honesty

Farm update: July 28

/ Elizabeth / 1 Comment

The corral’s warm metal panel is covered with grasshoppers each morning.

Friends, hello. Muted greetings from high summer in the desert, where it is hot, smoky and dry. Let’s not mince words – the world is full of terrible suffering right now, most of it instigated and/or supported by the current regime. It is hard to know how to phrase things appropriately in the face of an entirely intentional famine. We are experiencing our worst farming season in eight years, yet we have easy access to whatever food we might need or want – but children are being purposefully, deliberately starved, and collectively we are obviously fine with this. We are also fine with concentration camps, a militarized police state and taking benefits from poor kids to enrich billionaires. The active cognitive dissonance required to manage one’s daily existence in 2025 frequently leaves me in despair.

A lettuce plant and marigolds, both stripped to the stalks in a few hours.

Here’s one thing I do know – along with cruel, vengeful, power-hungry leaders, grasshoppers (and locusts) can also cause famine. The thousand-year drought in the American Southwest has created ideal conditions for these hardy creatures to thrive, and they are most certainly thriving here. Just about every conversation we’ve had with local friends over the past two months has centered on two topics: grasshoppers and drought. We’ve had no appreciable moisture this year, and the grasshoppers have absolutely annihilated many of our crops. Unless you have the experience of walking amongst our raised beds or our pasture and seeing tens of thousands of insects move at once, unless you’ve been hit in the face and arms repeatedly by these sturdy bugs, unless you’ve seen firsthand the scale of the devastation – you cannot possibly appreciate how bad things are here this year.

The kale is not thriving.

The brassicas (kale, cabbages, broccoli, bok choy, and so on) have taken the most damage, by far. Entire beds are destroyed in a few hours or days. I am pulling all the broccoli plants this week as they’re so badly eaten that there is virtually no chance they’ll develop proper heads this season, and it’s just painful to look at them every day. Mint, basil, thyme, tarragon – all the soft herbs are gone entirely.

The bean yield will sadly be far lower than expected this year.

As with all crops, the bean plants are at their most vulnerable when they’ve just put on their first true leaves; the grasshoppers love these tender, nutrient-packed starts. The rows are littered with empty stalks that didn’t survive, but we are seeing some resilience from beans that managed to escape that initial onslaught. We’ll likely get some beans, but certainly not the amount we’d planned on.

Dark-spotted blister beetles, a new arrival for us this year.

An enemy, but also an ally. It’s a delicate balance.

Because Nature never makes mistakes, the grasshopper invasion has been followed by dark-spotted blister beetles, who feast upon grasshopper larvae. We’d never seen these before, but they certainly have plenty to eat this year – although they also took out the beet and chard leaves on their way. They love alfalfa, too, and can be toxic to horses if their poison is heavily concentrated in hay bales.

Tassels on Painted Mountain corn; it’s drought-tolerant, cold-tolerant and apparently grasshopper-tolerant.

On the plus side, the grasshoppers have thus far done very little damage to our ‘Painted Mountain’ corn, an heirloom that I am exceptionally proud to grow this year. (You can see a little exploratory leaf-chewing in the photo above, but overall devastation is minimal.) I am so hopeful for this stand of open-pollinated flour corn and will share an update when we harvest.

The tomatoes and peppers have also mostly survived, with the exception of a few replacement transplants that disappeared in hours. I suspect the bitter compounds in well-developed Solanaceae plants aren’t appealing to grasshoppers, though the tiny ones don’t put up much of a fight since they’re likely too little to have developed their defenses. This metaphor is not just relevant in farming, obviously.

Lettuce plants reproduce by sending out their light seeds on the wind.

And of course the lettuce has gone to seed by now, so it’s time to harvest the little fluffy puffs to collect seeds for future plantings. Saving seeds always reminds me that gardening and farming are ultimately acts of optimism and hope, both of which I am sorely lacking at the moment.

