Naturally grown food for those dear
Potting On
Dear friends, family, customers, and supporters,
“Potting on” is the term gardeners use when moving a small transplant to a bigger container. “Transplanting” is moving from a container to the ground, a most exciting event. Potting on can be tedious and seemingly without purpose; why would you want to move to another temporary, limited container, when you could move into the ground? Where you can expand your roots to your heart’s content, meet others, find companions that help you ward off pests, and fulfill your greatest aspirations? To grow up, produce flowers, get pollinated, produce seeds and pass on your snazzy genetics, then die peacefully on the ground, your decaying body providing rich and necessary nutriment for your children and the whole of your community. Yes, plants are amazing.
I may take this metaphor too far, but yes, potting on is what Josh and I are doing. Moving from one temporary situation to another, to fill out that space, and grow ready for the great leap onto real, solid ground. Ground which will be, to people anyway, our own. We have realized this over the past months; while our CSA totally kicks ass, living in a tipi is fun, and working in exchange for rent is alright, this is not the way to get where we really want to be. There are many paths you can take to become a farmer, and at the beginning of this year I believed I could do it by part-time farming, part-time sucky town job. And now I realize that is not the way I want to become a farmer. Another way is to not farm for awhile, but work and save money until you have enough to begin. It’s the advice we have been given by every farmer we actually look up to (Wendell Berry, Susana Lein, Carl Benson, to name a few), but somehow always thought we could do it without that seemingly lame work.
We’ve got the experience, we know that we want to produce food and how, we just need the funds to begin. And there is work out there that we enjoy that isn’t farming and that we could maintain even after we begin the simple life again in the country. Quite randomly, and without knowing I’d just lost (thankfully) my waitressing job, and on my birthday, a good friend of ours who manages the huge UK Certified Organic CSA in Lexington, offered both Josh and I jobs. Spending all day with friends and getting paid to farm? Heck ya! So apparently we can keep our hands in the ground while making money. This job only runs until mid, November, but with other opportunities in Lexington, we’ve decided to move there for at least the next few months.
Unfortunately, though we had planned to begin this venture after completing our CSA season, circumstances have changed and we have departed much sooner. Our last week of distribution was this past one, 15 amazing weeks, and we are so thankful for everyone we have come to know through it. Since our housing situation is in flux, we may not be back in Corinth for Kokofriendzy, but we aren’t far! We may have departed the farm, but we aren’t departing the relationships we’ve made. We hope you all are well into your fall plantings, enjoying freshly dug potatoes, dry beans and just dying for the sunflowers to mature up those seeds, we certainly are! We are ever grateful for our customers and their excitement about their diverse baskets, as well as their patience with our shortcomings (like paste tomatoes) as well as our annoying abundances (like cucumbers). We are heartbroken to leave our beautiful garden, but know the next one will be even better (and hopefully permanent!) Since we’ll be living in a city again, we have no “no reception” excuse and even Josh will be available via cell. On the same note, if you happen to have any wicked cheap housing connections in Lexington let us know (we are in a sweet, but temporary situation now, and are on a ridged search for something longer term)!
This will be the last installment of our CSA newsletter, but you can keep updated via my blog, and email me if you’d like to receive personal updates we might send out as well.
Much love and huge hugs to you all,
Bri & Josh
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