Fourteen inches of snow on Mayday! C’mon! Wet, heavy, miserable stuff that took out about 30 or 40 trees – I don’t have an exact count. Needless to say I’ve been snuggled up to a chainsaw clearing those that fell onto the fields.

The near west field planted to alfalfa, June 2013.

Then in mid-May a look at the fields indicated that something was wrong. The alfalfa wasn’t coming back. Like so many others in SE Minnesota,I found that the winter rains that froze into solid sheets of ice in the low grounds suffocated the alfalfa. With little time to make a plan, I talked to Todd Churchill from Thousand Hills Cattle Company who agreed to replant and manage the alfalfa for the next three years. Whew!

So now I have the tillable portion of the farm leased for three years with a provision for landshaping and limited permaculture preparations. It’s all been replanted now, and we’ll see how the season unfolds. So far, mostly soggy . . .