Much as I wish I had a more positive update to share, I am also unwilling to pretend that farming is always easy or fun or rewarding. Sometimes it’s a miserable, exhausting sunbaked slog while watching plants be devoured in a matter of hours. Sometimes it’s replanting precious beans two and three times in the hopes they’ll survive the initial attack. Sometimes it’s bursting into helpless, infuriated tears, because when you’re irrigating, no one can hear you cry. And sometimes it’s taking resigned solace in the famous Zora Neale Hurston quote, “There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” This is a year for questioning, dear friends, and for questioning a lot more than just farming.

Thanks for being here, as ever.

April 5, or the price of eggs

/ Elizabeth / 1 Comment

Last time I went to the nearest corporate chain grocery store (16 miles away), eggs still cost north of ten bucks a dozen, despite the recent claim that “egg prices have plunged 44%.” I can’t speak to the pricing where you live, of course. We live in a rural ag community, where many, many households keep chickens – and one thing I haven’t noticed is price-gouging at the local farm stand level (price-gouging is absolutely happening at the Big Ag level). All of the handmade signs dotting the state highway and backroads around here are holding steady at $4 and $5 a dozen. This, to me, is the essence of community – folks know full well that they’re selling well below market, but prices remain relatively constant. Despite the country’s political temperature, I choose to believe that most people would gladly help their neighbor and support their community if asked. (See also: “Everyone IS Welcome” / Idaho community comes out in force to support local teacher.)

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What’s working

/ Elizabeth / 6 Comments

“…until we can grieve for our planet we cannot love it—grieving is a sign of spiritual health. But it is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes; we have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again. Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.” -Robin Wall Kimmerer

Right, then. How’s everyone doing out there? Let’s not sugarcoat it – things are seriously grim. But! How about we share what’s working and how we’re maintaining our sanity and finding our joy? I’ll go first.

How to jump in. It’s the most effective thing we can do right now, short of obvious consumer boycotts.

Mending is having a moment!

In the face of devastating wildfires, the Altadena Seed Bank looks to the future. “Even if the entire field burns down, they’ll regrow,” she said. “That underground resilience and connection is such a metaphor for Altadena — those nodes of connection and care are still so strong. Even if they’re invisible, we know we’ll come back.”

“Do not obey in advance.”

Building a community web of support, and calling on that community when in need. (Thank you, Jo Carole!) “The very concept of society rests on the idea of networks of affinity and affection, and the freestanding individual exists largely as an outcast or exile.” -Rebecca Solnit

Vote with your wallet.

Colorful handwritten letters from my cherished penpals.

The Birchbark House series by Louise Erdrich.

Read this.

The sensible, rational, thoughtful voices to listen to right now: Jessica Craven, Heather Cox Richardson, Paul Krugman, Robert Reich. If you have others to suggest, please share in the comments.

Organizing our first community seed and plant swap March 8! See you there?

“I’m simply reminding you that this nation was founded on resistance to arbitrary authority. We built American democracy in the face of what seemed to be impossible odds. And we will never, ever give up that fight.” -Robert Reich

My watchwords right now are calm, clarity and community. Would love to hear how you’re standing strong these days, dear friends.

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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Tomatoes not to buy

/ Elizabeth / 9 Comments

Definitely a non-GMO tomato harvest.

Hello there, friends. This is a brief but vital public service announcement coming to you from small farmers and seed savers everywhere.

We’ve just passed the Ides of March and are rapidly approaching the spring equinox. As such, in most of the northern hemisphere it is time to start tomato seeds. You might have missed the grand pronouncement – the current news cycle being what it is – but last fall, the first GMO tomato seeds for home garden use were approved by the USDA, and the seeds were released for purchase early this year.

Allow us to be perfectly clear – this is a major shift in GMO technology and marketing, as this tomato represents the very first GMO food crop to be released as seeds for home gardeners. All other GMO crops (primarily canola, corn, cotton, soy and sugar beet) are only available to commercial growers and heavily protected. This tomato was developed in the U.K., where GMOs are illegal to grow (as in Europe). It can only be sold in the U.S. because we steadfastly refuse to regulate GMOs. This tomato is aimed squarely at American home gardeners and will likely show up in stores and farmers’ markets this year.

