2020 Season outlook: Planting seeds, looking ahead

Heather-Marie and her nephew, Oliver, at the Friday afternoon farmstand last summer, which was a great success. Much thanks to the Prairie Lake Improvement Association for helping us to spread the word.

There are many unknowns in all of our lives right now.

For our farm, there is the only thing we know for certain: When the earth is warm enough, we will till our field and we will plant.

And we will farm.

What we do with the vegetables that grow this season remains to be seen, but here is a glimpse at our plans for this year’s growing season.

For those of you who aren’t up to date on what’s going on at Rising Phoenix Community Farm, here is a high-speed tour through our lives in the past year.

Ready? Let’s get to it. (Spoiler alert: we will not be offering a CSA in this transitional season.)

2019 growing season

Last fall’s growing season was a great success. The farm yielded an abundance of produce that allowed us to

grow for our CSA members,
operate a Friday afternoon farm stand for our neighbors around Prairie Lake, and
sell additional produce to retail vendors including the Duluth Whole Foods Co-op,
donate surplus produce to the Cromwell Tri-Community Food Shelf.

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We also partnered with fellow farmers John and Emily Beaton at Fairhaven Farm, who included some of our produce in shares for their CSA members.

Our final, regular-season shares and our fall share orders were, in a word, massive. We had a wonderful selection of potatoes, tomatoes, winter squashes and garlic, to name but a few items.

The hard work of feeding the field with nutrients and being good stewards of the land had really begun to pay off.

Heather-Marie’s parents, Tom and Carol-Ann, and her sister, Nicole, present the fall’s harvest of delicata squash. The squash went to fall share members and also to the Cromwell, Tri-Community Food Shelf.

Moving forward and moving on

At the same time, a number of changes happened at our farm. First, we moved our home, the Blue Caddisfly, the tinyhouse built by Heather-Marie and her father, Tom. For the moment, the tinyhouse is in storage at our friend Ann Markusen’s property in the town of Cromwell.

This year, we will continue to lease the land where the farm has been located, but we have begun looking for a new location where we hope to live and to farm. After moving her farm 5 times in 10 years, Heather-Marie has high hopes that this next move will be the last move for a long, long time.

Heather-Marie and John spent the winter in Vietnam where we explored the role of farming and food in this country’s culture. In November, we visited a university in Hue where we talked about organic farming and rural development before visiting an organic sunflower farm.

Winter 2019-2020

This winter, we had a wonderful opportunity to live in Vietnam. John was named a Fulbright Scholar and moved to Ho Chi Minh City to teach journalism at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities last September. Heather-Marie joined him in late October after closing out the farm season.

From a farming and local food perspective, the time in Vietnam was transformative. We learned what it was like to live and eat in a country where food and farming are at the heart of the lives of many people. We came away with many new ideas about how to farm, how to live and, best of all, how to eat.

Of course, the global pandemic brought all of this to an abrupt end in mid-March when the U.S. Department of State advised all Fulbright Scholars worldwide to make immediate plans to come home. For us, that meant we left Vietnam four months earlier than we had planned.

Late-summer sunflowers reach for the sky at the farm.

Preparing for the 2020 growing season

From a house we have rented temporarily in Duluth, we have begun to ramp up for the 2020 growing season. Our friends at Fairhaven Farm have started our seeds for us, so we are on pace for a good start to the growing season.

This is a transitional year for us. We will not be doing a CSA, but we will be growing vegetables for our community.

How will we get those vegetables into the hands of our family, friends and neighbors? That’s a question we don’t yet have an answer to.

Our original plan for this season had been to sell vegetables at our farm stand along with some additional wholesale and retail sales, but we will see how things progress with the current pandemic.

Thankfully, this is a decision we do not have to rush into. We plan on consulting with other farmers and explore what methods are being recommended. Our priority is ensuring the safety of our neighbors, our landowners, our customers, our community and ourselves…while feeding them, too.