Squeaky says “Don’t get left behind-head on over to our new address!”

Hello 46 North Farm Friends!

Please bear with us, but we’ve moved the blog location–I swear this will be IT for a long, long time.  We upgraded from the free WordPress blog site to a slightly fancier WordPress deal that is more adaptable to the needs of our growing farm business.

Over the winter we’ll be working out details and information on the new site, and it’s where we will be posting all future updates.  If you’ve subscribed to the blog at this address, I’m afraid you’re going to have to re-subscribe at the new blog address, which can be done at:

www.46northfarm.com

If you’ve bookmarked this site, you’ll have to dump that bookmark and do a new one for the new address as well.

Thanks for sticking with us through all of our many moves, both physical and digital!  We’re very excited about the upcoming year, and will soon be posting plant lists, growing tips, and more photos and stories from 46 North Farm.

Thanks for hanging in there with us- we’re looking forward to an exciting and productive 2012!

xoxoxo  The 46 North Farm Gang– Teresa, Packy, Eddie & Squeaky

There's lots of good stuff growing at the NEW new blog site....

2009 was an aborted growing season for us, although it ended in us buying 46 North Farm, so it was worth the frustration. In 2010 we planted very few flowers, largely due to the combination of no elk fence to protect them plus a lack of time, a result of our full time work that was (and is!) paying the bills. The dahlias struggled, and even if I had managed to get some flower seeds started, we barely had any beds to plant them in.

For the 2011 growing season I had the motivation of knowing that we had a big wedding to supply flowers for in early August, plus we wanted to participate in the first season of the River People Farmers Market.  I knew if I had enough flowers and herbs growing, between that and our edible plant starts we could pull it off.

There are flowers that I had been growing every season since we began farming that I hadn’t seen blooming for two years.  I missed them deeply, like dear old friends I hadn’t seen in far too long.  When they started to unfurl early this summer I would snatch a bit of time whenever I could to go and see what had begun blooming that day, quietly whispering “Hello!!” to each flower so that Eddie and Squeaky wouldn’t laugh at my sentimentality.

It was wonderful: bachelor buttons in deep blue, purple and burgundy black, all the tall golden yellow and deep red marigolds that make such long-lasting cut flowers, calendula in shades of peach, orange and yellow, and the lovely nicotianas! My favorite lime green, the delightful nicotiana langsdorfii with its dangling green bell-shaped flowers, and the delicious jasmine variety- white flowers that release the most amazing fragrance in the evening.  Tall red snapdragons and drifts of White Bishops Lace flower, and the dark purple Bishops Lace flower whose name I forget.  Towering yellow and burgundy coreopsis and deep pink cosmos swaying in the breeze.  And of course the dahlias, rebounding with new enthusiasm despite the best efforts of an army of slugs.

And then there were all the herbs whose flowers and foliage mix so beautifully into bouquets–lavender, catmint, oregano, sage, thyme, fennel, lemon balm–the fragrance and colors were intoxicating, not just to me but to the waves of beneficial insects that moved across our farm, turning the flowers rows into a vibrating, humming fiesta.  Honey bees, bumble bees, hover flies, wasps, butterflies and moths have been feasting on our flowers for months.  Less desirable creatures showed up too, including grasshoppers, cucumber beetles, black aphids and the most impressive infestation of slugs I have seen in my life. Many of our visiting insects, slugs and snakes feasted on each other as well, which is all a part of the process. We’re still working on balance in our farm’s ecosystem, but all things considered the damages were outweighed by the benefits.

It is truly satisfying to grow food for people.  I am excited about this evolving part of our farm, but I know I will always grow flowers and make bouquets for our market booths as well, because people pay us for flowers in ways that far outstrip money alone.

The young couple on their honeymoon who bought a bouquet at the Cannon Beach Farmers Market to decorate their hotel room. The proud mother who bought flowers to give to her young daughter after her first dance recital. The older woman who was taking flowers to the cemetary to put on a friend’s grave.  The countless people whose faces light up as they look over the bouquets, trying to pick which one to take home. Shy boyfriends buying flowers for their girlfriend, presenting them in a flustered display of awkward adoration to their beaming sweethearts. A sister buying a bouquet to take to her sister who was in labor at Columbia Memorial Hospital.  Customers who faithfully bring us back the canning jars that our bouquets are sold in, or who every week tell me about the vast collection of jars they are saving for me but forgot once again to bring to market that week.

