This season we’ve added another pickup day at the farmstand–Thursday–for a total of four options: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday. Again this year the main season CSA (Whole Shares & Half Shares) will run for 24 weeks and start in mid-May. The Whole Shares & Half Shares will finish up the last week of October, and then the Winter Share begins the first week of November with delicious winter squash, sweet root vegetables, and crisp winter lettuce. The 8-week long Winter Share finishes up the 3rd week in December.

The flexible Farmstand CSA is a debit card loaded with $400 to use all season long for any item–vegetable, fruit, honey, flowers, baked treats–at the farmstand. Ten weeks of fresh, fragrant, farm-grown flowers in hand-tied bouquets starts with pastel snapdragons in early July and runs through colorful dahlia season in September.

During these short, frosty January days we’ve been dreaming about ripe, juicy tomatoes, sweet and buttery corn, delicious early spring broccoli, and tender and sweet spring onions. But as mouthwatering as those daydreams are, we haven’t just been dreaming. We’ve finished up taking inventory of our seed stocks and started work on crop planning and seed ordering for the upcoming season. Soon we’ll be getting large boxes full of colorful seed packets delivered to the front porch and we’ll be one more step closer to enjoying a ripe and juicy melon on a bright, sunny August afternoon.

Email us at langwaterfarm @ gmail . com with any questions about CSA signup. Happy New Year!

The first farm, Riverhill Farm, is in Nevada City, CA. Riverhill is a beautiful farm that grows all kinds of vegetables, including some of the most gorgeous kale we’ve ever seen. Alan Haight has been farming there since about 2003 and runs a very successful CSA. He estimates that he’s feeding about 600 people, which is really significant given that the town only has about 3,000 people. So Alan is feeding 1/5 of the town. Who says small farmers can’t feed the world?

The second farm, Yolo Bulb, is right outside Davis and is run by Mike Madison. Mike produces lots of delicious olive oil and has an amazing cut flower operation. Rory’s hoping to grow a lot of cut flowers at Langwater Farm, so it was great to get to ask all kinds of questions about how he does it. He had a lot of helpful suggestions about everything from varieties to tractor implements. Mike even gave us a big bag of books to jump-start our farm library!

All in all it was a very inspiring weekend and made us excited to get started with our own operation!

• The lease is almost all done! After a number of back-and-forths between ourselves and the Ames family we are very close to having a completed lease. We’ll be leasing the land for five years, with the idea that it will be renewed into a longer term lease if everyone is happy after those first five years.
• We are working on forming an LLC, a Limited Liability Company. This will protect us personally from any legal liability that might come out of the business. Although the farm property itself will be called Langwater Farm, we need to pick a different name for our business entity (I know, it’s a little confusing). Currently naming the LLC is our biggest hurdle… any suggestions??
• Kevin bought a pickup truck! It’s green.
• Kate and Mary (Rory and Kevin’s mom) went and visited the farmhouse where Rory and Alida will be living. We’ll be leasing the farmhouse, which is on the property, along with the farm. Apparently the house has a wood stove, plenty of room for visitors, and a secret staircase! Couldn’t ask for more. Here’s a picture of the house.

So that’s what we’ve been up to. Needless to say, we’re getting very excited about the part where we stop worrying about LLCs and leases, and actually get to farm!

Stay tuned for more updates soon. In the meantime let us know if you have ideas for our business name.

Here’s the farm road running along the northern edge of the next field over, the Post Office field. The Post Office field is smaller, about six and a half acres. We’re contemplating an acre or two of pumpkins there for next year.

The property also has about 40 acres of mixed forest. These are all deciduous trees, but there’s also a fair amount of Eastern White pines in other spots. And here’s Kate! She took all these great photos (and more that we’ll be posting soon).

I’ve been thinking this to myself, oh, about every hour or so for the past week, ever since we got the news that we will soon be farmers. This time next year, we’ll be planting, weeding, hoeing, tractoring, harvesting, distributing, all on our very own farm. It still doesn’t seem quite real– it’s terribly exciting, and excitingly terrifying.

How did this come to be? It all started with a little email via New England Land Link that a land trust was seeking a farmer for property in Easton, Massachusetts. Since Kevin and his wife Kate live nearby, it seemed like a potentially perfect opportunity, especially since Rory and I have been keeping the idea of a move back to Massachusetts on the back burner. So we wrote a proposal. And another proposal. And an interview and many conference calls later, we now find ourselves the shocked and delighted tenants-to-be of a beautiful piece of farmland! The lease is not finalized yet, so nothing’s set in stone, but the process is under way and we are feeling good about working with the landowners and about the land.

About the land. It’s 80 acres total, about half woods, half fields. The property belongs to the Ames family of Easton. Part of the property was originally designed by landscape architect Fredrick Law Olmsted, the creator of Central Park. Needless to say, it is drop-dead beautiful. Fields gently curving against woods, surrounded by stone walls, dirt roads snaking through the woods and fields and over small streams, all bordered by Langwater Pond on the west.

Currently the property is not farmed. It’s a bunch of fields and woods. However, apparently back in the day, it was the home of Langwater Farm, famous for its Guernsey cows and Clydesdale horses. Here is a Langwater cow on the farm– note that the view is the same as our photo from Rory’s Iphone on the blog header (photo from lindahowardstein’s photostream on Flickr).

We’ll be calling our farm Langwater Farm, both at the request of the Ames family and as a nod to the rich history of this land.

We are looking forward to documenting our experiences getting the farm up and running here on this blog, and invite you to track the progress of our future farm. Stay tuned for future posts on leases, tractor shopping, farm stand construction, and so much more!