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Over the years farming has rendered me more and more reticent.

The soil and the rain and the hail and the hay, the death, and the afterbirth and the chores and the seedlings all have a quite way of pushing you out of the realm of talking and into the way of being.

I began this site as a way to advertise shares in our farm.

Eventually it became a place for me to process how the farm was farming us- and writing became a way to lift the good from the bad, the beautiful from the ugly, and see the deeper meaning in the down and dirty nitty gritty, to take the long view.

The long view is not an easy thing to sell.

It doesn’t glitter and glitz like the shimmery desireability of the more immediate gratification.

The fact is, you can buy your vegetables as you want when you want at the grocery store.

They will not be as fresh or as delicious as those grown on a local farm, but after all they are just vegetables and they will be quite serviceable for your salads and sauces and soups. There is a way in which “buy local” has become a new kind of religion, and not a very good one, as everyone deep down realizes that earth can never compete with heaven in inspiring better living…

For us, it’s very simple:

calling in the seed order

We have this honey of a farm. She’s nestled along near the bluffs of the St. Croix.

A creek edges her like a handkerchief handsewn with the blanket stich. A gravity fed spring trickles down the Western hill and provides all our goats and chickens and sheep with water from the pump in the barnyard. Once, when Hiway 95 was still just a footpath that the native people and loggers used to travel along the river, our road was the only road going North from Stillwater, through the town of Vasa- later named Copas. A silver sliver of fenceline jealously guards our 100 ft white pines, which tower gentle-giant like out front-a vestige of the days before the logging companies stripped the shoreline and sent the logs down the river to the mill at Marine. The vegetable garden lies in tidy beds and rows beneath a windbreak of gangly Norwegian pines that have formed a windbreak there for 104 years. But best of all the old Swedish barn, with its cozy hay loft and three horse stalls where we bed down new mothers with their Spring kids and lambs, the staunchion where we milk the goats, and the walls drilled with screws where we hang the hoes. When we first saw this place 4 years ago it was the barn which smiled a welcome at us, as we came up the drive. When we turned to go it wrenched us to leave that barn. It pulled on the heart the way a first love does, or a happy child, or a moist chocolate cake.

It was home.

When you have a farm like this, and when you find that the moist humus-rich soil grows the best brassicas, the zestiest greens, and the sweetest snap peas this side of the Rio Grande, it becomes a treasure too singular to hoard.

first farm baby of 2018

So, we are offering shares in it.

$600 buys a weekly portion of whatever is in season on Little Flower Farm from June-September. Each box will be a snapshot in time of the farm, and tucked inside will be a newsletter each week, with recipes, news, and that good ol’ inspiring longview.