Just writing out this list is making me smile–people invite me into such tender parts of their lives when they buy flowers from our farm.

There is a saying that is often attributed to the Koran, but which I believe is really just an old Persian saying: “If you have two loaves of bread, sell one and buy hyacinths, for they will feed your soul.” (I’ve also seen this quoted as a Chinese saying with lilies instead of hyacinths, and honestly wouldn’t be surprised to discover some version of the sentiment occurs in other cultures as well.)  I can see the truth of this whenever we sell flowers at a farmers market, and why I will always believe that cut flowers have a place at farmers markets despite their being mostly not edible. (Even the Cannon Beach Farmers Market finally conceded the point.)

This growing season my soul was very, very well fed.  I’m sorry to see the flowers beginning to fade now, but it’s time for them to do so. I’m letting things go to seed as much as I can so that we can save seed for next year, and plotting about how I’m going to fit in another row of dahlias somewhere.  Winter is a wonderful time to daydream…when it is especially grey and stormy out, I make a cup of tea and pull out my seed catalogs–smiling at the photos of old friends, checking out some new flowers I want to introduce myself to next season, and planning a riotously colorful, buzzing, vibrating, joyful party for next summer.

I can add yet another explanation to the mysterious lack of time we always seem to be suffering from–one of the main reasons I don’t update our farm blog as often as I mean to. While it is certainly true that we both have a whole lot going on in addition to working on starting up our small farm again, it is often the case that even when we do set aside time for farm chores, something always seems to come along to derail our plans.

Recently, distraction arrived in a small, feathered package.

It was mid-morning when I heard a weird hooting bird call outside.  I looked out back and saw what looked like a strange kind of pigeon sitting on the elk fence.  This time of year, odd birds start moving through the neighbourhood on their way south, so I just thought it was one of them, and that it would soon move on.

The next time I looked it was sitting on the electrical wire right above our back door, hooting and looking down at me. Eddie and Squeaky were very excited by this tremendously large and friendly bird sitting about 15 feet above them looking tantalizingly plump and tasty. I called out to Packy, interrupting him from his rather critical project: getting our farm taxes ready to send to our tax preparer, who had recently informed us of the exciting news that thanks to a change in schedule at the IRS, our taxes were now due on September 15, not October 15 as we had been planning on. Thanks IRS!

Once he and I wrangled the over-excited felines back into the house, he figured out that the odd bird that was causing all the fuss was a Eurasian Collared Dove.

“They’re not native,” he informed me.  ”They were first seen in Florida a few years ago, and have been making their way across the country ever since.  I wonder where it came from?”

We stood looking up at the bird for a while, and then both thought about our enormous to-do lists that day.

“Well, let’s keep the cats inside until it flies away,” I suggested. We went back to work.

I was on a massive clean-up tear, and was at the moment organizing the many baskets we use for farmers markets and farm events, sorting out how to store them best so that they don’t take over the house.  I was using the front porch as a place to spread everything out on, as it was one of the only open spaces available at that time. (Hence the much needed organizing project.)

The hooting got closer.  I looked up, and there sitting in the rhodedendron next to the porch was the Collard Dove, staring at me intently.  It was a little creepy.  It hopped closer, now sitting on the firewood-holder-thing.  Squeaky sat in the window inside, very annoyed to not be participating in the encounter in a more meaningful way.  As I stood there wondering what this bird wanted, it suddenly flew at me, apparently trying to land in the region of my head. My shrieking impersonation of Tippi Hedren in The Birds caught Packy’s attention.

“What the…?!?!??” he asked breathlessly, taking the stairs two at a time to find out what was trying to kill me.

“This is a really weird bird,” I told him.  ”I think it’s following me around the house, and it tried to land on my head.”

I mean, I like birds.  But I find it just a wee bit unsettling when they fly at me and try to land on me when I’m not really expecting it.  We stood there looking at the bird, who sat looking back at us.  This bird was not afraid of people at all. In fact, it just seemed to want to hang out with us.  There was no way we could let the cats out as long as it was around, and it showed no inclination to move on.

