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PCO – Pennsylvania Certified Organic – is our farm’s certifying agency.

Here’s the email I received from PCO and from the Organic Farmers Association this week:

“Dear PCO Community,  

Federal agencies are being directed to implement significant reductions in force (RIF). USDA Secretary Rollins recently announced that the agency will be “optimizing and reducing the size of the workforce to become more efficient.” The Department of Health and Human Services has already eliminated over 10,000 positions, and USDA employees have received a second round of deferred resignation offers. We anticipate that decisions regarding National Organic Program (NOP) staffing are imminent.

The National Organic Program oversees a U.S. organic sector valued at more than $70 billion, yet the program operates with a staff of just 85 people. Any further reductions to this already lean team will severely impact their ability to support new and expanding operations, enforce organic standards, deliver timely services, and uphold the consumer trust that is critical to the organic label. Your voice is urgently needed to help prevent these cuts.

The National Organic Coalition, along with the Organic Trade Association and Organic Farmers Association, has drafted a letter to Secretary Rollins making the case for a fully staffed and supported NOP. PCO has signed onto this letter.“

Agricultural funds are still frozen or cut for many domestic programs – the Organic Cost Share program may not be coming back at all, it seems, and farm contracts related to anything from “Climate-Smart” programs are frozen indefinitely. As previously mentioned in other posts, this is a problem for so many farmers because these contracts are already in motion, and some folks have already put forth the money or taken out loans for project completion (federal grants are reimbursement based, so you receive the money when the project is finished).

This past week, “the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) and Public Rights Project jointly filed a lawsuit against the US government for unlawfully withholding approved federal funds. The plaintiffs include: The Sustainability Institute; Agrarian Trust; Bronx River Alliance; CleanAIRE NC; Conservation Innovation Fund; Marbleseed; and the cities of Baltimore, Maryland; Columbus, Ohio; Nashville, Tennessee; New Haven, Connecticut; and San Diego, California.” PASA Sustainable Agriculture is represented as a plaintiff in this case.  

Here is the full letter from PASA Executive Director, Hannah Brubaker-Smith.

If you are interested in learning more, my friend and fellow PA farmer, Lindsey Shapiro, will be speaking to Reimagine Appalachia this Tuesday on behalf of PASA. You can register to listen on to this call here.

We swear!

Don’t  be fooled by this weather, and don’t let it get you down. We’re chugging along over here, pretending we don’t see mounds of snow in the field and changing shirts and socks when it gets too damp.

Also, I’ve been spending a lot of time indoors. Planning, and hanging out with the newest Crooked Row additions – Team Chick, but I do have to say that I have also been sleeping with my triangle pillow a lot.

The day after the Mid-March snowstorm I drove out to the middle of the state and picked up 200-some Austrolorp chicks. These little tykes have completely derailed my days, softened my soul and have given me immeasurable joy in the last month.

They’re hilarious, curious, exhausting at moments, and such…mighty…brats.

It’ll be months before these peeps are big enough to lay eggs, but I’m amazed by how quickly they are growing and changing shape. With each day they get braver, hungrier, and more motivated to prove to me that my brooder room is not, despite my constant efforts, chick-proofed.

Using the light cord like a tight rope. Face. Palm.

So, yeah. This is where I’ve been spending a fair amount of my mornings and evenings. But don’t worry – our original gals (who celebrated their one-year anniversary at our place this month!), are still getting regular TLC as well, and are still laying magnificent and delicious eggs.

This April has been a bit different than those previous. Along with the seeding and the planning and the certification renewals and supply ordering, there’s been planning, inventory estimating, design and redesign.

Instead of our wide-reaching CSA as in previous years, I’ve scaled things back to a Stand Share option, with Market Dollars or a CSA-style bag as you choose (and ignore the deadline in this link- we’re taking sign-ups through April). We’ve partnered with the Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Center again this year for a season of healthy initiatives, but otherwise I’m hoping you’ll be able to make it to the stand for the food you love. Otherwise, give me a holler and I’ll point you in the direction of a CSA grower near you. They’re there, and they’re amazing.

My main focus is our stand. If you know me, you know I have a tendency to overextend, and I’ve done a lot to mentally and logistically reign that in this year. The Crooked Row Farm Market is an incredible opportunity for us, and it also gives great exposure to our neighbors and friends who grow and produce such amazing food in our region. I want to be able to do this more effectively and successfully this year.

