Yesterday, while I planted 400 kobocha squash seeds as part of a Washington State Soil Health Committee trial, Paul gave a tour to a group attending a 3-day farm-to-table retreat at nearby St. Andrews House. Sometime this month, we'll welcome a class from a local elementary school, all of this in an effort to make real our tagline: Growing Good Food, Building Community, Sustaining the Land. We've gone round and round about what to call our model: Communal, Collaborative, Cooperative, Coordinated, none of which is quite accurate, so I have decided to just declare it Co Farming, after LB called it "the C word" at our last board meeting, before immediately realizing that wasn't going to work. For a long time, while we tried to get this business going, you could sense that we were not taken seriously: a bunch of city escapees from Seattle and L.A. playing "Farm." You could feel the condescension from the building supply store owners to the guy who dug our wells. So it felt gratifying yesterday to be asked questions as if we knew what we were doing, and then to come home and read this comment on Facebook:
There is so much to love about this Farm. The Farmers and food, of course. But they also are a wonderful example of sustainable agriculture, being stewards of the environment, and working in collective ways. A community asset in so many ways.
--Kaylyne Patricia, Market Manager Shelton Farmers Market