“This has got to be someone’s pet”, Packy said.  ”I wonder where it came from?”

So we called our wonderful neighbors, the Wildlife Center of the North Coast, and asked them for their opinion on the matter.

“Well, if you can get it into some kind of cage, you can bring it down here and we can re-locate it somewhere else,” they offered.  ” Or we can keep it here for a bit while you try to find who owns it, or find a home for it.”  We had a good discussion on the finer points of bird capturing techniques, including the towel toss trick, and we hung up the phone feeling good about having a plan.

Packy then spent the next 45 minutes trying to wrangle an ornery bird–who either wanted to sit on his head or eat sunflower seeds out of his hand, but definitely did not want to get into our cat carrier–into our cat carrier.

He eventually prevailed, but not before some very colorful language ensued.  I was definitely not very helpful, but stood by waiting to be of some sort of assistance that did not involve actual bird handling.

Once the bird was in the cat carrier, we thought about it a bit more.  It really did seem way too accustomed to people to be a wild bird that was moving into the area. We decided to go ask the neighbours if anyone knew of someone who had lost a pet dove. We walked up the road to our neighbour Kevin’s house, and hit the jackpot on the first try.

“Oh yeah,” he said.  ”That sounds like the bird that was hanging around at the Big O the last few weeks. They finally had to shoo it away, it kept flying into the store and the bar mooching peanuts off people.  I think Shawrron was calling it Dale.”

Shawrron and Dale are the wonderful owners of the very cool Olney General Store and Big O Saloon just down the road from us.

“O-Kay…  well, they won’t be wanting Dale the Dove back I guess”, Packy said glumly.  We had a lovely chat with Kevin about various neighborly things, then walked back to the farm, collecting discarded Diet Pepsi bottle from along the roadside as we went.  Someone around here sure likes Diet Pepsi.

When we got home, I called the Wildlife Center back and asked if we could take them up on their offer of bird sitting until we could maybe find a home for the Dale the Dove. Packy went back to tax wrangling, and I set out walking the cat carrier down through the farm, which is the quickest and most scenic way to get to them.

Their songbird cage was pretty much empty, and Sharnelle Fee (the founder of WCNC) directed me to just let Dale go in there. It took a little coaxing, but he soon hopped out of the carrier and explored the enclosure. It’s lovely– full of native shrubs, and more importantly for Dale the Dove, had an ample supply of bird seed.

Sharnelle and I stood around chatting for a while about wildlife and nature and some of the unfortunate aspects of human nature with regards to wildlife. The whole time we were talking, a small fawn was lurking nearby, occasionally getting bold and loping towards Sharnelle, who kept swatting it away. She looked at me somewhat resigned.

“Unfortunately, we had to raise him on his own without any other deer around to socialize him, so he’s gotten a bit messed up, and is way too used to people.”

Of course, we both immediately thought of the legendary Fawn-Fawn, who sadly passed away this past winter.

She was WCNC’s very first patient, and lived to be over 11 years old, which is pretty much an unheard of age for a deer not actually in captivity She was also completely unafraid of people, and quite a charming mooch. We were sad when we figured out what had happened–she just didn’t show up for well over a month–but it also helped me to not feel quite so guilty about putting up the elk fences.  Fawn Fawn was pretty used to strolling right past the greenhouse (and occasionally right through it) on her way across the farm, and I would have hated to try and re-direct her.

Eventually I said my good byes to Sharnelle, and began walking back up through the tall grass towards my long-ago abandoned to-do list.

Have you ever had that feeling that someone is following you? I hadn’t been walking more than a couple of minutes before I turned around and saw the fawn, standing about ten feet behind me.

“Oh no,” I said.  ”Shoo.  Go Home.  Go back.”  I turned around and kept walking, using the theory that if I ignored it, it would get bored and abandon this journey into unknown territory.

A minute later I turned around again.  The fawn was ten feet behind me, casually looking off into the distance.  We made eye contact, and it loped forwards excitedly, terrifyingly not unlike a golden retriever puppy. “Arrgh!” I said calmly.  ”Go back.  Seriously.  Do not follow me, you damn impossibly cute Disney-esque Fawn-Demon from Hell!”  Well, I was thinking that, anyway.