Press releases for this tomato tout its higher anthocyanin content. If you want higher anthocyanins in your homegrown tomatoes, grow any of the ‘Indigo’ tomato family bred by Jim Myers out of Oregon State University. ‘Indigo Rose,’ ‘Indigo Apple,’ ‘Indigo Cherry’ and more were bred through traditional multi-generational breeding techniques to display deep purplish-black coloration and high anthocyanin content. This is how new tomato varieties should be developed – not by splicing in snapdragon genes.

Respectfully and with great seriousness, we ask you not to purchase these tomato seeds and not to purchase these tomato plants, and if your local garden center or big-box store is selling these, to politely explain your opposition to these plants. The company’s goal here is clearly to reduce American gardeners’ opposition to GMO seeds in the home garden, bringing more and more to market. GMO seeds are not open-pollinated and cannot be saved nor shared. While GMOs may have no impact on human or environmental health (very much still up for debate), they certainly have a significant impact on seed sovereignty and therefore food sovereignty. Seeds, especially food crops, are to be saved and shared, not developed in a lab in a country where they can’t even be sold and then patented and flogged to the ignorant American gardener. Don’t buy these tomatoes.

Questions? Send ’em our way. This is a topic we are happy to discuss at length.

Wishing you all an abundant growing season, wherever you might be in the world.

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?

The beef tax

/ Elizabeth / 2 Comments

“We’re all paying it, every day.

In the US, taxpayers subsidize the cattle industry with billions of dollars of tax money each year. Most of that goes to pay for feed crops, but there is also a huge allocation of public land for the grazing of cows. About half the land in the entire country is just for cattle.

In addition, a significant portion of the climate problem is directly caused by the effects of bovine respiration as well as the clear-cutting of forests for grazing worldwide. It’s like someone is dumping manure on your living room carpet and asking you to pay for it.

The end result is that whether or not you eat meat, you’re paying for it.

Beef is more expensive than we realize. And it’s also significantly less convenient than we give it credit for. Climate refugees, storm-damaged assets, the loss of life and homes… these are directly caused by the one billion cows that humans raise each year.

What would happen if we simply charged a fair price for the beef and milk that people consume?

The industry has done a great job of persuading people that beef is cheap, convenient, easy, luxurious, wholesome and benign. It’s none of those things.

I wonder how long it will take us to realize just how much it costs us.”

We are focusing our laughably meager climate change mitigation efforts on electric cars and renewable energy. Until we address the bull in the room – so to speak – and deal with our filthy, wasteful, poorly managed and corrupt agriculture system, we’re going to get precisely nowhere. It’s long past time that we start paying the true cost of our consumptive lifestyles.

Credit to Seth for this post.

The new normal

/ Elizabeth / 4 Comments

Spring “branch-breaker” storms do so much damage to precious trees.

If you grew up on the Front Range, you’re probably familiar with the old adage to “plant out on Mother’s Day.” The idea was, of course, that any chance of a hard frost was past, and delicate warm-weather crops, like tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and eggplant, would be safe for the summer growing season.

If you’ve lived and gardened in the Denver area over the last twenty years, however, you know the very idea of planting on Mother’s Day is pretty laughable. This year, the holiday occurred as early as it possibly can – on May 8. Between Thursday and Friday last week, the temperatures in some Front Range areas plummeted from the high eighties to the low forties, with heavy, wet snow and overnight lows well below freezing. If you chose to “plant out on Mother’s Day” and your plants weren’t carefully protected or relocated indoors, you’re likely headed back to your friendly local garden center (hi Anne, Dave and team!) to replace your summer vegetables.

