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dear occupants of the blogosphere,

i write to you from teal creek. and no, i don't mean the farm -- although we're close to that too -- but the actual creek. its gurgles and splashes are woven into the silence along with occasional bird song, crunching grass, and a soft breeze.
 
the past few weeks have been chock-full of ... oh, all sorts of things. last saturday i was frantically power-walking the length of portland state's campus in search of a farmers' market that didn't exist.  the saturday before that i was watching an awesome funk band perform for free; now i'm writing to you on a quiet meadow in rural oregon.  who know all this would happen in so short a span?

rewind to march 4. alison and i leave tucson, the goats, ihler, and the desert. we get lost in phoenix. we get on plane to pasco, wa and crash for the night. we take the redeye train through the columbia river gorge (stunning) to portland. spend nine days there with our friend carrie, eating and sipping and listening to what the city.has to offer. we did a hilarious assortment of activities -- from art museums to lectures by bill nye (who is a jerk, as it turns out) to many a rainy afternoon knitting and sampling the city's famous coffee. we enter a nightmare of public transportation and eventually reach salem, where our two new farmer friends meet us and take us to our new home.

Keith and Sloan are an older couple who run Teal Creek Farms. Their land out here is breathtaking -- their farm slopes down a gentle pasture, through a meadow and ends at the very cold waters of Teal Creek.  They've one snuggly, silly dog (Oakley), a neighbor dog who basically lives with them (Duke), 12 chickens, 4 crazy cats, four ewes, and nine lambs.  Alison and I watched the last two lamb births for the season, and I could hardly speak about it.  It was positively mind-blowing and beautiful.

Alison and I live in an old trailer known as The Prowler.  We and the farmers eat all our meals together and work in the greenhouses or with the lambs most of the day.  All this is in preparation for TomatoFest, their annual sale in May of tomato plants to customers around central Oregon.  Days are still starting out frosty but quickly warm up to the 60s by lunchtime.  I still can't believe how therapeutic it is to be here -- walking outside at night to silence and cold breezes is a welcome change from car horns and city buzz.

On the note of my last post, I can't wait to go to market with Keith and Sloan.  Their market sounds much slower and like a very different crowd than what I'm used to.  They sell at the oldest market in Oregon, and one of their regulars is a 90+ old woman who wears gaudy costume jewelry and demands a hug from Sloan every week.  Plus, Sloan (she semi-manages the market as well) invited us to a training! Oregon just passed a lw that allows food stamps to be redeemed for fresh fruits and veggies at farmers' markets, so Sloan has to train her vendors on how to handle the new flux of customers and the logistics of food stamps.  !!!

 

And that, friends, leads us to now.  Alison is reading The Beekeeper's Handbook while I am studying our newly-found quiet farm life.  As always, I'll keep you posted ---

Kavita