First up – We’ve got an Official Website now, huzzah! It’s beautiful. Enter.Net worked some serious magic on my mish-mashed life, and now it shines.

Next up – Making friends: Liebe Media has taken on this year’s Crooked Row adventures with a camera, and I cannot wait to see what becomes of our collaboration. Kimber spent an afternoon hanging out with the chicks and loved it, and we discovered that we have aligned missions and passions that make us wildly compatible as pals, too.

I mean, look at these photos of our girls. Swoon.

Programming – You responded, and we listened. I’m excited to have a physical space from everything from Yoga in the Field with our dear friends at Tribe Yoga (and our other beloveds!) to Healthy Gardening workshops with Green Heron Tools, to picnic days and more, I look forward to spending time with you at the stand throughout the season as we explore local food and local life together.

Keeping Up – I love this farmerliz blog, since it’s been my way of sharing with everyone since the get-go, but soon I’ll be putting out a newsletter twice a month throughout the season to more specifically highlight local specials, events, recipes, and share the CR love with those who aren’t as hyped on the blogosphere. If you’d like to be added to the newsletter, add your name and e-mail to the comments here. More on this once I sit down and build it. 🙂

THE STAND! – We’ll be opening APRIL 14TH, and I’m so excited. Obviously the veggies will be slim pickings this early in the year, but we’ll have early greens and herbs – and, of course, THE BEST EGGS YOU WILL EVER EAT – as well as all the other local eats you’ve come to expect and love. With the Wayfare Baker gone we are excited to introduce The Daily Loaf from Hamburg, and her delicious, amazing breads. Taste of Country will be back with her incredible canned goods – including some featuring our own fruits and veggies this year! Stay tuned on that. Valley Milkhouse, Klein’s and BAD Farm will stock our dairy fridge, Wholesome Beef and Wild Fox are slated for our freezer, mushrooms from Primordia and Hudulfolk Homestead will grace the cooler with LV Kombucha, and Red Cat grains will once again showcase the diversity of the Lehigh Valley food scene and, perhaps, some pizza crusts? Like I said, stay tuned.

At the outset, we’ll be set up partly as a garden center. Everyone’s favorite Teena Bailey of Red Cat is growing hundreds of organically-raised vegetables starts for those of you looking for your own garden spaces this year. I’ve got a tote of organic Vermont Compost potting mix on the way for that same purpose. If you’re more inclined to be a seed-starter, we’ll have nearly a hundred varieties of organic and open pollinated seeds from High Mowing and Strictly Medicinals. Let’s get growing!

Because spring has sprung, my friends. And we can’t wait.

Yours in Peeps and Seasonal Treats,

Liz

One of my closest childhood friends gave me a copy of Amanda Palmer’s The Art of Asking for Christmas this year, and it’s pulling down all these interesting walls in my brain I hadn’t realized were there.

I’m notoriously bad at asking for help. Is everyone? Are you? Even when people offer to help, I backpedal from it (EVEN WHEN I, LIKE, REALLY NEED IT). Amanda writes about her life as a performer, from statueing as a street artist to touring with the Dresden Dolls and Tweeting fans for support, places to sleep with a back support pillow, meals after gigs and, later, a financial hand to launch an album without a label.

She also talks about Impostor Syndrome, or what she calls the Fraud Police, which are the voices in your head and, perhaps, within your peripherals that are telling you to get a real job; to not ask others for things; that you are not good at what you are doing and that what you are doing is silly and pointless and certainly not worth another person’s time or support.

One of my farmer friends used the term Impostor Syndrome last year to describe a feeling of inadequacy. I’d never heard that term before but immediately felt it was spot on, nailing down this panicky, insecure feeling inside me that fills me with trepidation instead of elation whenever a CSA share check comes in.

What do you think you’re doing, asking for money for food you haven’t grown yet? that frustrating, internal voice says. You don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t have the chops. You were an ENGLISH major!

Truth: I get anxiety when posting CSA bag photos.

Etc., etc.

I imagine a fair amount of humans experience this inside and outside noise.  I felt that way about writing, when I was writing  a lot more, and especially when I was thinking that I would pursue writing professionally. I felt like a hack when I edited the college paper. I felt like a phony the summer I was posted up at the Philadelphia Inquirer, covering bike crimes and murders and municipal meetings. Hell, I would feel like a fraud writing an album review, regardless of my prior experience with the band or with music in general. I didn’t feel that I knew enough, was savvy enough, was critical enough to have opinions that mattered.  

