Tuesday, July 29, 2014

We are an incubator farm. What's an incubator farm you say? We farm as Humble Pie Farm in the safe nest of Gardens of Eagan, our host farm. We rent land, machinery, cooler, pack shed and many other resources at an extremely affordable cost. It provides us a safety net as we venture into the risky capital and resource heavy occupation of farming. Really, it makes us. It would be so much more difficult to do what we are doing if we had to piece together all of these necessary resources. We are so grateful for the opportunity to participate in this program. 

This weekend our host farm, Gardens of Eagan, is having a giant birthday party celebrating the Organic Certification of this land that it purchased and inhabited three years ago. Oh, it is cause for celebration. 

Mike has worked for GOE for nine years and helped hire me in 2009. A couple of tips of his hat from the tractor and walks amid corn and tomato fields and I was smitten. I went to the farmers market, planted, harvested, weeded and reached out to the community as Gardens of Eagan staff for four years. Now I consider myself support staff as we live in the caretaker residence and Mike continues to farm for GOE by day. It's pretty obvious how very invested we are in this place. We consider the GOE farm staff Earl's extended family. 

This new land that GOE inhabited in 2012 needed some serious love. We picked up garbage. And cleaned. And cleaned and cleaned and cleaned. And cover cropped and planted trees and built soil and infrastructure and place. With the Wedge Co-op's support, we built a farm. Today it is beautiful. The land is beautiful. The buildings are beautiful. The veggies and fruit and herbs are beautiful. And on August 1st it'll be Certified Organic. It is great cause for celebration.

Please join us as we celebrate Gardens of Eagan.

Saturday, 8/2 OPEN HOUSE (free event!): Come celebrate with us from 11:00am to 3:00pm. We will be hosting tours of the fields and greenhouses and collaborating with our incubator farmers, Bossy Acres & Humble Pie Farm to bring you fun & engaging kids activities and fresh farm produce sales & samples, latest T-shirts on sale, Birthday Cake and farmer social at 1:00 under the pergola and more! 

Sunday, 8/3 DINNER ON THE FARM (tickets available $75): Join us for a birthday celebration dinner in the field with amazing food, fresh flowers, local beverages for every taste, live music and a bonfire. August 3rd from 3:30pm to dusk!  

We'd love to see you here!
Jennifer, Mike & Earl

Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Whatta week! It was so awesome. Fun, elating, exhausting, gratifying. Whew. I took photos this week. Here they are, dear Members. Hope yours was very fine too.

Eat Local Farm Tour, weddings, CSA and Co-op bouquets, and a little family time.



Eat Local Farm tours, harvest, flower child head wreaths and so much local flower love, all organized and supported by our local co-ops. Saturday was a great day.


 

And the rest of the week... 

Bouquet makins' with photo bomber
Incubator farm magic in action 
My delivery assistant and me on the way up, note the sunnies in the front seat :)
Family ice cream outing off the farm!
Be still my heart. I guess we need to get ice cream more often.
Best of the week to you all. 
Jennifer, Mike & Earl

Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Greetings! It's the beginning, well okay, middle of week 4 and last week so many beautiful flowers went out into the metro area and you know what, I don't have one photo. Not one. I think because I have an 18-month-old in one arm and flowers in the other. No room for camera or phone. Sigh. I'll do better next week.

Anyway, here's a written visual description. Loads of cheeky snapdragons in vivid reds and pinks paired with cheerful bright sunflowers and strawflowers in yellow and coral. Brilliant green sweet annie and neon magenta and plum sweet william. 60 plucky little hens and chicks in small clay pots sat on wedding tables with sea glass small jars holding 3 blooms of bright periwinkle blue bachelor's buttons, bright chipper orange calendula and uproar rose zinnias. Matching yellow-orange sunflower and periwinkle blue love-in-a-mist wrist corsage and boutonnieres.  

Do you have your mental picture? It was delightful. And more this week as we prepare for two weddings and the Eat Local Farm Tour, including flower child head wreath making and flower walks with new friends. 

