looked a lot like this (and no, this is not our farm). Since last June we’ve written our business plan twice, had a farm under contract then terminated it,…
Have you ever written a business plan? Currently, I am working on the third one of my career. The first was for my undergraduate class in Ecological Entrepreneurship. It was fun; a plan for an edible landscaping business called The IncrEdible Yard (I dare you to use that name!). I knew nothing about edible landscaping,…
Jenn and I are finally trying to buy a farm, which has gotten me thinking quite a bit about risk (no, not the Risk pictured above). Before we decided that we wanted to own and operate a farm, my perspective on risk related to property was limited to a modest mortgage for a house and…
The time has come where Chris and I are moving forward on finding our new farm. We aren’t sure how that’s going to end up, but it means that we are now actively looking. The first one, naturally, was the farm that initiated this major change in our lives starting two years ago. It’s finally…
A few days ago, I wrote an article for the New England Barbecue Society’s newsletter in the National Barbecue News that talks about the time we barbecue competitors put into practicing the craft. It was inspired in part by a comment made by Andy Husbands, the Chef/Owner of Boston’s Tremont 647 (and member of the…
by Jenn As described several weeks ago, waiting for lambs is hard. That’s not the only hard thing in farming (particularly livestock farming). Actually many things are hard. And worrisome. And stressful. And sometimes horrific. I’ll spare the details but the point is: farming is not all sunshine and lambs. That’s why farmers must carry…
For four days, I’ve had this Tom Petty song stuck in my head. Four days ago, the calendar predicted the arrival of our first lambs. No appearance yet. The calendar is a fickle, paper thing. We have lambing predictors based on various back dates of your choice. Since I did not use a ram harness…
Welcome to our new blog! Jenn and I had intentions of starting things off at the beginning of the new year, but as is often the case, life, the universe, and everything got in our way. So here we are now at the end of March with winter slowly releasing its bitter grasp on us. We’ve…