Work Trade Day ~ Garlic Season

Another awesome video from our friend, Jason, from Sew the Land. See what it is like to volunteer for a day at Root Bottom Farm during our month long garlic harvest. The ending is THE BEST.

Link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o9XuPIE-CM&feature=youtu.be

Check them out at www.sewtheland.com

Will Work for Food // A Volunteer's Day on the Farm

Root Bottom Farm loves their volunteers! This year we have ten people who trade work for produce. They do a four hour shift each week in exchange for a CSA share. We have friends returning this year for their fourth season! It is a huge help, especially with baby Josephine keeping me off the farm this summer, and in return they get farm knowledge, a good tan and fruit, veggies and value added products. One of our newest work traders, Jason, made this cool video to show what a shift on the farm looks like.

Check it out!

You can also watch and share it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yk1zF4_XWkg&t

Spring Farm // Busy Farm

A spring farm is a busy farm. After months of winter planning, we spend the busy season of spring seeding, bed prepping, tilling, planting, cleaning up, organizing, protecting plants against late frosts and doing everything we can before we are in full farm mode.  

One of the biggest upgrades on the property this spring was adding a new electric pole down at the barn with a separate meter. We also installed an 8x10x10 walk in cooler. We found the cooler on craigslist for the typical cost of just a new cooler door. It had previously been installed in a grocery store and sold to the farmer we bought it from. In typical farm style, there were more panels than we needed, but not all the parts we needed. Luckily, Morgan and our friend Mike figured it out and had extra panels for the floor so we did not have to pour a cement pad. It stays cool via a device known as a 'cool bot' that overrides a standard air conditioning unit to cool to temperatures suitable for vegetable storage.  This has seemed like an unreachable goal for years and it has already been a total game changer for the farm's harvest operations. 

We expanded our large perennial patches with more asparagus, blackberries and rhubarb. We also finally planted, my favorite, black raspberries.

We have had a very wet spring and sometimes it is easy to feel so behind. But, now, it's June and the sun is shining.  That is actually how most springs seem to go. It is slow to start. Then you are behind. Then it's June. Soon, it will be October.

Alison is our full time intern for the 2017 season and lives on the property in our creek house. She is an awesome addition to the team and a huge help with everything. And our cat likes her so much that she sits on her while she does yoga. 

Alison grew up on the North Shore of Long Island, New York, and completed an undergrad degree in Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems at the University of California, Davis last June. She’s lived a bunch of other places for a few months or less, and is really excited to be at Root Bottom this summer, which will be her longest residency so far, with the exception of her childhood home and college town co-ops and faux-ops. Alison has had very specific career goals in the past (the Peace Corps, horticultural therapy) which have been discarded as she learned more about the work, the world, and herself. She is now trying to keep her goals smaller and more opened ended. She wants to learn how to be a responsible steward of the land and grow food well on a reasonable scale. She wants to do good work that rests within the intersection of agriculture and social work. She wants to live a life crafted with care, that leaves space for whimsy, chutzpah, and all the little practices that bring her joy. Alison is obsessed with cloud taxonomy, her cast iron, exploring by foot, gluten, and Willa Cather. She hopes to one day have a stable enough lifestyle to play the tuba again. 

In addition to going to two weekly farmers markets, we feed 18 families a week on our CSA and we have nine people that do work trade for their CSA share each week. This year, we also included a cookbook with over 45 seasonal farm recipes. Our farm family continues to grow and we are constantly reminded what a great community we are a part of. 

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

The best addition, of course, is our sweet little Josephine. In March, the newest member of Root Bottom Farm came into the world and she is such a bright shining light in our lives.

She is a big help at market! She missed one week and everybody wanted to know where she was :)

Rot, bird or bug bites? Cut them out. Jam don't care 🍓The good we sell & we glean the rest and freeze to make jam. Zero waste. All the taste. We freeze on cookie sheets so it doesn't become a huge strawberry block later.  

Did you know that Asheville was voted the #1 city to visit in 2017 by Lonely Planet?  Stay with us on the farm!! More info about our tiny house here.We still have some seats at our Aug 5 Farm to Table dinner and at our fun Pedal to Plate Bike to Farm to Table event September 17. 

apple blossoms

Chinese Purple garlic

chamomile for sleepy tea zzzzzzzzzz

We gathered and hatched preying mantis eggs this season to build up our bug eating army. Each egg sack can have up to 300 babies inside! We hatched six. Fingers crossed!

Old timers call it a 'blackberry winter.' It is a late spring cold snap that ensures a bumper blackberry crop. Our canes are thick and full going into their fourth year. It should be a bumper crop, indeed.

And so the red hot poker party begins. The previous owner started with five plants and propagated and spread them around for 40 years! We have hundreds! They only bloom for two weeks and they are such a treat.