Chert Hollow Farm - Food For Thought

Active blog moved to Wordpress

2012-01-26T13:11:00.000-06:00

To all our readers:

We have moved our active blog presence to a new, Wordpress-based website that will integrate our continuing blog with our basic web presence. The new site will allow us to publish and present far more information and interesting features about our farm management and activities. Please update your bookmarks and/or browsing habits to visit the new site at:

www.cherthollowfarm.com

Although we transferred all the content to the new Wordpress platform, there are many links to these posts on other blogs and websites, and we don't want these to be broken. Therefore this blog will remain as an archive of content from the past four year, but will no longer be active.

Thanks for reading; we'll see you at the new site.

Eric & Joanna Reuter

Mid-winter work

2012-01-20T09:33:00.000-06:00

After returning from a much-needed and -enjoyed early January trip to visit family and friends, we've launched ourselves into number of important winter projects.

JANUARY CSA DELIVERY
Immediately upon returning home, we got to work putting together the first CSA shares, including setting up the inaugural online member survey. Our goal is for this system to allow limited share customization, helping members have some control over what they do and don't receive, while not being too complicated for us to manage. Two share sizes plus ten or so items plus three options (none, standard amount, extras please) is already a significant amount of complexity, but we're trying the system out this year because we really like the value it creates for everyone involved.

Shares were delivered on Monday and Thursday afternoon, with only one small hitch that was easily corrected. It took about 2 hours each day to do the delivery route, a significantly shorter time expenditure than going to one market, though higher mileage. Saving us more time, one of our employees will generally be doing the Thursday delivery route for us, paid as an independent contractor for the off-farm work. She likes the idea, as she'll be working here Thursday mornings anyway, and it means we only have to come to Columbia once a week, a significant time savings for us.

We've received a couple good comments already, so I'm hoping everyone enjoyed their pulse of fresh winter vegetables (and purchased eggs, in some cases). We'd certainly like to hear of any concerns. Although storing all these crops until now creates a higher risk and workload for us, we also really like getting some product to members right away. It makes their investment more real; no one has to wait five months to get any return on the up-front payment, and it buffers any future crop failures or issues through the rest of the year. So far, so good for the 2012 CSA.

SEED ORDER
Before leaving on our trip, Joanna especially worked long hours putting together our fairly complex seed order that juggles six or more seed companies and ~150 varieties. In addition, we save our own seed for many other items, but still need to integrate those stocks and any leftover seeds from last year with the rest of the order. Developing the seed order inherently requires putting together a realistic planting plan for the coming year, which is a large task in itself as we balance crop rotations, work schedules, weather/climate considerations, CSA needs (which are quite different from market needs), and more. Effectively, to make a cost- and resource-efficient seed order requires planning out much of the next year, and needs to be done by early January so we can get the orders submitted in time to get everything we want. With the continued growth in both small farms and gardening, more pressure is placed on the seed-supplier bottleneck every year and many items vanish quickly (particularly so as organic certification requires us to seek out organic seed whenever possible/practical). Most of our orders are now submitted, and are arriving. The first indoor seed starting (onions) is already only a few weeks away.

We used results from our December survey of CSA members to guide the seed order development. For example, with respect to pepper heat/spiciness, only one household of twenty voted for habanero-level heat, so most of the hot peppers that we grow will be in the low-to-moderate heat category. (We were thinking about skipping habaneros altogether until we tasted an amazing habanero salsa while traveling and learned that the almost tropical fruitiness is a characteristic flavor of habaneros; so we'll grow one or two plants.) From the survey, we also learned that many members seek out bitter flavors, so we're going to trial a couple of new crops that tend to be on the bitter side: escarole and radicchio. Joanna isn't especially fond of bitter flavors, but then again, neither are most insects, so these crops are likely to have fewer pest problems than some alternatives. Radicchio has a reputation for being finicky, though, so we'll start by trialing a smallish quantity this year. We had several members comment that they would love to get any fruit we can grow. Hopefully the strawberries that are in the ground will produce enough for distribution, and we're tentatively planning on a small watermelon patch, though they tend to be space-hogs for the yield anticipated. We're also increasing blueberry and fruit tree plantings that will hopefully pay off with fruit in future years. And in spite of an already complex seed order and planting plan, Joanna always enjoys playing with a few new things, so this year some new herbs are on the trial plan; these include shiso, cumin, anise, and bronze fennel (some of which can be grown for seed, but all of which have edible leaves).

WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT

Behind the scenes, we're developing a new farm website that uses a Wordpress platform to integrate our blog, general farm information, CSA member information and utilities, and a better recipe/advice section. It's a major upgrade to our online presence, but takes a lot of programming, design, and content development. At some point in the next month or so we expect to have enough done to bring it online, at which point this blog will go dormant as a content archive and all activity will move to the new site. In the meantime it means we'll be competing for computer time while balancing our roles (Joanna does most of the background programming & structural design, I'll be doing most of the writing and layout). It'll probably take us a year to really get all the new content put together, but we at least need to get enough done for a respectable online presence.

OUTDOOR WORK

Weather and indoor work permitting, we have a long task list on hand for outdoor infrastructure work. There are several more acres of overgrown land we'd like to clear of cedars entirely, and/or thin out for better pasture, given the growing goat and chicken population. The image above shows the orchard area; most of the visible cedars are on the clearing list. I also have to build a new, strong fence for this area, which will have more trees and other fruits going in this spring; other pasture areas could use some fencing work as well.

Another view of the new chicken shed above the orchard; that thick mass of cedars needs to go, so the area can regrow in a better pasture mix that chickens and goats will enjoy. We'll be saving the few hardwoods in that mix, which should really benefit from more sun and growing room to hopefully become good shade trees. We're also working with some neighbors to set back the thick cedar groves south of our entry road, which currently prevent the winter sun from warming and melting any snow and ice on that steep hill.

Whenever we get enough cedar logs collected and milled, there are a wide variety of possible projects requiring wood. We already have a request for some nice lumber for raised garden beds from a past wood customer. High on the list is enough lumber to build a smallish passive solar greenhouse for seed/plant starting, to get that work out of our basement and away from expensive grow-lights. In addition, I'd like to be able to improve the goat barn by adding battens along the walls (thin planks to seal gaps between the original boards) to improve the interior comfort. I also want to rebuild most of the doors, which were originally built with really ratty lumber because that's all I had left from the year's milling when the rest of the barn was built. Then I need to build new milking stands for the (expected) larger milking herd this year, making it possible for two people to milk at a time. The new chicken shed also needs more work, including finishing battens and building a solid confined run so the birds can have fresh air on days when hawks are around (right now we're just using less-than-ideal chain-link panels). Any logging we do generates branches to chip into mulch that needs spreading on paths, and various types of firewood that need to be hauled and stacked.

INDOOR WORK
Many small but important indoor tasks might be tackled this time of year, such as tool cleaning and sharpening, packing barn improvements, recipe research/writing/editing for later CSA use, finalizing the planting plan (& improving the long-term rotation plan), organic certification paperwork, tax preparation, and more.

January CSA share

2012-01-15T18:00:00.001-06:00

FIRST CSA DISTRIBUTION
We'll begin the 2012 CSA season by home-delivering our January share this week, a nice diverse set of seasonal storage produce with some fresh items made possible by the mild weather so far (we don't use hoophouses).

We intend to start writing up and including more recipes for items as the year goes on, but are still rebuilding our website for now and so haven't gotten to that yet. For now, Google and personal cookbooks will offer plenty of suggestions for recipes & uses, though I did find three recipes in our blog archive that rely heavily on share-included items:

Parsnip-sweet potato shepherd's pie
Sweet potato curry
Spiced squash soup

Here's a look at what shares will include, depending on individual requests (CSA members have the ability to opt out of items they don't like/want). Images don't necessarily reflect quantity distributed. NOTE: many root crops will have some dirt remaining on them, as it's just not practical to fully scrub these outdoors in winter conditions. Much easier for each household to wash a pound of roots in a warm kitchen with warm water; we did a basic wash to remove clods, numbing our hands in the process, but you'll want to finish them. That's the reality of farm-fresh food sometimes.

Garlic heads: A selection of multiple garlic heads, drawn from good storage varieties still on hand. Siblings of these garlic heads are already in the ground growing, and this is the time of year when the biological clocks of some of the remaining storage heads also realize that it is time to sprout and try to grow. Heads can last until March or longer, but if you notice that one is beginning to sprout, just use it first. Green sprouts may have a more pungent flavor than the rest of the clove if used raw.

Here's a key to the shorthand on the labels:
   All shares requesting garlic should have one of each of these:
        SIB: Siberian, excellent cooking variety which should be featured, not buried in the background.
    FIRE: Georgian Fire, spicy raw variety with strong flavor when cooked.
      SAM: Samarkand, one of the best varieties for storage.

Full shares also have one big or two small heads from among this collection:
      TOCH: Tochliavri, milder variety good for raw uses like pesto and salad dressing.
    BRIC: Brickey--Only a small supply, and thus we haven't sold it before, but we're quite fond of its robust flavor. From a woman who has been growing garlic in the area for years and was kind enough to give us a head back in 2009. Look for more in 2012.
      CRYST: Georgian Crystal, a good general purpose garlic.

For other information on garlic varieties, you might review this post.

Onions: A mix of red and yellow onions, small quantities but very tasty.

Carrots: Sweet cold-weather carrots with plenty of uses. They're a mix of sizes in part because the grasshoppers devoured numerous rounds of seedlings back in late summer, and we kept reseeding to fill in gaps. The small ones are true baby carrots, not the lathed things that get passed off as such in the store. A shredded carrot salad is a nice way to feature these, or simply enjoy the sweetness with a pile of carrot sticks. No need to peel, just scrub.

Parsnips: Excellent roasted, alone or in a root vegetable mix. We really enjoy parsnip soup, which we make as a creamy blended soup that's rich and filling on a cold winter day.

Sweet potatoes: Great for roasting alone or with other roots; big ones can also be baked. There are two varieties, one with orange flesh and one with white flesh; we think the latter are especially sweet with a nice texture. We especially like roasted sweet potato fries: Preheat the oven to 450ºF. Scrub potatoes and cut out any blemishes, but there's no need to peel. Cut small potatoes into rounds, larger ones into cubes or strips of somewhat uniform size. Toss with oil/fat of choice, sprinkle with salt and maybe a touch paprika or cinnamon. Roasting time is usually ~20-25 minutes. Stir after 10 minutes and check again at 20.

