We have a lot of neighbors. On Kirsop Road, where we live and work, we have normal neighbors, which is to say, one to either side of our place and one across the street. On Littlerock Road, where we lease seventeen acres, there is a more interesting arrangement of neighbors. Across the street, one neighbor, Bill Parr, our beloved landlord and his wife live. Beside us to the North is a trailer park chock full of neighbors, but we are mostly acquainted with the few who have backyards sharing a fenceline with our field. I would love to tell you a very long story of everything I think I know about all of them, but this is a newsletter of finitude, so I’ll keep it down to one sweet story of one set of neighbors who come out to say hello every day and tell us that we had visitors the night before. They tell us how many and what sort of visitors, deer and elk, and we give them vegetables, you know for keeping an eye on things for us, and sometimes they make us stop working at night and have dinner with them. In another year or two, we will have 85 new houses to the south, and 300 to the east beyond a strip of woods.

A word about the birds and the bees, and the flowers and the trees. We are taking on two new projects this year that we have tried a few times in the past and been more or less reluctant to try again, those projects being flowers and chickens. And the funny thing is, both of them give us a great big warm fuzzy feeling of joy and satisfaction. Yes, these things are some more work on top of our already ridiculous summer schedule, but they also represent what we might be doing with our free time if we had any. If I had realized how rewarding these things could be, I may have tried them much sooner. I know I must sound like a big whiny-pants in the newsletters about us never having time off, but it’s only for a little part of the year like this. Then, we get winter. You know that phrase about making hay while the sun shines? Well, it’s just so. There is a certain time of year when we can harvest everything delicious and good and we love it. I’m not sure we’d know what to do with ourselves if we had some time off. Maybe come over to your house and see if we could weed something for you. Crazy farmers.

Potato stories.
Last week we dug up a few of our weediest potato rows for you. Purple potatoes. The thinking there was that if we harvested them quick then we would not have to spend any time weeding them. Clever farmer tricks.
The week before that we started digging Yellow Finns for the csa, but quickly switched to Yukon gold, because they were bigger and more plentiful closer to the surface. Yellow finn potatoes are known for burrowing far and wide and deep. Yellow finn is our least favorite thing to dig, except maybe purple Peruvian fingerlings because they look like dirt and rocks and are tiny and it takes a loooonnnnggggg time to fill a bucket of them. Which brings us up to date for this week’s red potato. We have about eight varieties of potato this year to share with you, so even though you may think it’s just potatoes again, at least it’s a new kind of potato. Each one varys slightly in texture, and flavor, and of course, color and shape. But it’s not just for show, they have legitimate eating qualities to notice as well.
This week’s potato is named Huckleberry for it’s bright red color. These marvels are even reddish pink on the inside. Truly lovely, good prepared any way, especially for potato salad, for beauty.

Farm fashion news.
One day two lady farmers decided to wear super cute skirts to work after lunch. One was blue and one was pink. The pink lady farmer was cutting flowers and looking picturesque in a sun hat as well. The blue lady farmer was cutting summer squash and here’s where the story gets exciting. Something flew up her skirt and bit her on the bottom!! She smacked her own booty, stunning and killing whatever bad thing bit her and came home with a sad but funny story for the rest of us.
I’m working on getting new photos up on the website, like cute skirts and all, but it’s at the bottom of the list.