Natembea Northwest

TLDR: Sunday, March 12th from 12’ish-5’ish at Natembea, followed by potluck and any music folks feel like playing. But read on for baby goats. Egad this blog has been quiet, as the kids say these days, for a minute. Not that things have been quiet on the farm. Oh, I can’t begin to remember everything…

The coyote stops midstep, left paw held aloft as if responding to a command to “shake,” and cocks his head quizzically at me. “We’re not doing all that, are we?” he seems to say. I stifle a smile – bared teeth are a sign of aggression to most of our branch of the taxonomic tree….

April is such a goofball month. She stretches her days out and teases us with warm afternoons that invite lazy siestas, while whispering: Hurry, hurry – everything needs to start growing Right Now, don’t waste a moment of sunlight! And we race to get everything in the ground, planted, mulched, trimmed, caged against the deer,…

We wanted to get there a few minutes early, because we suspected there’d be a crowd. Crowds are still a bit unnerving in this peri-pandemic time, but we weren’t going to miss this one. Because the Uptown Farmers Market is an almost religious observance in Port Townsend, and the first market of the year, with…

The old saying goes that the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago, and the second best time is now. The problem is that with farming, the second best time to do just about everything is Right Now. Yes, the farm blog has been quiet for almost six months. I assure you…

With Jefferson County infections and hospitalizations higher than they’ve ever been, we’ve decided that it is in everybody’s best interests if we withdraw from this year’s Farm Tour. We are grateful for the enormous amount of hard work that the Jefferson County Farm Tour staff have put into this event, and hope we are able…

Cars. Pigs. Cows. People. Ternate, Indonesia. A couple of small islands north of Tonga. Surprisingly, not the gun club just down the road. Wait – what? Well, yes – literally. Years ago, when Devon and I were looking at moving back up to the Pacific Northwest, some of our friends pointed in horror to an…

What’s in a name? Back when Devon and I were courting and found ourselves (long story) in the Kenya’s Samburu Valley, she described a minor revelation that the place had for her. Years earlier, when she was reading Deliah Owens’ Cry of the Kalahari – yes, same Deliah Owens – she’d been annoyed at the…

Four years ago, there was a hailstorm the morning we put in all those chestnuts up on the hill. Next spring, on the morning of our hazelnut work party, the skies also opened up with hail and sleet. So it was only fitting that, with spring less than a dozen hours old, we’d wake to…

The last time we had pigs on the farm was…not an optimal experience. It was a learning opportunity. It was a shining counterexample to the dictum that everything is either a good experience or a good story. But that was years ago (by using the plural, strictly speaking, I mean “more than one”). And I…

A couple of days ago I was weeding the beets that I’m going to try to overwinter when a little black scurry dashed between the bits of pulled grass and plantain. Too small and skinny for a vole, too big for, oh, any normal insect, and fast. I pulled aside the clot of dried leaves…

If you were to ask the storm, it would probably say it got held up in traffic. Fall technically arrived yesterday morning at 6:30, but didn’t start in earnest until somewhere around midnight when everything blew sideways with scudding low clouds and drenching rain on a southeast gale. By the time it got light this…