Family Update #18 Spring - Fall 2023
Happy Advent! At a certain point we should just admit that we are bad at blogging. Somehow the demands of actually farming interrupt our ability to share with others what we are doing. Below is an attempt to share the last 9 months of work, joy and the occasional set-back.
If a picture is worth a thousand words then its probably not enough, so we added some captions throughout to make sense of what’s been going on at Isidro Acres.
Turning dirt into soil.
In addition to the dozens of small projects we’ve tackled (some with success and others with additional opportunities for humility) the ongoing and never ending project of moving poop continues. Loads and loads or organic material, compliments of a local cattle operation, are carefully mixed into with our native dirt to produce fertile soil. The stuff that healthy plants need to grow and become nutrient rich.
In addition to shoveling loads of manure, and feeding our animals to produce more manure (as well as providing us with milk, eggs and meat), we planted a few dozen oaks, mulberries and persimmons.
We also improved and built out our chicken, duck and turkey area. The new area prevents predators from coming in, and has a cleanable coops and accessible roosts to collect eggs.
We also moved the big shed and added on a 12x12 welding booth.
Not all work.
We work for the sake of leisure, not the other way around. Making time for enjoying the fruits of our labor included lots of celebration. From first communions to first canoeing trips, our Spring and Summer were full of punctuated moments of joy between long days of harvesting and processing.
In Memoriam
Sadly, our beloved Aunt Mary (Brooks) passed away after a battle with cancer. The ups and downs were intense, but the family rallied around her, and she, as she always did, responded in kind. She loved until the very end, with the heart of a mother that made everyone her son or daughter.
She always sought to find the good in people, even though she was painfully aware and sometimes vocal about their faults. As teenagers, my cousins, David and Brandon, and I, easily shrugged off the criticism of others, but Aunt Mary’s disappoint in something we had done, despite our best attempts to dodge it, always hit a little harder. Even when we thought she was wrong, we never doubted that she was motivated by a desire for us to do better. Luckily for us, her disappoint never lasted long, she would always find something good in us, even when we didn’t always see it in ourselves. She saw the good in others, not because she was naïve, or overly optimistic, but because she took it as her responsibility to help make them better.