About LazyOxFarm

Lazy Ox Farm is licensed by the State of Missouri Department of Agriculture to sell and ship our own plants (license #1931).
   
We are a small family farm located in the beautiful Missouri Ozarks. We have been growing and selling sustainably raised plants and veggies for more than 15 years, first in northern Idaho and for the last 8 years in southern Missouri. Besides raising plants and seeds for you, we grow most of our own food in a very large garden. We also raise chickens, Kunekune pigs, and Mini Jersey milk cows. We grow some of the feed for our animals, including corn and sorghum for the chickens and turnips, sweet potatoes, and winter squash for the pigs.  We freeze, can, dry, pickle, cure, smoke, and whatever else we can figure out to preserve our farm's bounty. We also trade with local farming friends for items that we don't produce, like honey, lamb, and hay.

We have great fun making sorghum syrup. You can see some pictures of the process below.

We are self-sufficiency nuts and try to be a little more self reliant every year. We heat with wood from our farm and with solar, radiant floor heat, and cook on a wood cookstove in the winter. We try to do as much as we can ourselves. We purchase less and less food every year. We enjoy this lifestyle and want to help others succeed in their quest to do more for themselves, whether they are raising just a couple of tomato plants or a 1/2 acre garden.


     
With the increasing costs and questionable quality of grocery store food, more and more folks are starting to grow their own. We applaud this trend and want folks to have success with their gardening efforts. We also believe that gardening should be fun. So, we offer a variety of hardy, tasty, and attractive veggie and herb plants for you to enjoy. 

     Although we are not certified organic, (we dropped our certification in 2005 when the Federal government took over the program as we are slightly allergic to bureauocracies.), we do grow using only organic methods because we believe in it. On our farm we use mostly on-farm soil amendments (composted manure from our animal friends), cover crops, and occasionally purchased alfalfa hay pellets to keep our soil fertile. 

We do many things by hand the old fashioned, labor intensive way our forefathers did. It keeps us and the planet healthier.

Thank you, 
Ron, Margie, Andy, and Sarah Lennington

Oh yes, about our farm name...

We really did have oxen, and they really were lazy.  We tired of watching them watch us work, so they are no longer a part of this farm. We hope to be horse or oxen powered some day, but for now Ron is our ox and he definitely is not lazy!

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A couple of our Kunekune pigs. 

Ron and Sarah harvesting sorghum.  

                  
Ron and friend using an old sorghum mill to turn our sorghum cane into juice.

A modern Ozark mule turning the mill.    

               
              Fresh sorghum juice starting to cook down.

Update 1/2/2013

The summer of 2012 turned out to be the hottest and dryest on record for the southern Ozarks. We had Texas style heat and California style drought and regular Ozarks humidity. It was a lethal combination for many plants, but the good news is that we also managed to have many successes. Most tomatoes stopped producing in June and did not start setting again until late September, so they did not have enough time to ripen a fall crop. But, a few varieties managed to produce all summer. These were: Ozark Pink, Marglobe Supreme, Anna Russian, Tornadoes de Corones (sp?), and a Big Beef cross with Eva Purple Ball. Joe's Pink produced most of the summer, but not in August. I whole heartedly recommend these varieties for HOT areas.

Our pepper trials and seed production ventures were a bust. We could not keep enough water on the peppers during the extreme heat, and they just did not set hardly at all. So, we have no new pepper varieties in our seed line up this year. Another bust was Lima Beans, except for Hopi Pole Lima. It deals with the heat better than any of the 10 other varieties we have attempted to grow in the last couple of years. The okra and cowpeas did not even waiver in all the heat, so we have developed a taste for them out of desperation for something fresh to eat in August. 

Hopefully, we will be able to report on how well things grow in cool, rainy summers next year!
Happy growing to you!

Summer of 2013 update:

Yes, we did get to trial varieties that do well in cool (for South Missouri) and too much rain. August brought us day after day of rain and cool, muggy temperatures. It was death for almost all cucurbits (cucumbers, squash, melon) and tomatoes. Peppers took it in stride, but the super hot peppers were slowed down. The star of our melon trials was Edisto, which continued to produce perfect melon after perfect melon. I highly recommend it for disease resistance, flavor, and productivity. The Glass Gem corn was trying to polinate during all the rain, so I thought it would be a bust. But, it produced like crazy and was gorgeous to boot. The tomatoes that did best were Honeydrop, Black Plum, Orange Banana, Japanese Black Trifele, Indiana Red, and Riesentraube. 

Summer of 2016 update:

Well, we just had our worst summer for gardening ever. We had many huge rainstorms of 5" or 6", almost one per week May through mid-August. Most everything in the ground drowned except the eggplant and the super hot peppers. We grew quite a few plants in containers, and those fared much better. Huge amounts of rain seem to be the new norm for us, so we are putting in raised beds.