Entry No. 003 · October 2026
The weather turns
October is when the weather turns in north Mississippi, and it does not do it gradually. One morning the air has an edge on it, the dew is cold instead of warm, and the light comes across the long field lower than it did the Sunday before. It will be eighty again by Thursday. It usually is. But the first cool morning is the one that tells you which way the year is headed.
The honest report from the garden has not changed since August. The first tomato is still expected in the summer of ’27, Lord willing. What has changed is the calendar. Summer lets you put things off; October doesn’t. A spring garden is made in the fall or it isn’t made — that is when a bed gets cleared, when the soil sample goes to the county Extension office so you know what the ground is short on before you spend a dollar on it, and when the leaves come down for free to cover whatever you opened up. The first frost in these parts usually lands around the first of November. After that the ground stops taking orders until spring. So the list for Mamma’s garden is a short one and it is all due this month: pick the first bed, test it, clear it, cover it.
The other thing October brings is deer season. Archery opened on the first in the Hills unit, which is ours, and the first gun season runs from the twenty-first of November. On a place like this, that is not only a sporting matter. Fall is when a landowner hears from people who would like to hunt the back of the property, and what you say to them is one of the few ways land earns anything before it grows anything. We wrote down what we learned about that in the hunting lease guide, and every date and bag limit for this season is in Field Guide No. 007, taken straight off the state’s own sheet. That makes the Field Guide seven deep.
And it is fall in Oxford, which is its own season. The country around town is at its best right now, and the lists are the busiest they will be all year — who has pumpkins, who is pressing cider, whose Christmas trees you ought to go ahead and look at. That is what the Almanac and the Oxford Edition are for. The dog gets a fall list too: our neighbors down at Porch Dog Supply wrote theirs out in what a porch dog needs when it turns cold.
It is the last month the ground will take orders, and the first one where you can stand to be out in it all day. We mean to use it. What gets done will be written down here, same as always, and Mamma’s Garden Club gets the letter when the first bed is clear.
— the Tramels
Entry No. 002 · August 2026
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.
— the Tramels
Entry No. 001 · July 2026
We inherited the farm
There are four of us. Three want to keep it. One of us — the one writing this — wants to be honest about what keeping it costs.
Here is what we inherited: a farm our grandparents worked for decades, thirteen miles from Oxford, Mississippi. A pond with a big tree standing over it. An orchard that half-remembers being tended. A barn with Pappy’s Mule still parked inside. A red gate that still swings, a long field that still frosts over beautifully in January, and a house that holds more of the past than a house probably should.
It hasn’t been abandoned. It’s been interrupted. Our dad meant to retire here and carry it forward — he spent years going back and forth doing exactly that. He died before he could finish the move. The farm has been waiting ever since, the way farms wait: quietly, and at its own expense.
So here’s the deal we’ve made with the place. It has to start carrying some of its own weight. Not a fortune — enough. We’ll restore it one project at a time, put real numbers next to real work, tell the story straight, and let the farm make its case for staying in the family.
This journal is that record. First cleanup weekend, first repair, first thing that grows back. The homework behind it — the leases, the exemptions, the programs — is already piling up in the Field Guide.
— the Tramels