Hi everyone, it’s good to be back!   Mandy and I have been on a holiday that started out with an adventure.  I’ve mentioned that my paternal grandparents are from Ireland and in 2018, my pops took us all back and had the cousins tour us around to see where we are from, where our folks lived, worked, and socialized and where they had brutal encounters with the Black and Tan, which contributed to my family moving here.    We walked the roads and saw the deep green fields and clear black streams that cut through them from the local mountains and visited the sites where our elders are buried.  During that time, we learned that the Kerry Way is a long...

  Just before midnight on Wednesday, I took the old truck and picked up my brother and sister in law at the Airporter in Athens and we made the rainy drive back out to the farm.  We were all exhausted.  Mandy and I in the prior evenings, had gutted the two bedrooms, pulled off the molding, the doors, removed ceiling fans, ripped out carpet, rotted sub flooring, scraped ceilings, re-framed the joists, installed new sub flooring, and painted the walls and ceilings just in time for the wool carpet installer, who showed up late and finished at 7 p.m. on Wednesday.  We hurriedly hung doors, reinstalled ceiling fans, re-installed moldings, re-furnished both bedrooms, and caught a shower just in time to...

  My dad’s parents grew up in county Kerry Ireland and that beautiful green island holds a special spot in my heart.  My grandfather, Patrick O’Shea, was born on St. Patrick’s day and spent much of his adult life as a bagpiper and a cable car driver in San Francisco.  I’ve been listening to an old record of him singing an a cappella song about longing to visit the cottage he grew up in.  He did eventually go back in the 60’s and took my dad when he was about 10 years old.       My dad took us to that cottage in 2018 and it was beautiful.  We found out while there, that his grandmother used to grow...

...Continued from 1/21  Time to head south. Our final tour dates were both in GA. Our dear friend Nicky had set us up with her friends...one of whom was Mandy.     I grew up in the suburbs of Sonoma County and knew a lot of Italian ranchers, but Mandy was the first peer I ever met who was farming produce. It was an abstract concept before meeting her.     She rallied a big crowd in Athens to come see the bus and brought sweet potatoes she had grown that we diced, deep fried, and passed out. We then took the fryer vat and poured it into our fuel tank and started the bus for dramatic effect and so they could...

Continued from 1/14 ………We turned it down. We were too committed to even fathom getting off the bus. Instead, we offered to try to fix their veggie conversion and tour with them as support. Once her managers determined that we were upstanding citizens (an accountant, 2 school teachers, and whatever I was) they agreed.        We spent the day frantically patching up their problems so they could get their bus and crew to Boulder CO for a big conference at the University with Woody Harrelson and Johnette Napolitano (Concrete Blond/Talking Heads) the next eve. After many hours of gravel in our backs and grease and oil in our faces, we got it working (Huzzah!) and drove through the whole night...

There’s a lot of new people to this newsletter and we thought it a good time to give y’all the backstory to the farm.  Believe it or not, the seed for this farm was planted on an old school bus that ran on vegetable oil almost 20 years ago.  We named her Unifried.  I originally told this story back in the winter of 16’/17’ while Mandy and I were on a cross country drive from CA to GA to complete the circle and bring the old bus to its final resting place on our farm.  There’s adventure, romance, and celebrities and folks seemed to love it the first time around, so….. This is that story:     Unifried the bus was born in 2003 when...

We had an exciting morning this Monday!  You Georgians probably had a few sleepless hours and know what we are talking about.  The winds were incredibly and unexpectedly high and there were all sorts of thunderous sounds jolting us upright in our beds, despite the lack of lightning.    A huge BOOM awakened us at one point and it was different than our normal booms…  random shotgun fire in the night, train car linkage cracking as the slack is pulled out of 100 stopped cars, thunder itself, explosions at nearby rock quarries.  These are all pretty normal to us, but none of it jived with what we heard.  Too dangerous, dark and cold to go outside, we scooted our heads away from the window a bit...

  It’s April 7, 2012 in Athens GA.  Our first market as 3 Porch Farm and we are in the very back.  To get to us, you need to pass by 7 other talented, productive, and well established farms.  We set up, nervous, lean, exhausted.  Our work weeks are 105 hours each. We slept 2 hours last night.  Desperation, delirium, and a splash of hopefulness all swirl into the cocktail that is our consciousness.  Will people come?    A week before, I met a bread truck driver at an old country store.  He generously gave me a bunch of big stackable plastic bread trays that we are now rolling to our booth. A huge rolling rack of trays filled with pints of sweet smelling berries.  Red, ripe, dewy from...