Friendly Farm

Friendly Farm providing pesticide free fresh local produce for over 30 years Fresh local produce grown within Iowa City limits.

You may place an order by phone or email and pick up by appt. We will try to have farm stand on Fridays in pm, also will be at most Saturday Farmer's Markets in Iowa City. Our produce is sold at New Pioneer and featured at Waterfront Hyvee. However we sell to various local markets and restaurants throughout the season depending on what we have available and what is needed.

“An awake heart is like a sky that pours light.” ― Hafiz
04/04/2025

“An awake heart is like a sky that pours light.” ― Hafiz



Landscape, dense with trees :: ellen bryant voigtWhen you move away, you see how much dependson the pace of the days—how...
04/03/2025

Landscape, dense with trees :: ellen bryant voigt

When you move away, you see how much depends
on the pace of the days—how much
depended on the haze we waded through
each summer, visible heat, wavy and discursive
as the lazy track of the snake in the dusty road;
and on the habit in town of porches thatched in vines,
and in the country long dense promenades, the way
we sacrificed the yards to shade.
It was partly the heat that made my father
plant so many trees—two maples marking the site
for the house, two elms on either side when it was done;
mimosa by the fence, and as it failed, fast-growing chestnuts,
loblolly pines; and dogwood, redbud, ornamental crab.
On the farm, everything else he grew
something could eat, but this
would be a permanent mark of his industry,
a glade established in the open field. Or so it seemed.
Looking back at the empty house from across the hill,
I see how well the house is camouflaged, see how
that porous fence of saplings, their later
scrim of foliage, thickened around it,
and still he chinked and mortared, planting more.
Last summer, although he’d lost all tolerance for heat,
he backed the truck in at the family grave
and stood in the truckbed all afternoon, pruning
the landmark oak, repairing recent damage by a wind;
then he came home and hung a swing
in one of the horse-chestnuts for my visit.
The heat was a hand at his throat,
a fist to his weak heart. But it made a triumph
of the cooler air inside, in the bedroom,
in the maple bedstead where he slept,
in the brick house nearly swamped by leaves.



Alice Walker: "While Love Is Unfashionable"While love is unfashionablelet us liveunfashionably.Seeing the worlda comple...
04/02/2025

Alice Walker: "While Love Is Unfashionable"

While love is unfashionable
let us live
unfashionably.
Seeing the world
a complex ball
in small hands;
love our blackest garment.
Let us be poor
in all but truth, and courage
handed down
by the old spirits.
Let us be intimate with
ancestral ghosts
and music
of the undead.

While love is dangerous
let us walk bareheaded
beside the great River.
Let us gather blossoms under fire.



“We're all fools," said Clemens, "all the time. It's just we're a different kind each day. We think, I'm not a fool toda...
04/01/2025

“We're all fools," said Clemens, "all the time. It's just we're a different kind each day. We think, I'm not a fool today. I've learned my lesson. I was a fool yesterday but not this morning. Then tomorrow we find out that, yes, we were a fool today too. I think the only way we can grow and get on in this world is to accept the fact we're not perfect and live accordingly.
Ray Bradbury, from The Illustrated Man



Silence. First it’s a cloud of apricot trees in flower, yellow or ivory, like a thousand little butterflies sown in the ...
03/30/2025

Silence. First it’s a cloud of apricot trees in flower, yellow or ivory, like a thousand little butterflies sown in the fresh grass, moving in the glow of lamplight when night ascends. Fragments of dreams. You can see the red sun setting on the foliage, like an enormous mass of incandescent steel.

Then there were the trees a little farther off, straightening their fragile frames, the woolen blue pincushion flower like an eye and that tumult of milk in the deep stone, and finally the moan of the air beaten by a flock of blue woodpigeons– a silken challenge perhaps, or one of crackled leather.
Deborah Heissler


Spring is like a perhaps hand by e.e. cummings Spring is like a perhaps hand (which comes carefully out of Nowhere)arran...
03/29/2025

Spring is like a perhaps hand by e.e. cummings Spring is like a perhaps hand (which comes carefully out of Nowhere)arranging a window,into which people look(while people stare arranging and changing placing carefully there a strange thing and a known thing here)and changing everything carefully spring is like a perhaps Hand in a window (carefully to and fro moving New and Old things,while people stare carefully moving a perhaps fraction of flower here placing an inch of air there)and without breaking anything.



Once in a golden hourI cast to earth a seed.Up there came a flower,The people said, a w**d.To and fro they wentThro' my ...
03/27/2025

Once in a golden hour
I cast to earth a seed.
Up there came a flower,
The people said, a w**d.

To and fro they went
Thro' my garden bower,
And muttering discontent
Cursed me and my flower.

Then it grew so tall
It wore a crown of light,
But thieves from o'er the wall
Stole the seed by night.

Sow'd it far and wide
By every town and tower,
Till all the people cried,
"Splendid is the flower!"

Read my little fable:
He that runs may read.
Most can raise the flowers now,
For all have got the seed.

And some are pretty enough,
And some are poor indeed;
And now again the people
Call it but a w**d.

