Posts filed under 'farm'
Gratitudes
After this week’s pick-up, we will have just three more pick ups for 2009! It is hard to believe; like this summer, the fall season is just flying by. And although not much needs to happen in that time in the fields, we do have to finalize and bring together all the details for 2010 in just a few weeks. The planning happens, in many ways, all season long as we respond to the way things unfold, always looking for ways to improve our service and find the things that work best for our farm, its land and its folks. We are already so excited for next year, and are happy to be bringing this year to an end with abundance and a feeling of success with small but measurable growth!
And since this is Thanksgiving week, here is a list of some more of the things we are thankful for, in addition to the above, that we will fill our gratitude tree with this week:
*Our family, our togetherness, letting the world rush by without us.
*So much laughter…our house is the funny house.
*Fresh paint
*Good books and great music
*Ever improving soil and more wiggly worms.
*Baby goats and farm fresh eggs.
*Friends, past and present, that make life so rich.
*A bustling market stand and busy Farmer’s market.
*Heater-Allen Brewing
*The best CSA members ever!!!
Happy Thanksgiving! Thank you all so much for being a part of this adventure with us!
Add comment November 24, 2009
On the farm
Sometimes, I feel like there is no farm news to share, especially at this time of year. Ask me about family time, reading and writing and arithmetic, sewing and knitting, baking more, and crazy fall cleaning…then I might have a lot to say! True, all of this takes place in the context of your farm, because the farm is our home and everyday landscape as much as it is our job too. We take our little walks down into the trees to mark the changing of the seasons, seeing how our one special spot can change so much from month to month. We walk the pastures with the goats and chickens, our youngest an animal girl from the start. What we don’t do much of anymore, is visit the vegetables. They don’t need much from us, and if they do, like the leeks and their weeds, it is hard to put that task at the top of the list, knowing that the weeds will be dying back soon and the leeks will outgrow them in time. We do keep a close eye on the new field and the rain as it comes. We have cabbages, chinese cabbages, turnips, kale, purple peacock broccoli, mispoona, and lettuces planted down there in what goes underwater as winter progresses. It doesn’t usually happen until after the first of the year, so we planned on harvesting things up through this month and next. The heavy rain keeps us on edge, but so far so good. In fact, that sums up the news from the farm as we venture into winter, so far so good…what more could we hope for!
Add comment November 10, 2009
Staying Healthy
I spent most of this week on the farm tending to fevers and sore heads, throats, and tummies. As terrible as that sounds, the farmer was better by day 3, the kids each after 1 or 2 days. We made lots of chicken soup from Kookoolan Farms’ birds with lots of veggies to make a rich, healthy, and healing broth. We sipped tea with some of the elderberry syrup we made at summer’s end for just such occasions, and we took hot baths and rested. In the end, we were happy that it was over quickly and that it wasn’t too bad.
We tend to look to food for our vitamins and minerals and medicines, and I feel blessed to be able to continue to eat fresh, nutritious vegetables through the fall and winter, times when our bodies are called on to fight off the colds and flus that come during this time of year. All growing vegetables and fruits begin to lose nutritive value once they have been picked, and they also will not reach their maximum nutritive value if they are picked under ripe to make it through shipping and handling to stores far and wide. And although each season offers its own set of repeating foods, we hope that with your CSA share you notice a rainbow of colors, from dark leafy greens to bright orange carrots and squash, with red, cream, purple, and white roots. All of these provide a well balanced supply of various vitamins and minerals and antioxidants. There are, no doubt, always many pieces to the pictures of our health, and colds and flus are hard to avoid, but I hope that you are staying well and enjoying the bit of natural medicine the healthy and tasty produce we share together provides!
Add comment October 27, 2009
A hard frost!
The farm frosted hard this morning! This may be the last week of veggie harvests that teeter in the space between eating seasons. The very last peppers, the very last summer squash…although the tomatoes are always picked to ripen in storage just so we can spread out the season of everyone’s favorite summer fruit, and we may just get another eggplant harvest next week because the plants rebounded quite unscathed from this morning’s layer of frosty white. Other signs of change abound. Waking at 5:30 this morning to help a wee one get a drink of water, I was struck by how much it felt like the middle of the night. It was dark, the bright moon set for the night, and no sight of the rising sun. I just couldn’t imagine staying awake, the feeling that it was still night was too strong, even though this was the hour we did wake on Tuesdays not long ago, sky light blue, ready to begin the harvests for the day.
In many ways, everything around us is telling us to slow down. The days are shorter, the sky telling us to sleep more, work less. The crops that needed us to tend to them day in and day out, to harvest, harvest, harvest their mad rush at setting as much fruit as possible while the heat lasts, the weeds competing with our plantings in a summer long race to win, all done for the year. The frost itself calling to us to take the time to start the fire and warm the kettle again, because no harvesting could be done until the leaves thawed. The farmer’s market ends this week too, and in a flash, our summer routine is gone for another year. Slowly, slowly we inch towards winter.
So alongside your summer squash this week we have the first of the season’s winter squash! And everything that has been touched by this morning’s frost (and our two softer frosts before this) has been infused with the sweetness of the season. This is the best time to eat fresh food, the sweetest and fullest of all. We were caught off guard this morning, the first really cold fingers of the season, but harvesting food for all of you through the fall is one of our favorite things to do. Unlike in the warmer months, food becomes such a treasure, a source of warmth itself, as we head into colder weather. If you are at all busy bees like we are in the summer, the true savoring starts now, when nature beckons us to slow down and sip some soup!
Add comment October 6, 2009
Autumn Harvest
Even though this month has been wonderfully warm and we have been holding on to the tail end of a great summer as tightly as we could, September is almost behind us and there is no denying that things are in transition here at the farm. The cucumbers are done for the year, most of the winter squash have been harvested. The kids pulled there first pumpkins from the field and carved them just because. The sunflowers have all tipped their heads to the ground, there’s not enough sun left in the day to lift their yellow faces to. The very last thing to be planted in a year on the farms will be in the ground soon, garlic for next year.
September harvests begin to show a change in harvest items, October even more. Both are a mix of the last of summer’s goodies with the next wave of cool weather crops. The fields hit their high point in September, and because we plant so much for the fall and winter, we see a kind of plateau here in abundance through the rest of the year. It isn’t until around the winter solstice when we have to harvest more discreetly, knowing that the growth that plants have put on until this point it is until things pick back up in early spring. It is is hard for us to believe that Farmer’s Market ends in just two short weeks…we still have so much food to harvest!
Because of this, we are spending a lot of time shoring up where we will be selling all of this food. To verify for all of you, we will be making CSA harvests through all of October and November and December 1, 8, and 15. We will then offer, by order, a holiday harvest the following week. This will finish out 2009, and we will announce our 2010 CSA details that December as well to existing members, and we will go from there for next year!
Add comment September 29, 2009
