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Friday,
January 7th, 2022
Volume 31 Issue 1
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In This Issue of The
Wood Prairie Seed
Piece:
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Short Supply
Chain.

‘Cave Brand’ Fruit Crate
Label Art. Pajaro Valley, California. Circa
1920.
Beautiful marketing art from a century ago. The
mostly agricultural Pajaro Valley abuts Monterey Bay
in California’s Central Coast and includes the city of
Watsonville.
Here in Maine, we have retreated to the Aroostook
County version of cave-dwelling and that means long
days working hard in our well-insulated and windowless
underground potato storage grading through our 2021
crop of potatoes. Nature blessed Maine with a
once-in-a-generation big potato crop last
Summer, thanks to excellent growing conditions which
trended dry until that deluge of a near record 10” of
rain in September.
We’re grateful the crop looks good and the potatoes
are keeping well. Orders have been coming in fast and
furious. We’ve been keeping up with the immediate
demand from eager-beaver gardeners in early planting
locales. Most customers by now know they can place
their trust in us to store until needed their order
of the Organic Certified Seed Potatoes which we
ourselves grew. Again, potatoes are keeping
superbly in the perfect conditions of our own
underground potato house, which is literally attached
to our residence.
By design, Wood Prairie Family Farm is 100% free of
middlemen. We offer to you the best potatoes and
the world’s SHORTEST supply chain:
from our potato fields to our on-farm potato storage
then shipped directly to you at the proper time for
Spring planting!
Please place your order now while selection is at its
best. You can have confidence that we will keep
your potatoes safe and sound, and that we will ship
your order to you at the right time, just as we
have successfully done for over 30 years.
Thanks, stay warm and stay safe!
.
Caleb,
Jim & Megan Gerritsen & Family
Wood Prairie Family Farm
Bridgewater,
Maine
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Wood Prairie Family
Farm Photos.

Shifting
Gears: Winter Finishes Outside Work on New Wood
Prairie Expanded Packing Shed & Office. Northern Maine does
not deal in subtlety. When the Fall turns into Winter, it is
apparent to everyone. No one is confused when snow and
cold arrives, when the time for outside work passes, and the
shift is made to sheltered inside work, such as grading
potatoes. Our goal for this year was to button up
the outside of our new building. We met that
goal and made as much progress as the building season
allowed. After the Amish-made Raised Seam Metal Roof
panels were installed, attention was turned to strapping the
building’s outside and applying green metal siding,
also made and purchased from the Amish in nearby
Easton. We got the East wall covered but the other
walls will have to wait until Spring. In the photo
which looks westward, Megan is driving a Clark Forklift back
into its safe harbor inside the building after having moved
around pallet boxes. Halle, our Great Pyrenees guard
dog looks on, overseeing her realm.

Everything is Black and White. This is a shot taken
from inside our new building. The vantage is looking upward
through the wooden roof trusses and wood 2x4 strapping to
which the completed metal Standing Seam Roofing has been
screwed into. The visible outside of the roof is brown
and the underside is white. However, that underside is
hidden by the placement of black synthetic fabric over the
strapping and under the roofing. The underlayment has the
job of preventing moist air from condensing on the cold
metal and then 'raining' inside the building.
The 72-foot long free-standing wood trusses were built for
us by a second local Amish-owned company. Their
craftsmanship and fair pricing are unbeatable and we always
prefer to spend our dollars in our local economy with other
family businesses.

Yes Northern Maine is Still a Safe Bet for a White
Christmas. Even with
the change in climate, it’s still an extremely rare year
when Northern Maine does not have a White Christmas.
However, gone is our past era of reliably White
Thanksgivings. Nowadays some Thanksgivings are
white, while others are not. In this photograph,
Caleb is plowing our yard early one morning last month -
before the crew showed up - with his 9-foot 'Boss'
snowplow mounted on a 4WD Diesel F250 Ford pickup
truck. It takes Caleb a full 4 hours to plow
everything out after a 6-8" snowfall. Every
week we have tractor-trailers come in to pickup or
deliver, and those big rigs need plenty of room to be able
to turn around without getting stuck.

Amy Gerritsen Rescues Neveah the Cat. We’ve
all heard of cats getting stuck up in trees and unable to
get down. During today’s snowstorm, Amy ventured
outside only to hear the cries of a somewhat desperate cat
stranded atop the snowy roof. Old-timer Neveah
(that’s ‘Heaven’ spelled backwards) had apparently
discovered an unfinished nook or cranny in the new
building through which she could slither to cold freedom
in the outside world. The impact of the
blowing cold snow seemed to have shocked her from the
ability to retrace her steps and find her way back
inside. So, Amy climbed onto some scaffolding
and came to Neveah’s rescue. Amy
is now on Christmas break after completing her first
semester at Husson University in Bangor, where she is an
eager Occupational Therapy major. She’s had a good
start and her hard-won 3.8 GPA earned her a place on the
President’s List. Over break, she has been working
steady and helping her mother Megan update, organize and
bag up thousands of seed packets of our growing
collections of Organic
Vegetable Seed, Organic
Herb Seed and Organic
Flower Seed. In another week she’s back
to hitting the books in Bangor.

Photographer Russell French Begins His "About Organic"
Series on 'Instagram.' Our friend,
Russell French, longtime and talented photographer in
Portland has begun a series on Instagram
entitled "About Organic." Here is Russell's thumbnail
description: “About Organic - Jim Gerritsen.
'The better we understand nature, the more we advance and
the greater our success.' " You’ll want to read Jim’s
full statement as he has contributed a great deal to the
success of the organic community in Maine. See the
link to my
website in my profile. Farmers like Jim
and Megan and now their kids are the cornerstone to many
communities in our rural state. Thank you, Jim, for your
patience and support over the years.”
And so here is that referenced Full Statement:
Jim Gerritsen, Wood Prairie Family Farm,
Bridgewater, Maine
As a rule, we Americans have a poor track
record when it comes to achieving sustainability
in managing resources, such as in farming,
fishing and forestry. From an early age, I
wanted to better understand how agriculture
could fulfill our legitimate needs as human
beings and do so in a manner that was gentle on
the planet. The right path dawned
nature-centric, working in harmony with nature –
and leaving the land, the fisheries and the
forest in a better condition for our future
generations.
What we now call organic farming originated 125
years ago as a protest against the rise of the
‘modern’ age of agriculture which heralded
purchased inputs, depleted the soil and devalued
experiential knowledge. Displaying full hubris,
the new 'modern' agriculture promoted mankind as
a conqueror of nature. But time has proven
organic farming to be the agricultural paradigm
the world needs. Today’s burgeoning community of
organic farmers has accumulated hundreds of
thousands of years of practical farming
experience. Organic farmers grow healthy,
nutritionally dense, good-tasting food in a
resilient agricultural system which builds soil,
sequesters carbon and advances humankind.
Demonstrably we organic farmers have no desire
or need for persistent synthetic farm toxins,
which are proven beyond a doubt to be harmful to
people, the environment and the planet. The
better we understand nature, the more we advance
and the greater our success. |

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Caleb & Jim & Megan Gerritsen
Wood Prairie Family Farm
49 Kinney Road
Bridgewater, Maine 04735
(207) 429 - 9765
Certified Organic, From Farm to Mailbox
www.woodprairie.com
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