Flowers, Salads, and Pesto
We have certainly been enjoying this week of cooler temperatures on the farm! It seems like a time to catch our breath before the slide into summer is official. The sky offers dramatic scene changes from puffy white clouds to blankets of grey, and the question of rain lingers in the back of our minds. In the greenhouse, we are in our final weeks of seeding kales and lettuce, and it’s a relief not to be checking on them constantly as they germinate to ensure they’re not drying out. Out in the fields, the plants also seem to enjoy a break from...
read moreLate Spring Musings
This spring I tilled up a garden plot in our backyard for my four-year old daughter. The edge of our farm fields are literally mere feet away and millions of plants are endlessly calling out for tending, and yet planting a garden seemed the thing to do. We are both just loving being gardeners! It’s so relaxing and entertaining. Watching the progress of our little plot, popping in whatever plants we want in all kinds of non-liner patterns, having a place where Delphine can do things her way all make the garden a huge win. Delphine made a path...
read moreA Well-Timed Strawberry Moon
Summer is here and the farm is going OFF! We are now stocking strawberries, frisee, and romaine, green leaf, and red butter lettuces in the Farmstand as well as at the Saturday and Sunday farmers markets. The best thing to happen this year, in my opinion, is that the strawberries became ripe in time for the Strawberry Moon this past Saturday, and not late like last year. Thank goodness we weren’t stuck in the rainy cold gloom for an extra-long time this year! A lot of us at the farm have established our home gardens with plant starts, and...
read morePlants and People Growing on the Farm
That strange march of time has caught me on the back foot once again, and on Tuesday I found myself celebrating my 27th birthday. Put like that, it sounds like I was dreading it, but it’s quite the opposite – I feel more myself at this age than I have at any other. Maybe it’s from being told I have an old soul one too many times, or perhaps that everyone says I look just like my mother, but whatever it is, I like this feeling. A sort of settling into myself, an ease I think I’m only just finding the edges of. I’ve spent so much time looking...
read moreExisting and Thriving with Plants
Hi, my name is Natalie and I love plants.No really, I love them. Sometimes I think I came here just to witness them work their magic. Being a farmer to me is not just growing food. It’s watching the plants transform, learning about their cycles, and being completely left in awe by them — I swear watching a bee pollinate a strawberry flower the other day felt like a full-blown miracle.Do you ever just think about photosynthesis? Or soil microbes? Or seeds? Or the mycelial network by which plants communicate? Or how plants find ways to defend...
read moreWelcome, Springtime Heat!
Wow, Spring heat has hit us full force this year! Here on the farm we are rolling with it, suddenly able to harvest much more varieties of fresh crops and using up the last of our stored roots. It is exciting and energizing! Your CSA this week will be packed with goodies to make salads and my favorite: Iced Mint Tea. I recommend getting a big pitcher if you don’t already have one, boil the mint in a pot of water, add honey, cool, and transfer to the pitcher, then keep in the fridge for a refreshing taste of summer! PS – adding a pinch...
read moreNew Produce and New Pigs
May is an exciting time of year on the farm. It’s a transition time from preparation to production. Our greenhouse team is at the summit of peak output and now it’s time to get all those plants in the ground. We’re off to a good start: already getting a round of lettuces, our first kale succession, and our onions transplanted in the field. (Did you know in just two beds of shallots we hand transplant almost 800 plants?) This week, we’re starting to see new produce (much of it featured in your CSA share), including baby carrots from the...
read moreFestivals of Springtime
May is here! Many cultures celebrate this seasonal midpoint between the vernal equinox and the summer solstice. Around the world, these festivals include Beltane (Celtic, Pagan), May Day (Euro-American), Wulpurgisnacht/Valborg (German and Scandinavian), Root Festival (Yakama), Ching Ming (Chinese), Whitsuntide (Dutch), and the Goddess Festivals: Aphrodite (Greek), Venus (Roman), and Lada (Slavic). The themes many of these festivals share are a celebration of growth, renewal, fertility, and abundance. In many traditions, this marks the...
read moreTulips Springing
A gift that being a farmer gives you is living life by the seasons. They all have their defining features and creatures — for me in spring, it’s unpredictable weather; it’s watching tulips ripen; it’s little baby frogs living in the greenhouse lettuce, purple sprouting broccoli, absurd amounts of raab, piglets in a pen and bringing new crew onto the farm. Going into my third season at Red Dog, I’m in a throws of nostalgia: this time last year I was doing a lot of the same…picking tulips, for example. Here I am doing it all over again, but I...
read moreEarth Day Recipes
This week is earth week! Produce-wise, April and May can be the slimmest pickings of the year on local PNW farms, when the overwintered and stored crops have mostly been eaten and we turn our attention to growing and transplanting seedlings. It can sometimes be difficult or uninspiring to cook with locally grown fruit and veg at this time of year so I am going to list two recipe suggestions that are fun, unique ways to eat on Earth Day, using Red Dog Farm ingredients provided to all our CSA members! 1: PSB Pizza — a Red Dog crew...
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