Important Dates:

June 14, 2025: Fleming County Farmers Market opening day!

July 1, 2025: Next subscriber giveaway drawing.

July 9^th 2025: Save the date! Community Farm Alliance (CFA) is coming to Loving Farm to talk with us about agrotourism, another one of our favorite topics. Once we have the registration information, we will be sure to share it here. Participation is free of charge but spots will be limited so you will want to sign up asap. The program will include a brief tour of our farm, followed by a speaker chosen by CFA to talk about ways to increase the success of agrotourism on Kentucky farms.

I had a procedure about 2 weeks ago and this week felt like getting back to work. There are still too many non-farm related appointments on the books for my liking for this time of the year. Being able to be among the tall grass, weeds, and flowers in between that time away from the farm calms my mind in a way that I am certain many of you can relate to. Not being able to be outside makes me squirrely. All of the annual starts have been whittled down by my lovely spouse to a mentally manageable amount.

Perriee and I had a fantastic meeting with a representative from the Kentucky Center for Agriculture and Rural Development (KCARD) this week and started talking about business enhancements that we can pursue, mainly to help us with marketing, record keeping, and maybe some encouragement to get our business plan done. If you are a Kentucky farmer, it is a resource worth checking out. We are looking forward to working with them to help us stabilize the future of the farm. Loving Farm is not here for the monetary riches, but ya know, we have to feed these cats and ducks somehow!

We have still been picking strawberries on the daily which has doubled as a form of physical therapy from the surgery I had. The joke around the house is to start offering physical therapy at the farm. Pick food, cut flowers, walk to get the mail, pull weeds, hand feed peas to the ducks, and plant some seedlings. I stand by it! Lots of greens are being harvested which we have been sauteing and freezing and eating too, of course. We have been cooking radish tops, turnip greens, and lamb’s quarters. Perriee snatched up some cilantro we finally grew as it started bolting and tossed it in the freezer for tomato and salsa season.

Zinnia seeds have been sown. The zinnia seeds we bought from American Meadows when we moved here are the ones we planted. We still have like 5 bags of seed that we planned on sowing all of this year. We purchased them initially with the intention of putting them all down in the field. It was one of those typical ideas where the labor to complete was “mildly” underestimated and now we have zinnia seeds forever. Not sure if we will get them all in or not this season. They are kind of old, but you can’t just give up on them! There are yellow, white, coral, cactus and an annual mix. When we direct sowed them, we scruffed out a spot, put a bunch of seeds down and cover them. Once they germinate and are big enough, we transplant them to their final growing spot. We put them in the field, “down at the bottom”, which is by the creek. There was some hard rain the day following but I feel like the ground is spongy enough to take in the seeds and settle them in as opposed to them washing away. Time will tell, as it always does.

While we were down there in the field putting seeds in, (let’s be honest, Perriee was doing the heavy lifting and raking and pulling) it occurred to me that this is the perfect time of the year for early identification of plants; both good and non-desirable ones (native-non invasive, “good witch” plants vs native or non native invasive, “bad witch” plants). The ragweed is still short. The hemlock has not gone to seed and the sunchokes are popping up everywhere. If this is something that interests you and you would like to learn more about plant identification, we offer trail tours with bouquet bars for $25 per person where we can walk our trails, point out some plants and you can make your own bouquet to take home with you from whatever we have blooming at the farm at the time. We can do this at any point during the year since we always have a stash of dried flowers in the cooler months and we love being outside in the cold.

So, the surgery I had was for breast cancer and ultimately medical professionals keep saying it sounds like best possible case as far as outcomes go, but it has still been rough. This was the year to go all-in on the farm for us two and this new-to-us situation has rerouted life in a way we are not even understanding right now. I started to write, “derailed” but we won’t be getting on the track and going on that same path again. Yes, we are still growing flowers (and trying our best to sell them), that is literally all either of us want to do, but the future is being transformed in a different way than we imagined. I am currently pivoting in my brain, trying to find the light in this part of the maze and end up in dark corners multiple times a day, sometimes sitting in the umbra for a bit before turning around to find the sunshine again.

Cliche as it sounds, regular screenings are what caught it early, so early in fact they keep talking about how tiny it is and how good the mammographer is at our community hospital where it was initially detected. There is no intention of this newsletter turning into a cancer report. I don’t even want to talk about it half the time (sorry Perriee, that this does not include you- hug her tight next time you see her as she is living it 24/7). It just feels right to share and hopefully buy some grace if we need it because the farm is more of a jungle than usual or if a newsletter comes out late or you come over and there is more cat hair than usual floating around or whatever. You get it. Thanks as always for your support and for following along.