The Flower~ Lord Alfred Tennyson


**ds

The trees are coming into leafLike something almost being said;The recent buds relax and spread,Their greenness is a kin...
03/26/2025

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Philip Larkin


Nanao Sakaki: "Just Enough"Soil for the legsAxe for handsFlower for eyesBird for earsMushrooms for noseSmile for mouthSo...
03/26/2025

Nanao Sakaki: "Just Enough"

Soil for the legs
Axe for hands
Flower for eyes
Bird for ears
Mushrooms for nose
Smile for mouth
Songs for lungs
Sweat for skin
Wind for mind




The foot feels the foot when it feels the ground.Buddha
03/24/2025

The foot feels the foot when it feels the ground.
Buddha



Sometimes since I've been in the garden I've looked up through the trees at the sky and I have had a strange feeling of ...
03/23/2025

Sometimes since I've been in the garden I've looked up through the trees at the sky and I have had a strange feeling of being happy as if something was pushing and drawing in my chest and making me breathe fast. Magic is always pushing and drawing and making things out of nothing. Everything is made out of magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us. In this garden - in all the places.
Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden


Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing ItselfAt the earliest ending of winter,In March, a scrawny cry from outsideSeeme...
03/21/2025

Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself
At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow...
It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier-mache...
The sun was coming from the outside.

That scrawny cry--It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.

Wallace Stevens


After that hard winter, one could not get enough of the nimble air. Every morning I wakened with a fresh consciousness t...
03/20/2025

After that hard winter, one could not get enough of the nimble air. Every morning I wakened with a fresh consciousness that winter was over. There were none of the signs of spring for which I used to watch in Virginia, no budding woods or blooming gardens. There was only—spring itself; the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it everywhere: in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in the warm, high wind—rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive and playful like a big puppy that pawed you and then lay down to be petted. If I had been tossed down blindfold on that red prairie, I should have known that it was spring.

Willa Cather, My Ántonia


a sprig of dill :: howard nemerovSmall, fragrant, green, a stalk splits at the topAnd rays out a hemisphere of twenty st...
03/18/2025

a sprig of dill :: howard nemerov

Small, fragrant, green, a stalk splits at the top
And rays out a hemisphere of twenty stems
That split in their turn and ray out twenty more
In hemispheres of twenty yellow stars
Targeted white, sprays mothered of spray
Displaying their tripled oneness all at once,
Radiant and delicate and loosely exact
As the cosmos in The Comedy, or as
The Copernican system on an orrery,
The quiet flowerworks of the mind of God
In an Age of Reason—that’s in here. Out there,
The formless furnaces in Andromeda,
Hydra, The Veil, Orion’s nightmare head.


E. E. CummingsIn Time Of Daffodilsin time of daffodils(who knowthe goal of living is to grow)forgetting why,remember how...
03/17/2025

E. E. Cummings

In Time Of Daffodils
in time of daffodils(who know
the goal of living is to grow)
forgetting why,remember how

in time of lilacs who proclaim
the aim of waking is to dream,
remember so(forgetting seem)

in time of roses(who amaze
our now and here with paradise)
forgetting if,remember yes

in time of all sweet things beyond
whatever mind may comprehend,
remember seek(forgetting find)

and in a mystery to be
(when time from time shall set us free)
forgetting me,remember me.




Miguel de Unamuno: "Throw Yourself Like Seed"Shake off this sadness, and recover your spirit;sluggish you will never see...
03/16/2025

Miguel de Unamuno: "Throw Yourself Like Seed"

Shake off this sadness, and recover your spirit;
sluggish you will never see the wheel of fate
that brushes your heel as it turns going by,
the man who wants to live is the man in whom life is abundant.

Now you are only giving food to that final pain
which is slowly winding you in the nets of death,
but to live is to work, and the only thing which lasts
is the work; start there, turn to the work.

Throw yourself like seed as you walk, and into your own field,
don’t turn your face for that would be to turn it to death,
and do not let the past weigh down your motion.

Leave what’s alive in the furrow, what’s dead in yourself,
for life does not move in the same way as a group of clouds;
From your work you will be able one day to gather yourself.


April 5th, 1974 Richard WilburThe air was soft, the ground still cold.In wet dull pastures where I strolledWas something...
03/15/2025

April 5th, 1974
Richard Wilbur

The air was soft, the ground still cold.
In wet dull pastures where I strolled
Was something I could not believe.
Dead grass appeared to slide and heave,
Though still too frozen-flat to stir,
And rocks to twitch, and all to blur.
What was this rippling of the land?
Was matter getting out of hand
And making free with natural law?
I stopped and blinked, and then I saw
A fact as eerie as a dream.
There was a subtle flood of stream
Moving upon the face of things.
It came from standing pools and springs
And what of snow was still around;
It came of winter’s giving ground
So that the freeze was coming out,
As when a set mind, blessed by doubt,
Relaxes into mother-wit.
Flowers, I said, will come of it.


sorrow is not my name :: ross gay—after Gwendolyn BrooksNo matter the pull toward brink. Nomatter the florid, deep sleep...
03/14/2025

sorrow is not my name :: ross gay

—after Gwendolyn Brooks
No matter the pull toward brink. No
matter the florid, deep sleep awaits.
There is a time for everything. Look,
just this morning a vulture
nodded his red, grizzled head at me,
and I looked at him, admiring
the sickle of his beak.
Then the wind kicked up, and,
after arranging that good suit of feathers
he up and took off.
Just like that. And to boot,
there are, on this planet alone, something like two
million naturally occurring sweet things,
some with names so generous as to kick
the steel from my knees: agave, persimmon,
stick ball, the purple okra I bought for two bucks
at the market. Think of that. The long night,
the skeleton in the mirror, the man behind me
on the bus taking notes, yeah, yeah.
But look; my niece is running through a field
calling my name. My neighbor sings like an angel
and at the end of my block is a basketball court.
I remember. My color’s green. I’m spring.



Address

2040 Waterfront Drive
Iowa City, IA
52240

Telephone

+13196215462

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Harvested cherry tomatoes for field to family for ic schools... beautiful day to pick!

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