High Summer, High Hopes
Hello everyone, Happy Summer Solstice!
I haven’t been in touch in a long time, and I wanted to send an update from the farm. It’s been a very busy few months, and I’ve been working on just about everything except online marketing. To be completely transparent, I tended to overthink writing to an agonizing degree, so I was more than happy to place it on the back burner. At first I felt a little tugs of guilt about not being as active in the great swirl of online communication. But, coming up for air gave me the clarity I needed to decide how I want to keep in touch moving forward. We won’t be using social media, because it’s become less about connection and more about control. And I will do my best to weed out the overthinking.
I’ve had a funny saying stuck in my head for a few months, and I’m not sure where I got it: "Perfectionism is procrastination wearing lipstick.” Maybe I made it up, maybe I got it from my great-grandma Aylene, who was full of witty one-liners. Either way, it’s helped bring me back down to earth when I’m mentally up in the air considering every single option or outcome. I’m sure many of you can relate. I’d love to know, do you have any snappy sayings that help you keep it moving?
And now for the field notes:
We’ve, at long last, cleared the back of the property of giant bamboo stalks. It took about a year of chopping, dragging, stacking, burning, and a weekend with a rented skid steer, but we got it done. That plant is no joke. There was a moment when we worried the skid steer might not be strong enough to pull out those tenacious roots, but luckily Dylan is also quite tenacious and more than a little determined, so he won in the end. I think every bird in the neighborhood came to follow him around as he combed the soil for more roots. They feasted on worms and made our back yard sound like a tropical rainforest. Now I’m working on cover cropping the new flower fields, which will build back up the soil structure that we had to break down in the process. So far I’m using buckwheat for the growing beds and Dutch white clover for the walk paths, both of which our neighbor’s honeybees absolutely love. It will take a little while to turn the newly cleared land into healthy garden soil, but I’m already seeing more bees, butterflies and birds, which lets me know we are on the right track. I’ve never had so much growing space, and the potential makes me giddy.
In other news, I’ve been teaching some extremely fun workshops, designing and installing pollinator gardens, and of course growing flowers and popping up at the UAB Farmers Market on Fridays. I’ll share more details as I get back in the swing of writing, but for now I just want to say thank you so much for following along. I love hearing from you, so please don’t be shy, hit reply! Ok, that was bad, I’ll stop.
Talk to you soon/see you around,
Rachel
