September 29, 2017 8:00 pm | Fiddlehead Farm

Another growing season comes to a close

October 25, 2017
by Bob Fade

This weekend we will be attending our last farmers markets for the year, it is the end of our second growing season. Farming, for us as a new farm, is an all consuming endeavor. The days are long, our ‘to do’ list only seems to get longer, and we make more mistakes than we want to admit to. Last week, when I mentioned to a customer that we were a new farm and had a lot to learn, she said “you would never know that, your produce always looks so beautiful.” I thanked her and said “That’s probably because we dont bring all our screw ups to the farmers markets.”

We dont usually post pictures of the crops that get tilled under, or the times the bugs got the better of us, we are usually presenting the best side of who we are as farmers. While I love being a farmer, it is exhausting, pushes me to my limits, and there can be no excuses for why things didnt succeed. It all rests on the farmer’s shoulders. I havent encountered a problem yet that I couldnt have avoided by doing something differently.

In the past, when I heard people thanking their customers and saying it was their customers that keep them going, I always wrote it off to hyperbole. But as a farmer, Ive finally realized what they meant, and it isnt just something people say to keep their customers happy.

I want to thank every one of you who bought from us this year. It truly was a pleasure to hear about the joy you got from the food we produced. We received a lot of compliments and endless encouragement from the communities in Saugerties and Rosendale. It is endlessly rewarding for me to have a customer return and be happy to find a certain product again this week while telling me how much they enjoyed it the last time they bought it, to see the person who buys a bouquet of flowers every week walking towards our stall, or to watch a child sample a cucamelon and ask his mother to buy them. It is those moments that helps keep my passion for farming fueled and it is in those moments when I realize that we are doing this together, the farmer needs his community as much as the community needs its farmers.

Thank you for making it possible for us to continue farming. We look forward to growing for you and sharing another year together in 2018.

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Breanna’s new Alpaca children

October 9, 2017October 9, 2017
by Bob Fade

Somewhere around our first date, Breanna mentioned that she always wanted to have alpacas, some time after that, to impress my new girlfriend, I brazenly promised her that I would make sure she eventually had them. She has ingeniously forgotten most of the things Ive promised during our courtship, but the alpaca promise was one she refused to let go. So last week, after moving a newly purchased and previously disassembled greenhouse to the farm in about ten thousand different pieces, I relaxed in a chair while scrolling through Facebook. I saw a post from someone who was dispersing of an alpaca herd a little over an hour from here. We got in touch and decided to go see them the next day.

When we got there, the woman showing us the herd mentioned that she had two special alpacas that she was thinking of bringing back to her farm, they had bonded and one of them was deaf, so they couldnt be seperated. I looked over at Breanna and she was looking at me like the kitten in the Shrek movie, eyes all watery and huge. I knew we were about to own a deaf alpaca.

This is what I saw when I looked over at Breanna

We chose three alpacas, Peaches and Cream, they are white and Cream is deaf, and Stella, a reddish brown alpaca. We went home and made plans to pick them up in about 5 days. Breanna was going to come back to get them in the minivan.

By the time we got home, it became apparent that waiting five days was impossible. I called and changed the plan so that Breanna could pick them up in two days, which gave me just enough time to reconfigure a shelter for them, clear out the pen area and fence it in. Two days later, Breanna pulled in, three alpacas in the minivan, and we pulled and prodded the alpacas out of the car and into their new home. Im letting her take care of them and I try to keep my distance because if they end up liking me before they like her, Im afraid our relationship might be done for.