Hill and Hollow Farm

Robin and Paul have been operating a CSA (Community Supported Agricultural) here in Kentucky for almost eight years now. In addition to vegetables, they raise chickens, both for eggs at home and for broilers at market, some sheep, a dairy cow, and other animals variously from time to time, including two children.

The lovely shack you can see behind the Magic Hatchback was their home for the first couple of years. It looks better from the outside.

Robin and Paul have been expanding their farm recently, having added sixty acres to their original ninety acres of bottom land and forested hills. A mostly year-round creek runs through their place, Flat Rock Creek, so named because the slate that lies under most of the Apalachians runs almost dead level around here. Paul says the creeks were once designated as official roads - despite the occasional drop off they can easily be navigated, even by so low a rider as the Magic Hatchback.

These days Robin and Paul live mostly in the house they built for themselves, along with the (mostly) outdoor kitchen and dining room, with local timber and recovered materials, which you can see at the center in the background. A green house, used for propagating and seed germination, is soon to be joined by a "high tunnel," an inflated, double-walled greenhouse where vegetables can be grown to harvest. The high tunnel will allow Hill and Hollow CSA to extend their season to nearly the full year with cool weather vegetables.

The weather can be tricky here in central Kentucky. During my stay here there have been t-shirt days separated by rain and nights that leave half an inch of ice on the rain-water collection barrels that are used here for bathing.

There is no doubt that farming is hard work. We worked roughly eight hours a day, six days a week, except when we got rained out, tilling some by hand, seeding trays for germination, and working on some of the endless construction and the inevitable clean up. Then, there is always the late night (early morning) necessity to stoke up the wood stove to keep yourself warm.

Thunder is rumbling in the distance, and I have to cross the creek to get to my bed in the shack. Such is life.