A new Diary of a Young Farmer post by Zoë Bradbury. Zoë shares what she’s been up to in her second year farming in southern Oregon — like plowing for the first time with her two horses.

In this new Diary of a Young Farmer post, Zoë Bradbury describes her first of many asparagus harvests and the accompanying celebration. She made it through Year One! Read more here…

Zoë Bradbury’s newest post in Diary of a Young Farmer. Catch up on what’s new: a CSA (already full!), new equipment for the horses, and the beginning signs of spring. Read more…

January 31, 2009
Dear Winter,
It’s the end of January. Words like “hibernate” and “dormant” typically go with this time of the year, but man, Winter, you’re such a tease this year! Please explain how it is that I ate my first asparagus out of my field last week, counted dozens of new strawberry blossoms, and [...]

By Zoë Bradbury
November 25, 2008
It is the eve of my last harvest and I am tucked in by the woodstove while a storm slams at the south side of the house. The weather vane swings atop the roof, screeching as it tilt-a-whirls on the ridge cap. The dog snores in an overstuffed chair by the [...]

By Zoë Bradbury
September 23, 2008
I have been swallowed by September – enveloped in the folds of peak harvest. The heirloom tomatoes are on. The cabbage is ripe and huge and gorgeous. The leeks are fat. The corn is ready. The sunflowers are nodding under the weight of their own seed. The sun is still shining. [...]

My strawberries were rupturing in the field, the ripe and semi-ripe berries developing rain lesions as red and raw as open wounds….

This is August. And August is so full, it does to a vegetable farmer what many people spend hours of meditation trying to achieve. August makes you empty.

One of the challenges to resettling rural America is land — finding it and affording it. Development prices put farmland out of reach for anyone who doesn’t have a trust fund, or family land, or a fat pension.

The farm was laid out below in all its straight rows: brown fields bisected by green farm roads, flanked to the north by the river. I could see my strawberry patch, and the mosaic of color that is my block of head lettuce.

By Zoë Bradbury
June 17, 2008
I’m long overdue in introducing Barney and Maude, the two Belgians who arrived on the farm in April. They are quite the couple: tireless farmworkers and completely inseparable.
Barney is the sensitive one — tall, lanky, and pigeon-toed, with a bleach-blond rockstar hairdo. Maude is mouthy and affectionate, with a personality as [...]

By Zoë Bradbury
May 29, 2008
There is water. Water on my fields. Water in pipes. Water in hoses. Water on asparagus. Water on raspberries. Water on carrots and beets and potatoes and leeks and artichokes and dahlias. There is water at last.
Of course, now it’s raining again.
But during those few recent days when Oregon was blasted [...]

By Zoë Bradbury
May 14, 2008
You’re probably all wondering what happened to me. Two plus weeks of silence since my last cliff-hanger dispatch about the cash flow crisis. Did she go belly-up? Bankrupt? Are they auctioning off her pickup, her $100 Earthway seeder, and the steel ribs from her greenhouse (now valued at a whopping $380 [...]

By Zoë Bradbury
April 22, 2008
What I’ve learned in April is that the mythic “cash flow crisis” that farmers face in springtime is no myth.
The generic plot goes something like this: farmers spend lots of money in the spring, then make it back in the summer and fall.
Springtime = money out. Harvest time = money in.
Unfortunately, [...]

By Zoë Bradbury
April 10, 2008
Grafting is the process of joining one thing to another, of taking two things that do not share a natural relationship or affinity for each other — and making them one.
In one barn, my sister Abby is grafting a hundred apple trees and as many plums and pears for the new [...]