Nitty Gritty Dirt

Don't Forget Your Bags

It’s been another great week at Nitty Gritty Dirt Farm!   So much field work accomplished, livestock moved, supers added to the bee hives, and still time for a little swimming and printing t-shirts!   We really have a great crew that can work through whatever comes along – hot weather, escapee chickens, woodticks, colds….

On Monday, we sent another group of lambs to market, cutting down substantially on the number of baaing mouths to feed.  It is always a little sad to see them go and a little relief to cut down on the chores.  All the adult sheep are on the back corner of the farm grazing on a mixed legume and grass pasture secure in their new electronet pasture.  The goats and lambs stay closer up to the buildings for safety.   We enlarged the pig pen for the not-so-little pigs to get them some new ground to dig.  It took them about ½ hour to dig up the 16 foot square addition.  We will keep adding on and begin gradually moving them farther away from the barn.  

All of our interns are getting quite proficient at milking the three Saanen does.  Stormy is the biggest challenge as she both gives the most milk and she gets impatient if it takes a new milker too long according to her.   Holly and Liz and Emily are all doing very well and we have had no new milk buckets kicked over. 

We have been using our new cream separator (that we ordered on E-bay from the Ukraine) to separate the cream from the milk.  We made one batch of ice cream that tastes great but lets us know that we probably need a new ice cream freezer.  Our biggest success is making butter.  We’ve made two batches – and it tastes wonderful!  The separator has a special attachment for making butter that works great – you just need to have at least ½ gallon of cream to use it.  This takes us two to three days – depending on how much milk we drink – to get enough milk for that much cream.  We are all pretty excited.

One of our interns, Liz, who incidentally has an art degree created a design for t-shirts for our farm.   Just tonight after we finished prepping the bok choi for tomorrow’s shares, we printed the first run of t-shirts for our crew.  Last week everyone went thrift store shopping to purchase shirts to print.  When you pick up your share tomorrow, and in the weeks ahead, you will be greeted by a farmer or intern wearing one of these original art print t-shirts.  We are hoping that Liz will set up a little business printing them – because we know that many of you will want one for yourself. 

 What's In Your Share

In your share you will get the last of the Mei Qing Choi, a few more green onions, and a bag of Sugar Ann Snap Peas.  You will also get a container of fresh picked strawberries from the TLC Berry Patch in Pine City.  TLC is owned and operated by Robin’s son Lucas.  The T is grandson Trent and C is Carey, soon to be Lucas’s spouse.



We hope you enjoy the strawberries and if you want more, you can stop by if you are on your way north to Wisconsin via Highway 70.   We have plans for strawberry jam and strawberry smoothies.

Until next week. 

Nitty Gritty Dirt

Even though the rain kept us from weeding and hoeing and mulching, our intern crew did get the Sugar Ann peas twines up the stakes put in earlier. Sugar Ann sugar snap peas will grow about 4 feet tall and need twines to hold them up.  As the vines grow, we will add more twines. This keeps the pods clean and makes picking the peas much easier when that time comes. The twining happened between rain showers which have been the frustrating story of our lives this week. 

The potato plants are doing great.  They seem to love the rain.  They are well mulched so the weed growth is held to a minimum.  In some of the other fields, we watch in frustration bordering on mild horror as the weeds grow and grow and grow with all the rain, taking over and becasue the fields are so wet, we can only watch and wait.   We did enjoy our couple of days shelling dry Black Turtle beans from last year, making cheese and wine and and working on a variety of clean-up, fix it assorted projects. And, the weeds keep growing and and growing and we know we'll have a lot of weeding and hoeing once the soil dries out enough.  One of the projects accomplished today between rains, was renovating the turkey hoop house - adding a first floor to the small hoop.  Liz, our intern carpenter tackled the project making a wonderful house with a roost and a Dutch door!  Our Bourbon Red Turkeys  - hopefully our new breeding stock, seem very happy with their new raised roof.