Side note – reading Amanda’s book has me excited about music for the first time in years. As in, I want to make time for young music and new music again. I wish I could explain to you how thrilling this is for me. Hop Along and the New Pornographers used to wreck me in college. I once locked myself in a room at the farm house in New York and listened to the Mountain Goats’ “This Year” for something like three hours straight. When I moved into Little House and was sleeping in a sleeping bag in the living room at night and trying not to be terrified about being alone in this house out in the woods, I would stay up all night painting my walls to Side A of Vampire Weekend’s Modern Vampires of the City and a rapid succession of everything by The Killers. But it’s been years since I’ve really let the sound in – I think, at least in part, because I didn’t feel like I was a loyal enough fan to be a part of a music scene. And maybe because I’ve let other humans in my peripherals cast judgements on the sounds that make me happy.

I started the farm in 2013. It was, hands down, the most challenging year of my life. Also, the worst, for a whole pile of reasons I’ll tell you about over a beer or three sometime. Also, in moments, the most beautiful. I was living in my childhood bedroom, trying to start a business with minimum experience, trying to grow food and hoping people would want to eat this food and holding down two other jobs because there was no way this food thing was going to be a sure bet.

See this? This right here is a panic face.

And then, in all that chaos, something started to happen. For every woody radish I was tossing into my compost pile and for every beet that didn’t germinate, someone would approach me at market to thank me for the tastiest romaine they’ve had since they were a kid. I spent a whole season without irrigation, but a restaurant bought a trunk load of my heirloom tomatoes. Friends in my life suddenly got excited about broccoli raab. People I’d known for my whole life and people I’d just met were sending me photos of the food they were cooking. They were thanking me for doing what I do.

Something else happened over the last few years, something I didn’t realize was happening at the time: I stopped hearing people when they said these things.

Because I felt like I didn’t deserve it. I can name a dozen growers off the top of my head who grow really amazing, beautiful food that I’ve yet to feel I can measure up to. They are older, more established and, at least in my head, more professional. Their arugula never has flea beetle damage. They are holding down families and lives that don’t consist of making a giant pan of curry with leftover frozen stand veggies to eat for the next seven days. I spent the better part of a week this winter coming home to hit the restart button on my furnace while I simultaneously held my fire extinguisher and my breath because I don’t understand machines or combustion. I feel like adults with their fingers on the pulse of their careers maybe aren’t doing this.

#childfarmer? #notadulting?

What The Art of Asking is teaching me, one emotionally-volatile page at a time, is that maybe I’m wrong.

Maybe Crooked Row works because it’s a bit slapstick and messy. Because sometimes carrots decide they don’t want to grow in one field but the strawberries are the best you’ve had in years. Because sometimes you find me on the verge of tears over a tub of red beets because I really don’t know anything about running a store, and WHY CAN’T I GET MY BEETS TO GROW LIKE THESE?! Because somehow I got your kids to like chard. And, most importantly, because each year gets a little better for you and for me. A little tastier, a little more organized, a little more like the farm life that I want. And, once you’re in the door (by which I mean the receiving end of the vegetable bag), we are that much closer.

So here’s me passing the hat, on behalf of myself and for all the other growers here. We all do it differently. We are from every walk of life. We are your classmates, neighbors, employees, market friends. Some of us have been doing this for years, and some of us are still figuring it out. But we are here, and we want to stay here, and we want to grow for you. For every farm sunrise, chicken video, delicious dinner, farmers’ market date, farmland preservation vote, CSA bag you love and remember, support us this season. Please.

This one. Right here.

We are asking you to trust us. We want to feed you. Let us feed you?

These are some of the ways I can feed you this season. These are some of the ways my friends can.

Lehigh Valley, let’s keep growing this food family.

All My Green Love,

Liz

Winter is always a very disorienting time for me. At the start I imagine myself recharging energy packs that I’ve burned out and used up over the course of the previous season. Weeding through July, seeding through May, harvesting each week and wrapping up in November means I get to shut off my alarm for a few weeks, right?

And then the thoughts start trickling in. The food thoughts. As I sat bundled up with my space heater at the stand leading up to the holidays, I daydreamed about butternut squash, roasted apples, hot bean soup. I thought about all the berries I’d been freezing through the summer, tucked away in my freezers and waiting to be blended into summer-nostalgia smoothies in January. I daydreamed about stir fry. All the stir fry.

