Today is beautifully bright and breezy. There's a slight haze, and when clouds try to form, they lack definition. Then the clouds die, twisting and pulling like scraps of ribbon above.
I'm home today. Elizabeth, my ten-year-old, is too. She's been sick, spiking 103 degree fever for three days. Missing a lot of school. This is as good a time as any to think about the business side of my farming incarnation. I'm looking at the immediate tasks, the things I know we can easily accomplish. The things I've learned. Stuff I can already do well... without turning my life, and the lives around me, upside down.
Beyond the vegetables and pumpkins we're growing, we can cultivate hops and make decorative wreaths. Of course, it will take three years for the Rhizomes to mature into twenty- foot-tall plants. If we want to brew barn beer, we can find a spot and do it easily. Perhaps Farmer Brown will let us harrow a hay field and replant it in two row barley. For show. As far as livestock is concerned, barley makes for great eating, just like traditional bale hay.
We can also start a pretty cool farm stand. We can pickle cucumbers, green tomatoes, and beans. We can make a variety of salsas. Above it all, we can start looking at everything we grow, and even the things we want to grow through the eyes of experienced innovators. Of course, our friends, whom we've never met, at Stonewall Kitchens, have set a great standard from which wannabes, like me, need to move forward.
My experiment, eccentric as it might seem at first, is helping me think clearly about what it means to farm. It is helping me to dream and think of creative possibilities while I work. I realize that at some point, I will have to spend more time on the big picture and attend dreaded trade shows. Things won't be so simple any more. Now I understand where the saying, "You're not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy," comes from. A farm, I am finding, even as a guest (sharecropper, perhaps), has a protective quality about it.
I suspect that even in the worst years, the sense of promise, season to season, must be powerful.
If we are successful... and I think we will be.... it will mean that my
concepts and whimsical thoughts, and those of my kids, Debbie, George and Ann will have germinated.. not unlike the seeds we're planting behind the old barn, in the photo just above.
Our ideas will blossom! This old farm will have proven to be the best business incubator yet.
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