Butternut squash: These didn't store as well as we hoped, and are showing their age, but should still have good flavor & nutrition for those willing to work around any developing softness. Offered as seconds-quality to those willing to take a chance on them. We'd recommend baking them whole (poke a few holes), removing any obvious bad spots, pureeing them, then using the puree in soups, breads, or other uses where the squash is combined with other ingredients. Anything that isn't taken by members, we'll use the above procedure on and freeze for later use.

Leeks: Tasty mild alliums, adding a different flavor to dishes than onions. These are excellent sliced thin and sauteed in butter, or used as the base for leek-and-potato soup. Wash before use to remove any grit that might have gotten between layers. The easiest way to do this is to cut lengthwise in half and rinse under running water.

Cowpeas or cornmeal: Specialty items that are inefficient to grow but fantastic from a culinary point of view. We're offering members a choice of small quantities, one or the other. Cowpeas are similar to black-eyed peas, and should be featured in cooking rather than buried in something like a chili; they also make a nice hummus base when cooked very soft. Cornmeal will be fresh-ground from heirloom corn, especially good for cornbread or polenta. If making the former, use all cornmeal (no wheat flour) to accentuate and appreciate the flavor.

Daikon radishes (not pictured): Long, large white radishes with a sweet/mildly spicy flavor. Great for stir fries, pickling, and certain salads, though they may be strong raw for some palates. Can also be shredded as a topping for wraps.

Spinach: Harvested fresh from overwintering beds that have done really well in the mild weather. Would not have predicted that we'd be able to pick field-grown spinach in mid January. Delicious sweet winter flavor, almost like candy; don't waste this on cooking, just enjoy as a nice fresh green salad. We rinse greens and send them through a salad spinner (because they store better if they're not soggy), but we always recommend that you wash greens again in your kitchen to remove remaining grit, bits of mulch, etc. Thanks to one of our dedicated employees, Kim (in background), for freezing her hands alongside us this day!

Herbs: Snow is melting off now, but haven't had a chance to check on all of them yet. Thyme is in harvestable condition for sure.

Eggs: These aren't directly included in the CSA but are available for purchase by members. Only some hens are laying right now, and we can easily personally go through 3 dozen a week, but we'll have a few dozen extras available.

The next distribution won't be until March or later depending on weather & crop conditions, but this early batch of farm-sourced food will be a nice treat for all involved.

Using & sourcing electricity on the farm

2012-01-09T06:00:00.001-06:00

A reader from Georgia wrote with a question on our approach to electricity use, and our decisions and experiences with being on or off-grid. The response email quickly became detailed enough to become publishable as a useful discussion of this issue.

We’re on-grid through an electric co-op (Boone Electric), and our electricity use varies strongly with the seasons. Summer is by far the highest because we’re running a walk-in cooler and refrigerators for produce. We also run AC in the house midsummer when the outdoor temperatures get too high, because we have to be able to sleep at night, though we keep the thermostat pretty high by most people’s standards. We also have an electric stove, which gets used heavily in late summer and fall for all the canning we do.

We actually have two meters, one each for our house and main packing barn. The latter runs all our cold-storage areas and electric fences, while the house runs our personal needs plus the computer, and grow lights we use to start plants in spring and summer. The graphs below show the last 12 months of electricity use here, drawn from our Boone Electric account. Keep in mind that the billing month is well after the actual use dates, such that the peak in "October" is actually closer to mid-August through mid-September.

The graphs show monthly usage in kilowatt-hours/month. Our cold-storage barn meter peaked at around 650 kwh/month this year, which was hot and dry. Our home meter ranged from 400 – 1300 kwh/month. The highest month was an outlier (the highest usage peak we've had while living here) that may relate to AC use combined with lots of late summer canning, though it still seems abnormally high. I can't explain the data glitch for the missing "August" numbers. For reference, these numbers translate to monthly bills of $60-$130 for the house, and $20-$60 for the barn (including the base fees and taxes, which are around $20 whether or not we use any electricity that month). The house electric bills also includes a fee for a "renewable choice" program which creates a commitment by the electric coop to source at least as much power from renewable sources as is used by the members in that program.

To put these numbers in context, I drew on data from the US Energy Information Administration, which tracks residential, commercial, and industrial electricity usage by state; the latest data are from 2009.

Our annual household average is just over 700 kwh/month, as compared to 1,098 kwh/month in the average Missouri household. That’s still inflated from our actual personal use, as there's quite a bit of power used for the business, such as the fact that the computer is running a lot more for business use than personal, and we currently start all of our transplants in the house using grow lights, which are a serious power suck (but one that will dissipate when we build a greenhouse for managing transplants). So in terms of actual personal consumption I’d guess we’re closer to half average. In terms of total power use, if our household and barn 12-month averages are combined, they total just over 900 kwh/month, meaning our home and farm business combined still use less electricity than the average Missouri home alone.

We take a number of simple power conservation measures. We don't have a clothes dryer, virtually never use electric heat, have energy efficient light bulbs in virtually all light fixtures that will take them, and keep various electronic devices on power strips that we turn off when not in use to minimize power drain. We do have a solar hot water system, which we noticed cutting our electricity bills by 20-30% once it went in years ago, and which we like having for the ethical sense of how it works. We do try to target our major hot-water usage (like laundry and dishwasher) around sunny days to maximize its benefits, and there are many days where our hot water is effectively "free". That being said, we’re not sure it was really economically worth it, and are sure that solar PV (electricity) isn’t for us, because given how little energy we use already the cost of the system never really pays itself back. At our low rate of usage, it’s going to take 30 years for the solar hot water system to pay itself back (and that's if we don't have more expensive repair bills like we had this summer on a system that doesn't seem to be nearly as fine-tuned as we anticipated). It would take a lifetime for PV to pay itself back. Estimates for how fast solar or other renewables pay themselves back often rely on high energy use numbers for wasteful households, not for how sustainably minded homes can actually be run to minimize use in the first place.

We could do far more sustainable things with the solar PV money (like invest it directly in our vegetable farm) rather than put it into newly manufactured solar panels which use resources to mine, manufacture, and ship, like just being smart about our energy use in the first place. It's a similar situation to paying $30-40,000 for a hybrid car, or $12,000 for a normal one that gets 80% as good mileage. I'm happy to see hybrids (and renewable energy sources) being built and purchased as that does help push development of better technologies, but basic personal conservation is still the untouchable elephant in the room of energy options.

Also, being off-grid increases your risk of power loss, and/or increases your costs to buffer that power loss (large generators, serious battery banks), and for a vegetable farm whose livelihood requires keeping lots of vegetables cool in the heat of summer, the cost/benefit of off-grid power just doesn't compare to the security of grid power (we do have a small generator for emergencies anyway).

Besides, neither wind nor solar are all that cost-effective here in Missouri’s highly volatile climate, especially without investing in some serious backup generators/battery banks which also don’t really pay themselves back. We feel we’re overall more sustainable by staying on-grid and practicing effective conservation, rather than spending gobs of money to “save” that last remaining power cost. Part of our estimates, too, rely on the fact that Boone Electric is extremely well-run and we've very comfortable placing ourselves in their hands (they're even quite respectful of our organic status, happily allowing us to maintain our power lines instead of spraying them, unlike some utilities we know of). In a different setting, we might be more willing to explore alternate options, but we're quite comfortable with our setup. Effective conservation fits our lives better than the alternatives.

Bird list and other natural events, December 2011

2012-01-05T06:00:00.001-06:00

December was a wonderful month here. The weather was pleasantly seasonal, with gradually declining temperatures and many sunny days, and enough rain but no disruptive storms. Along with an equally reasonable November, we've had a long stretch now of sensible, enjoyable weather that we'll try to remember whenever it ends. We spend somewhat less time outdoors in December, partly because of office work, and so naturally have less time to see and hear birds and other events, but this is normally a quiet natural month anyway.

Birds were very quiet over the first half of the month, but starting on the 18th much larger mixed flocks of robins, bluebirds, waxwings, titmice, juncoes, chickadees, goldfinches, and more began appearing. During the week leading up to Christmas, it often felt like an aviary outdoors, as flocks of birds packed our trees, chattering and singing away, while other streams of them coursed through and over the treetops. This began around the time a major winter storm walloped the Plains west and north of here, and I suspect many of these birds were moving south ahead of the inclement weather.

Hawks have been all but missing, with only one Red-Shouldered and no Red-Tails observed all month. We've seen or heard no sparrows, either, though many do overwinter in this area and we saw multiple species on a morning hike at Rudolf Bennitt Conservation Area, about 15 miles northwest of here. Our Great Horned Owls are clearly remaining for the winter, though, as they can often be heard hooting at dusk from their roosts just to the north along Silver Fork.

NEW IN NOVEMBER (1 species, some observed earlier this year but not in November)
European Starling (one dense flock one day)

PRESENT IN NOVEMBER (22 species)
Canada Goose
Red-Shouldered Hawk (seen once)
Bald Eagle (seen once soaring over the farm)
Great Horned Owl
Barred Owl
Red-Bellied Woodpecker
Downy Woodpecker
Northern Flicker
Pileated Woodpecker
Blue Jay
American Crow
Tufted Titmouse
Black-Capped Chickadee
White-Breasted Nuthatch
Carolina Wren
Eastern Bluebird
American Robin
Cedar Waxwing
Yellow-Rumped Warbler
Northern Cardinal
Dark-Eyed Junco
American Goldfinch

MISSING/UNOBSERVED SINCE NOVEMBER (6 species)
Snow Goose
Turkey Vulture
Red-Tailed Hawk
Golden-Crowned Kinglet
White-Throated Sparrow
Song Sparrow

December food on the farm

2011-12-30T06:00:00.002-06:00

December is a wonderful month for on-farm food, as we have about the highest possible diversity of ingredients to work with. Some fresh produce is still available, we can justify starting to dip into preserves, fresh meat is back on the menu, and we can start making time to do some really interesting and enjoyable things in the kitchen. In addition, we often end up hosting many visitors throughout the month, giving yet another impetus to culinary extravaganzas. Here's an extra-long photo essay on the kinds of food we can source and make from this one diversified farm. As always, ingredients listed in italics were sourced on-farm.

Joanna's birthday party
We held a special birthday celebration this year, as it turned out that a couple from Joanna's college geology department would be visiting for the first time over her birthday weekend. Her old workplace at the USGS hosts several other college geology alums, so we invited everyone out for an evening of catching up. Here's the diverse spread we put together to feed the crowd.

Tasting platter: smoked pork shoulder, smoked Canadian bacon, cucumber pickles, beet pickles, fresh goat feta cheese, aged goat cheddar cheese.

At left: homemade ravioli with creamy (goat milk) winter squash sauce & sage leaf. At right: pork loin simmered in goat milk sauce with carrots and parsley.

