Important dates:

November 1: Monthly email subscription giveaway drawing!

April 25^th, 2026: Third Annual Earth Day Celebration at Loving Farm! Mark your calendars. We will be having a day filled with fun and music, food and makers!

Happy Frostmas Flowerers!

Yes, it was another super jam packed week at the farm, full of hard work and beautiful moments, a combination you cannot beat. Unfortunately no one signed up for our Plein Air Painting Day, but maybe it was due to fear of the cold? It seemed there was a lot of interest in participation through all of the channels we used for advertising. Regardless, Kit from Artmarkit is coming to visit and we are going to plan another one in the late spring- early summer.

For anyone who loves the cold (or even those who want the heat, but need to push themselves to be outside in the cold) please reach out this winter to schedule an activity here at the farm. We will take you out for a walk on the trails and seek beauty in the gray days of the coming season. Then we can warm up in the Flower Studio over some home baked bread and dried flower arranging. Of course, we love the seventy- degree days as much as the next person, but those temperatures seem to be the rarest, so we try our hardest to find affinity for the lows. Personally, I find it much more comfortable to be out when it is frigid, compared to the heat, as long as my body is properly covered (head, hands, feet). I also feel it is important to continue to move as much as is physically possible in the wintertime to maintain precious mobility, especially looking into the future of my aging body.

The biggest news out of Loving Farm this week has to do with the arrival of our greenhouse! It was carefully delivered and settled into its new spot next to the Flower Studio. Having started moving all of the flower buckets and seed starting trays out of it, it is like, to quote my sibling, “feeding a whale a tic-tac”. It is barely crowded with stuff under the beautiful shelves, and the room in the Flower Studio that I took all of that stuff out of looks so amazingly emptied! This new addition was made possible through a grant we received through RAFI which Perriee applied for and we are so very grateful and are so excited to see what is possible now that we have it to work with. The first resident is a tiny rosemary plant that we started from seed back in the spring, which I feel has doubled in size since moving it in there. Shoutout to Patsy at TZ Sheds in Flemingsburg where we purchased it from who made the process so easy!

On Thursday, we had the chance to host a site visit for the Organic Association of Kentucky (OAK) where Mad got to see the progress we have made since they first visited us almost a year ago! Keep your fingers crossed that we will be chosen for a field day in 2026. Of course, you know we will blast it out here if we are having one! There were two big ideas swirling at the close of the visit: a native hedge row along the railroad track and looking into a prescribed burn for the expansion of our pollinator patch. For the hedge row, Mad tossed out the idea of hazelnut bushes which we would absolutely love!

As I am typing this, I am also thinking about ways that we could fund the planting of natives on our side of the track to help eliminate the need for spray (we have no spray signs posted now), maintain the hillside, reduce space for invasive plants and increase the benefit to the environment. Some of the plants we have been daydreaming about that would replace the honeysuckle and multiflora rose along the bank of the track are viburnum, hazelnut, button bush, willows, high bush cranberry, beauty berry, winter berry and more witch hazel! I am sure there are others, but those would serve us perfectly to start!

At our Kentucky Farm Launch class a couple of weeks ago, we had a speaker teach us about the Ag Development Board which might have grants for projects that benefit multiple producers and invest in Kentucky agriculture. In my mind, that native hedgerow would seem to fit nicely in this box. What if that fund is so big that our little half mile of track would not even touch the budget limits? We could rent an auger and get some nice size plants to get it established a little quicker. I like setting big goals.

On top of it all, we now have 2000 gallons of water tank conveniently situated along the track from our CSP grant that would water a significant length of it. Does anyone reading this have more thoughts on this? Please send us an email if you do! I would love to talk to you about it more. Additionally, who remembers the name of the Kentucky nursery with the native plants and is related to Teresa from Hazelfield Farm? I feel like that would be the place to source from!

Anyway, we rounded out the week at a night market hosted by Derby City Midnight at Turtleback Ridge and got to spend time with so many amazing people. We revived our Squirrely Dan and Darry costumes for the evening, as you can see from the picture were very warm choices for the cool nnight outside. Perriee got to hang out with the cutest pup, Banshee who has the most beautiful foot fur I have ever seen on a dog and we invited hollerhag to come vend at the Earth Day 2026 event! Check out my egg bell that we got from them here! Thank you to everyone who shopped our table and to youse who signed up for your first newsletter and for anyone we got to chat it up with, as each interaction was uniquely special. Of course, the beer was delightful, per usual, but the thing about our local brewery is that I mostly want to go there for the community, and the beer happens to be a huge, delicious benefit. That is some kind of magic right there.