Obviously, Denver weather is known to be erratic, and these massive diurnal shifts are one big reason (after overdevelopment, of course) why the Front Range no longer has a commercial fruit industry like we do on the Western Slope. But while Denver was in the grip of a monster late-spring storm, the East Coast was broiling under record high temperatures and excruciating humidity. Locally, our area has seen more than its fair share of severe weather recently, including unseasonal hard freezes that absolutely crushed peach and cherry growers. A certain number of extreme weather events are to be expected, of course, but it is no longer possible to argue that they’re the exception. They’re now the rule.

In less than a decade, Colorado has experienced two “hundred-year weather” events – the devastating 2013 floods and the scorched-earth Marshall Fire this past December. That stunning fire, of course, was precipitated by bone-dry conditions and hurricane-force winds – and followed a few hours later by about ten inches of snow. Too late, obviously, to prevent the loss of a thousand homes; the Marshall Fire quickly enthroned itself as the most expensive “natural disaster” in Colorado’s history. Is it even accurate to refer to these disasters as natural, since they’re entirely our fault?

The point is, it is no longer feasible to expect the weather to act the way it’s always acted. It is no longer possible to change the trajectory that we’re on as a population and a planet; there is absolutely no hope of achieving the 1.5 degree warming limit by 2030 and it’s foolhardy to pretend otherwise. All we can do now is adapt to our rapidly changing climate – stop building in wildland-urban interfaces, create a resilient and regionally-adapted agriculture system and learn how to live with the ‘new normal.’ Hundred-year weather events should be expected every ten years, if not more frequently, and we need to ready ourselves for these, instead of acting shocked and horrified and surprised every time they occur. We cannot continue to behave as we’ve behaved in the past and expect that the weather will accommodate us. Also, we should really, really stop irrigating the desert to raise cattle and lettuce (looking at you, Arizona) and we should outlaw Kentucky bluegrass – actually, lawns in general – in the American West. (We can’t even hide bodies in Lake Mead any longer!) The sooner we accept our harsh new reality and learn to live with it, the better off we’ll all be.

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Fight inflation in the kitchen

/ Elizabeth / 6 Comments

The total came to nearly $90 – four painfully small canvas totes of groceries that did not include meat, cheese or eggs. Had I been shopping at an ultra-fancy Amazon-owned health-halo organic market, this might have seemed reasonable, or even a bargain. Instead, I was at the (sadly) best option in our poor, rural county: a grim, dark and untidy corporate chain store with exploitative policies, limited fresh produce and extensive displays of cheap soda, chips and cookies. Shopping here is not pleasurable, by any stretch of the imagination; both the atmosphere and the prices leave much to be desired.

Unless you’re named Musk or Bezos, you’ve likely noticed that inflation has started to bite, and to bite hard. In the twelve-month period ending this past March, the U.S. inflation rate was 8.5% – the highest it’s been since late 1981. In the simplest economic terms, inflation means that our money doesn’t go as far as it used to. The huge conflagration of various challenges we’re facing right now – a global pandemic, the pointless war in Ukraine, climate change, housing instability, supply-chain disruptions, insatiable greed – means that we’re all experiencing inflation to varying degrees. The good news is that in almost all cases, you can control how much inflation affects your individual household by adjusting your own behavior. No surprise, then, that one of the easiest places to accomplish this is in the kitchen.

Before we really start whining about grocery prices, however, I want to make it perfectly clear that the average American spends far less on food as a percentage of their household income than do most other developed nations. The best available statistics indicate that we spend about 7% of our budget on food, whereas in the U.K. it’s closer to 9.5%, and around 15% in France, Spain and Italy. On a relative basis, our food is devastatingly cheap here; this is because we have absurd federal farm subsidies and because we’re a net exporter of food, which means we produce a lot. (Our cheap food is obviously both terrible for the environment and our own health, but the system holds!) Unfortunately, we’re very spoiled and therefore accustomed to cheap food, which means that we’re far more sensitive to price increases than other countries. (See also: $90 for four tiny bags of groceries, above.)

If you, too, are starting to feel the sharp stick of inflation in your own food budget, we hereby present some easy ways to keep your food costs down, eat healthier, and reduce environmental impact. It’s a win-win-win!