At left: fresh bread from Missouri flour. At right: sweet potatoes chopped for roasting.

At left: mixed salad greens (not the same ones served this night, but a similar fresh mix). At right: birthday carrot cake (our eggs, goat yogurt), with creamy (goat chevre) frosting and organic Missouri pecans.

This was a fun meal to put together. Overall, Joanna wanted an Italian theme, as her college geology department has strong ties to Italy. As Italian food is generally her realm (partly because of her experience there), this was mostly her meal to prepare, which she was quite happy to do. I insisted on the nice Germanic tasting platter just to even things out a bit, and give me something to do. Plus we had all this fresh pork begging to be shown off...

Serving Sycamore
We try to invite our main restaurant chefs/owners out to the farm every winter. This allows them to see the place and maintain a direct connection with their ingredient sources, allows a good discussion of the past and future growing year, and lets us thank them for their support by preparing a good farm-sourced meal (especially from things we can't/don't sell them). Last month it was Trey from Red & Moe; this month we hosted Mike from Sycamore. We went with a Mexican theme this year.

Fresh-made Missouri-wheat tortillas in the cast-iron skillets, plus two sauces. Upper right, smoked pork simmered in a spicy red pepper sauce (dried anchos, jalapenos, red anaheims, garlic). Lower right, green sauce (roasted green tomatoes/onions/garlic, dried peppers, herbs).

Tortilla fillings (along with meat and sauces): fresh goat cheese, cowpeas.

Other treats: fresh pepper sausage (ground pork, dried anaheim/jalapeno/ancho peppers, garlic, cilantro, stuffed in our hog's casings). Fresh carrot sticks & watermelon radishes for garnish.

Not shown: baby greens mix and cilantro for topping the tortillas & fillings.

Other random meals
When we're not hosting guests, there's still lots of interesting food to be made with December ingredients. Here are just a few more meals that we happened to take photos of:

Stir fry of ground pork pepper sausage (see description above), rehydrated peppers, daikon radish, Filipino noodles. Side of fermented kimchi (cabbage, carrot, daikon).

Healthy breakfast: Diced sweet potatoes fried in lard; fried eggs & cured bacon. Side of strawberry yogurt (goat's milk yogurt, preserved strawberry jam). BTW, we define healthy as "hearty enough to get us through a morning of work without being hungry two hours later".

Above left: baked beans (beans unfortunately not ours due to crop failure): organic white beans, maple syrup, mustard seeds, cured pork, onion. Above right: our weekly staple cornbread (ground corn, goat's milk yogurt, eggs, leaveners).

Above left: BST (bacon, spinach, & cheese sandwich; cheese on left is our aged cheddar, cheese on right is purchased smoked gouda) with cucumber & beet pickles. Above right: sweet potato pancakes (sweet potatoes, eggs, onion) with simmered cabbage (onion, cabbage, pork, organic Missouri apples, wine, caraway) and a rare treat of brussels sprouts (from a depressingly low-yielding test planting).

There were many more interesting meals, and most of these photos are drawn from the first half of the month alone. Don't let anyone tell you local foods are boring or restrictive.

Winter holidays

2011-12-23T06:00:00.012-06:00

Christmas is a quiet time here; it's not a major holiday for us, so we mostly enjoy it as a cultural reason to make traditional foods like German Christmas cookies and relax for a couple days. We exchange a few gifts for tradition's sake, but tend to feel that our lives and actions throughout the year mark our beliefs far more strongly than an isolated flurry of stress and consumerism (we view New Years resolutions the same way).

The winter solstice has a more direct meaning as farmers, marking the literal transition into winter, though also the beginning of increasing day length again just when we've finally started to slow down. We celebrated that on Wednesday evening with a small group of friends and a visit from Joanna's parents.

The farm animals are settled in for winter as well, in solid buildings that will keep them in comfort through the weather to come. Whatever your holiday preferences and plans, may they mean as much to you as a quiet house, warm fire, and good food mean to us. Merry Christmas and all other holidays from all of us at the farm.

Food preservation methods: Fermentation

2011-12-21T06:00:00.002-06:00

FERMENTATION OF VEGETABLES
Fermentation is a historic food preservation method that has increasingly fallen out of favor since the advent of freezing and canning, but one that remains useful for some vegetables in particular. Cabbage, for example, can be fermented into sauerkraut, a perfectly normal food that nonetheless is almost entirely purchased instead of homemade. Even our hard-core traditionalist German cookbook assumes the home cook buys, instead of makes, sauerkraut. Yet there are distinct benefits to fermenting vegetables yourself.

One useful book on the subject, Keeping Food Fresh (a fascinating collection of traditional Old World recipes and methods for food preservation; the new edition has been renamed Preserving Food Without Freezing or Canning), includes this worthwhile point:

Inevitably, food is altered in the preservation process. However, unlike sterilization (canning) or freezing, many traditional methods do not necessarily mean a loss in flavor or nutritional value. Lactic fermentation, for example, enhances digestion and also increases the enzyme and sometimes the vitamin content, compared with the unfermented food. In other processes, the act of preserving often enhances the flavor of a food rather than its nutritional value.

From another angle, Harold McGee's eminently scientific tome On Food and Cooking states that:

(the microbes involved in fermentation) leave most of the plant material intact, including its vitamin C (protected from oxidation by the carbon dioxide they generate); they often add significant amounts of B vitamins; and they generate new volatile substances that enrich the food's aroma.

We've found that home-fermented sauerkraut is a tasty and stable way to preserve cabbage (which you can't really freeze or can), that doesn't degrade the product, and was well worth our trying over the last few years. We've also experimented with fermented pickles and kimchi.

JAR FERMENTATION
The simplest method, which I drew from Keeping Food Fresh, is to pack shredded cabbage into jars, layered with salt and spices, and let the natural fermentation take hold in a controlled setting. I am intentionally not giving a recipe here, as fermentation (like any other home kitchen experiment) can go wrong if not done right, and folks wanting to try this should rely on a more authoritative source for specifics. But here's how it looks when I do it:

I shred multiple cabbages using a food processor. For this batch, I did about 20lb of cabbage, 5 ~4lb heads of our excellent fall Napa. I cut out the cores but use the rest, washing it well. For rough reference, this resulted in 4 half-gallon jars packed tightly.

Then I pack the shredded cabbage into quart or half-gallon jars (latter shown here), adding a dose of salt every few inches, along with a few juniper berries per jar. A wooden rolling pin makes an excellent tool for repeatedly mashing down the cabbage into a tightly packed mass, which also helps release some juices. When I've packed all I can to the base of the rim, I pour some boiling water into the top, and screw on a good-quality canning lid and ring, a good use for once-used canning lids. You don't want these to seal entirely, so you don't water-bath them. The not-quite-seal you get with hand-tightening allows just enough air exchange to allow for controlled fermentation without spoilage. These just sit on the counter or another storage area, and do their thing; weeks or months later, we crack a jar to a loud HISSSS and most of the time a nice, tangy, excellent kraut. We cook it before serving just in case, but usually it's quite obvious when it's gone bad (this has rarely happened).

CROCK FERMENTATION

We've also tried fermenting cabbages in large open crocks, with less success. For this to work you need to keep all the vegetable submerged in a brine, weighted down, and this has been hard to do with the materials we have on hand. We've wasted a distressing amount of cabbage which has just gone moldy. So this fall we ordered a modern German Fermenting Crock (picture below from the linked site) on the strong recommendation of a trusted friend. This new version of the old-school crocks has a special water seal that helps keep the process under control, and seems quite well thought-out. Our trial run is underway, and we'll report on the results when applicable. We prepared this batch in late November when cabbage was abundant and we were still overwhelmed with other produce. The recommended fermentation time is 4 to 8 weeks, meaning that we'll have abundant kraut just about the time that our freshly harvested greens take their winter break.

OTHER FERMENTATION

There are many other items, and ways, to ferment. We've tried cucumber pickles before, with mixed results. One batch worked okay, but we didn't prefer the flavor compared to "normal" vinegar pickles, though this may just be what our taste buds are used to. Both we and a good friend have experimented with fermenting kimchi, with very tasty results. The kimchi recipe that we used needed only three days of fermentation at room temperature, yielding very quick results (but arguably not achieving much in the way of food preservation since we ate it in within the time frame the the ingredients could have stored on their own). On the other hand, it was a good way to experiment with fermentation. The quick-fermenting kimchi recipe that we used is from Nourishing Traditions, a cookbook that we saw referenced frequently when we did some online reading on the topic of fermentation; Daniel Boone Regional Library has a copy or two.

Whey is an optional but recommended ingredient for many fermented recipes, because it helps jump start the microbial activity. We use whey from our cultured cheeses such as feta or cheddar (but only if we started by pasteurizing the milk), or we drain yogurt in cheesecloth and collect the whey from that. We don't use whey from ricotta, because it's not cultured, and we don't use whey if it is from an unpasteurized batch of cheese that will be aged (just to be on the safe side).

Books on fermenting are full of interesting and oddball ideas for home cooks to explore as desired. But the core point is that fermentation is a very useful and unique method of food preservation, one that doesn't require as much work or equipment or energy as many other methods, and which can even improve the food in question (something rarely said of freezing in particular). So it's worth trying if you're feeling adventurous or just like the idea of making real sauerkraut for once.

Food preservation methods: Root cellaring

2011-12-19T06:00:00.001-06:00

We've had questions from new CSA members regarding home food preservation techniques and any relevant items that might make good holiday gifts. We're thrilled that folks are thinking ahead to preserving next year's bounty, as that's the key to getting the most out of a CSA and building the economic sustainability of local foods in general. This series will present some of our experiences and advice, along with ideas for kitchen items that we've found to be useful investments as serious practitioners of home food preservation.

ROOT CELLARING & WINTER STORAGE
Many kinds of produce and foods are reasonably stable on their own, if given the proper conditions. Traditional farms and homes used various forms of a root cellar, generally a room dug into the ground (or a retrofitted basement) which used the ambient ground temperature and humidity to keep foods in proper conditions for long-time storage. As in other topics, there is a ton of information available in books and online, so we're going to focus on the ways we handle this process.

Choosing storage varieties:
There are many different varieties of any given produce item, with different culinary and storage properties. For exampe, Arkansas Black apples are virtually indestructible, while others may last only a few weeks (see this publication from Iowa Extension for examples of apple storage qualities). Potatoes, garlic, onions, and many other storage crops are the same way. If you're buying (or planting) items intended for storage, do some research and ask some questions first. If the grower has no idea, that may be a hint that they don't store food themselves and maybe aren't handling the food properly for storage either (see next).

