Spring has been a busy time on the farm, as always, and we’re into the full swing of summer production mode as we approach the solstice. Most of the main season crops are in the ground, we got lots of beautiful seedlings to homes in many of our neighbors’ gardens, and we’re harvesting bountiful spring vegetables.

Our Online Farm Store is Open

In case you missed it – we opened our online farm store last week and we’ll be open for weekly orders through November! The ordering window is open Saturday through Tuesday every week, for pickup on Thursdays between 5:30-7:30 at one of three pickup locations: Jackworth Ginger Beer (East End), Hitchhiker Brewing Co. (Sharpsburg), or Allegheny City Brewing (Northside).

You don’t have to order every week, and you don’t have to pre-purchase farm store credits to participate. Just visit the farm store, online or in the Grownby app, any week between Saturday at 10AM & Tuesday at 7PM to pick out your produce and place your order. The first time you order from us, you’ll create a free account on Grownby, which you can return to any week to order throughout the season. In addition to our organically grown vegetables, herbs & flowers, we’re also offering some of our fellow farmers’ eggs, pork, chicken, dry beans, and additional specialty veg. We update our offerings each week with whatever seasonal produce we’re harvesting.

Order here: https://grownby.com/farms/be-wild-er-farm/shop

This week we’re harvesting garlic scapes, head lettuce, cut salad greens, red radishes, purple kohlrabi, chard, three types of kale, dill, cilantro, dandelion greens, and more! You can also find pasture-raised proteins – eggs from Pittsburgh Pastures and bacon, sausage & hot dogs from Blackberry Meadows on the farm store this week. It’s not too late to place an order in for pickup this Thursday, June 11th. Get your order in by 7PM tonight!

If you miss the chance to order from the farm store this week, you can find us at Bloomfield Market this Saturday, June 13th from 9AM-1PM. While the farm store is the best way to access our locally grown food weekly, we’ll be at market roughly once a month with the bounty of the season. You can find the full list of our market dates in the events page of our website.

Regenerative agriculture and the impending food crisis

While there’re many waves of hope to ride from the excitement of spring renewal and so much abundance to steady us as we approach the summer solstice, there’s also much grief & rage to be felt and collectively processed about these turbulent seasons of change. Orchards across the continent are facing a season where their trees might not bear much fruit, after several hard freezes followed early heat in the spring, freezing buds & blossoms and cutting their procession to seed short. With fuel and fertilizer prices high and shortages hitting in the early spring, many farms at every scale had to make difficult decisions to scale back or take on debt to proceed with production for the season. Environmentalists and economists have been warning about a building food crisis for months, and everyone’s feeling the impacts in some way already.

I’m heartened and grateful to be a part of communities that care about each other and the earth. Who are committed to finding the ways forward that allow us to keep putting resilient connections at the center, through whatever storm each season brings. This farm is people powered by strong relationships between collaborative minds, hard working bodies, pollinators, hand tools, soil microbes, small machines, sun, rain, and sweat. Our relationships to you as our customers, our fellow growers, our neighbors, and our friends are also at the heart of what keeps this farm growing. Even if we weren’t running a market farm, I would selfishly continue to choose agriculture over most other lifeways because it physically feeds & nourishes me, keeps my body in motion, outside, hands in the dirt, ears & nervous system attuned to the sounds of wind & birds in the trees, bees in the cover crop, thunder in the valley, and stories scattered across field tasks by people I care for and trust deeply. Don’t get me wrong, regenerative farming at scale is as profoundly physically difficult as it is fulfilling. We run a market farm because sharing the food we so carefully plant, tend, and harvest with our hands with as many people as are excited to eat it is part of what makes it so meaningful. We believe in the potential for more adaptive bioregional food systems to outlast the fragile & unsustainable industrial system we’ve all been forced to buy into, and we’re working hard to weave our small part in the quilt of local food in Pittsburgh, every season.

We grow hearty & diverse crops in living soil, fortified by cover crops & organic soil amendments, not petroleum based fertilizer, and our small walk-behind tractors require less fuel than the tractors most larger farms rely on. We use integrative pest management strategies that involve supporting beneficial insects in the ecology, cultivating biodiversity, and applying organic-approved sprays made from botanicals, probiotics, and fungi, when needed. We’re slinging produce harvested up the valley the day before you take it home, for the same price as food shipped hundreds of miles by refrigerated diesel trucks to your grocery store & harvested days or weeks before you pull it off the shelf. We’ll keep feeding you through food and climate crises, if you keep meeting us in this work with your support and your produce purchases. Whether you order from the farm store, or visit us at market this season, thank you for continuing to join us on this journey, however variable the terrain, whatever the weather.

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Bewilder Online Farm Store is Open