Below is one of the only photos I took all week. I think you'll like it. Earl is my totally game, very patient, flower delivery assistant on Tuesday mornings. We leave at 6:30, stopping at two co-op groceries, and a business in Minneapolis. Our fourth stop, around 9, is the coffee shop and the park. Then we hop back in the car, and he snoozes while I drive back down for deliveries in Webster and Northfield. We get home around 11:30 for lunch. This is how we do family farm business, interspersed with slides and banana chocolate chip muffins. It's a great life. 

Happy week to you dear members!
Best,
J,M&E

Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Earlier this week. It was so, so vibrant!
Life at HPF this week is all about balance. Family and work life balance. Individual and work life balance. Individual and family balance. Balance between harvesting and making bouquets like crazy and the necessary, oh so necessary, field work like weeding! 

This morning as I was packing our car readying for our Tuesday morning deliveries to the co-ops, members and Birchwood Cafe, I thought for the hundredth time this season, I can't believe we are growing and delivering these beautiful flowers. We're living the dream. It's so wonderful. I love it. It's also a steep growing curve as we head into week 3 of our second and largest growing season. 

Everything is beginning to bloom in earnest. We're already into our 4th sunflower planting. They were spaced 2 weeks apart. This is week 3. Hmm. The 1st and 2nd plantings of the snapdragons have rounded out and are entering the beginning of the end. We'll leave the plants in the ground because they will give us a second flush of blooms, not sure about the quality but we'll try it. The lisianthus is planted in the caterpillar tunnel (a small, temporary plastic high tunnel) and we still have a bunch of room so I think we're going to try a late run of vibrant orange and red lilies, or maybe cutting mums. The weeds this week were suddenly totally out-of-control in some areas, but we called in a grandma for child care and hammered out some serious hand weeding today with awesome and totally satisfying results. I LOVE hand-weeding. I know, it's weird. It's just so gratifying to see the immediate results of one's work. And, in the next few days we'll see the freed plants flourish, and that is a beautiful sight too. We've finished one wedding, and have one this weekend, and two, along with the Eat Local Farm Tour, next weekend. It's a busy month filled with good things and people. 

Well, dear members, that's what's happening down here. Hope you are all well. Please come to the Eat Local Farm Tour on July 19th. We'd love to see you and your family and friends. Also, keep August 16th on your calendar, 4-7pm. We want to celebrate you. 

Have a great week!

Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Greetings! Hope you're having a lovely week. 

This spring, oh wait, it's summer now! is all about rain and wind in these parts. The resiliency of field flowers is really amazing. And here are some reasons you can feel really good about investing in our local, family flower farm. I wrote this post last year, apologies to our founding members for the repetition. I wanted to start with this post just because knowledge is power. And motivation and reinforcement.

Most of the cut flowers available at florists and grocery stores in the U.S. are imported from countries in South America. 
“In 1971, the United States produced 1.2 billion blooms of major flowers and imported only 100 million. By 2003, the trade balance had reversed; the United States imported two billion major blooms and grew only 200 million."
Smithsonian Magazine published an article in 2011, “The Secret Behind Your Flowers”, which details the giant industry that has grown exponentially since the 1970s. Here’s an excerpt from the article: Most workers made the minimum wage, which is now about $250 per month…As recently as 1994, a Colombian sociologist found children as young as 9 working in greenhouses on Saturdays, and children 11 and up working 46-hour weeks in almost all areas of the farms. A 1981 survey of almost 9,000 flower workers by scientists from Colombia, France and Britain found that the work had exposed people to as many as 127 different chemicals, mostly fungicides and pesticides. (One incentive to use pesticides: the U.S. Department of Agriculture checks imported flowers for insects, but not for chemical residues.) A 1990 study by Colombia’s National Institute of Health (NIH) suggested that pregnant Colombian flower workers exposed to pesticides might have higher rates of miscarriages, premature births and babies with congenital defects. There's so much more to this, and if you'd like to read it, here’s the link!

Please, feel so good about your Humble Pie Farm membership! We do. Have a great week!

Our weeding crew, Aunt Jane and Mike's mom, Lucia. So grateful.
Dusty Miller. We picture someone else with that name. 
Dragonsnaps, as Mike calls them.
Sweet, sweet William.