Preparing storage items:
In some cases, like apples, the product is pretty much ready to store as-is, assuming you establish the proper conditions. Onions and garlic need to be cured first, a process of hanging the fresh crop until it dries enough to become shelf stable. Most of the time, you buy these two in this condition anyway, though it's worth being aware of the season and asking the grower to ensure they're actually properly cured and not fresh. Other things, like sweet potatoes, are often sold "fresh" at farmers markets but will benefit greatly from proper curing before sale, and will then store much longer and taste much better. In these cases, curing involves storing the items for a certain length of time at fairly warm temperatures to allow certain natural chemical changes that enhance stability and flavor.

Storage locations:
Selecting the proper storage location begins by researching what "ideal" storage conditions are for a given item (in terms of temperature & humidity), then finding the closest conditions that reality will permit. Knott's Handbook for Vegetable Growers, p. 432 & 433, is our reference source for storage conditions. For long-term storage, temperature stability is a plus; temperature swings will reduce the storage life of produce (this is why garages aren't ideal). For example, garlic begins to sprout if temperature fluctuates regularly; sprouting is desired from the October-planted garlic in the ground that will be next year's crop, but the garlic that we want to keep eating into March needs to be tricked into thinking that it's not time to grow yet, and stable temperatures will help. Sweet potatoes like it warm and will start to go bad if they get too cold. Most other storage crops are happier in cooler conditions. We don't have a proper root cellar, dug into the ground to ensure high humidity and temps just above freezing all winter, though it's a someday-project. It's also possible to construct a basement version, in effect a cold-storage room that stays colder than the basement itself (see these articles from Mother Earth News on building a proper root cellar and a basement version).

We do, however, have a house that is larger than we need, and whose back rooms we hardly ever use and thus don't heat or cool artificially. So for years we've used the back "master" bedroom as an excellent root cellar, as it tends to remain between 34-40F throughout the winter, given the large buffering presence of a basement underneath and well-insulated walls. Apples, garlic, onions, and more do well back there, the former in crates or boxes and the latter hung in bundles or spread on wire racks. Other items store best at warmer temperatures, like sweet potatoes and winter squash, and we store these in the house itself, often in the same room we cured them in originally. Darkness is important, too: daylight will encourage sprouting or other unwanted developments.

Storage time:
We don't always intend our storage items to last a really long time, given that we also preserve lots of food in other ways. In most cases we shoot for things like apples, potatoes, and squash to last us into January, at which point we can start dipping into more canned and frozen foods for the next few months. Garlic and onions usually last us into March with some attention. It's important to check your storage items regularly, and use anything that's starting to sprout or otherwise go bad. You can't predict ahead of time which onions will sprout in January versus March, but regularly checking and using the ones just showing some green will naturally cull the supply without much waste.

If you take your home food supply as seriously as we do, refusing to buy produce from off the farm year-round, you quickly realize that the "hungry" months aren't winter, but spring. We still have plenty of food on-hand in the depths of February; it's the warm rainy days of March through May in which food supplies are actually the thinnest. By this point the only fresh food is lightweights like salad greens and radishes; you still have months to go before the heavy hitters of summer and fall show up again. This is why we use root cellaring as a complement to other preservation methods, as a way to delay the use of longer-term storage items. Our special Mercuri winter tomatoes are the same way; we don't expect them to last all year, but we do expect them to keep us out of the canned tomatoes for a few extra months, thus saving the need to do extra canning during the already-busy season.

Salvaging stored items:
When you do notice stored items starting to sprout or go bad, there are many ways to salvage them before loss. Sprouting onions can be cut up and dehydrated, an easy task for a cold February day. Now you have onions for much longer, without doing all the work in busy onion season. My favorite trick for saving sprouting garlic is to steam-roast large batches, then freeze the pulp (a trick I learned from a Michael Ruhlman cookbook). I pack a glass baking dish with sprouting garlic heads, pour a little water in the bottom, cover it with foil or a lid, and roast for an hour. Then I squeeze all the soft, aromatic garlic pulp into a dedicated ice-cube tray and freeze it, creating little "bullion" cubes of pure roasted garlic that add great flavor to soups and sauces for months past the expiration date of the whole garlic. Mid-winter squash or sweet potatoes can be cooked up into pulp, then frozen, replacing empty spots in your freezer where you've started pulling out other items. Mid-winter apples turning brown can still be made into applesauce.

All of this could be done in the fall, but that's when we're already too busy preserving food that has to be dealt with then, and still actively farming. If nothing else, cellaring/storage is a way to delay some of that preservation work a few months, spreading it out so it's not so overwhelming, and extending the storage life of these items. At best, it's an easy way to enhance the diversity of your winter menus with food that took little to no preservation work, simply the dedication and planning required to acquire and store fresh local food when it's available.

On-farm hog slaughter setup

2011-12-16T06:00:00.000-06:00

We've slaughtered and processed our own meat on-farm for years, primarily goats, deer, and poultry, and have found that these animals are fairly straightforward to deal with. Hogs, however, take a lot more work, care, and preparation to do properly, and there is remarkably little detailed information online to guide others like us who are independent-minded in learning such things. After doing our first smaller pig last year, we wrote up lots of ideas and observations on how to make things run more smoothly in the future, and followed these notes in setting up our slaughtering system this year. While we need more practice in the actual killing process (hogs are harder to kill cleanly than goats or poultry), we were very happy with the efficiency and practicality of our processing setup this year, and so offer this photo tour of the infrastructure & setup we used to allow just two of us to do this work effectively.

Note: this is not a post on how to kill and process a hog. We're still working out our favorite methods, and with only two of us, taking step-by-step photos is quite impractical once we're bloody and busy. This just shows how we arranged the job and the tools we used, as a guide to others considering similar work.

Above is this year's hog, a full-blooded Berkshire we purchased post-weaning from JJR Farm, which raises certified organic pork about an hour south of us. We got him in May and kept him on pasture throughout the summer and fall, feeding out a certified organic feed along with as many vegetable scraps, dairy whey, and on-farm byproducts we could generate. We're ironically grateful to the Missouri Department of Agriculture for their idiotic no-feeding-commercial-pigs-vegetables ruling, as this guy alone ate every scrap we produced and still powered through lots of grain; we're too efficient in our vegetable handling and didn't generate nearly enough waste to cut the grain budget for even one pig, much less several. We don't know his live weight when butchered, but the carcass minus head and guts weighed around 210 lb, so probably in the mid-high 200s total (head and guts are large and heavy).

Above is an overview of our processing setup; most of this will have closeup photos following. We waited for a series of days with daytime temperatures a bit over freezing, and nights just below, to keep the meat cold while handling outdoors. This cloudy day was ideal, as even cold sunlight heats what it touches. From left to right:

Scalding tank in which whole carcass is dunked to loosen hair before scraping.
Heating fire behind tank, heats water and cold farmers.
Temporary cattle-panel pen in which actual killing happens
Large stainless-steel sink for rinsing small intestines.
Stainless steel work table for scraping and handling carcass.
Plastic table for holding tools, soap, and other needs.
All-weather hydrant with soap and hose.
Tractor with bucket & chains for handling a heavy carcass with only two people

Note that the whole area is set up along an open, linear plan that allows the tractor to move forward and backward unimpeded. This very important for clean and practical carcass handling, as it needs to be moved from killing pen to scalding tank to work table, then eventually up to the main barn for hanging, and having open ground makes this easy, quick, and safe. You don't want to be bumping into things with the tractor or the carcass. We actually ended up moving the work table just in front of the scalding tank (as viewed in the photo) as a more convenient location to scrape the carcass, requiring less tractor movement.

Assorted useful equipment, from left to right: Pots and tubs for useful scraps (heart, liver, etc.), jar for collecting clean blood for blood sausage (didn't happen this time), knives & sharpeners, sanitary gloves and band-aids (in the interest of preparedness), bell scrapers for removing hair, burlap sack for dunking in hot water and spot-scalding difficult bits of hairy skin, sausage stuffing attachments (helpful for flushing water through the small intestines which we clean for sausage casings), salt for water that the small intestines are temporarily stored in after an initial flush, towels, vodka for dulling hog's senses prior to killing, soap & sponge, matches for fire, reference book in case just in case.

Not shown but also needed: A string to tie off the bung. We found that we needed more containers than we had for holding organs, tongue, jowls, ears, fat scraps (to be rendered for lard), and various other tidbits (such as the bladder, which we initially saved but didn't end up using because we found insufficient information on how to handle it). The knives shown are not sufficient for sticking a full-grown hog; one with a long, solid blade, preferably double-edged, would be ideal (this appears to be a good example).

Main stainless steel work table (purchased at restaurant auction), sharp carpenter's saw for bone work, buckets for blood (collected for soil fertility reuse) guts and other nasty bits, all-weather hydrant with splitter, hose, and nozzle. The splitter allows for hand-washing at either the hydrant or at the end of hose. There's a bar of soap tied into a clean piece of scrap silk long underwear; this keeps soap accessible & suds form right through the cloth (pantyhose works best but we don't have any).

Scalding tank and fire. We weren't sure how well the seams on this old tank would hold up to direct heat, so didn't build the fire directly under it, but just off to the side. The tank is propped up on concrete blocks so we could shovel hot coals underneath and thus manage heat better. This works quite well and allows maintenance of a nice fire at all times to warm the cold workers. Next year, we might add one more course of blocks to allow a higher coal heap; it got a little tight under there. We were also concerned the tank might be just a bit small for our large hog, but it fit perfectly. Setting the water level about 2/3 full also worked just right, enough to submerge the carcass but not to slosh over meaningfully.

We prepped a double log cabin fire structure the day before so we could get the fire going with little effort in the morning. The firewood is mostly cedar scrap, both log ends and leftovers from on-farm milling, that produce a nice hot burn. We easily kept a good fire going most of the day, but let it die down when the tractor had to drive by so there would be no problems with stray sparks/embers. We positioned the fire relative to the rest of the work area with the forecast of a gentle north wind (photo is looking SSE), expecting the smoke to always blow away from us. Instead, as we should have known, the topography of our narrow valley meant that for much of the day the local smoke was blowing east instead, right into our scalding tank and scraping location. Figures. The shovel and rake shown were used to rake and move coals as needed. We monitored tank temperature (you want around 145F) with a small soil thermometer inserted into a hole in a cedar plank, which floats happily on the surface and gives a good reading. It took about three hours from initial fire starting to get the water to temperature. We actually overshot a bit, but cold water from the hose took care of that problem.

