The 2017 growing season will be the Small Family Farm’s 12th growing season! Yet somehow 12 years has slipped by like a long weekend and we approach the dawning of a new one with the same excitement, passion, commitment and hope as any other year. Our love for what we do does not fade or weaken, but it solidifies and cures and refines the way a relationship will over many years if honored through the good and bad.
Our five year old watches as friends and neighbors move. People buy and sell homes-they change where they live. She asks me, “Mom, will we ever move?” I tell her “No, we will never move.” And I think about how good it feels to say that, and I watch how she is comforted by my answer. In our fast-paced world with so much change, ambiguity and variation it calms me that I know, if that is all that I ever really know, where home is. While for many those kinds of changes make sense and need to happen, this family is very deeply rooted on this ridgetop. The uncertainly that lies within even a new growing season brings enough apprehensiveness for one year.
Lucky for us, we have a CSA Farm. We are farmers in a changing climate, changing economic climate and amidst an impulsive and stimulating world. But all that is given and known and predictable is extremely valuable and sacred in our lives. Things like our homes, our families, or friends and where our food will come from. The CSA model is stable and wholesome and refreshingly dependable for everyone involved. 
We enter a fresh season with a new 20×20 walk in cooler that we put up last Fall that will make getting our vegetables cold easier than ever before. We bought a new vegetable brush-washer this winter as well that we are very excited to work with to wash crops like peppers, cucumbers, and other root vegetables.
We’re making preparations to begin our first seeding in the greenhouse the first week of March. We begin with seeding onions, leeks, shallots, celeriac root and celery. After a couple weeks we begin to seed crops like parsley, swiss chard, and then the brassicas like cabbage, broccoli, kohlrabi and kale. In just a few short weeks the greenhouse will start to feel and smell like Spring under a couple thin layers of plastic in a cute little high tunnel somewhere in Southwest Wisconsin. The games begin.
We hope that our farm can become a constant in your lives. We hope that you think of us year after year like part of your “home”. That the buildings and the fields and the faces that represent this little Small Family Farm are an iconic image floating around inside your heart somewhere and are something that is not only comforting to you, but is a place where your nutritious vegetables come from. Sign Up again for another year of your weekly or bi-weekly CSA share deliveries. We are so honored to grow with you!
