Nothing is in the ground yet
A month later, the honest report is that nothing is in the ground yet. Mamma’s garden is still half-remembering what was planted in it. The first tomato is still expected in the summer of ’27, Lord willing. Everything we’ve managed since July, we managed on paper.
The deal we made with the place was that it has to start carrying some of its own weight. Weight doesn’t wait on a growing season, so we started with the parts that don’t. There is a store now — a shed by the gate, more or less. Shirts, a mug, a sticker for the truck, carrying the marks that were already here: the red gate, the barn, the big tree. Printed to order on plain workhorse blanks and priced like we’re selling to cousins, because mostly we are. Nobody is getting rich off it. It goes toward keeping the lights on at the homeplace, and we would rather say that plainly than dress it up. The Farm Store is open.
The Almanac went national, which was not the plan so much as the result. It started as a list we kept for ourselves — who has strawberries this week, which dairy will sell a herd share, whose Christmas trees are worth the gas. It is now 169 real farms across thirteen states, every one of them read off its own website or Facebook page before it went on a page. No fee to be listed, no ads sold against anybody’s name. If you farm and you’d like your own neighbors to be able to find you, getting listed costs nothing.
Two smaller things. Mamma’s Garden Club is up — a letter, not a newsletter, sent when something real happens, starting with the first bed we clear. And the Field Guide is six guides deep now: the leases — hunting, hay and grazing — the ag exemption, the USDA programs, what to do the year you inherit farmland, and how a dove field stays legal. That is just our homework with the margins cleaned up, but it’s homework somebody else can use.
So: a store, a list, a letter, and six guides. None of it is a crop. It’s the part you build before you build — the small machine that’s supposed to earn what a place like this costs to keep, so that the work out in the dirt can go at the speed the dirt wants. The dirt hasn’t noticed yet. That comes next.