At left, .22 rifle and bucket of aromatic cedar sawdust (we have lots left over from milling). The latter works well for soaking up blood and odors, especially once the day is done, to help prevent too many predators and scavengers from descending on the farm. The rifle is used to shoot the pig prior to sticking (cutting vein in throat to allow proper bleedout). This is harder and more complicated than the straightforward killing of a goat or chicken; we're still not expert with this step. Quick version: it takes more than a quart of vodka to put a full-size hog to sleep (or we soaked it in too much corn), we haven't found a .22 to have the stopping power with a hog that it does with a goat, despite many references to the contrary, and we need a longer sticking knife. I got the cut basically right this year, but my knife wasn't long enough so it took several thrusts to get deep enough.

At right, tractor bucket with chains set up for hanging/transporting carcass. The hooks at each end of the chain can either go into a back-leg hock (hanging the animal vertically head-down, for blood-draining and gutting), or if you tie each pair of legs together first, the hooks go into the rope-tie, hanging the animal horizontally with its back down, perfect for transport, dunking in the scalding tank, and setting down on a work table for scraping. We fumbled with the rope a bit while trying to get the legs tied together properly; the rope broke once or twice, and getting a good knot around a tapered leg took longer than it should have. Next year we might try some straps that can be cinched down quickly around the legs. Also note the stump under the bucket; tractor hydraulics only hold their strength when the engine is running, so if you want the bucket off the ground with the engine off, you need to prop it up safely (I did this time so I could work on chaining the bucket just right without getting a faceful of exhaust). We leave the engine running whenever the carcass is hanging; I don't trust any props to hold up nearly 300lb of pig with us anywhere nearby; diesels burn very little fuel while idling and it's a worthwhile safety margin.

Killing pen made of four cattle panels with T-posts at the corners, tied together with baling twine. We left one panel end loose so it could be swung out as a gate (to get him in and us out), and secured it with a bungee. Next time we'll probably place T-posts at the halfway points, too, as a full-size hog can easily push through an unsupported 16' panel if you're not watching him (which I was). It's also helpful for the panel nearest the tractor/work zone (foreground in this photo) to be able to come off quickly, so you can drive the tractor in as soon as the hog is down and chain him up for maximum bleed-out. Next year we'll use bungees instead of string on that side, too, to make this faster/easier. Alternatively, hog panels would allow easier access as they're much lower than 4' cattle panels. The tractor bucket could be rested on one so it's ready to go if you drop the hog in the right place.

Preparations also involved gathering/preparing/purchasing a few things that aren't photographed, but here's a list for reference: Butcher paper, freezer tape, lots of regular salt, a little curing salt (pink salt), brown sugar (for curing bacon), diesel (for the tractor), proper food-grade containers for curing bacon & hams. We also put cattle panels across the front of the barn (to keep dogs/coyotes out), hung a scale off of a rafter, and hung a singletree off of the scale. A couple of old feed bags under this setup kept blood from dripping onto the gravel.

For reference, here's the order we work in:
- Shoot & stick hog.
- Hang by back leg(s) to bleed out.
- Hang by all legs to scald, using bucket to raise & lower carcass so that water sloshes all around it.
- Set carcass horizontally onto work table to scrape (can turn tractor off since weight is on table).
- Remove head when scraped (usually needs extra work separately to remove hair). We'll often also do some work on loosening the gullet and front-end tubes through the neck cut before hanging for gutting (see below), as it's much easier to do this on an even table than with the carcass dangling over you.
- Hang by back legs again for gutting; set large tub below carcass to catch guts as they fall out; we work from back to front (top to bottom). This helps keep everything clean, since we salvage many organs and the lower intestine for sausage casings. You could also do this while the carcass is on its side on a table.
- Hose out carcass thoroughly (hung from back legs if previously working horizontally).
- Transport to overnight hanging place, still using bucket. We were able to carefully transfer the quite-heavy carcass from the bucket chains to a singletree (rod with two hooks) chained to a barn rafter while keeping the carcass suspended, rather than setting it down on the ground and hooking it up to a pulley before hoisting. This kept the carcass off the ground, and didn't require the use of a rope pulley which works fine for 140 lb goats but which we were unsure about for a much heavier hog.

At the end of daylight, with two people working, we had the carcass scraped, gutted, cleaned, and hung; casings emptied, rinsed, and temporarily stored in salted water; and the working area cleaned up and liberally covered in sawdust. After dark, we got the small intestines fully cleaned, scraped, and packed in salt for sausage casings without staying up too late. That's with a relatively slow start, as we didn't even get the fire started until around 8:30am (hog went down a little before noon), given the demands for milking & other morning animal chores, and just not feeling the need to be too hyper about rushing the work.

For various parts of the next week, we cut up the carcass, started the hams and bacon curing, boiled bones & scraps for broth and chicken food, froze the bulk meat, cleaned interesting bits like the head and feet, rendered fat for lard, and so on. But the methods and setup described above let two people kill and clean a large hog on a long but not unreasonable day that was efficient and methodical.

December office work keeps the farm going

2011-12-10T06:00:00.002-06:00

Even a fundamentally outdoor, physical career like farming requires a fair bit of indoor work to maintain, and early winter is when this work really catches up to us. Every year December brings a tension between trying to work on outdoor offseason projects (such as logging, mulching, infrastructure repair/construction, meat butchering) and seasonal indoor needs of the business. Here's a quick look at the projects and necessities that keep us tied to a computer or desk for much of this month, often competing for limited access to our single terminal.

Financial reconciliation
With our sales pretty much complete, we have to close the books before end of year. We go through invoices and bank deposits to ensure nothing is missing or unpaid, match earnings to deposits, and so on. There are always cases where we paid a business expense with personal funds, or vice versa, either through mistake or circumstance, and need to reconcile those situations in our accounts (determine which entity owes the other money and remit it). The farm also needs to pay us rent. With our fiscal year ending Dec 31, there are all sorts of these account issues to handle, which take time and concentration to get right.

Seed order planning
Seed orders for the following year need to be completed in early winter, as (a) the first seeds are started in early February, and (b) with the ever-rising demands for seed from small farms and gardeners, specific varieties sell out faster and faster (this is especially important for a certified organic farm which is supposed to use certified seeds, though there are various ways to wiggle out of that requirement). This year we set ourselves a goal of completing our seed order by Dec 31, which means a lot of time spent on planning documents and maps. In doing this, we're juggling rotational considerations (keeping crops of the same family from following each other), CSA planning for the full year to keep distributions even and manageable, restaurant interests, workload balance throughout the year, predictions/hopes for weather, and more. Part of the challenge, too, is to maintain economic efficiency by not ordering more than we need or will use, thus saving money and waste. It's a very complex process to plan for the almost 200 varieties of food plants we grow. Getting the order done early helps ensure we get the varieties and quantities of seed we want, and/or that we can substitute effectively from another source if something does vanish quickly. It also takes a weight off our shoulders in the new year when many other tasks come on quickly (like taxes, organic certification paperwork, and spring seedlings).

Website work
There are always website updates to make, but this year especially, we've taken on the project of completely rebuilding our farm website for CSA service. We built our original site to advertise a market farm, intending it to act primarily as a static online brochure where customers could learn about our methods and products and then seek us out at the market, with a separate blog to serve more actively interested folks. As we move into CSA, we're far less interested in outright advertising to the general public, and far more interested in serving our paid members with useful content and features that relate directly to their CSA experience. Thus we're redesigning the site with more dynamic content like recipe collections, member surveys, farm events calendar, indices of blog-postings on various relevant topics, and more. We'll also be porting this blog itself over to Wordpress (the platform on which we're building the new site), so that all our online content is available in one place. Though our focus is on CSA, we do also want to build the site into a useful reference for others interested in our style of homestead farming, and will be working to build a very informative site that in part pays back all the online help we found when starting this place ourselves (and fills some gaps we couldn't find). All this takes a lot of computer time on the programming and content-development end, and again this has to get done in the winter because we sure don't have time once spring comes.

CSA planning
Though we've done much of the basic setup work, and have our membership complete, there is still a lot of background work to be done in getting the CSA truly ready to go, especially with our first distribution intended for mid-January. We sent out an initial member survey to capture information like delivery preferences & addresses, and are exploring different delivery routes that will serve us all most effectively (every member has both a preferred day and location to get their share). The January share will partly act as a test of this system, but we still want a sensible first draft to work from. We'll also be working on planning out different farm events given interests expressed on the survey; so far workshops like cheesemaking and food preservation are high on folks' requests.

Sharing tasks
Most of the work above falls into Joanna's purview; I may be the face of the farm as its salesman and public voice, but she's really the core engine at its heart. She does most of the seed planning, accounting, and computer programming that keep us running year-round. I tend to handle the writing and photography, which means I get the glory, but it should really only reflect off me from her. In return, as in most of the year, I handle much of the routine daily work like animal chores, housecleaning, cooking, laundry, and more to allow her the physical and mental freedom to focus on these important and time-consuming tasks. I also work on second-hand projects like house repairs, woodworking, firewood management, and as much logging as I can do within earshot of the house (for safety reasons). It's an excellent partnership, but one that doesn't always give her the credit she deserves.

Blog writing
What this means for the winter, especially, is that I get very little time on the computer and so blog-writing naturally suffers. I usually need a break by this point anyway; though I have lots of policy and farm-related topics in my head, I get a bit burned out on developing them all into unpaid content. Though we're much more confident in the farm's future and the value of our online presence than we were last year, there will still be a significant drop-off in blogging for the next month of two. For the rest of this month, we'd like to get to our remaining Food Preservation posts, and one on our hog-slaughter setup, but after that it will mostly be occasional light-duty updates, especially until the new site with integrated blog is up and running.

Happy winter
So our winters are not so much a time off, though we do work shorter hours than summer, but a time to focus on different work and recharge our outdoor farmer batteries for the all-too-soon return of the growing season. It's generally a pleasant time, with Joanna doing comfortable computer work in a home office with natural lighting and a fire in the stove, and me puttering about comfortably on house & farm projects that I can do alone, including some especially interesting cooking now that I have time and a full set of food preserves that I can play with. May your winter be as enjoyable as ours usually is.

Bird list and other natural events, November 2011

2011-12-06T06:00:00.001-06:00

The quiet of winter begins to descend on the farm through November. In the final week, we only observed 19 different bird species, mostly those that will be with us throughout the winter. I'll likely be making very few changes to the list below for December. The coyotes continue to be quite active, with one neighbor saying it's the most populous coyote year they can remember in 30+ years here. I suspect that plays a role in:

Hunting season was a bust for me this year. I saw nothing for the first week, then on day 8 saw three in two different locations, but all moving fast and screened by brush. Since then we've been too busy with farm work, Thanksgiving, pig slaughter, and more to justify any more hunting time. A friend hunting here did take a button buck, which made us all happy. We kept the hide, tongue, and liver, all of which we use but he didn't. We're not alone in missing a deer this year; the Kansas City Star reports that deer harvest in Missouri has been declining for several years now, with this year's harvest down 45,000 animals from five years ago. We've certainly seen plenty throughout the year, but the short legal hunting season doesn't always correlate with the best time for a farm like ours to actually hunt deer, so it didn't work out this time. That's life, and the 200+ lb of pork we butchered last week will make up for it.

