Farm Stand

On Wednesdays from 4-6:30, starting this week, we will have a stand set up at the farm on Chappy. We'll have plenty of fresh vegetables as well as locally roasted Chilmark Coffee for sale both as beans and brewed. The farm is located just across the street from Brine's Pond and the Chappy Community Center. Hope to see you there!

The Chicken Coop

I have a great family friend, John Pratt, who has been a remarkable resource over the last year. My family has know the Pratt family since I was in the first grade with their daughter, Caroline in Georgia. Remarkably, the Pratt family is a mirror image of my family: an older boy, a middle girl, and a younger boy, all of us the same ages. We all grew up together and even now manage to see each other every so-often, mainly on Martha's Vineyard where the Pratt's come to vacation every summer.

John is a  lawyer in Atlanta who offered me pro bono lawyer work when I first started Slip Away. He helped me establish the farm as a LLC, saved a website address for us, organized business matters with my investors, and tightened up my business plan and budgets. His help navigating the confusing business/legal world while also providing general enthusiasm and advice was a tremendous gift in itself.

And then he offered an even bigger gift. In addition to being a lawyer, John is also a skilled carpenter. He builds beautiful things, and decided he wanted to build Slip Away Farm a chicken coop. He decided to use his one-week vacation in August on Martha's Vineyard as the time to build it. Collins was able to help him, and together they planned and began the building. They put it together it in pieces on the Vineyard, which we then loaded on to a dump truck and brought over to assemble on Chappy.

John's vacation ended two weeks ago and he headed home, leaving Collins in charge. He and Jason have been working diligently on it, and it is now recognizable as a chicken house. They have some of the shingles up, the four big windows will be going in shortly, along with the nest boxes and the most beautiful door a chicken house has ever seen.

The whole thing is on skids, so we will be able to move it around the farm, relocating the chickens to peck at and fertilize new sections of ground. The house has enough room for roughly 60 chickens, which will provide us with a steady supply of fresh eggs to sell. Can't wait.

A Little Bit Distracted

I admit I have been neglecting the blog for the past few weeks. I do have what I consider to be two good excuses, however: 1) The end of August was insanely busy and 2) I now live in a house with no internet (or consistent cell phone service).

The end of August is a tough time on the Island: the summer crowds are at their max, and there is a desperate feeling in the air as tourists try to cram in the last of their summer vacation, and many Island business owners try to make their money, knowing that the demand for their product or service is about to drop dramatically. These last few weeks of summer, we increased the produce we brought to Farmer's Market significantly, finishing plantings of vegetables at a remarkable rate.

While trying to meet the summertime Market demand, we also worked to prepare our field for fall crops, planting the broccoli, cauliflower, kale, lettuce, carrots, beets, spinach, radishes, arugula, etc. that will see us through to the first heavy frost. Our successful summer CSA encouraged us to try a five-week fall CSA, so we scrambled to get the cool weather crops in on-time.

In addition to working full-force in our Katama field, we prepared to move ourselves and the farm (bit by bit) over to our new property on Chappaquiddick. We spent one Sunday brush mowing until it was so dark that we could no longer see where we were running our mowers, excited to clear out some of the poison ivy and brambles in areas that will eventually become our vegetable fields.

We borrowed a dump truck from Beetlebung Tree Care and moved furniture, boats, and a chicken coop (more on that later) over to Chappy, three roundtrip rides on the Chappy ferry. We unpacked all of our boxes and settled in to our new farm and our new farmhouse, which I still have a hard time believing is ours. I keep reminding myself that this is our land, our house (at least for the next five years, anyway), finding it difficult to grasp the enormity of it all. We are just so lucky.

Last night, a double rainbow filled the sky over the farmhouse, and Jason and I walked our fields in awe of the beauty of the place. It almost felt as if the sky was welcoming in fall, saying goodbye to summertime in a spectacular array of colors.