Bootstrap @ Rippling Water – Bringing the Lessons Home

My time at Rippling Waters Organic Farm is drawing to a close, with only a few days at the farm each week to help wrap things up. The bulk of the work, from seed cataloging and selection to harvest and cleanup, now falls on the shoulders of the journeypersons who will be taking the farm over next year under the guidance of our farm manager Julee Applegarth. The farm will be in good hands with Molly and Brenna-Mae taking the reins and planning out... Read More

Bootstrap @ Rippling Waters – Swales

Last month I gave a few examples of how we battled with the elements all season here at Rippling Waters. I am going to keep with this theme and wrap up the remaining challenges I faced here in Southern Maine and how we are going about fixing them. The earth challenge, the soil challenge; everyone’s soil seems to give them one issue or another, if it isn’t the structure it’s the weed bank, if it isn’t that it’s the calcium levels or the acidity,... Read More

Bootstrap @ Rippling Waters – Discovering the Wonder of Seaweed

An update from Rippling Waters Organic Farm: we are expanding the mandala garden. If you came to see it last season and witnessed the unrelenting vegetative salvo then you know why – it was a huge success, blockbuster. In the name of progress we’ve created labyrinth-like rays shooting out from the center (sun) bed. Piled high with newspaper, seaweed, sawdust, greensand, compost, leaves and hay these beds will cure for the winter and give home... Read More

Bootstrap @ City Grown Seattle – What I Am Learning: Interdependence

Becky selling City Grown veggies at our neighborhood farmers’ market   I think anyone who knows me would agree with me here: I am a bit of a control freak. I try to keep it in check, but the tendency is there to want to do everything all by myself to make sure that it’s done “right.” As it turns out, this can be troublesome when one is starting a business with two partners! It also tends to be a problem when trying to... Read More

Bootstrap @ Rippling Water – The Wonder of Mulch

At a time when the word “automobile” is, in some circles, synonymous with peak oil, climate change, and supreme-wanton-disregard-for-all-things-sacred-and-green, and the roaring sound of an engine seems to impress only the attendant at the gas station or the oil tycoon picking filet mignon from his teeth with one of the thinner bones of an Ivory Billed Woodpecker, I am going to attempt a risky metaphor: our farm is currently a vintage beast of... Read More

Bootstrap @ Rippling Waters: Mandala

 Last spring our farm manager, the venerable Julee Applegarth, was looking out over the top of one of our fields and musing out loud to a gathered crowd upon the fact that previously she was unable to get much to grow in the hard-packed soil there. She stamped her foot, I recall, illustrating the hard-packedness of this particular quarter-acre field. She said it would be planted with members of the brassica family but because of years of tilling... Read More

Bootstrap @ Rippling Waters – Introduction

I didn’t get into this thing consciously; there was no decision made, no career-test administered, or no plan of any sort, not at first anyway. It just sort of grew in me, starting perhaps when I was a boy passing off Comfrey leaves as payment for an invisible meal at a ‘restaurant’  in a game we used to play in the woods. My mother ran a daycare which meant there was always an endless supply of friends to grow the economy of the imaginary... Read More

Opportunities for Young, Agrarian Mainers

Photo: Regina Fitzsimmons Last Wednesday, forty young farmers and young farmer enthusiasts met at the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association (MOFGA) fairgrounds in Unity, Maine for a farm tour and potluck. Founded in ‘71, MOFGA serves as a resource for agrarians by helping them grow and promote organic food, protect the environment, recycle natural resources, beef-up local food production, support rural communities, connect food buyers... Read More