I'm Nate. I own and operate Foxfire Orchards in Decatur, Texas. Welcome to my blog, where I'll write about my farm philosophy and goings on at the farm. I like to go pretty deep into things sometimes,

How we're growing sweet potatoes in a cold temperate climate, zone 6A.

In which spring has almost sprung... but not quite... and then it did!

In which I talk about making natural slow compost and maybe raising natural kids...

A random selection of strange spring photos... and compost!

In which winter turns into spring in a couple of days!

About late winter plant foods in the garden, which can help us bridge the hungry gap.

Besides being a hugely internationally popular children's book (it's like top 50 in the world on Amazon), it's also a fact of life and a normal bodily function... so why all the shame and taboos? During

In which I describe what happened to me in the last 2-3 years.

For a long time on HIVE, @simplymike ran a fantastic garden challenge. The idea was that once a month, bloggers would share details of their gardens, showing us what they're growing, how they're growing

I think I've been doing myself a disservice not putting the date in my titles. I didn't learn it was March til the 3rd. What the hell happened to February?! Roughed out shape for the temporary chicken

Last Sunday's post was one I've been working on for a while. I cut about 800 words off of it as I was coming up on my trip that day. When I said "posting for posterity, BRB" I meant that I needed

So @esteem app got updated to work with the new block chain, Hive, a fork from Steem. Let's try a short post to test it out! @riverflows provided the inspiration - a post about wild garlic. Here it's very

Over the years we've collected 4 or 5 varieties of Jerusalem artichokes. However, for the life of me, I cannot find where the rest are growing and I've been digging around aplenty! Still, I wanted to share

Most of the garlic seems to have overwintered well and after a week of warmer weather, got a flying start! That's 10 cm of straw mulch in top. 6 rows of tightly spaced garlic in an 80 cm wide slightly

The weird weather continues. After having a couple of centimeters of snow, it suddenly became very warm and in a few days, we had 20+ degrees in the shade. Tomorrow a new -5C night time temp is expected,

Work is crazy. Shopping is crazy. Steem is crazy. The internet is crazy. People are crazy. How the hell are we supposed to deal with all the craziness when it's literally everywhere these days? It's harder

Last weekend we couldn't visit our garden and do some work there, as it was time for the annual meeting of our local gardening and permaculture forum. The meetup is an yearly thing in late winter, happening

First crocuses started appearing just as all the snow melted the other day! I really love and appreciate spring bulb flowers, their short appearance but long and unassuming lives and their perfect timing,

After we got about 5 cm of sudden snow after a 10C week, go figure, we're again headed for the 10C tomorrow. So as good as time as any to start in the spring pruning in the orchard. Luckily I started doing