Colorado

Farm update: May 12

/ Elizabeth / 2 Comments

It’s mid-May here on the Western Slope and we’ve had virtually no appreciable moisture for months. Grand Mesa snowpack is critically low. Accordingly, even though water allocations haven’t yet been set, we are planning for an exceptionally limited irrigation season, as are other farmers in our region.

What else is happening on the farm these days?

This photo of gated pipe in our pasture is from back in 2018 – our pasture looks nothing like this now.

Our gated pipe is always broken down and stored for winter, and we’ve returned that pipe to its position along the ridgeline. We made some needed repairs, but it will likely be at least four to six weeks before we get water so we won’t know our pass/fail result until that first irrigation run.

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The art of mending

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A visible mend on a favorite pair of thrifted vintage jeans.

Do you choose a significant word or guiding principle for each year? My word for 2025 is “mend.” I love both the literal and metaphorical meanings of this word, and how it ties in beautifully with my current sewing practice as well as my overarching goal to build and strengthen my community ties. As Austin Kleon wrote recently, “The idea of ‘being local’ is becoming more and more important to me. In times like these I crave the company of humans living near me who care about the same things I do.”

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The 2024 bean harvest

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Part of our display at a recent harvest festival.

Hello friends. Mid-November and we’ve only just finished harvesting the last of our dry beans. We grew over thirty cultivars this year, some roaring successes and some total crop failures (Ayocote Blanco). As ever, we learn from each year’s experience and know better what to grow and what not to grow in coming seasons.

Below we’ve listed all the new cultivars we grew this season, and we also grew almost every cultivar from 2023. We won’t describe those again in this post, but you can read about that harvest here. (Note that the bean we referred to as ‘Palomino’ in 2023 is also called ‘Southwest Gold’ and ‘Zuni Gold,’ depending on the company.)

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Seed saving 101

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Gardeners! If you’re in a temperate climate like we are (zone 5b), you’ve likely noticed that most, if not all, of your annual flowers and vegetables have either set seed or are well on their way to doing so. We’ve had an exceptionally warm autumn this year; normally by now we’d have seen overnight lows into the mid- and high 30s, but we haven’t yet dropped below 40 degrees. This means that many annuals have simply kept on producing and haven’t yet been triggered to set seed and then die; while day length has of course decreased, temperatures have remained unusually high. This is terrible news for the massive wildfires burning in Utah and Wyoming (we are once again coughing under smoky, hazy skies) but great news for those of us focused on saving seeds, since our window of opportunity is still open – for at least another week or two here.

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Farm update: September 16

/ Elizabeth / 4 Comments

We are on the cusp of autumn here on the Western Slope and the weather is truly spectacular; any Colorado resident will tell you that September here is like nowhere else. Most days remain warm and bluebird sunny, but the overnight lows routinely drop into the mid-40s, and our morning and evening chores require an extra layer. A hard freeze is in our near future – three to four weeks, at most – and this year I won’t be too sad about letting the crops go. It has been a tough season of learning, and we need time to rest and regroup.

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High summer book reviews

/ Elizabeth / 4 Comments

With the intense heat and the wildfire smoke, we’ve been spending more time than normal indoors lately. This is terrible news for our climate, but good news for our reading lists! This round-up is heavily weighted towards non-fiction (with a clear attention economy/stolen focus bent!), but I have a couple of dark suspense novels lined up (Lisa Jewell’s None of This Is True and Lucy Foley’s The Paris Apartment) to carry me through these dog days and into (hopefully) cooler temperatures. (You can check out a few previous book review posts here, here and here.)

The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt

Jonathan Haidt’s new book, subtitled How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, has gotten a ton of both positive and negative press recently. The book’s essential thesis is that we’ve moved from a play-based childhood to a phone-based childhood, much to society’s detriment. Parents overprotect their children in the real world – no playing outside in the front yard on your own because you might be kidnapped! – whilst at the same time handing them a smartphone with unrestricted access to all of the horrors humans can dream up. He also argues that social media in particular has contributed to (caused?) most of the dramatic increases in depression, anxiety, eating disorders, suicidal ideation and more mental health issues seen in pre-teens and teenagers in the Anglosphere.

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We have garlic!

/ Elizabeth / 6 Comments

Back in 2021, farmer colleagues down in southwestern Colorado launched the Grasshopper Collective. This cooperative operation amongst growers was created in response to a particularly devastating grasshopper invasion that year:

“The intense growing conditions left us with many questions. In an age of drought and increasing climate instability, how can we adapt? How can vegetable growers be better prepared for years like this? What crops make sense for the future? Amongst our four farms, one plant stood out as particularly resilient, and that was GARLIC! Garlic harvests were bountiful across the board. It seemed that this pungent, powerful Allium was exceptionally undesirable to the hoppers. Beyond that, its timely July harvest window makes garlic a reliable crop to produce, even in the tightest of water years. Garlic thrives at our high elevation and appreciates the cool nights and desert air. On the consumer and market end, it is a keystone of the culinary world, and an essential item in many growers seed stock.  Thus, the idea was born – let’s grow more garlic – let’s start a Garlic Seed Company – and with what better name than “The Grasshopper Collective.” 

