Once Upon a Farm January Newsletter

Author

Sam Once Upon a Farm
January 25, 2026

🌱 The Backyard Farm Update

Summer is in full swing here in New Zealand, and it's been a strange one. We had a proper heatwave, then a week of rain and unseasonably low temperatures that left me wondering if summer had decided to pack up early. The garden seems to be managing the swings so far, though one tomato plant gave up the ghost in the wind - just snapped right off at the base. But the beans? They bent and bounced back like nothing happened.

The hens have their own ideas about all this weather drama. During the heatwave many of them shut up shop completely in the laying department, then a few of them decided that going broody again seemed like a perfectly reasonable response to the chaos. But the hens who aren't broody have looked at this cooler weather and thought "lovely, this is much better" and have returned to spring-level egg laying performances. I'm not complaining.

And despite all the weather swings, I'm harvesting green beans, zucchini, tomatoes, spring onions, chives, basil, blackberries, strawberries, and plums. The garden is abundant in that particular way summer gardens are, when you're simultaneously overwhelmed by how much there is and deeply grateful for all of it. There's something about standing in the garden at the end of the day, basket full, that makes all the uncertainty feel manageable somehow.

🤔 Pottering Ponders

I've been thinking a lot about adaptation versus control lately. The tomato that snapped in the wind versus the beans that bent. The hens who stopped laying versus the ones who kept going. The garden beds that shrugged off the temperature swings while others sulked.

We spend so much energy trying to create perfect, consistent conditions for our gardens and flocks. And I understand why - there's real comfort in predictability, in knowing what to expect. But watching my little backyard farm navigate this strange summer has reminded me that resilience isn't about creating conditions where nothing ever goes wrong. It's about building systems that can adapt when things inevitably do.

The beans didn't need perfect weather. They needed flexibility - literal and figurative. The hens who kept laying through the heat weren't somehow tougher than the ones who stopped. They just responded differently to the same challenge, and the flock as a whole got through it because not everyone reacted the same way. Some went broody, some stopped laying, some carried on. Between them all, we still had eggs when we needed them.

I can't control the weather. I can't make every tomato plant windproof or convince every hen that laying through a heatwave is a good idea. What I can do is build systems that have enough diversity, enough flexibility, that when one element struggles, others step in. That's not fatalism - it's realism paired with careful planning. It's planting more than one variety of tomato, keeping a flock with different ages and temperaments, growing food in different microclimates around the property.

And maybe that's something worth thinking about beyond the garden too. Building resilience in our lives isn't about insulating ourselves from every possible problem. It's about creating enough diversity in how we meet our needs that when one approach fails, we have others to fall back on.

🌍 What's in Season?

What's In Season? - September 2025

Northern Hemisphere - Winter

Planting: This is your planning and preparation season. If you didn't get garlic in the ground by the winter solstice, you've likely missed the window for this year - but it's the perfect time to think about where you'll plant it next year and order your seed cloves. You can start hardy greens indoors (kale, spinach, lettuce) for early spring transplanting if you have a sunny windowsill or grow lights. For those with milder winters, you might still be able to plant bare-root fruit trees and berry bushes while they're dormant.

Harvesting: Winter greens if you planned ahead in autumn - kale, chard, spinach, winter lettuce. Stored crops from last year's harvest: onions, garlic, winter squash, potatoes, carrots. Anything you preserved or put up during abundance season.

Recipe: Roasted Root Vegetable and White Bean Soup - Use whatever stored roots you have (carrots, parsnips, turnips), roast them until caramelized, then simmer with white beans, vegetable stock, and fresh thyme. Finish with a swirl of cream if you like. This is the kind of meal that makes winter feel less like something to endure and more like its own season with its own gifts.

Southern Hemisphere - Summer

Planting Now: Succession planting is your friend in summer - more beans, heat tolerant greens every 2-3 weeks means you don't get completely overwhelmed all at once. You can also start thinking about your autumn garden - brassicas (cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower) can be started from seed now for transplanting in late summer.

Harvesting: Everything, all at once, constantly. Tomatoes, beans, zucchini, cucumbers, berries, stone fruit, herbs. Summer is when you remember why you do all this work the rest of the year.

Recipe: Simple Tomato and Basil Salad - Because when tomatoes are this good, you don't need to do much with them. Slice ripe tomatoes, tear fresh basil, good olive oil, flaky salt, black pepper. Serve with crusty bread to soak up the juices. This is what summer tastes like.

🔬 Science Spotlight

Science Stuff: Why Integrated Systems Are More Stable

One of the things that fascinates me as I try to learn and understand the "why" behind farming practices is how often modern science validates what farmers have been doing for thousands of years. And this month's weather drama in my garden has me thinking about something called resilience theory - the science explaining why diverse, integrated systems handle stress better than simplified ones.

In ecology, this is called resilience theory. A system's resilience is its ability to absorb disturbance and still maintain its basic function and structure. Think about a monoculture - a field of just corn, or a garden bed of only tomatoes. When conditions shift, everything responds the same way because everything is the same. A pest that likes corn has an all-you-can-eat buffet. A disease that affects tomatoes can sweep through unchecked. Hot weather that stresses tomatoes stresses every single plant at once.

Now think about a more integrated system. Different plants with different root depths accessing water and nutrients from different soil layers. Different crops attractive to different beneficial insects. Plants that fix nitrogen paired with plants that need it. Perennials alongside annuals. In my backyard, this looks like chickens integrated with gardens, worm systems feeding the soil, diverse plantings that bloom at different times.

When stress hits an integrated system - and this month's weather swings were definitely stress - the impacts are distributed. The beans bent while some of the tomatoes struggled. Some hens stopped laying while others carried on. The soil biology kept working because it's diverse enough that temperature swings don't knock out all the beneficial organisms at once. The whole system absorbs the shock across all its different elements instead of transmitting it uniformly through a monoculture.

This doesn't mean nothing goes wrong. I still lost a tomato plant. But losing one tomato plant of the many I'm growing is manageable. Losing my only tomato plant would be a worse problem.

At a backyard scale, integration isn't complicated. It's planting pollinator flowers along your vegetable beds so beneficial insects have somewhere to live and eat. It's keeping chickens who turn kitchen scraps and weeds into eggs and fertilizer. It's growing a mix of crop types rather than betting everything on one approach. It's building healthy soil so your plants can weather stress better.

The industrial agriculture system has spent the last century moving toward simplification and efficiency - monocultures, single-purpose breeds, standardized practices. And it's fragile because of it. One disease, one pest, one weather event can devastate an entire region's crops because everything is the same. Our backyard systems can be different. They can be integrated, diverse and resilient.

You're not trying to eliminate risk or create perfect conditions. You're building systems that can bend instead of break.

Did You Know?

Healthy soil can hold up to 20 times its weight in water. This is why integrated systems with good soil biology handle weather swings better - the soil acts like a buffer, holding moisture during dry periods and draining during wet ones. It's not magic, it's mycorrhizal fungi and organic matter doing the work. When you build your soil, you're literally building climate resilience into your garden.

📺 Last Month’s YouTube Spotlight

That's it for this month. Take care of yourselves and your patches of earth,
- Sam