Back on the Blog

The darn pandemic knocked me out of my blogging stride, but I’m hoping (fingers crossed) to get back on the tractor to post a lot more again this year, because it’s been busy on the farm, with fun plans ahead!

We’ve been digging into finding our farm’s rhythm and moving beyond what felt like a constant start-up phase. The big news is that we finally were considered “established” enough to be able to take out an infrastructure loan, and over the past fourteen months built a new heated prop house, a third high tunnel, and an equipment shed (the first structure on the farm that could classify as a “barn”). Less visually exciting, we opened up enough vegetable fields that we can cover crop and rest half the farm every season, and thanks to four seasons with more staff continuity (our team is always awesome, it’s just an extra bonus when folks stay for more than a year) we were able to get some smaller but key systems into place.

And I didn’t share enough of it here!

The truth is that the reason I don’t blog or post as much as I want to is that I find social media grindingly anxiety producing. In my own little bubble, I’m happy to plod along and things generally seem good or at least do-able.

But I always feel like when I go online to share something, everything is so superlative. (I’m not dissing farms that are awesome on social media – I love seeing and hearing how you all do things!)

But hearing and seeing enough of: “If you haven’t planted XXX by now, it can’t grow this year!” or “Real farmers make $$$, and if you don’t than you are just playing at a hobby” or “Organic farming is just a way for farmers to bamboozle you out of your hard-earned money” pops my bubble and I grump around the fields the rest of the day.

I care enough to be irritated, but not so much that I want to waste time on rage responding, so I just start avoiding blogging or social media. It’s not that I don’t want to share the good things that are happening here at Hartwood or the beauty in the world around me, but more like social media feels like constant multi-tasking in a performative manner (like multi-tasking while you are being judged at how you switch between things?). And multi-tasking and performing are basically the two things I hate the most!

Anyhow, my goal this year is to get over that feeling so we can share more about what’s happening at the farm (and how we interface with the wider world). 2022 is shaping up to be the year of streamlining the hundred tiny projects that we what we do a little bit better, and making sure that all our veggies taste even better. And hopefully I can suck it up and multi-task enough to get some great pictures of it from here to you!