Abundance in Winter

Big and little carrot buddies from a recent fall harvest

In the late fall and early winter I think a lot about resilience and nature’s capacity to regenerate health and diversity in its annual cycle. Even though visible production in plant and animal life diminishes in winter it is a time of abundance. We see trees, perennials and other plants go dormant and animals like bears and frogs hibernate as plant and animal life reserves what it needs to renew itself vibrantly in the spring. This is how natural systems work. A balance of conservation and abundance must exist.

Our selection of seeds reflects those everlasting principles of nature and keep that necessary regeneration in mind. We have long term goals of saving and selecting the seed varieties we use so that they can best produce under the unique location and micro climate of our farm. Choosing to grow heirloom and open pollinated seeds gives us the flexibility to save seeds while supporting seed growers that specialize in producing heirloom seeds. Choosing to buy this kind of seed reorients demand from large scale seed producers to smaller, independently owned businesses that tend to focus more on unique varieties. A genetically diverse offering of vegetable varieties in the world creates a safer, more secure food system and more resilience in the face of this climate emergency. Who wants a world filled with only the varieties you can buy at a grocery store? My taste buds, body and mind say NO THANK YOU!

The carrots pictured above is one such open pollinated variety that we've been growing for many years. A lot of people look at yellow carrots and shrug their shoulders and it’s no wonder. The yellow carrots you buy in the grocery store are often flavorless and dry! These golden wonders pictured above are not only brilliant to look at but also to eat. Growing the large quantity of vegetables that we do, we often encounter a wide range of diversity in shape and size of the vegetables that grow from the seed we plant. That is genetic diversity at work, nature’s safety net visible in the sheer volume of the seeds that we grow. Because we harvest so many carrots we experience and celebrate the awesomeness of that diversity. Take the photograph above featuring a standard carrot (about 6-7 inches long) right next to a fully formed but miniature carrot of the same variety that stands at about 1/3 of an inch long. A lovely representation and celebration of how unique our plant relatives are and how this upholds their resilience in the face of ever changing environmental circumstances. The natural world around us creates revolutions of change as a matter of course in order to bolster their resilience and the health of the world around us, embracing diversity and change.