This is a smart team of growers who chose to work together to address the ongoing challenges presented by a changing climate, and one of their answers to those challenges was ‘garlic.’ While we are too far away geographically to team up with this lovely group, ‘garlic’ is the answer to some of our challenges here, too.

We mentioned in our last post that the grasshopper infestation this year is apocalyptic, dwarfing the damage we saw last year. This means we have missed out entirely on many of the favorite crops we grow, including tender salad greens, head lettuces, chard, kale, beets and carrots, to name a few. But in our lived experience (and this might certainly vary for others!) the grasshoppers never touch the alliums, a spicy, pungent plant family that also includes onion, leek, shallot and chive. And so, we’ve had a terrific garlic harvest of almost eighty pounds this year, nearly doubling last year’s yield.

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Farm update: July 8

/ Elizabeth / 11 Comments

It is official: we crown 2024 The Year of Mediocrity. Six years into our farming journey, it is expected that we might hit a slump – and so here we are. Numerous farming challenges large (hay delivery canceled, annual shearing rescheduled again and again, a goathead invasion, an apocalyptic plague of grasshoppers, rampaging rodents, hail) and small (late planting, poor germination, ricocheting temperatures) mean that this season, we’re going to be happy with anything we get. Anything! I’m not even weighing our harvests, because I’m not going to judge this year’s output against previous years – it’s not a fair fight. The brassicas were mowed down by hungry grasshoppers. The beets and carrots got too hot and never germinated. The strawberries were devoured by ravenous baby squirrels (a terrific band name!). The tomatoes and cucumbers and peppers and squash are all still so tiny and fragile and battered that the prospect of harvesting anything before Christmas seems laughable at the moment, but perhaps the tide will turn in our favor as we move into high summer. We do have plenty of irrigation water this year, which is something we never take for granted.

Much happier after taking off their winter sweaters.

Despite an unplanned six-week delay that was entirely out of our control, our four rescue alpacas were successfully sheared a few days ago. They had really started to suffer in June’s abnormally high temperatures, constantly seeking out shade in the pasture and the cooling waters whenever we irrigated, and we were very glad to get their winter coats removed. I am in the process of learning how to spin their fleece into yarn and have attended a local spinning and weaving guild to observe and practice this ancient art. Like all handcraft there is a meditative aspect to spinning that soothes my constantly anxious mind, and this winter I hope to make some real headway on the bags of fleece we’ve accumulated over the years.

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Farm update: May 20

/ Elizabeth / 5 Comments

Hello friends, and how are things with you? We are quickly entering our busiest season on the farm, jumping between planting, irrigation and weeding, and are working hard on keeping ourselves physically and mentally healthy while still accomplishing our tasks. Here are a few recent images from the farm, if you’d like to see.

Plant ID is not tricky with this one.

The lilacs have nearly finished for the year, but the blooms and their scent were spectacular this season. We have primarily the classic pale purple flowers with a few white ones thrown in for good measure. While we have planted lots of things during our time at Quiet Farm, we cannot take any credit for the lilacs as all were planted before we found this place. They are such a welcome addition to our spring and we love their unmistakable scent as we go about our farm tasks. Do you have a favorite spring flower?

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The cold plunge

/ Elizabeth / 4 Comments

Ice on the stock tank where I dip.

The cold plunge is everywhere these days – most especially in early January – and I am not even on social media. I am so innately resistant to doing something just because everyone else is doing it that it feels exceptionally silly and performative to share this here, as though I’m shouting into the void, “Hey! I’m doing this too!” What sort of glittery prize do I want for this? Even so, I keep discovering beautiful, crystalline thoughts on cold plunges and they seem like just the thing to share when I have a hard time putting my own experience into words.

From Ani Lee: “Saying that this practice feels good is not exactly accurate, that would negate the fact that it is actually kind of painful. But it feels helpful, really helpful…The experience of cold dipping feels good, I think, because it requires all of your attention. You can’t think about anything when your body is trying to stop you from freezing. I am most a body when I am dipping. But cold dipping is, somehow, its own kind of cozy…There’s something about taking my body to a place of deep discomfort and saying ‘I will not abandon you here’.”

If it’s snowed, the gutters drip from above while I’m in the tank.

And from the brilliant Catherine Newman, writing on Cup of Jo: “But you learn to detach your mind from fear, and this is no small thing. Your whole life, your brain has been a generator generating preemptive anxiety and catastrophic possibility and now you stand at the water’s edge and you pull the plug on it. You hit mute on the shrieking voices of sanity and natural selection — “The water is too cold! You will die!” — so that you can wade in and, paradoxically, be well.”

Of course we live in America in the rapidly-dimming golden twilight of late-stage capitalism, and so of course you can spend many thousands of dollars on some sort of overly complicated backyard cold-plunge absurdity. Or you can run a hose from your ag tap and fill a galvanized stock tank that serves the exact same purpose and probably costs no more than two hundred bucks. Plus, the alpacas can still drink from it in the summer.

I’m not here to claim that cold plunges will cure all the world’s troubles. I do think, however, that we’d be far better off if we weren’t quite so comfortable all the time, and if we didn’t always look first to the pharmaceutical industry to solve all of our First World problems.

What are your thoughts, friends? Anyone else out there cold plunging this winter?