2025 Review

She's been a bit of a mess

so..

last week, when I started this newsletter, my four year old was playing in the bath while I caught up on emails just outside the door (it was open). Suddenly he called out "mama" in a semi urgent tone. I jumped up and ran over as he held out a piece of the bathtub to me. I'm not sure how long it took me to register what happened but what seemed like a few seconds later Robin yelled up to me as I held my hand on the hole and pulled the plug.. but it was already raining in the kitchen.

We can only laugh. because this year has been an absolute disaster in so many ways; an actual dumpster fire of a year.

Sure there are good times and we're not in a war-zone and we're well-fed and housed and we get to work outside most of the time and we live in a beautiful part of the world.. but it was one of the toughest we've had in the last 15.

So what went wrong?

• we lost 100% of our squash. it's a long story.. many boring "industry specific" factors.

• in late August I found that 90% (I'm not exaggerating) of our carrots were eaten by deer and geese. This has NEVER happened so we were not on the look out and which is why we took no measures to protect the crop.. it's been a non issue for the 15 years we've been growing.

  To put it in perspective- we should have harvested least 40 macro boxes of carrots but we actually ended up with ...drumroll please... 3.

• the deer and geese have continued to eat our crops including chicory and endive that they rooted through a $1000 piece of row cover to get.

• (we need a dog)

• to top it all off, after harvesting what should have been 'watermelon radish' we noticed they were all tough and not pink at all! The seed supplier had noticed that the seed was not true to type in July but we did not get the memo.. and July is too late anyhow.

Those are the major, hugely financially devasting things that have happened.. and throughout the season there have been micro-disasters almost every week.. The drought didn't help. The many days of dangerous smoke. the unbeaerable heat. Post heat wave we had a wave of sickness and mental health break requests.. it was a difficult summer for all of us.

Food security is precarious due to the enviromental unpredictability that come with climate change (chaos) but also because of the toll it takes on the people that are working through this chaos.

That's a compressed story of the dumpster fire year we had. So Moving on..

THE BRIGHT SPOTS

• The addition of Boulangerie Marcel on the farm has brought more customers to our farm.

• We still have a wonderful community of eaters that support us through the CSA and by coming to the farm store.

• The Customized baskets are still (for the most Part) working wonderfully.

• We love that we get to work with other local farmers to fill our weekly baskets.

• We have a great team that shows up and works their butts off and are fun to be around!

• the greenhouse crops were abundant and beautiful

• the fall growing season proved to be wonderful and our fall greens and brassicas were delicous and plentiful!

Optimism

We are eternally optimistic, albiet a little weary.

We've learnt a lot of lessons this year and are so grateful that we have a winter season to spend some time planning and preparing for the next year.

I've been meaning to convey all these things earlier than today but honestly, we hate complaining...but we do feel like we need to communicate these things to help explain why were buying in so much and to give a sense of what is in store for next year (better things we hope!)

Thank you for your support!

We appreciate you!