Artemis Farm Aerial — The farm, with Haystack Mountain & the Front Range behind. Photo by Matt K’s drone!

It was our first year on our new leased land, with our new farm partners. You can read more about how we got the land here.

It was so fast, and so slow. It was so joyful, and so heartbreaking. It was a dream come true, and a sometimes nightmare. It was carving the first faint outlines of a sculpture from a block of raw stone.

Treehouse Farm Collective Members — Four new homies in our new digs, Jan 21st.

Cleaning hemp stalks, plastic mulch, & drip tape.

We cleaned up four acres of hemp stalks, plastic, and old drip tape left behind by the previous tenant. We shaped and built our own permanent beds. We spread mulch, and compost, and more compost.

We got chickens and built them a coop and ate many eggs and watched the resident bobcat grab and eat one while being pursued by a coyote. The bobcat growled at me once from the rafters of the chicken coop and a few weeks later got into the coop and ate 3 more chickens. We’ll get more. We got a real chicken tractor and we’ll get electric fencing soon.

We planted, and planted, and planted, and planted. We built six hoop houses. We wrote six subleases. We grew and designed for ten weddings, 25 flower share members for 16 weeks, and five weeks of the Nederland Farmers Market. We made awesome, exciting wholesale relationships with the Colorado Flower Collective and Longmont Florist.

We watched Matt sow an acre of India Jammu wheat in February, with seed from Moxie Bread Co., and watched it sway, four feet tall, in June. His friend and mentor John Ellis used an old swather to cut it down after it had lodged in a hailstorm, and he borrowed a combine from Black Cat Farm to get the grain from the chaff. Our neighbor Luke Cushman baled the straw, and we sat on the bales at the Hoe Down, and used it to mulch our tulips in the fall. In the fall, we ate pizza made with flour from our farm’s grain.

We hosted nine on-farm workshops on growing and floral design and we loved them so much that we’re hosting 10 next year!

We bought a little farm truck! And a refrigerated van! The van overheated and came to a halt 10 minutes off the lot, with my first spring flower share delivery inside. It got fixed, eventually, and now runs pretty good thanks to an excellent mobile mechanic. But I did scream at the top of my lungs at the dealer on the phone. Not sorry.

We moved into the farmhouse in July. It was exhausting, and almost broke us, and we love our new house and we’re so grateful to live on our farm.

We saw the same few great blue herons fly over the farm day after day. We watched red-tailed hawks and Swainson’s hawks and golden eagles and bald eagles and northern harriers and great horned owls surf the winds and roost in our trees and eat the mice. We blessed them and felt blessed by them.

We wore mosquito netting hats, scratched our thousands of mosquito bites, and watched bull snakes wend their way through the beds in search of mice and voles. Once, coming home from market, we saw a black bear right at our gate.

We weathered snow and hail and smoke and drought. We felt like the world was suffocating in July and August when the wildfire smoke closed in. We listened to the red-winged blackbirds singing in the brush in winter, and the Woodhouse toads in the pond in spring, and the cows lowing in the pasture in summer, and the wind whistling through the trees and the coyotes howling together in fall moonlight. We are praying for rain and snow right now.

We harvested over 65,000 stems of flowers, and we think they must have caused 65,000 smiles to radiate out over our community.

We laughed and cried SO HARD. We learned that we made the right choice of partners, because Cody and Melissa and Matt are so passionate, and caring, and clear, and kind. We learned that we could laugh and cry with them without restraint, and it felt so good. We were featured in 3 different publications! You can see two of the articles here and here.

Cody and Mel say “Good Job” to each other, and they started saying it to me, when I was out in the field, alone, and honestly I’ve never felt so happy to hear that kind phrase. So we started saying Good Job all the time. Try saying it to yourself some time.

We hosted a gorgeous and delicious Meadowlark Farm Dinner, and the Flatirons Young Farmers Coalition Hoe Down, both featuring food from the farm.

We planted 700 peonies and thousands of other perennials, because we are STAYING. We watched the ditch company tear down the wall of trees along our ditch that had been growing for 20 years, and made plans to sow seeds on the bare earth.

We built studio tables. We built irrigations systems. We built temporary hoop houses and shade houses and greenhouse tables and a seedling cart and a giant walk-in cooler. We built a little composting toilet shack that blew down in the wind, so we got a little tent that fell apart after a few months. We’ll find a better solution 😂

We planted 4000 bulbs for next spring, plenty of perennials like daffodils and fritillaria, too. We sold 32,000 bulbs to our community! We tried a new method of bulb planting: temporary raised beds, covering the bulbs with lots of compost after laying them out.

We listened to the entire Harry Potter series while dividing dahlias, and decided we had enough tubers to both plant and sell.

We ate so much pizza from the wood-fired oven, which was built by Brian Scott at 63rd St Farm and owned by Moxie Bread Co. Some of the dough was made with the heirloom wheat grown on the farm. We crushed apples and made cider, much of which will become libations at Mel & Cody’s wedding next October.

We found glorious, creative, hilarious Amanda to help on the farm, and on her last day she stabbed her big toe with a broadfork! Right through! She’s ok now. We had two amazing dedicated volunteers, and Caitlin Kenney stayed through the entire season, and gave us the opportunity to practice regenerative yoga with her. ‘Cause she’s a boss.

Here’s what we didn’t do:

Make a profit (maybe next year).
Die (though sometimes it felt like we would).
Quit (though sometimes it felt like we should).

And none of it would have been possible, and we would not have kept going, without the generosity and forbearance and kindness of others. We feel so held by our community of farmers and customers and neighbors, so safe with our friends, so embraced by the earth we have the opportunity to know. If you don’t know by now, I am profoundly grateful to you, no matter who you are, for reading these words and joining us in creating a place of joy, beauty, wonder, and presence. Keep coming back – we want to share our farm with you for a long time.