Just this last week we also made new hoop houses for the Aurocks and the Barracanas (our Barred Rock X Aracana) chickens we hatched in our incubator.  Karla built the new much larger hoop pens for the teenage chickens who had outgrown their smaller house.  Robin tried to sex them and only move the hens into the new faciltiy leaving the cockerels in the old house.  We're not so sure how good Robin's sexing skills are as we heard a suspicious rooster crowing noise coming from the all-female? house.  Karla also began the second hoop house for the Aurocks - the second group of chicks we hatched and  Emily and Holly finished the house with nettings tied in many places. All of the chickens seem to be enjoying their roomier accomodations.  Robin mowed the grass today putting in many miles and hours while retracing her steps through the wet grass.  It looks great around here.

The animals don't seem to mind the rain.  They have shelter to get out of the rain, wind to keep the bugs at bay, and a lot of farmers who feed, water and care for them. 

Our harvest buckets are all scrubbed out and ready for the harvest that will start tomorrow morning.  Robin and Gigi and all of the interns and critters are praying for a little Thursday sunshine.  It is so much more fun harvesting, processign and packing your shares when it is not raining!  We look at weather predictions but trusting in any prediction beyond 48 hours seems to be less accurate than more.  So we keep our raincoats handy, keep our eyes on the clouds searching for sun and continue to farm and harvest through whatever comes. 

Until next week.   Robin

What's in Your Share This Week

Mei Qing Choi  Bok Choi

Green Onions

Salad Mix including:

lettuce

mustard greens

mizuna

kale

arugula

swiss chard

bulls blood beets

pea shoots

garlic scapes



DROP SITE TIMES ARE LISTED BELOW ON THE DROP SITE LIST.  Please email Gigi at nittygrittydirtfarm@gmail.com to confirm your drop site choice.  Thanks!!!



It is finally time.  YOUR FIRST SHARE WILL BE DELIVERED ON THURSDAY June 16th, THIS WEEK!    As most of you realize, it has been an even crazier than usual spring for planting and growing.  With colder and wetter than normal early spring and then a huge leap to hotter than normal weather, the early season crops like the lettuces, mustard greens, mizuna, and arugula are not happy.   So there will be fewer varieties to offer early this season.  However our fields are looking great with the promise of a great variety of veggies to come soon.  The snap peas, potatoes, bok choi, broccoli, and more are looking great!   We are excited about the bounty we expect this year.  And we have a great farm crew able to put out an enormous amount of work.   We hope you have an opportunity to meet Karla, Liz, Holly, Emily and Susie who are our full time interns.  We have also been delighted to have Sam with us for a month and are very sorry to see him leave. Today is his last day before he goes on to his next stint working with Wiscorp maintaining Wisconsins trail system.  Birgit and Sue also enliven our crew, volunteering one or two days each week.   When you see one of our crew at the farm or drop site, please introduce yourself to these hard-working crew members.

Planting Basil

Using our new planting tool - three steps in one.

With nearly an inch of rain so far last night and today, we are happy, the plants are very happy and we’re spending the day getting a bit of this and some of that accomplished – all those odd jobs that get ignored in the need to get the bigger jobs accomplished.   Some succession seeding, cleaning up flats and packs and organizing the greenhouses, fencing sheep and horses, making mozzarella cheese, transplanting parsley and sage, and all the normal farm animal chores are keeping us busy but feeling a bit more relaxed than most days.  And Birgit is in the kitchen today preparing our communal noon meal.  Today will be a German specialty – spaetzle and lentils with rhubarb compote for desert.  

Pepper Plants

What a wonderful, soaking, much needed rain we’ve been enjoying last night and today!   We watch the weather forecast closely and knowing that rain was reported for today, we’ve been planting and seeding and hoeing and weeding and mulching like crazy farmers the last two days.  We’ve planted thousands of basil, kohlrabi, tomato, cantaloupe, watermelon and flower plants over the last couple of weeks.  Our crew mulched more than two acres of peas and potatoes with several 600 pound bales of hay and we’ve hoes nearly 2 acres of sweet corn.

Until next week..... Robin

Hard working crew moving round hay bales used for mulch.

What's in your share this week. 

D'avignon Radishes - long red and white

Rover Radishes - round red

Crunchy Royale Radishes

Mei Qing Choi - baby choi

Don't forget to BRING YOUR BAGS