I’m a quick study in my meal prep. Hand me a vegetable, and I’ll roast it or throw it in a wok. It’s one of my most satisfying activities as a grower and as a homeowner. It’s nearly midnight as I write this and I want to pull out the last of my beets and do this right now.

Anywho. It’s about this time, just past the new year and straight on through February, that I start to feel the first tug of excitement for the growing season again. The seed catalogs begin to arrive. My heart soars. I pull boxes of potatoes out of the basement and assess my seed stock needs. My mind turns to potting soil and tomato stakes.

And tomatoes. So many tomatoes. I’ve reeled myself in over the last few years, paring down my tomato choices to less than a dozen instead of the twenty-plus varieties I used to plant. 2018 marks my sixth growing season in the Lehigh Valley, and I’ve taken a more pragmatic approach to what I am ordering and what I’d like to grow. Of course, I still have a whole box of exciting and hard-to-pronounce herb seeds from Strictly Medicinals, but you have to keep some of your darlings.

My farm stand opens again in April, with organic seeds and organically-grown plants and all folks will need to outfit a solid garden, along with the early spring veggies. I’m already planning, and I’m already stoked. If you had told me three weeks ago I’d be feeling this way, I wouldn’t have believed you.

My style of farming, like the seasons, is cyclical. I’m slowly emerging from the cocoon of exhaustion and into the light of what is sure to be an amazing year. We have a storefront; we have excited supporters and customers; we are about to have a whole room full of chicks and boxes of seeds; we have a renewed commitment to document this adventure for anyone who may be interested.

We can’t wait to share the journey, the dreams, and, most importantly, the food.

Liz is the owner of Crooked Row Farm, a certified organic vegetable, herb and egg farm in New Tripoli and Orefield. Her farm stand is located at 3245 Route 309 in Orefield. Visit http://farrmerliz.com for more info.

Craig Finn says it best, as usual:
We’re gonna build something, this summer
We’ll put it back together raise up a giant ladder
With love, and trust, and friends, and hammers, this summer.

It’s a little more than the usual Crooked Row farm season spin this time around. We’re rocking the two-day-a-week Blue Mountain Farm Market in Slatington. We’re slinging teas and herbs and eggs at Trexlertown. The CSA is 50+ strong. The chickens and the veggies in Orefield are happy, and the herbs in New Tripoli are flourishing. We hatched a chick! Heck, we even have two acres of grain to harvest, courtesy of a new friend with some antique combining equipment, for the Wayfare Baker and other interested baking parties.

Redeemer Wheat from Red Cat Farm and Danko Rye, growing growing growing in the field.

Did I mention we’re certified organic now? And we’ve picked up some killer help this year, really phenomenal humans who are self-contained and love being around the farm.

And still, that’s not the big news. Here’s the big news:

We’re opening a stand.

When I was a kid, Wehr’s on 309 in Orefield was a spot we all adored. The farm stand had excellent produce, it was right on the way to visit Dad’s shop, and they always had cool animals we could go visit in the back.

Imagine my surprise when, fast-forwarding to 2017, Dolores Wehr sold the property to my parents just as the season picked up.

Admittedly, I’ve had very little to do with the building end of this magical new project in our lives. I’ve been watching Team Clymer and Dad Wagner and all the other carpenter and door guys for weeks and months transform this barn into a store I’ve been daydreaming of now for years.

And on Saturday we throw the doors open.

It’s an aggregated farm stand, my favorite kind, one that highlights the best of what Crooked Row and all our farmer friends have to offer. We’ll have local fruits and veggies, honey, cheese, meat and eggs. We’ll have organic and conventional food, so there’s something for everyone. We’ll have Monocacy Coffee and Wayfare Baker Bread and Lehigh Valley Kombucha. We’ll have all the people I love, in a space we can share, just for you.

3245 Route 309, Orefield, PA 18066.
Weekdays – 10-6
Weekends – 10-3
(Or whenever the sign is out, for you early birds)

So come on out and see what we’ve got to offer. Come enjoy the Lehigh Valley food scene. We’ll only keep growing from here.

Oh yes. The pawpaws are sprouting. ❤

One last note: We built the Herb Labyrinth at PEX again this year, where it was well-received and full of joy and gratitude. Thanks to all who walked the path and all who helped to build it. We’re trying to bring it to Allentown in the fall, folks. Stay tuned.

Yours in Plant Magic,  Herb Labyrinths and Big Farm Dreams,

Farmer Liz

We are our only saviors. We’re gonna build something this summer.