Another growing season comes to a close

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.