Hello, farm family! Yesterday, an old memory resurfaced from some dusty corner of my mind. It was of my great-grandfather sharpening a hoe on our old foot-powered wheel grinder. Hoes We used hoes a lot on our farm back then. Naturally, we employed them for transplanting seedlings and weeding vegetab...

Hello, farm family! After a tumultuous winter, spring is finally here, even though the weather seems to be having a hard time getting the message. Farmers are not fooled by unseasonable chills, however. If you’re anything like the farmers I know, you’re already moving full speed ahead: filling up gr...

Hello, farm family! Have you ever walked by a weedy bench and thought, “I’ll just pull a few weeds,” only to realize you then worked for over an hour? Me too. The positive side of that is that I got lots of weeds pulled rather than just a few. The drawback is I now have less time to do the other thi...

Happy International Year of the Woman Farmer, farm family! If someone had told me a decade ago that there would be an International Year of the Woman Farmer, I likely would have said something to the effect of, “Well, that’s the most unnecessary, gender-discriminatory thing I’ve ever heard of.” Some...

Happy New Year, farm family! As I type these words, I find myself straddling the space-time continuum in a way that I don’t often do. The change from one year to another has heightened my awareness of both the nature and passage of time. What is the Nature of Time? In my writing present, it is still...