Wow! A Nitty Gritty Dirt Farm first – an up-north cabin weekend retreat for all farm interns and farm owners - hosted by intern Laura at her family’s cabin in Wisconsin. The cabin kitchen was filled with basil and cilantro, cukes and zukes, peppers and the broccoli we all brought along with a few liquid beverages and we enjoyed boating, tubing, swimming, the hot tub, Bananagrams and Quelf. It is great to have a crew that enjoys playing together as much as working hard together.
We came back from the weekend with Robin sick with some kind of sinus infection – better now, and Steph a little under the weather. But the farm work goes on and so do we.
Drying Tower of Buckets
We retied the staked tomatoes, mowed down the green beans (and now the yellow beans), built an addition on the turkey pen giving them a greatly enlarged outdoor area onto which we later added a top as the young turkeys quickly learned to roost on the high top of the fence panels at night and then hop to the outside world come daylight. Since no one likes chasing down little turkeys, a top was in order.
On Tuesday with a greatly expanded crew – thanks Sean, Matt and Emilie for helping out – we moved the five (not-so) little pigs from their baby quarters to their new pen (built on Monday) under the lean-to of the barn where the lambs used to be. We had taken six more lambs to Braham to our butcher on Monday so the smaller lambs were moved in with the remaining few older lambs in a farther out pen, thus making their old pen available for the pigs. We learned about the idea of using pigs as cultivators - ‘piggerators’ Joel Salatin of Polyface farm and “Omnivore’s Dilemma” fame calls them.Our hope is that our five pigs will root up all of the old manure and packed bedding left by several years of sheep living under the barn lean-to so that we can just load it up and transfer this rich compost to the fields. In just two days, they have already made a pretty good start. They are also very interested in the lambs that are in the pen just to the south of them and Reba the cow just to the west of them. Reba and the lambs are not quite so sure about the pigs.
It is exciting harvesting as we move toward August. All of the midsummer veggies are ripening. The buckets of purple, golden and deep green peppers, wheelbarrows of red onions, and a table full of bright white garlic makes us as thrilled as we hope you will be.
All of us here have been canning and freezing like crazy – Dilly beans, pressure-canned yellow beans, Brown Sugar Dill Pickles, Kimchee, Short Brine Dill Pickles, frozen broccoli and ice cubed herbs. We encourage you to cut up, blanch and freeze any of your share veggies that are more than you can use up right away. They are wonderful to add to a soup or stew come winter.
onions
We look forward to meeting or re-connecting with you at our MIDSUMMER ABUNDANCE FESTIVAL this Sunday – 3:00 – 5:30 pm. We’ll be cooking up a bunch of fresh veggies in stir fry, serving beer, wine and ice tea, drum circle drumming (bring your own drum or use one of ours), hayrides around the farm, cut your own flower bouquets from our rows of field flowers, and enjoy lots of good conversation around good food, good community, and good farming. Until then …………… Robin
What’s in your Share this Week?
Mars Red Onion
Eureka Yellow Beans
Garlic
Raider, Sweet Slice and Homemade Pickles Cucumbers
Zephyr, Slick Pic, Raven, Elite, Horn of Plenty, Lita Summer Squash
Yukon Gold Potatoes
Red Russian Kale
Joi Choi Bok Choy
Conchos Jalapeno Peppers (dark green )
Gypsy Pepper (yellow elongated)
Islander Pepper (purple bell)
Scarlet Nantes Carrots
Orange Thyme
