And everyone liked the kale salad.

We're thankful for big skies, dinners consumed before 9:00, belly laughs and starting over.

Particularly that last one. The idea of  beginning anew is one that I think all us humans hold dear, no matter which season or time of year it comes along.  Each day is a fresh start, a new chance to enjoy the crazy luckiness of being alive.

If we mess up planting dates, we'll get a chance to do it again in days, weeks or months time. If the flood rains come for weeks and inundate our baby carrots, giving us a less abundant Spring harvest, we'll get to try several times over in the Fall. If we drink too much coffee in the morning, act like a total spaz and snap at our partner over the kale bunches, we can recognize our mistake and start over. Not like that ever happens, of course.

We love starting over here. It means we're learning. It means we're living, and trying. It's not always easy--in fact, it's often not.

Honestly, the fact that we're allowed to concern ourselves more and more with how to grow better and how to start over with engines blazing each new season and NOT with what we'll do when we have our products---well, that's just fantastic. People here want fresh, clean food from squares like us. Y'all are invested and interested in eating well and supporting a small family farm in your neighborhood. 

From Day One, you folks have looked us square in our dorky mugs and said, "So, what's next? What can we do to help? When can I get my next bag of salad?" It's  100% spectacular.

As we find success in this business, it is entirely due to the care and enthusiasm demonstrated by y'all with each dollar, email, note and voiced (and unvoiced) sentiment of encouragement. We are grateful for you---the customers, the readers, the friends, the family--who support this crazy muddy adventure. We're trying our best to make you proud and keep ourselves as close to the path of good choices and restful nights as we can. Our community has done nothing but show us love, interest, faith and none too few well-timed pats on the back. They mean the world. You keep us going.

 2015 is fat with experience.

The months of making nearly zero profits while our fields were all underwater to the winning of grants and the gaining of chickens (and the loss of some of said chickens) and a zillion other personal & farmish achievements and struggles, it's been quite the year. Not the year we expected, and thank goodness for that. Alex turned 30 and I turned 29 this year. If we were able to predict how our year would go at this point in our lives, I don't even want to imagine how disgustingly bored we would be. The whining from me alone would be interminable. 

photo courtesy of The Urban Exodus, 2015

At Thanksgiving, we traveled to Austin to visit family. A lavish spread of food was provided, but we brought along a huge kale salad, a cooler of bok choy and several dozen eggs. ( What can I say? Everyone in the family already knew we were stalk-eating weirdos.) The salad was gobbled up. I felt inordinately proud of how well-received it was. Those leaves were picked by hand, from our fields.  Alex put it together, and we hoped it would taste good enough to eliminate any lingering cliche of the two liberal-arts grads who went to start an organic farm and love quinoa and--of course--brought a kale salad to Thanksgiving. And I think it did.  Or maybe it didn't. But it didn't matter, because it felt good to have our family ask for more of something we grew and put together just for them.

More importantly, I'm happy to be that quinoa-eating goober, and I'm lucky to do it with the best person I know. And moreover, we're lucky for this life and damn lucky to have folks around who care, invest and support us.  We won some kind of cosmic lottery with our customers, our friends in the flesh, our friends from the wacky-yet-sincere internet, our fellow farmers young and old, and our dear, dear family. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa, Happy New Year and gladness to everyone.

Cheers to y'all, because it wouldn't be any fun at all without you.