The Open Gate Farm On Camano Island, Washington

Dear Friends of the Farm:

The door to the cave has closed.  It does this the first day of Spring every year.  Slams shut and we can’t get back in.  No more hibernation.  No more long evenings around the fire wondering why life holds what it does.  No more leisurely planning for the year to come.  No more cocooning.  Nope.  All that is over.

The call to action is ringing loud and long today.  Spring has sprung on the farm.  We’ve heard it and have responded.  The first thing we did was invite some young farmers up for a day.  They arrived last night, sleeping bags and overnight kits in hand and as I write this are they are strewn about the house sleeping off popcorn and plans for today and late night talking about what ever teens talk about these days.  Your old chipmunks went to bed and slept.  We know what we’ll need for this busy day. (more…)

Dear Friends of the Farm:

We had a bit of weather this week.  Transplanting lettuce while the snow blew around us impressed the ducks.  They were praying for a hard freeze so they could use their Christmas skates.  No luck though.  The snow didn’t stick and their pond didn’t become an ice rink so they put their hockey sticks away and headed up the lane to look for slugs in the north field.  The baby lettuce did fine too, after we popped a floating row cover over them for the night.

Today it’s blowing to beat the band again.  And we’re not talking a junior high school band.  This one has a long line of tuba players with good lungs going for all they’re worth!  Professional wind blowers they are.  Earlier this week it blew apart the low tunnel in the South Garden.   Don’t worry.  The tall one you all helped build by the raspberries  last August is calm and serene and intact.  Right now, however, there is a skeleton of PVC pipe in the big garden along Russell Road and plastic is pulled part way up to form a wind break.  More 40 mph tuba players are expected this afternoon, so plastic flapping will be heard throughout the land.  But being clever and desperate farmers, we have ideas on how to fix this.  Soon as the wind slows down, anyhow.  It involves binder twine. (more…)

Dear Friends of the Farm:

Ruts are common on a farm.  Every day has a morning, work, lunch, work, dinner, nightfall, and then sleep.  Day in.  Day out.  The patterns of living get laid out on each day and we cut them out and stitch together a life we can wear with at least some comfort.  That is what happens to happy farmers.  They figure out what to do and it becomes deeply etched in their lives.  We even wear those ruts with pride, knowing we’re doing important work, feeding the nation.

Part of the daily pattern here at The Open Gate Farm is that every morning before breakfast, Snickers the warden dog leads one of us down to the chicken run and watches while we let the gang loose on the place for the day.

The chickens and ducks have their ruts too.  They all go to the duck’s swimming pool and line up around the edge, wetting their whistles before heading out to work.  The chickens first job is to beg for a can full of cracked corn. The ducks head up the lane to check the water level in the ruts left by the tractor.  Some of those holes are a foot wide and ten feet long and when it has rained in the night, filled with brown water that might, they hope, have worms at the bottom.  So off they go, wading in and swimming around in these little pools of hope.  Heads go down and when they come up we hear them reporting their successes to each other. (more…)