Making the Crops
The small family farm is one the last places - they are getting rarer every day - where men and women (and girls and boys, too) can answer that call to be an artist, to learn to give love to the work of their hands. It is one of the last places where the maker - and some farmers still do talk about making the crops - is responsible from start to finish, for the thing made. - Wendell Berry
Explore the crops we grow and offer for sale at our farmstand through the links below
Vegetables
The availability of our seasonal produce has ebbed and flowed over the years, yet our commitment to trying to grow the best crops is steadfast. Here we are referring to crops free of synthetic fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides, pesticides, and most certainly fungicides which are most damaging to our fungal partners that are essential to building healthy soil in partnership with healthy plants. We use draft horses for our fieldwork and feel it has been, and will continue to be, important, exciting, and magical to explore the possibility of growing food with a minimum of fossil fuel energy and an optimal mix of muscle power both human and animal.
Since the farm's founding we have subscribed to William Albrechts prescriptions of balancing soil cations, specifically calcium, magnesium, potassium, zinc as well as boron. We have amended our soils over the years with hi-calcium lime, epsom salts, homemade compost, zinc sulfate, and boron.
As we learn more about soil ecology from the likes of Christine Jones and Helen Atthowe, we are excited to refine our methods of feeding our soil microbes with fewer and fewer and off-farm inputs and more and more energy from the sun.
Vegetables don't stand alone. Livestock can be part of the fertility plan; cover crops protect soil between harvests; timing matters because Northeast Ohio weather makes every season feel shorter than the seed catalog promises. The goal: harvest at peak quality while leaving the field better than you found it.
At the Stand Now
Garlic
We purchased 40 odd pounds of hardneck seed garlic from Fedco Seeds upon moving here in 2012. We have been growing, saving, eating and selling that same garlic ever since. We sell it by the head, pint, quart or by the pound.
Setting the Table
Fruit
In 2021 a deer exclusion fence was erected around our main 16-acre field. The next year we planted 100 fruit trees within that field, adding another layer protection for the trees, hardware cloth around the trunks for rabbit and vole deterrence. In 2024 we harvested our first small crop of fruit, which were grown without synthetic fertilizer, insecticides, pesticides, herbicides, or fungicides. We look forward to offering more of this fruit in the near future, but also realize the path to marketable fruit grown without the abovementioned -cides is uniquely challenging and trying. In the meantime, we have expanded our small bush fruit like strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries.