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Newsweek Holiday Gift Guide

I am especially proud to be President of Pescadero High School Viking Boosters this year. The farm dominates the committee: Sharina is Secretary and Kim Hussey, who leads farm tours, is Vice-President. The Boosters funds the high school sports teams

Ryan, with high school student help, renovated and painted the Snack Shack. The students, though, must own it. Everybody will sign up for a maintenance task around school; everybody will bring a donation of $10 three times a year

The Vikings. Open for Business!

It is a year last week that Foxi arrived at the farm. Foxi died suddenly, but peacefully, in the summer, and is buried underneath a lilac in the garden. We miss her ridiculous panting and happiness so much.

For Foxi

The black dogs on our farm are always elderly, rescued dogs. They nap in the shrubbery and don't chase the chickens. We miss them bitterly when they die. But this is an idyllic home for dogs, and our new black dogs are here. They are 10 years old, and have no names.

I met their owner at Crissy Field in the early summer. She loved them but had lost her home, and called Rocket Dog Rescue.

The Dogs with No Name patrol the fenceline of the garden, but like their distance. She will wag her tail for you, but he is shy and may not come out from underneath the roses.

Foxi's rescuer visits to walk the new black dogs a little way up the road, before they get tired and need to return for their naps in the shrubbery.

Dog with No Name in the farm garden

August is almost over, and the kids are back at school. It has been an astonishingly gratifying month for the farm. In the first week of the month, we featured twice on NPR and were filmed for ABC.

Sharina never got off the ‘phone, hearing your comments and taking bookings for tours and events. We were awarded a $33,500 grant for our irrigation project, of which more later! And we won a blue rosette at the 2009 American Cheese Society competition for our fresh goat milk cheese. That is, a national first place for our basic farmstead cheese!

We consistently win national prizes for our plain cheese. It has the delicious taste of our town: the Pacific breezes, the rich loam and nutritious pasture, our healthy herd of goats. I thank the judges, and all our visitors and friends, for their support. But this is not my prize. It belongs to Salud and Roberto and their family.

I met Roberto when I was very young. I had moved out of my yurt and in with my husband, and was working at Jacobs Farm in Pescadero. Roberto and I would drive a flatbed truck to the produce terminal at SFO at night, and pick up and deliver boxes of tomatoes and herbs. We got on so well for seven years that of course I asked him to join me in restoring the dairy farm where I lived.

Roberto's wife Salud had followed him from Guanajuato, with their two younger girls. She looked after my baby with such a strong work ethic it was obvious she could run the new dairy business. Salud began traveling to Davenport two or three times a week, for a year, to learn the art of cheese making from Nancy Gaffney, who had sold me her goats. Roberto and Salud's older daughters, Norma and Rebecca, joined her in the dairy.

It is the consistency of Roberto and Salud's work, and that of everybody else on the farm, that earns our prizes. Every action on the pasture, with the goats, or in the dairy, is exact and timely, as it was the day before, and will be tomorrow. The blue rosettes are theirs.

Norma's hands. See the rosette on Salud here

The astonishingly talented and much-married Janet Periat and I MC at Pescadero's 19th Arts and Fun Festival this past weekend

It was warm enough on the coast to take your shirt off. This man had thoughtfully added duct tape to the words tattooed on his back, because PAFF is family entertainment…

Sharina purchases Ryan's outfit in the South Coast Children's Services Fashion Show

Ryan and Annie on stage, before their clothes were sold. It's a condition of Harley Farms employment that you or your children must model at the SCCS Fashion Show!