There’s a thing that happens when you’ve read enough permaculture theory, watched enough no-till YouTube, and spent enough time nodding along to podcasts about working with nature instead of against it. You start to believe you are, in fact, building something that will eventually love you back.
And then it rains five inches in a day, your paths turn into a drainage experiment, you find squash bug eggs on approximately every leaf you own, and a rooster you didn’t want to deal with today forces the issue by being just charming enough to get himself rehomed to a neighbor’s son’s house instead of the freezer.
This is the gap between theory and practice. I live here now. Rent is paid in spoons. Spoons I sometimes don’t have.
The birds are fine. I want to say that up front because if you follow along at all, you know bird housing has been an ongoing low-grade crisis since January. This week: rooster rehomed, Omlet Cube operational, second coop still in pieces, Pecan the Pilgrim gander harassing ducks he has no business harassing because he has two perfectly good goose mates and yet. The raccoon breach from last week held. Hardware cloth: doing its job. We continue.
What I’m learning is that the animals don’t care about your systems. They care about your actual execution. The gap between “I have a plan for this” and “I have this handled” is approximately the width of one unscrewed panel on a prefab coop at dusk.
The squash trellis is a war zone and also thriving. First Black Beauty zucchini harvested and eaten Friday — gorgeous, tender, genuinely exciting, which is good because the kabocha is getting absolutely swarmed by squash bugs and someone has to be having a good time.
I’ve started feeding the eggs and nymphs to the chickens, which is the kind of closed-loop pest management that sounds elegant in a Substack post and looks, in practice, like me, ass up and crouched under a trellis pulling off affected leaves and trying to find anything to smash the bugs, because I have forgotten to bring gloves, again. The chickens are thrilled. The squash bugs are not winning, but they’re putting up a fight. (And I do expect they’ll win eventually, but hopefully I’ll get more of a harvest first...)
The tromboncino continues to be the most vibrant of them all, with two almost ready for harvest! Maybe the best thing I’ve learned this year was from Meg Grows Plants and her obsession with cucurbita moschata. While not squash bug resistant, I’ll take squash vine borer resistant because I’m fighting enough over here already, thanks.
We ordered beneficial insects. Twenty-five million nematodes, ten thousand trichogramma eggs, and then they just gave us 1,500 ladybugs and two praying mantis egg cases as a gift, which feels like the universe trying to apologize for something. Like squash bugs. Or japanese bettles. Also ordered 600 red wigglers because I dug up my potato bed and found zero earthworms. Zero. And something keeps digging up my in-ground worm composters. I did get a decent potato harvest, not great, but good considering the effort I put forth, which was almost none.
The potato bed rehabilitation plan is now: worms → cardboard → compost → mustard cover crop as biofumigant → garlic in October. It’s essentially a regenerative therapy arc for a raised bed, and I’m choosing to find that funny.
Twelve rosemary cuttings and twelve lime basil are currently sitting in jars of water on my counter, propagating, because I read that they might deter squash bugs and at this point I will try anything that doesn’t involve me kneeling in the heat. This is the correct philosophy. This is systems thinking. This is also just a bunch of herb cuttings in mason jars that may or may not root before the squash bugs have already won.
The rosemary smells incredible, though. Small mercies.
The systems are getting built. The perennials are going in. The soil is, slowly, learning to hold water instead of slicking it off like terracotta in a downpour. Five inches of rain this week revealed exactly where the bird yard needs swales. I wrote it down. Next year — or maybe even this fall — we’ll fix it.
That’s the deal with a farm that loves you back: it takes a while for the love to start flowing the right direction. You put in the infrastructure, you build the soil, you plant the perennials, you accept that this year is a learning year and next year is when things get easier, and then next year you say it again.
But the zucchini is in. The rosemary smells good. The chickens are safe.
That’ll do.
Hearthroot Farm is 9.5 acres in Zone 7b, Stafford County, Virginia. We’re figuring it out as we go and writing it down so you don’t have to start from zero.
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