Moon Dog Farms

A Certified Naturally Grown fruit orchard and vegetable farm.

MoonDog Farms is dedicated to stewardship of the land, reinforcing a healthy community and producing great food.  

Sailing the wide, sunnhemp sea...

To feel present, it helps to breathe. If you can simply stop, for one moment, and take in all the sensations within you and the vibrations around you, then you've stepped into the elusive, oft-mentioned art of “being present.”

You have to listen. You have to open up to the world around you. You have to let your guard down.

And it helps if you're standing in a field of tall grass higher than your head, whooshing all around you and sounding like the ocean. It really helps.

Sure, maybe you don't have one of these fields nearby, and so my advice is moot and you'll have to go back to finding calm in a corner of your bedroom or in your kitchen or bathtub. Those are still great options, in my opinion. And I'll need them as well, for as of yesterday, my field of calm, my wide sunnhemp sea---well, it was plowed under.

 

Our experimentation with sunnhemp grass as a cover crop was wildly successful. This tall, graceful plant performed beautifully in our gumbo-clay soils and brain-melting humidity and heat. And it was a sight to behold. Some of the stalks grew nearly 7 feet tall, stretching their soft, silvery blue leaves upward and outward, until our Summer 2 field looked marvelously impenetrable—a jungle fortress of soil-improving foliage that absolutely pleaded you to come and hide in the middle.

And that I did.

Standing in the midst of those tree-like plants and listening to them sway and bend in the wind was like tapping a pause button on the rest of the world. It's good to sail away on an ocean in the middle of your farm, if only for a few moments.

The sunnhemp covercrop in bloom. Looks a bit like orchids.

Yet, like I said, the Crotolaria juncea couldn't stick around. A few of the stalks had burst into blossom, a sure sign that it was time to turn them under into the soil. At the point before bloom, the plant has its maximum amount of nutrients and energy stored up, and those will either end up expressing themselves in the flowers or—if we time it right---by decomposing into our soil once they're cut down. The flowers are gorgeous, but we'd much prefer that they give us a hand in building up our dirt.

McFarmer strapped on his handy backpack weedeater and went to town, laying down each stalk. Normally this would be done with a mower implement on the tractor, but ours is out of commission at the moment. Sigh, farming means so many broken tools.

And so the hours-long weedeating of the sunnhemp wall commenced.


Apart from standing in a tall field of grass, this week also brought us some other joys...

After many days of recovering from pounding rains and a heavy pruning, our cherry tomatoes are back! I can't tell you how exciting it is to arrive at the farm in the morning and spot tasty little red dots adorning your trellises.

The hosui pears are still putting on heavily, and we had the good fortune of an extra hand to help us with harvest. Alex's sister Beth, always a mensch, donned her mosquito gear and sweat alongside us the entire harvest day, without so much as a peep of dissent or frustration. And she let us pay her in okra.

While harvesting that okra, I stumbled upon some little pals conducting their business in the expired sunflower beds. An arigope spider had strung her web across the aisle, which I proceeded to barrel into like a clumsy goal-keeper. Amazingly, it held fast. Once I had disentangled myself from the hand-sized madam, I saw that she had not one but two meaty grasshoppers wriggling in her net. Apart from how beautiful this spider is, we appreciate her for playing for our team.

This little guy better watch out for the spiders!

And perhaps the most exciting bit of news comes from a completely empty field. We've decided to expand in 2015, and this week we mowed and plotted out two new fields which will soon go into covercrop . After that, they'll go into production for Spring. It's very ambitious, as these fields will triple the amount of acreage we maintain. We've intentionally grown very slowly up to this point, careful not to overextend ourselves. But we think this is a good choice, and we will still continue to move cautiously. The time is ripe, and we want to grow more food. Wish us luck.  

And wish luck to the sunnhemp seeds we'll be seeding here, and to the future wooshing sea in the middle of the farm.

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