*Alicia, Ben and Shae after the final harvest of 2021*

I’m sure we all feel a lot of bewilderment looking back over the last year and especially over the past two years—it’s been a surreal experience to say the least. Today Ben and I spent some time looking through some of the photos from the 2021 season and we were reminded of the moments of beauty and bounty from the year which can be easily overlooked by so many difficult events unfolding in the world. Despite receiving the most significant rainfall we’ve ever experienced in the North East, facing the second year of a global pandemic as young new business owners, and trying to navigate the changing world, all while trying to hold the farm together, the plants continued to grow and thrive despite these difficulties. Growing food keeps us sane, and the community around us kept us motivated and inspired. Thank you to everyone who supported our farm and us throughout this year, and allowed this little plot of land to pump out produce for hundreds and hundreds of households this season. Through our detailed record keeping this year, we were able to calculate that we grew and harvested over 32,000 pounds of produce off of this little one acre farm. That number blew us away. What a year indeed.

TO BE CLEAR. We may post rosy photos on social media that makes everything we do seem effortless, but we were faced with many difficulties this year. The 2021 season started out very dry, and we were even threatened by a small wildfire that blew towards the farm during a windy day in late March. Luckily the fire department and dozens of neighbors wielding shovels, axes and brooms helped ward off and extinguish the flames before it reached the farm (though it came within 40 feet of our garlic beds). Around the same time I (Alicia) was taken down by a severe infection of Lyme disease, leaving me bedridden and unable to work on the farm for almost two months. Ben and our friend/employee Shae had to shoulder the burden to make sure the farm work got done, but after expanding the CSA significantly, this was no easy task for two people. To make matters worse, we were then inundated by heavy rains for the remainder of the season, totaling well over 56” for the season. This made it extremely difficult to get out into the field to do the work we needed to, and we felt helpless and desperate as we watched the ground saturate and the crops suffer. It continued to rain and rain, and while our farm didn’t flood, all of this water left us with a growing season battling diseases and stress in our crops. Since we don’t use fungicides or any other chemicals on our farm, we had to take care of these problems in different ways. I can’t tell you how many days I had to go down row after row of crops pruning off diseased foliage, mulching under every possible crop and praying for the sun to come out and the rain to stop. When we say the farm is hand tended, we mean it.

*The fire in late march as it raced towards the farm.*

I outline these hardships not to ask for pity but rather to highlight the true conditions of growing good food. Despite these difficulties, we woke up everyday relishing the beauty of the soil we work and the people around us. I have “Do It Yourself” tattooed on my leg, but what I have learned since starting the farm is the importance of depending on one another. These days, “Do It Together” feels like a more appropriate slogan to live by. We thought we could start and run this farm just the two of us—and force our way through the hardships, but we have learned that we truly need to lean on the support of the community around us, and allow them to fully lean on us. Without our neighbors, friends, community members and families, we could have never carried the weight of this task. In March, when the fire was roaring towards the farm, and we looked up to see our friends and neighbors running towards the flames to protect the delicate plantings, we saw that this farm has become so much more than a place to grow food—it has become a place to grow community too. And during a time where we have been forced to be separate from one another, and our social bonds are becoming weaker and more breakable, something as simple as good food can strengthen these ties. We all need to eat, we all need each other and to see these fundamental aspects of humanity collide on this acre of land has been the most fulfilling venture of our lives.

I sit here writing in the first week of 2022, as we are about to enter our fourth year on this land in Troy. The past years have flown by—we have seen babies born who are now children, we have watched the soil we work become more fertile and resilient in our hands. We have also made a lot of mistakes, both on the farm, in community and personally, and if we’re good at anything, it is learning from these missteps and trying to get better the following year. Farming has a strong cyclical nature to it—we hibernate in the winter and the next growing season is a fresh start. We review and scrutinize everything we have done that we need to improve over the winter, and then we lay out a plan to shift habits to create better outcomes. This ebb and flow keeps momentum high but also doesn’t allow us to become complacent. There are so many areas we need to improve, in every aspect of the farm, and we will continue to grow, learn and do better for the soil and the community as each year goes by.

During our first CSA pickup of 2021, I stood at the farm stand and met our new and returning members, after not seeing many of them during the entire 2020 growing season. So many people came up to me and told me that the farm was the thing that got them through the difficulties of the pandemic, and without this food, and the routine of coming to the farm to get their box of veggies, they would have lost it. I didn’t fully understand the power of what this place meant to so many people until hearing this sentiment over and over again. What our members didn’t know was that they were keeping us sane too—everyday we woke up with them in mind, and knew that failure wasn’t an option as long as these people were in our lives. The community kept us going and in return we kept them fed.

Thank you for taking the time to read these rambling reflections of growing food on this little plot of land. You can find more by following us on Instagram or Facebook as we dive headfirst into the season ahead.

Sincerely,

Alicia + Ben

Farmers, Edible Uprising Farm

What. A. Year.