I’m not much good at end of year reflections and summaries. Lately the end of a calendar year has been a blur of holiday markets and sales that have become an increasingly busy time for our farm, and I tend to crash during the transition into the New Year and try to catch up on some much needed rest.
2024 was an interesting year for 46 North Farm. Many things went right: we had a stellar garlic harvest (the photo above was taken in late May of 2024), I trialed a new planting method for our dry-farmed winter squash that worked better than I’d hoped for and resulted in a bumper crop, we had our first significant harvest of dry-farmed beans in years, and it felt good to be packaging and selling those again. We grew a trial crop of native lupine seed for the Institute of Applied Ecology and had a great yield. Many crops–fruit, vegetables, flowers–grew beautifully and abundantly. Jams and pickles were made, dried flowers were transformed into seasonal arrangements.
And yet, many crops struggled and were off-kilter. Farmers like to complain about the weather, but last year’s weather really WAS odd, like one of those mix-and-match children’s books–the individual patterns were familiar, but how they fit together was not. Extreme temperature fluctuations were maddening, when it would be in the high fifties-low sixties (Fahrenheit ) one day, and then the next in the mid-eighties, and then a day later back to low sixties. Farmer, plants, insects, and birds were all confused and upset and stressed out by it. Crops would bolt unexpectedly in the heat, or be damaged by unexpected rain. Some plants, like our dahlias, were super late to bloom after the long hard freeze of winter. Elk and deer continue to laugh at the individual fencing around our fruit trees and keep them severely pruned and unable to produce. Hungry birds were especially aggressive, damaging crops that they’ve never bothered before. It was hard to be mad at them, even though I was. They were hungry and confused, and just doing their best to survive, and often so was I.
2024 was also a humbling year of injury and illness for me, and when your work is very physical and demanding of fitness and stamina, that can be devastating to both your body and your business. I took more serious painkillers and antibiotics last year than I have taken in the last twenty, and found that it’s really hard to farm when you are stoned on Vicodin, or limping from a not quite healed ankle fracture, and that respiratory illness and hard manual labor don’t really go well together.
Farming is a job where you just keep learning every year, and I learned a lot in 2024. They were many lessons that weren’t super fun to learn, or lessons where it felt like I was reading from the wrong text book, or had wandered into a ancient philosophy class being taught in French when I thought I was in a class about soil biology. It was a weird year! Not the worst I’ve ever had as a farmer, but definitely up there in the top five.
And here we are in 2025, and who knows where this year will go? I’m working on expecting the unexpected, and so far that’s been a good strategy. We are hopefully at the end of an unusually long very cold dry spell in January, with some rain expected, but it might also be snow. Or maybe it won’t? Cold isn’t unusual in January, nor is freezing weather, nor a sunny stretch, nor is snow. But to be sunny and dry and cold for this many weeks IS unusual, and I have no idea what long term effects it will have as winter slowly shifts to spring. I know it is setting our garlic crop back a bit, and we may have lost some plants that I had hoped would overwinter. It’s delayed some transplanting I need to do, but also hopefully has knocked back some of the annoying insects that like to overwinter so maybe there is an upside.
Deep breathing helps. Doing familiar chores helps. Cleaning up and clearing out helps. Making the best plan you can, but remaining open to change helps. Who knows what 2025 will bring for any of us–all we can do is try to meet it with strength and fortitude, hope and humor.
