Leaning into summer gifts 🌞 + updates
Every morning begins with water for my husband and me right now. We both wake, get dressed for the day, and then head outside to set up water. Casey takes care of moving hand lines in our fields, and I water our starts and the gardens around the house. I do it before I’ve responded to emails or made my morning cup of tea. In our dry growing season, water is essential, and so it comes first.
Starting our days with water is a summer rhythm, one that provides a particular feel to our mornings. I love being outside first thing and hearing the birds call and enjoying the coolness of the air. We often end our summer days with another kind of water activity, cooling off by taking a dunk in our cold water-filled pallet bin in the yard. These are just a few pieces of the daily sensations and activities that tell my whole body it is summer. Yesterday I ate some of the first blackberries of the season, and I remembered a million past Julys. The water and the explosion of new flavors this time of year help me savor the particular energy of this high point in our year.
Other seasons bring other habits and rhythms. In winter, I start my days with splitting kindling and building fires in our wood stove. We light a candle for our dinners after the sun goes down. Those days are book-ended by those fires, as we bring heat and light into the cold and dark. And the flavors shift as well — our plates filled with comforts of stored sugars of winter squash and parsnips.
These annual shifts make me feel alive. They help me feel more fully present in a way that I have sought out my whole life. In a life full of activity, they also help me find rest even when I am still working. Yes, there is work to do year-round, but that work shifts. I get a break from watering in the winter, even though then I have the daily work of building a fire. Just as I grow weary of a particular kind of work, it passes into something new.
And, so I am always surprised when I hear other homeschoolers extol the virtues of schooling year-round. When people bring this up on homeschool forums, there are always many comments from people saying “oh yes, here too! It’s great!” Of course, in a homeschool setting, “school” can look more like play and fun, especially in the early years. But, in our homeschooling house, school days have their own feel and purpose — we spend our mornings doing school. That means reading books (great! wonderful! books!) and working on math. But to do all that requires us to … be inside. Which is perfect in our mostly rainy, cold falls, winters, and early springs in Oregon. Again, it’s something we dive into with joy come fall, as the kids and I do truly love the type of learning work we do together.
BUT. By late spring, when the world has warmed and dried and the birds are singing and flowers blooming and vegetables growing and mountain trails calling … we are DONE! We are ready to be OUTSIDE — gardening, planting, building bike jumps, harvesting, hiking, swimming in the river, hosting friends by the campfire, and reading in the porch hammocks. Taking one big thing off our plate frees us up to fully engage in both the intense work and joyous play of summer. That is the mode we are in, and we are all LOVING it.
I feel immensely grateful that we can shift our life with the seasons in this way. It’s certainly something we’ve intentionally “cultivated” because we do get so much enjoyment and satisfaction from a seasonal lifestyle. When the children were younger, I even enhanced their awareness of the yearly cycles by reading seasonal picture books with them (something I wrote about in my farming and parenting book). At 10 and 13, they’re possibly too old for that kind of thing now, but I still pull out some of our favorites and strew them around the living room at the turning of each season. This summer, I’ve caught them flipping through the old familiar books on hot afternoons. It makes me happy.
Summer will eventually wear thin for me too, I know. I never think it can — isn’t this the best life has to offer? But by September I grow tired of the dust and the endless watering and the heat waves (and, more and more, the late summer smoky skies). And then the shift to rain and cooler weather in fall is welcome.
But I’m not there yet. Today I happily watered my garden and delighted in the hummingbirds visiting my bee balm and I will eat the first of the cherry tomatoes with dinner. I’m here, in this season, fully present.
How about you? How is this summer going for you? I know other parts of the country have been having wild summer weather lately. I hope that everyone is faring reasonably well and finding summer joys even amidst the busy season of work and weather extremes.
On to other recent happenings around here …
I’ve been promoting the GFM podcast on Instagram with some drawings/comics.
Growing for Market podcast
As I shared in last month’s newsletter, I’m now a co-host on the Growing for Market podcast! This is a job that makes me pinch myself because I enjoy it so very much that surely I must be dreaming.
I’ve been recording a lot of really fascinating interviews with farmers lately. You can listen to my two-part interview with Growing for Market magazine editor Andrew Mefferd now, as well as all of Andrew’s interesting interviews. More episodes from me are coming up soon, covering topics such as farm stress and incorporating agri-tourism into a profitable farm business! You can listen anywhere you get your podcasts, or on the GFM website here. Also, if you can take a moment to subscribe and rate the podcast on your app, it will help more people find it! Thank you!
Parenting and farming book update
We’re working on the design stage now for The Book, which makes it all feel really real. I’ve said it a million times, and I’ll say it a million more times, THANK YOU to all the farm families who reached out and shared their stories and experience with me. There are so many different voices in this book, and I can’t wait for it to come out next year!
2024 calendar in progress
I’m also deep into the work of designing and drawing next year’s calendar! I will admit that working on this project mid-summer always feels somewhat surreal. 2024 feels far away! And, since I include a preview calendar for the following year, this week I drawing little calendars for early 2025 and wondering what in the world will be going on in my life or the world then. It seems like forever from now, and yet it’s close enough that it’s time for me to think about it in this way. I don’t want to rush any of us through 2023, but my plan is to have my 2024 calendars available for sale locally and as digital downloads on my website beginning in early fall. Stay tuned!
I made a new sign to advertise our vegetables — I had to include drawings, of course!
We’re selling veggies again!
One summer rhythm that my husband Casey and I revived this week is harvesting produce for customers! We’ve been on a sabbatical from commercial vegetable farming since closing our CSA program. In that time, we’ve still been tending our farm, growing ridiculous amounts of produce for ourselves, and experimenting with other crops — we planted hazelnuts, for example! But last week we began harvesting for customers again! You can learn more about our farm, Oakhill Organics, here.
We are now selling our fresh vegetables at the new Blue Goat Farm Market in Amity, Oregon (506 S Trade St. Amity, OR 97101). Blue Goat is a restaurant we’ve worked with since they first opened in 2010. Now they’re re-inventing their purpose, and it’s very exciting to be a part of their new venture.
If you’re local to us, I hope you’ll check it out! Blue Goat is open every Friday and Saturday 3-8 pm, and you can find our veggies in a reach-in cooler (next to some of their yummy produce too). We'll be harvesting and selling year-round again! We have tons of great summer, fall and winter crops growing in the fields right now. It's certainly more than our family can eat, so we’re excited to share the forthcoming bounty.⠀
Blue Goat is also offering a small menu of delicious food items (the corn fritters are amazing!) as well as fresh produce, flowers, beverages, and artwork.
… Thank you for reading! May your market displays and your plates both be full and colorful!
With gratitude,
Katie