The rainfall tap finally reopened, giving us a welcome 4.43" over the month, the most we've recorded since May (October totalled 0.60"). It's too little too late for most crops, but still beneficial to our pastures and wildlife. Overall November was a quite pleasant month, with stable weather gently cooling off into winter, and no major storms or disruptions. I love this form of Missouri autumn, the long tranquil arrival of winter that makes us deeply happy to be able to work outdoors.

NEW IN NOVEMBER (2 species, some observed earlier this year but not in October)
Bald Eagle
Great Horned Owl

PRESENT IN NOVEMBER (26 species)
Canada Goose
Snow Goose (in migration over farm)
Turkey Vulture (a rare late one on 11/15; they winter south of here)
Red-Tailed Hawk
Red-Shouldered Hawk
Barred Owl
Red-Bellied Woodpecker
Downy Woodpecker
Northern Flicker
Pileated Woodpecker
Blue Jay
American Crow
Tufted Titmouse
Black-Capped Chickadee
White-Breasted Nuthatch
Carolina Wren
Golden-Crowned Kinglet
Eastern Bluebird
American Robin
Cedar Waxwing
Yellow-Rumped Warbler
Northern Cardinal
White-Throated Sparrow
Song Sparrow
Dark-Eyed Junco
American Goldfinch

MISSING/UNOBSERVED SINCE OCTOBER (16 species)
Wood Duck
Great Blue Heron
Sharp-Shinned Hawk (likely ID but not certain)
Cooper's Hawk (likely ID but not certain)
Ruby-Crowned Kinglet
Catbird
Blue-Headed Vireo
Common Grackle
Finch, either Purple or House (couldn't ID for certain)
Mourning Dove
Belted Kingfisher
Eastern Phoebe
Eastern Towhee
Summer Tanager
Black-Throated Green Warbler
Nashville Warbler

Busy week

2011-11-30T06:00:00.023-06:00

This has been, and will be, an especially busy week for us. We had intentions of continuing the Food Preservation series with posts on root cellaring, fermentation, and cheesemaking, but those will have to wait. Here's a brief look at this ultra-busy early winter week on the farm.

Sunday
The week's forecast clearly showed perfect butchering weather, a set of stable days with highs in the low 40s and lows around freezing. Time to slaughter the pig. We spent much of this day setting up the infrastructure and plans for this complex task: set up killing pen, prepare scalding tank & fire site, set up processing tables/knives/soap/etc, prepare gut buckets & other containers, prepare hanging location in barn, set up tractor for carcass transport, clean kitchen, etc.

Monday
Pig slaughter: Start the fire to heat the scalding water (and to keep us warm), kill the pig when the water is ready, scald & scrape the carcass, remove & process guts (separating useful organs like heart, liver, small intestine for casings, etc.), begin processing head, etc. Got the carcass hung and all the infrastructure cleaned up as dark fell. Spent evening cleaning & scraping small intestines for sausage casings. Below right, carcass hanging in barn with cattle panels to keep dogs/coyotes away. Sans head and guts, this still weighed in around 210 lb.

Tuesday
Pig processing & cold snap preparation. Morning, worked on cutting up and freezing pork, such as this slab above left. Processing includes skinning sections we don't want hide-on (we leave hide on bacon & ham), scraping fat from hide for lard rendering & sausage making, cleaning up head for head-cheese, separating cuts for immediate freezing (ribs, shoulder, sausage scrap) and those for curing (ham, bacon, jowl). Afternoon, did necessary farm work for seriously cold Tuesday night (low 20s forecast), including covering spinach beds, harvesting remaining daikon radishes, harvesting lettuce, greens mix, & beet greens, bringing in hoses & other plastic items, moving all unfinished pork sections into coolers for cold protection (both hams & one side). Evening, make leberkaese (German liver loaf), continue processing meat, especially starting cuts curing for planned Saturday smoking session. Cleanup takes a long time each night, as we have to wash everything including tables and counters.

Wednesday
Planned work: return our visiting breeding buck to his home farm after a month's sojourn with our ladies, transitioning the rest of the herd from their pasture shelter to their winter barn (below left) with new paddocks set up. Continue processing pork (hopefully finish, including getting hams curing), other farm work if time allows. Likely work on putting together first CSA email & member survey to begin direct prep for January distribution; we're rebuilding our website to make it more CSA-centric and are testing some new programming and content. May start rendering lard.

Thursday
Expected to be a reasonably warm day (50ish), so harvest & wash some root crops (carrots, parsnips), try to finish building the new chicken shed (below right) to be done by Friday evening given weekend plans. Collect bedding pile from final goat pasture shelter & start new compost pile. Continue work on CSA needs, lard rendering, etc.

Friday
Finish chicken shed if not done, fill gaps with lots of other winter farm cleanup (mulching overwintering crops, compost pile maintenance). Given forecast for extremely cold weather coming Monday, with weekend pretty much shot for work (see below), there will be plenty of prep work to get done.

Saturday
Spend morning smoking pork & bacon, cooking, baking, housecleaning, and otherwise preparing for exciting overnight visit from long-unseen friends. Afternoon arrival stops all work, then host dinner for visitors & several local mutual friends, doubling as birthday celebration for Joanna.

Sunday
See off visitors in morning, then host more friends for lunch who are moving to Wyoming and leaving us 16 laying hens, hence the need to finish new chicken shed by Friday. See off those friends mid-afternoon and get ready to host local author Emma Marris & family for dinner, in honor of her fantastic new book Rambunctious Garden.

Monday
Collapse and enjoy a cold day with a warm fire after one wildly busy week.

On-farm Thanksgiving 2011

2011-11-28T06:00:00.001-06:00

Thanksgiving is our favorite holiday, and possibly favorite day of the year. The meal we prepare and serve functions as a reminder and celebration of the year's work to support ourselves, and the value of the food we produce, as well as the reality and potential of locally sourced food from independent farms. We take no notice of consumerism, stress, or arbitrary cultural prescriptions, and simply prepare a special meal that reflects both real seasonal food, and the accumulated results of a year's farming. This year we celebrated alone, a word that in our increasingly urban society has negative connotations, but is often just the way we like it. Throughout the day, we interspersed food preparation with relaxation, reading, and conversation, leading up to a mid-afternoon meal that had no schedule but the timing of the food, which took only moderate concentration to get right, and whose component dishes were no more complicated than any other meal we normally make. Here is the meal we sat down to, with thoughts on its sourcing, preparation, and the holiday's place in our lives. As always, on-farm ingredients listed in italics; compare to last year if you like.

The dishes

Above left: roast chicken, freshly butchered the day before. A young Rhode Island Red rooster, healthy and fat, with exquisite flavor, one of many extraneous roosters resulting from on-farm breeding this year as we increase the size of our laying flock. We've found that our farm-processed heritage-breed birds aren't very fussy in the oven; the breast is still tender and juicy when the deep inner thighs are finally done. I hardly baste or fiddle with such birds; we think the inherent quality of the meat (the moisture is natural, not injected), and perhaps the quantity of fat, keeps it from drying out. Above right: my customized stuffing, the only version Joanna has ever really liked: onions, sage, thyme, parsley, egg, fresh-made bread cubes, organic Missouri pecans, organic Missouri apples, Missouri honey, Missouri Norton wine (adapted from p. 23, In a Vermont Kitchen).

Above left: roasted vegetables, including onion, carrot, potato, sweet potato, parsnip, sunchoke, garlic, leek, daikon radish, salsify, herbs. Above right: fresh-made rolls from a family recipe, including Missouri wheat flour. Not shown, farm-grown/canned strawberry jam, garlic butter.

Above left: fresh-made applesauce from organic Missouri apples. Above right: fresh salad of spinach, goat feta, organic Missouri pecans, organic Missouri apples.

Above left: fruit salad of preserved blueberries, strawberries, Missouri peaches, plus fresh organic Missouri apples. Above right: pumpkin pie: pumpkin, sweet potato, egg, goat milk, sugar, spices etc. with homemade crust. Note: all such pie recipes call for evaporated milk. We hate purchasing such processed products, and in the past have spent time cooking down our own milk to make an equivalent. This year we just used straight whole goat's milk, which worked perfectly.

Final thanks
The day before, I happened to run across this quote from John F. Kennedy, which seemed especially fitting for our celebration of this holiday:

As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.

When we assess our current lives, it's easy to see that our choices and actions directly support those things we value most and are most thankful for, such as independence, food, health, physical & intellectual stimulation, variety, and perhaps most of all, each other. We're grateful for the opportunities we've been given in this life, for the families that raised us to make the most of these opportunities, and for the mutual support, dedication, and love that continually help us build a comfortable and meaningful life on this humble but infinitely worthwhile farm.

I'm thankful this is my morning commute, even in inclement weather.

November farm food

2011-11-23T06:00:00.039-06:00

Throughout November we remain inundated with fresh food, finding no need to dip into already-preserved items, while struggling to find time for preserving the harvests that keep coming in. Here's another of our regular photo essays on the farm-sourced food we eat year-round. Many photos aren't very good, as this time of year most of our cooking is done after dark, and the lighting in our kitchen is not ideal for photography. They still get the point across. As always, on-farm ingredients listed in italics.

Using vegetables

Left: stir fry of peppers, onions, garlic, broccoli (ours & some from our friends at Happy Hollow Farm), served with peanut sauce (organic peanut butter, vinegar, Missouri sorghum, soy sauce, hot peppers). Right: simple salad of mixed greens, lettuce, watermelon radishes.

Left: salad of spinach, fresh goat feta, organic Missouri apples from Blue Heron orchard, organic Missouri pecans. Right: creamy soup of garlic, sage, thyme, goat milk, delicata squash, spinach, butter, flour.

Entertaining chefs

This is the time of year we start holding on-farm end-of-year meetings with our chef customers, to go over the year's sales, discuss feedback in both directions, and discuss next year's plans. We try to hold these at the farm so they can see the place, and so we can thank them with a good meal. The first to visit was Trey from Red & Moe, along with his wife. Lunch included:

Left: baked polenta (fresh-ground cornmeal, water, salt, butter). Right: polenta sauce (delicata squash, garlic, sage, goat milk, butter, flour); basically a thicker version of the soup above.

