2024: Our Seventh Season

Another year on the farm!

The season always goes by so fast, and at the end, it’s hard to remember what even happened. But with Eliza's words (she actually wrote the text, so any first-person reference to "I" below is actually her) combined with (mostly) my photos, we've pieced together our annual recap of the events on the farm here at Lilliputopia — year seven.

Farm store connections: Five years of farm store fun

It’s hard to think we’ve been running the store for five years now, since we remodeled the old building and Solé partnered with me to operate the shop. Now she and Mahogany live in NY state, and we continue to operate and collaborate. Every year we meet many new people and together we create a fun and useful farm store experience. In our emails, we try to spotlight and celebrate at least one of our vendors each week.

There are over 35 different local participating vendors now. Every season we get a few more and it is exciting to identify new local talent. For instance, this year we welcomed:

Faith who creates macramé‚ as Sticks & Strings Macramé, Susie with her cute reusable mesh bags selling a Sew Q, produce from Oso Honey Farm (Henry the owner is the guy above with the carrots), April Showers Soap, Gretchen with Purple House Chocolate, Rough Cut Soaps & Sundries, Vida the creator of beautiful wreaths as Wild Branch Studios, and Jenn with Moonrise Metal Works, crafter of the most lux garden markers you've ever seen.

Sadly, some folks have moved on, due to new career ventures or a move out of the state. So for this reason, we will no longer be carrying Able Hemp or Patriot Preserves (Christian, Gwen and little Oliver above). Please let us know if you or someone you know may be a good fit for selling products through the store. Word-of-mouth is the most effective way for our small business to thrive, so please contact us!

Fruit and veggy production on the farm

It was an exceptional year for our dry plot. We decided to till in the spring, which relieved some compaction and made it much easier to plant. In addition, the summer was unseasonably mild, with a few rains in August and September, allowing for very nice outdoor working conditions and a long growing season for the plants. July was very hot, but bearable, and we had little to no wildfire smoke. The rain in the late summer meant that many of the tomatoes split or cracked, but we had so many that it didn’t matter too much.

Sadly, my patch of bindweed continues to increase in size every year and nothing that I do seems to slow it down. Thankfully, moles and gophers ("mophers", we say) gave us a break this year and left us alone. Still, we had our usual problems with aphids in the high tunnel, and a new field pest appearance, squash bugs. Overall, it was a good year.

Fundraising, projects and grants

I usually apply for a few small grants (<$10,000) during the winter. This year we were lucky to receive the food bank producer grant again, as well as a Oregon disaster resilience grant. The disaster resilience grant helped pay for a second set of 3,000 gal water catchment tanks. These were hooked up to our existing pair of 3,000 gal tanks, doubling our capacity to collect rain water!

We had often run out of rain water in July/August, but with this improvement we should be able to last a bit longer during the summer. They can also be used for fire suppression, if necessary. The tanks were installed both times by a local business called Grady Barrels, and we were satisfied with the entire process.

Our seasonal volunteers

Every season we have different volunteers (WWOOFers) that travel here from all over the globe. In the spring, we welcomed Ruby, from Manchester England, who has become a great friend and was an enormous help. Ruby worked on everything from seeding to weeding. She's a wizard with a weedwacker, and has been a big help with several construction projects.

Jace was with us for several weeks. He was from Salt Lake City area and helped with some building projects and a lot of earth moving. He had a pretty wildly eclectic taste in music and a friendly, cheery disposition.

We were so grateful to meet Lenora who helped us so much this year with lots of weeding, mulching, harvesting and foraging. She was also able to lend a hand as a seasoned builder in some sensitive deconstruction in a materials salvaging operation. She has become a good friend and we have continued to appreciate her house- and pet-sitting expertise.

We owe a debt of gratitude to so many other people, too numerous to mention. New friends, old friends, future friends. The best part of this farm experiment is a deeper connection to the local community.

Wall Update: Structurally Complete!

We made another big push with the earthbag retaining wall this year. We bought a mortar sprayer and rented a higher volume air compressor to facilitate application of the base coat of plaster on the wall. This was important to stabilize the outside of the bags to keep them from breaking down in the sunlight. Also it allowed us to backfill against the wall with gravel and soil. The layer of round gravel next to wall should help facilitate drainage to the perforated drain buried at the base of the wall.

This year we are going to experiment with some different lime plaster recipes to create the final layer(s) of plaster. It has been a true learning experience and an exciting step forward in defining areas for future building projects.

The end of an era: Goodbye to YamYam

This fall was a hard one because our dear little puggle’s time finally came to an end. Even though she was both blind and deaf, we still thought she would live forever and eventually inherit the farm when we are gone! Alas, it was not to be. She was 15 when she passed, and it left us all very very sad. But we treasure all the time we spent with Yammy — that sweet little curmudgeon.

Miscellaneous projects and upgrades

We completed many small projects, especially in our house, that made quality of life much improved. Just for posterity, here's a bit of a list (yes, we go back and read these blog posts to keep track of what have been up to):

• Our friend Mike painted our house and stained the deck and they look great!

• We installed a new kitchen sink with new tiles

• Built a workbench under the carport

• Build and improved greenhouse storage and tools

• Inoculated a few mushroom logs with shiitake and lions mane

• We bought a used Kubota tractor! We are really excited to use this. It’s already been extremely helpful moving our piles of stuff (soil, horse poo, materials) around.

• Thorin with the help of many friends and neighbors skillfully demolished a house in Corvallis to salvage tons of materials including wood and roof tiles. Thanks to our farmer friend Alice for tipping us off and helping make it a reality.

• Thorin and others at the new Heritage Hall held the first annual Blackberry Jamboree, a fun event in Monroe with food and music.

Closing out the first quarter of the 21st century...

We are super excited about 2025 and all the projects on the horizon. Year-over-year we are slowly adding to the farm, improving the operation and growing our community. We passed a great threshold this year. Our e-mail mailing list grew to over 500 people. Those are people that went out of their way to sign up with a pen or pencil in the farm store.

Every week during the season we send out email updates for what's fresh and we include a few pictures and information about products and vendors. If you are interested, you can peruse the last 20 emails or so online, and you can join the mailing list there as well.