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Monday 2pm - 6pm Sunday 12pm - 4pm

Owl's Roost Farm

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United States
Rockford, IL
Owl's Roost Farm

Sustainable food for the community of Rockford, IL.

05/28/2025

Come out for our first volunteer day of the season and learn about our regenerative farming and agroforestry practices, land conservation work, meet our chickens and be with community! We're moving in a new direction as a co-operatively owned farm and community space guided by mutual aid and food sovereignty and wanna hear what free veggies ya'll want and talk about our plans for the future (:

We'll be working on cutting invasive brush in our woodland area and finishing a dead hedge around our chicken run. Dead hedges not only are a natural and free way to build a needed fence and dispose of our brush, but create valuable habitat for birds and other critters while returning organic matter back to the land.

After working for a bit we'll have a farm tour, then enjoy a community meal and a fire under the oak trees for folks that want to stay and hang. Feel free to show up in whatever way you can and for however long works for you. If you would rather chat and relax on the patio or help out with meal prep you are welcome and wanted!

5:30- Work time: dead hedging or cooking
7:00- Farm tour
7:30- Meal
8:00- Fire

Please RSVP in our DM or to the e-mail in the bio so we know how much food to make!

03/27/2025

Today 30 new chicks joined our flock 💛🧡🤎🖤

It’s Ritchie’s first time raising chicks! Life achievement unlocked!

#815 ***rfarmers

03/01/2025

come visit us at tomorrow (03/01) from 10am to 2pm and learn how to inoculate mushroom growing media and take your own growing block home!

eat mushrooms! do science! 🍄

06/04/2024

The other day my dear colleague in healing our ecological relationships- -asked me what I think the proliferation of thistle in the garden we co-tend at .rising is trying to tell us. A wonderful question that I’ve been thinking about ever since. My initial response was that possibly there’s a deep compaction issue- plants with robust taproots often show up to help us with this. But tonight I was pulling some thistle at my home farm and I had a slightly different thought. Maybe thistle shows up like a friend who knows how to ask the probing, thorny questions when you’re making sus choices. Not to tell you that you’ve done something wrong or to fix things for you, just to ask the questions you maybe haven’t been so diligent about asking yourself. Not “Your soil’s compacted again 🙄” or “Here. Let me fix your compacted soil.”, but more like “Are you sure what you’ve been doing hasn’t compacted the soil?”

In both gardens, the thistle is showing up after a period significant (thoughtful !) disturbance. Disturbance isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but there can be negative consequences, like compaction, depending which methods are used. I know that the methods I used were unlikely to cause compaction, but the thistle didn’t. All she knew is that she’d been dormant in the seed bank and now she wasn’t. Cause for concern. So she raised the question.

This evening as the sun set in a stormy sky and the first fireflies of the season flickered nearby I tested out how difficult it’d be to hand pull the thistle in an area I’m prepping for sweet potatoes- my tentative response to the thistle’s question. Most slipped easily from the ground, hardly leaving a sign they had been there at all. Even the tougher ones weren’t a struggle. The thistle in this picture has a taproot about 18” long. I pulled it with a single hand that was already holding three other pulled thistle plants. We’re doing a-okay compaction-wise over here, but I’m glad I took the question seriously anyway. I think the thistle feels respected now.

06/02/2024

Thanks .liam.foundation for letting us take your Pride Parade float straw to turn into mushrooms. The q***rest possible reuse for float straw (iykyk) 🍄🔥💛

Happy Pride to all y’all fellow q***r farm and food people out there!

***rfarmers ***rfarmer

02/16/2024

Compost still lifes, February 2024

Big news in the world of convenient composting options for Rockfordians: if you are in the 61107, 61108, or 61114 zip codes, we now offer compost pickup at your place! Head over to GrownBy (link in bio) to see all of the options we offer for convenient composting and be in touch if you’ve got questions!

Thanks to all of the folks who encouraged me to offer this option and to charge a sustainable amount for it. Especially and

#815

10/20/2023

I’m in Ohio caring for my family off-schedule this month, so I’ll see you folks next month! Enjoy this toad giving us all some side eye in the mean time. 💚

08/29/2023

Sometimes I have extra time at and I end up making unnecessarily fussy bouquets of exclusively yarrow and grass. There are, like 30 stems in there, guys.

#815

08/26/2023

I have a fuzzy, fond memory of sitting on a sunny hillside in Ohio snapping beans with my grandma and mom one summer when I was about 7 years old. I felt so big being invited into that work. It didn’t even much matter that I didn’t really care for green beans, especially not after that winter when we ate them, freezer burnt and far too often. It was important work getting those stem ends and strings separated from bite sized pieces, and I was important because I was included. The one way I remember loving to eat green beans was when grandma cooked them to near mush with a ham hock- a recipe I recently learned, many years after the last time I ate it, is identified with Appalachian culture. By the time I was cooking for myself, no one in my family made it anymore and so I never learned to cook it.

When I started farming, I planted a lot of green beans. Big gardens have a lot of beans, I knew from my formative years in the farthest reaches of the Appalachian foothills. That first summer, I grew far too many bush beans and spent far too many hours picking them. What I didn’t sell, I snapped and froze. I didn’t like them any better than I did when I was 7. In the years since I’ve changed up what I grow. If you’ve talked to me in August during the last few years you’ve probably heard me say sweet things about Dragons Tongue or Romano. Neither is the bean of my childhood, though.

This year I’m growing Red Noodle beans, part of a family of legumes originally cultivated in Asia called long beans. I was drawn to this variety for the same reason I assume many white folks are drawn to it: it’s impressive length is a novelty to those of us who grew up eating European varieties of beans. But for folks who grew up practicing an Asian foodway, these beans are no novelty. They’re the beans of their childhoods.

I’m grateful to be meeting this new-to-me garden pal. I’ve been wowed by the beauty of the flowers and by the flavor of the beans and I expect to grow them again next year. And I’m especially grateful for their humbling call to come back into relationship with the beans of my childhood. Next summer I’ll learn how to prepare Appalachian green beans 💚

08/17/2023

We want you to come join us for some community joy and rest tomorrow 💚 Make medicine with us in the form of elderberry harvest and take medicine with us in the form of resting under the oak trees.

Note that Guilford is still under construction so to drive onto the farm you have to come from the west (Alpine). Directions for parking on farm or in the neighborhood are in our saved stories.

#815

08/03/2023

Our hazelnut hedge has a few fruits for the first time 💚 Hazelnuts are native to our region, but I hadn’t seen a hazelnut on the plant before and I’m really taken with the frilly husk. I think it looks like a dumpling, and Aida thinks it looks like a mermaid purse- what d y’all think?

07/23/2023

Q***r farmer problems and solutions:
1. Grow really pretty flowers
2. Be too butch to feel great wearing them in your hair
3. Live vicariously by putting them in your wife’s hair
4. Enjoy that you nailed both farming and marrying a cute witch
5. Go to the Q***r AF show closing at that said cute witch showed in ✨

***rfarmers ***rasfolk ***raf

Address

5180A Guilford Road
Rockford, IL
61107

Opening Hours

Monday	2pm - 6pm
Sunday	12pm - 4pm

Website

http://owlsroostfarm.com/

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