Left: fresh-made pita wedges. Right: fresh goat's milk ricotta. Also served: green tomato relish (green tomatoes, onions, peppers, etc) and mixed green salad with watermelon radishes.

Using chicken efficiently

November also launches fresh meat season, as we finally start butchering fall animals. Young roosters are high on the priority, as we hatched several batches of eggs this summer to increase our laying flock, and naturally 50% of those birds will never lay an egg. The first two under the knife were hybrids between Rhode Island Reds and Black Ameraucanas. Rhode Island Reds are especially great meat birds with succulent flavor, especially when they're as fat as these two were, and we think Reds are easier to gut than Ameraucanas (which seem to have more connective tissue holding the innards in place). Fortunately, these two seemed to have characteristics of a typical Red with respect to butchering and flavor. We can stretch a single chicken through many meals, making the most efficient use of the entire carcass. Here are the many meals we sourced from just one rooster.

Left: sauteed chicken breasts, served with a spicy pepper sauce (onions, garlic, tomatoes, mixed dried peppers, cilantro). Right: chicken soup (broth from bones & carcass, onions, carrots, cabbage, parsley, leftover noodles & rice). The delicious fat from this carcass made this an especially rich and satisfying winter soup.

Chicken "tacos": homade pitas stuffed with shredded chicken (scraps picked from carcass after boiling for broth), spicy pepper sauce (see ingredients above), shredded purchased cheddar cheese (a special treat; our numerous homemade rounds haven't aged enough yet), cilantro. Roasted sweet potatoes on the side.

Not pictured: oven-fried chicken (thighs breaded with fresh-ground cornmeal & eggs), mashed potatoes with giblet gravy (chicken organs sauteed with onion, butter, flour, salt, goat milk).

Using apples
We've recieved several deliveries of organic apples from Blue Heron Orchard in NE Missouri (5 bushels in all) for home preservation and use, and do all sorts of interesting things with them, including canning lots of applesauce & apple butter, and drying apple rings.

Left: fresh apples with cajeta (Mexican goat's milk caramel: slow-simmered goat's milk, sugar, cinnamon). When done right, this thick caramel sits in a jar in the fridge making tasty treats quite easy any time of day. Right: baked apple pancake (apples, egg, goat milk, sugar, flour. An easy and hearty breakfast, topped with maple syrup.

Bourbon-apple-pecan pie, my favorite to make, though not exactly farm-based. A filling of bourbon-soaked raisins, sliced Missouri apples, Missouri pecans, & sugar. The crust uses a bit of goat milk, that's something... Just a fantastic flavor.

Thanksgiving

All November meals are just a prelude to Thanksgiving, the most important holiday here as it celebrates truly good food and the completion (mostly) of the year's farming, along with a sense of self-reliance that is deeply meaningful to us. Take a look at our 2010 menu if you need any last-minute inspirations, and may the holiday be as relaxing and inspiring to you as it will be for us.

Hunting and the fall farm soundscape

2011-11-21T06:00:00.002-06:00

Mid-November is hunting season, bringing me a rare chance to sit still in the woods and just listen. We value silence and listening throughout the year, as often our best clues to natural or human events are not visual. Working in the fields, our eyes have to focus on the task at hand, but our ears can remain perked for unusual birds, chicken excitement (possible hawk), frogs, insects, and more. Knowing the soundscape of the farm allows us to understand far more of its patterns than our eyes could ever tell us. Even so, hunting gives me a new perspective on this aspect of our life.

I hunt primarily by sound rather than sight. Our woods are fairly thick, meaning there are no long sightlines or shots. I usually hear a deer coming well before I see it; it takes concentration to pick out the quiet step-step-pause of a deer moving through leaves, and to prepare before it comes into sight. I use an iron-sight hunting rifle with no scope, and set up either in a basic open tree stand or on the ground, sometimes stalking on foot to scare up something. Then, too, I usually hear the deer I scare before I see it, and have to judge by its sound where it went. I don't bother with fancy hunting gear, scents, or other purchased tricks. All this requires concentration on the environment around me, far more so than relaxing in a heated deer cabin at the edge of a cornfield. I consider it a much more interesting, and fair, competition with the deer; the frustrating days when I don't see or achieve anything at least keep the odds balanced.

Nestled under a tree deep in our eastern woods before dawn, I settle in and listen to the woods come awake. Goldfinches start up early, flitting high overhead with a rapid chew-chew-chew-chew that everyone but me thinks sounds like po-ta-to-chip. Crows and Blue Jays also tend to start early, the latter mimicking hawks and generally carrying on. Some mornings the woodpeckers are really active, with Flickers, Red-Bellieds, and Downys all over the place, or Nuthatches crawl the trunks with their distinct honking call. If I'm lucky, the loud distinctive cry of a Pileated Woodpecker echoes through the trees, and I might catch a glimpse of the large bird skimming through the treetops. Squirrels get off to an early start, too, driving me nuts as they create the momentary impression of a larger footstep before going on to make far more noise as they rummage through leaves and chase each other. Most of these things I hear more than see, tracking the noises and estimating where they are across a landscape very familiar to me.

The natural world isn't the only source of morning audio stimulation. One or more roosters start crowing well before dawn; in fact, I can trace Joanna's movements as she does the morning animal chores from the sounds that echo back to me through the woods. First, a flutter of squawks & clucks from the chicken shed as she opens the door and the hens fan out in search of food, the roosters fighting over their first courtesan of the morning. A few minutes later, the three goat kids start hollering as they catch sight of her walking down the field road toward their overnight shelter. We've been housing the adult does overnight in the dairy barn for the last three weeks, leaving the kids in the normal field shelter, and they're quite capable of sharing their displeasure with the entire neighborhood when they have an excuse. Early-morning whining goats are our answer to barking dogs in the middle of the night. MAAAAAAAAAAAAAA in three slightly different keys, kept up as the heartless Joanna goes right past toward the barn. I can't hear the adults hollering back, or the pig squealing in excitement at her approach, hidden as they are behind a hillside, but I know the timing of each. Eventually, when she's done milking and brings the does back out to pasture to rejoin the kids, the ruckus quiets down again.

There are off-farm sounds to follow, too. The four-lane Highway 63 is barely a mile to the east, and can generally be heard roaring away unless a trick of air currents masks the noise. The twin bridges over Silver Fork a few miles to the north are special offenders, acting as a sounding board for the constant traffic, even at wee hours of morning or night. Commuting hours, such as the prime deer-hunting hours, ratchet up the highway noise even more. There are mornings when I really have a hard time picking out the subtler noises of the forest for the ubiquitous white noise from 63. Even on the west end of the farm, our blacktop road can be just as loud, as even a single set of tires from some predawn commuter whine for several miles, echoing up our valley and obliterating the gentle movement of leaves that signals a quietly moving deer. There is no answer to this problem; we use roads too and our tires are no quieter, but I suspect we also pay more attention to the value of silence than most people. Of course, there are other mornings where the atmosphere has played a different set of cards, and the absolute silence could convince you there's nothing for miles.

Oddly, I've found that having something else to listen to sometimes heightens my concentration on the surroundings. My mind is always in high gear, unable to shut down and stop thinking entirely, and I can easily get lost in thought and stop paying attention, or get antsy thinking about all the other farm jobs I'm not getting done by sitting out here with a rifle. While it would be nice to be one with the woods a la Thoreau or Muir, I don't find that easy to achieve when the demands of farm life are so strong, and the world is full of interesting and frustrating things to think about. So I've experimented with listening to audiobooks on a small iPod, an earbud in just one ear and the volume turned way down, and found it a very effective compromise. I can half-listen to the book, usually something that doesn't take too much concentration, letting it keep the thoughtful part of my brain occupied in a more-passive situation than active thought, while the other brain half and ear keep a normal watch. Having one ear blocked means I turn my head more, keeping up a regular owl-like swivel across the landscape, actually improving my eyes' ability to pick out subtle movement or link it with my open ear's attention. So far I've never been surprised by a deer or anything else while using this method, and it lets me stay in the woods longer without stress, annoyance, or distraction. On the surface, this is rather contrary to the enjoyment of natural sounds around me, but we're all inconsistent beings, and I've found this to be a good compromise between an idealized druidic oneness with the woods and my high-octane personality and brain which don't like sitting still not accomplishing anything.

This season offers a rare chance to spend time in the woods rather than fields, and I enjoy the chance to slow down and appreciate a different part of the farm and a different way of experiencing it, in a way that works best for me.

Market plans, November 19

2011-11-18T06:00:00.025-06:00

This will be our final market of the year, and of the forseeable future. As the final market day before Thanksgiving, this will be a great time for consumers to stock up on useful items for the holiday meal.

Parsnips: These should be nice and sweet following many cool nights; those we tested recently were good. They're even better in late winter or early spring, and we may be distributing some to CSA next year, but there will also be one round available for Thanksgiving shoppers.

Spinach: An early harvest from beds primarily intended to overwinter for CSA, like the parsnips. It tastes great right now and will make some excellent salads.

Cabbage: Medium-large Napa cabbages, harvested several weeks ago and kept in cold storage. Juicy and well-flavored, these make fantastic slaw as well as sauerkraut, soups, and more.

Daikon radishes: Sweet to mildly spicy, these versatile white radishes can be sliced on salads, pickled, stir-fried, roasted, and more. They store very well and will last several weeks in your fridge.

Winter squash: A small selection of good winter squash, useful for all sorts of baking and cooking.

Garlic: One final pulse of diverse garlic; consider purchasing a large quantity to last you into winter. Most of these will last into January, a few as long as March.

Green tomatoes: At this point, these are our special winter-keeping Mercuri tomatoes, which have a great flavor when green and the ones with a hint of ripeness will slowly ripen on your counter. Some will inevitably go bad, but most store quite well into the winter. They're plenty good used now, for green tomato pies, chutneys, relishes, fried in cornmeal, and so on. Give some a try.

Herbs: Parsley, thyme, oregano, mint, tarragon, sage, and probably cilantro. Herb bundles will easily store until Thanksgiving and beyond. This evening we used a bundle of oregano that went unsold the last time we attended market, two weeks ago; it was in perfect condition. All of these herbs store well in a plastic bag in the refrigerator.

Food preservation methods: Canning

2011-11-17T06:00:00.001-06:00

CANNING (Boiling water bath)

Canning heats and seals food in glass jars, using a large pot of boiling water, making it shelf-stable for a long period of time. It takes the most supplies, prep work and processing of any method, and must be planned for accordingly. It is also more dependent on having a critical mass of food to be preserved, as it is highly inefficient to heat a large water bath for just two jars of something, as opposed to the quick-and-easy packing of a few containers to be tossed in a freezer. However, canning allows the bulk preservation of many extremely useful staple foods that would require rows of freezers otherwise, and makes the preserved contents instantly usable when desired (unlike thawing or rehydrating).