Of course this went on all the way back to the house.  I set the cat carrier down while the Impossibly Cute Fawn-Demon from Hell set about discovering all the tasty plants in our herb garden, and even showed great interest in exploring our basement. I shooed it away and shouted for Packy–interrupting tax time yet again–while the cats tried to decide if this weird not-quite-a-dog thing was a good exchange for the tantalizing bird. I think they were disappointed in my trade efforts.

Packy was very little help, even once he stopped laughing hysterically.  I struggled desperately to stay mad at the damn thing as it darted around tasting things and trying to entice Squeaky into playing with it.

 I think it is deeply unfair that fawns are so cute- those huge liquid eyes and the big wet nose. The way they hop around like over-excited bunny rabbits…  it is Just Not Fair.

We ended up walking the Impossibly Cute Fawn-Demon from Hell all the way back to the Wildlife Center, herding it along with an old broken rake when it started to veer off into the pasture too far.

Sharnelle smiled apologetically when we got back.

“Did he follow you home?  He’s never left the property before this, but then most people leave in cars, they don’t walk here…”

She got him into the bird cage she was working in to hold him so he wouldn’t follow us back, and we walked slowly back to the farm.

“What was I working on again?” I asked.  It was now late afternoon, and I had so far managed to cross nothing off my farm chore list.

“I think you were organizing baskets, but didn’t you say you had to do some watering today as well?” Packy reminded me, as he trudged back upstairs to the sweltering office to once again try to make sense out of our paperwork.

“Oh yeah.  Watering.”

I watered the plants until it started to get dark (next year we are so installing drip irrigation) and then went in to try and figure out something to cook for dinner involving zucchini and lemon cucumbers, both of which are growing with great enthusiasm right now.

The baskets are still on the front porch, but at least the taxes got done.  Maybe next weekend….

Somehow, Eddie the Cat's Farm Chore list always includes a lot of napping, supervising other people's Farm Chores, and catnip monitoring.

Happy Ending Update:  Dale the Dove was adopted by one of the Wildlife Center volunteers who had another pet dove already.  Hopefully they don’t mind him sitting on their head on occasion.

No update on the Fawn-Demon from Hell yet….

I was just prodded by the delightful and oh-so-helpful Naomi of Naomi’s Organic Farm Supplyin Portland to post some updated greenhouse and plant photos, so Naomi- these are for you!

We have a plant stand outside the Astoria Co-opfull of fantastic greens and herbs that are eager to get planted, and will keep it stocked through the season with great edible plants for your coastal garden. If you miss us at one of our market appearances this year, you can always get plants at the Co-op.

Eddie and Squeaky are beside themselves waiting for me to plant some of the catnip outside, and sneak into the greenhouse for their fix when they think I’m not looking…

I am still buzzing from the great gathering of local farmers and fishermen at the Blue Scorcher Bakery & Cafe last Sunday night! When North Coast Food Web, the Astoria Co-op and BSB were first planning the event, I knew that it had potential to be a productive evening. It turned out better than I had even hoped. In spite of the torrential rain and flooding that sadly kept some of our South and Tillamook County folks from being there, attendance was huge and the mood was enthusiastic. I was especially encouraged to see so many new growers show up.

Local chefs checking out the Cannon Beach Farmer’s Market

I’d love to see a Farmer-Chef Connection event like the one that happens in Portland take place here on the coast! I know they can be a lot of work to organize, but with the great chefs we have here in our region, and the growing number of local food producers, it could be an event to remember. (I’ll just add that to my to-do list, shall I?)

I know this picture doesn’t relate to anything I’m saying here, but I just love this old tree on our farm with the lichen covered branches, and couldn’t help but stick a picture of it in in here somewhere…

The other half of the rainbow….

As we stood in the greenhouse watching the amazing, vivid rainbow shift between single and double that day, I observed that this was obviously a blessing on our truck! However, about a week after the photo was taken I was driving this same truck along Highway 202 and hit a patch of black ice, skidding off the road into a ditch. All was ok, and a very nice neighbor rescued me and gave me a ride into town to find Packy, as cell phone reception is pretty spotty out where we live. Once the truck was towed out of the ditch and examined, neither the truck nor I had a scratch on us.

Come to think of it, maybe the rainbow blessing did work after all….