Hi Everyone,

   I’m here again and will pick back up with a weekly update on farm life.  I hope you’ve had a nice few months and have enjoyed a vacation or at least a dip in some refreshing body of water, even if it's just a baby pool.

   We appreciate your patience with our absence on the newsletter front.  Sadly, Mandy’s father has been confronting some serious medical issues, so we’ve been focusing most of our energies towards helping out there and actually haven’t been living at the farm for the last couple of months.

   Fortunately we’re only 20 minutes away from the farm, so we’ve taken to helping in evenings and the overnight shift, which has given us the opportunity to drive back to the farm for a few hours each day to touch base with the crew and to try and get things together for Fall and Spring.

   The dahlias were struggling through that long hot drought in June and July, but we managed to get most of them through that rough patch and they’ve now firmly established themselves and the team is already in the process of netting them.

   There was a major delay in them getting started, because the heat was so intense that the young sprouts kept burning and dying. There were no clouds.  It was always 100 degrees. The nights barely cooled down. The soil could burn your hands. It was concerning, but the lion’s share of them continued to put up more shoots until the weather was favorable enough to allow them to grow successfully. We eventually had a couple weeks of frequent light rain and cloud cover with temps in the 80’s and low 90’s and it was the window of grace the plants needed to finally take off.

   We did lose hundreds of tubers to the oven-like soil conditions, but we planted thousands and we always save some extra tubers to plant in the event of loss, which came in handy.   We also managed our water levels as perfectly as possible which really helped to minimize tuber rot effectively.

   If you are trying your hand at dahlias in your southern garden and suffered setbacks, don’t be hard on yourself.  We know farmers that lost large portions of their crop too.  Dahlias are never easy in the south, but this summer has been about the worst conditions we’ve experienced and we had to lean on more than a decade’s worth of experience to navigate it successfully.

   Our team is all working whatever hours they want during the slower months.  Being so hot, that means we’ve got about 3 folks in the field until 11:00 or 12:00, Rachel at the computer part time, and Mandy and I doing computer work when possible in the evenings and field work between 9:00 and 5:00.

   Kali’s been enjoying a summer off and Sarah is on month’s vacation, road-tripping across the country and visiting farms and friends while camping out in her truck along the way.  It’s a great way to experience the country. It truly is a stunningly beautiful country.  I spent a lot of time in my younger days seeing North America through its backroads, campgrounds, trails, rivers, lakes and mountains.  It’s a magical experience that’s somehow almost the opposite of running a farm.  Nature is still the central theme, but the experience is one of extreme freedom which can feel like quite the inverse of running a farm.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you are in your 20’s or 30’s and are feeling stuck existentially and don’t have a mortgage or mouths to feed, take advantage of the opportunity that so many people miss,… grab a friend, a sleeping bag, and a camper shell and start driving to alpine lakes, redwood forests, waterfalls, southwestern land bridges, national parks, and soak it all in.   Bring a guitar, go to primitive hot springs, meet people you would never otherwise meet and watch your worldview expand before your eyes and new possible life path’s unfold in front of you.  The world of jobs and rent and responsibilities will still be there when you get back.
   If I didn’t take a similar leap, I not only would’ve missed some of the most magical experiences of my life, but I also would have never met the love of my life and we’d have never started this farm together.  Now I can’t imagine myself doing anything else.  (Though I wouldn’t mind another carefree road trip at some point :))……. Maybe someday.

   So we’re back at it as much as we can be and we’ve got fun things in the pipeline that we’ll chat about in the weeks to come.
   

Mandy and I also did get a chance to spend 10 days in  southern Italy and Sicily.  We had the most profound experiences swimming in stunning coves off the coast of Puglia.  I’m a sinker, so swimming is usually a refreshing dive in, followed by an anxious 2 minutes of paddling around and making sure I can get back to shore quickly before I drown.  But in this magical land, there were zero waves somehow and salinity levels so perfectly balanced that even my led feet remained buoyant.  We floated endlessly in coves as young Italians dove off cliffs around us.  We smiled and swam in open water and I found I could stay in the water for over a half hour….swimming distances to explore caves as my fear of drowning drifted further and further away while the Mediterranean held me safely aloft.  Mandy loved it as much as I did.  It was almost spiritual for the both of us.  I didn’t realize the extent of the suffocating experience I had in the sea until I was all of a sudden freed from it.  Such a sense of liberation.  What an immense delight.  We talk of it often.  We’ll probably find ourselves aiming back there in the future.
That’s where I’ll leave it.  Floating peacefully in southern Italy.
Have a great weekend!
Steve