For those of you that saw our post on Facebook August 4, you know we celebrated 27 years of marriage. What a phenomenal show of support and well wishes we received. Truly heartwarming! 27 years!! When you put that into perspective, we have been married well over half of our life now. If you consider the four years we dated, we have been a couple for almost our entire life. I say all this because we do not hear it often that people find their soulmate at such a young age. Yes, we were young kids when we got married. While I am not sure I have the ultimate in marriage advice, we found that sharing a passion is our secret. Something that we enjoy doing together. Obviously, our passion is farming and sustainable living; not only providing quality food and products for our customers but also supporting others in this endeavor as well. We try to support local entrepreneurs, small farm ventures, farm to table establishments, food cooperatives, local artists . . . we are all in this together. There is a saying that we all vote with our dollar and small businesses are the backbone of our economy. We live it, believe it, and are part of it. We see this everyday with the customers that support our small business and we cannot thank you enough.
Now onto what we have been doing the last few weeks since our last blog. Since we finished the first crop of hay, we have now been hauling it all back to our land and getting it stacked in neat beautiful long rows. Who knew that grass rolled up into a ball could be artistically beautiful!!! But enough with the hay. We have talked about hay forever it seems. We have also been very busy with our two Farmers Markets a week. One on Friday in Bruce and one on Saturday in Ladysmith. Both have a great group of farmers and artists that work hard all week long to bring their items to customers anxiously awaiting quality produce. When you go to the market next, stop and ask your farmer how they raised that item you are purchasing. That one cucumber or tomato probably started its journey to you in January. January is probably when the farmer started looking through their resources of what to purchase in seeds for the year. Then maybe around April those little seeds were planted into little containers. From there every day, they were painstakingly watched over, watered, rotated, loved and nurtured. By the end of May, they were then hopefully planted into the ground. That is if the weather was cooperative and wasn’t too cold or too wet. By then you may think, OK they are well on their way. But wait, then there is the daily watch of the weather for frost. Maybe we need to gather items to cover each plant so they don’t get killed off because of our uncertain Wisconsin weather. Ok so we are now into late June and frost isn’t so much of an issue. Now we have severe storms and tornadoes – some farms, gardens, greenhouses were wiped out this year. Their season is done before it even began. Revenue lost and no way to recoupe for the year. The ones that survived, work hard to make sure that the customers still have their produce for the market so we don’t lose that customer base for the year so we weed, water, and continue to care for the crops and hope and pray! By now we are in July and August and we are rewarded with beautiful vegetables!! Healthy, vibrant, beautiful veggies!! We made it, we made it! Remember when you visit your local farmers market, ask that farmer how they raised that product for you. They did it with pride! Excited to share what they did with you! So ask them, encourage them, and thank them! You will definitely make their day. They won’t remember the hardships they went through because they will be proud!
As always, we leave you with our tagline Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food. But also, thank your farmer.