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Farm update: April 25

/ Elizabeth / 10 Comments

Hello, friends. It is the busiest time of the year on the farm and we have ten thousand different projects on at the moment. Here are a few things we’ve been up to lately, if you’d like to see.

Tomato starts before splitting.

The sunroom is packed with hundreds of starts, mostly warm-weather crops like tomatoes and peppers. I’ve started seventeen different tomato varieties this year, some new and some tried and true classics, plus thirteen different peppers ranging from mild and sweet to incendiary. After last year’s pepper bounty, I’m committed to expanding our production of the larger bell peppers; I believed that our growing season was too short for the full-size peppers but 2021 certainly proved me wrong. As always, the vast majority of the plants we grow are from saved open-pollinated seed so that we’re protected from the vagaries of the seed market. That said, I tried starting ‘Sungold’ tomatoes again this year; they’re a hybrid but if you’ve ever tasted these incredible gems, you know exactly why people go mad for them. I’ve obviously grown thousands of tomato plants and consider myself a pretty experienced grower, but three years in a row now my purchased ‘Sungold’ seed has failed to germinate. I contacted the seed company – a reputable Front Range outfit – about the poor germination and have yet to receive a response. Frustrating situations like this are exactly why we save our own seed, because we cannot rely upon companies to provide our food.

We will ship you a free kitten.

We live in an exceptionally impoverished county; a direct consequence of that is an absurd population of stray dogs and cats, because people do not spay or neuter their animals. In late March we unfortunately discovered that a feral cat had chosen our hay barn as a warm, protected nursery; now we have one adult cat and six kittens. While we’re happy to have some assistance in controlling the mouse population, we definitively do not keep any household pets so fate will run its course with this lot. An apocryphal quote attributed to Gandhi reads, “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” In this (see also: CAFOs) and in so many other respects, the U.S. is failing entirely.

So pretty! So aggressive! So invasive!

If 2021 was The Year of the Goathead, 2022 looks to be The Year of the Thistle. We’ve written before about cotton thistle (Onopordum acanthium), which is hugely invasive in our area and produces massive, thorny plants that are dangerous to humans and animals. As we work on spring cleaning and tidying around the farm, Thistle Patrol is a key task. If we can dig out the plants by the roots when they’re small, we can prevent them from becoming these treacherous four-foot monsters and of course from spreading seed to produce even more thistles. We travel around with a small shovel at the ready, prepared to vanquish our spiky foe wherever it might be found.

All the little blue tape pieces mark areas that have to be repaired. Sigh.

We are also at work on The World’s Lengthiest and Most Tedious Tiling Project, involving a complicated and not particularly interesting tale of obtuse angles, poorly manufactured countertops, a rickety garage sale tile cutter and many, many other challenges, surprises and obstructions. When (if?) we ever finish this project, it will hopefully look incredible; the road to reach that lofty point, however, still appears long and winding. Also someone in all those DIY YouTube videos should really mention that charcoal grout against white tile shows every chip, imperfection and error. “We didn’t know what we didn’t know” has never seemed so apt; we’ll chalk this one up to hard-won learning.

Will we harvest any fruit this year? Time will tell.

And finally, we’re excited to see blossoms on most of the fruit trees we planted in our first full season here. We of course live in the heart of Colorado’s commercial fruit territory, but the changing climate means that no plant is guaranteed survival any longer. Of late, we’ve endured punishing fifty-mile-per-hour winds plus overnight temperatures in the 20s; the big propane-fueled fans in the surrounding orchards have been on a few times recently in a desperate attempt to save their year’s harvest because these frigid temperatures are devastating for the fragile blossoms. The cherry trees in our area are likely gone for good, thanks to last year’s freeze. Many growers have started culling their delicate peach trees in favor of hardier apples; though peaches sell for far more per pound, the risk of losing the entire crop is also far greater. We are doing our best to adapt to a drier, hotter, windier place and to keep our plants (and ourselves) healthy while doing so.

And with that, we’re back to work! Wishing you a pleasant week ahead.