Canning does raise more food safety concerns than other methods; the process must be done properly to ensure the food is safe to eat, and some items cannot be safely canned in a boiling water bath (pressure canners are more flexible, but are more expensive and not covered in this discussion). It is highly important to follow and understand reliable directions & guidance; this is available from numerous reputable sources and we will not be attempting to reinvent the wheel in covering this topic thoroughly. However, we are considering holding one or more canning demonstrations next year for CSA members interested in learning more.

Canning is generally most appropriate for high-acid foods (such as vinegar pickles) and/or high sugar foods (such as jam). Our canning effots this year included pickles (cucumbers, beets, & green tomatoes), relishes (zucchini & green tomato), crushed tomatoes, tomato juice, whole tomatillos, jams, fruit butters, applesauce, green tomato pie filling, and peach halves in syrup. Notice the green tomato theme? They were extra abundant this year. On the other hand, we didn't get to some of our favorite canning recipes including ripe tomatoes, such as tomato paste and salsa, as there weren't enough tomatoes to accomplish this.

Methods:
Canning leaves little room for creativity in the kitchen; ingredient ratios often have to be just so to ensure a safe results. Recipes that are intended for canning should be followed precisely; recipes not labelled for canning should not be assumed to be safe for canning. For example, the Ball company (preeminant maker of canning supplies) has a large website devoted to guidance and recipes. Our primary reference for canning is the book So Easy To Preserve, available from the Georgia Extension; their website also seems to have most or all of the recipes & info from the book. That said, we occasionally tweak a recipe now and then, but only in minor ways that don't mess with the ingredients or ratios that are critical to the food safety. For example, we once ran out of dill seed while making pickles, started substituting other spices in the same quantities, and discovered some really good spice combinations to make pickles more interesting (for example, a mix of cumin, coriander, fenugreek, cloves, and fennel makes amazing pickles).

The need to be careful to produce a safe product should not frighten people away from canning; it is no worse than handling raw meat in a proper manner or any other sensible handling of food products for which the home cook should be able to take responsibility.

Canning involves multiple steps, which we'll only summarize because again there are many other thorough references available (such as this complete timeline) Empty jars are heated in a large boiling water bath, then packed with hot food (either complete liquids like applesauce, relish, and jam; or solids like cucumbers and tomatillos surrounded by a pickling liquid). Metal lids with rubber seals are applied, held in place by a screw-on ring. The jars are returned to boiling water for a recipe-specified time to ensure food safety, then removed to cool. The process of cooling creates a vaccuum within the jar, compressing the lid to create an airtight seal which allows the food to be stored at room temperature for a year or more.

This all takes time, including bringing a large quantity of water to boil, preparing all the food ahead of time, processing the jars, and so on. With experience you'll learn how long each of these take, and learn to balance the tasks to take a minimum of time. For example, with pickles I'll often start the water-bath pot going before I even start to cut up cucumbers, whereas prepping and cooking down applesauce takes far longer before you're ready to can. In some cases you might break the work into two days, such as making applesauce one night and reheating it the next night along with the water bath to do the actual canning.

Jars may be reused, though with each use their chance of breakage increases with varying levels of loss. Cucumbers may be salvaged from a pickle jar which breaks in the water bath and eaten fresh; applesauce which took half an evening to prepare and cook will disperse through the water and be a total loss. We generally use new jars for high-value items like applesauce and tomatoes, reserving used jars for lower-value or salvagable items like pickles and tomatillos. Lids should NOT EVER be reused, as the rubber seals cannot be guaranteed through more than one use; the metal rings are fine as long as they're clean and unbent.
Equipment:

Canner & jar holder: These large black pots come in two sizes, one that can hold pint-size and smaller jars, and one that can hold quart jars. (We have one of each.) The rack that comes inside the canner keeps jars from bouncing around next to each other.
Jar lifter: a special and necessary tool that safely lifts hot jars into and out of boiling water.
Metal funnel: Needed for getting food into the jars with minimal mess. We prefer metal to plastic given the amount of hot-boiling material involved.
Thermometer: This is helpful for maintaining the temperature of the water that the lids sit in before being put on the jars. The water should be around 180ºF. Boiling the lids before they go on the jar can ruin the seal.
Bubble remover: Bubbles will sometimes form in the food as it goes into the jar, and these should be worked out of the food before putting the lid on. We've found that a small wooden spoon works reasonably well. A small, heat-resistant rubber spatula might be an even better choice. Some canning starter kits come with plastic bubble removers, but we prefer to avoid plastic. We've read not to use metal utensils to remove bubbles becaues they can scratch and weaken the jar.
Kitchen scale: not always necessary but helpful for judging product quantities.
Jars, lids, and rings
Large soup pot for preparing sauces or brines

All needed supplies are widely available at grocery and hardware stores, at least in our area. I estimate a starting setup would cost $50-$60, all of which will last a long time. Jars which cost about $1/each for quarts (including rings & lids), and should give several years of use with careful handling.

Food preservation methods: Dehydration

2011-11-16T06:00:00.046-06:00

We've had questions from new CSA members regarding home food preservation techniques and any relevant items that might make good holiday gifts. We're thrilled that folks are thinking ahead to preserving next year's bounty, as that's the key to getting the most out of a CSA and building the economic sustainability of local foods in general. This series will present some of our experiences and advice, along with ideas for kitchen items that we've found to be useful investments as serious practitioners of home food preservation.

DEHYDRATION OF FRUITS & VEGETABLES

Dehydration, like canning, takes more up-front work but produces a shelf-stable food item that requires no further energy to store. Numerous fruits and vegetable can be dehydrated; our favorites include herbs, tomatoes, peppers (hot & sweet), okra, shiitakes, strawberries, and locally purchased peaches and apples. Some dried foods are quite good just as they are. Others can be rehydrated for a few minutes in boiling water and used in cooking.

In many cases, dehydration intensifies flavor and sweetness, especially for fruit (including tomatoes). For example, during wet summers, we've harvested cherry tomatoes with mediocre flavor and frustratingly quick splitting. These often did not meet our criteria for market quality, so we dried a test bunch as a salvage operation. To our delight, the flavor of the resulting product was superbly sweet and complex, and they served us well on pizza throughout the winter. Now we make a point of dehydrating cherry tomatoes every year; another way to utilize what would otherwise be a waste product on the farm.

Equipment:
In some climates, sun drying is an option; not so much in central Missouri. It's generally too humid here to safely or effectively dry most foods. Some ovens can be set to low-enough temperatures to act as dehydrators, but this can tie up the oven for long periods of time. And it is possible to build your own dehydrator, but by the time materials and labor are accounted for, we're not sure that would end up being cheaper than buying a good, reliable one. After researching the options and reading online reviews, we decided to invest in an Excalibur Food Dehydrator, and we absolutely love it. These are American made and sold direct from the California factory. And they work really well. Given the cost of many dried foods like sun-dried tomatoes, or dried fruit, a good dehydrator can pay for itself in a reasonable time period, especially if you have access to extra produce through a garden, CSA, neighbor, or other source.

We have the nine tray version with an automatic turn-off timer, which is really useful for letting items dry for the proper time even if that ends in the middle of the night or when we're not near the house. We strongly recommend getting a version with a timer. Nine trays are actually quite a lot of space to fill; working with some smallish end-of-season sweet peppers, it took the two of us about an hour to fill nine trays. Some things are faster than others; with the help of an apple peeler/corer/slicer and a capable user, trays of apple slices go pretty quickly. (Our apple peeler/corer/slicer is from Back to Basics in Draper, UT, and we quite like it. We've used other versions that haven't worked as well. We can't find a website for Back to Basics, but this gadget is available from various online sources.)

Before buying a dehydrator, you might consider where you're going to put it. Often a running dehydrator will smell like the food inside (it is running a strong fan in there, after all). This is not a big deal when it's tomatoes or apples, but if it's peppers (even sweet peppers), hoo boy. We can't be in the same room as nine trays of drying hot peppers; we tend to keep our unit in an unused back room while it's running. It certainly doesn't need to be in the kitchen, as the unit is self-contained and not messy. You can do all the prep and tray-loading in the kitchen, then carry the trays back to wherever your drying chamber is (spare bedroom, closet, basement). It's also helpful to be able to open a window. Just thought we'd mention it before someone with a one-bedroom studio chases themselves onto the street with a full load of drying jalapenos.

Methods:
For most items, the basic idea is to cut up the produce, maybe seed it (like peppers), and spread the pieces on each tray before setting them in the dehydrator. You can dry some items whole (like hot peppers), it just takes longer. Generally it makes sense to at least halve things. Also, the smaller the pieces, the more trays you can fit in the dehydrator at a time. When I'm doing whole cayennes, for example, I can only get 5 trays in because they stick up so much, whereas sliced Anaheim peppers allow all 9 trays.

Whatever size pieces you choose, best practice is to make all pieces roughly the same size so the whole tray or batch finishes at the same time. Judging doneness can be difficult, and somethimes I think we've erred on the side of over-drying just to be safe. Over-drying results in a crispy product that won't be as good, while under-drying risks the product molding or otherwise going bad in storage. Rotating the position of the trays can also help to ensure even drying. We consult the references mentioned below to know which products should be leathery and which brittle. Examples of the latter would include items you intend to grind or powder later, like herbs and some hot peppers (one of our standard winter spice mixes involves blending lots of different dried peppers in a food processor to make an intense pepper powder, great for salsas and sausages). There are lots of good books, manuals, and online resources (such as this University of Georgia site) for getting drying times right (our dehydrator also came with a reference manual). We've also relied heavily on the book Making & Using Dried Foods.

Many dehydration books are full of oddball ideas for things to dry, including lettuce (???). We've tried unusual things like mustard greens, which were really neat to powder into a broth, but took lots of space for almost no resulting product. It's fun to play with trying different things. Herbs can work quite well as a way to preserve summer bounty and cut the need for purchasing old spices from a store.

Washing all the trays can be mildly annoying, so we often try to do multiple batches of the same thing before changing. Washing between different items can be quite important, though. We once dried mint, then went straight to apples thinking the uncut herbs couldn't have left any residue. We ended up with a batch of apple rings that tasted like toothpaste. Wash your trays; no one wants hot-pepper dried strawberries.

Also, we once had an insect outbreak in some tomatoes, so we've started to put products in the freezer for a week or two after dehydration as an extra way to kill insects. It's easy and increases the storage life. Just don't open the container or bag until it comes back to room temperature, or condensation will decrease the storage life by partially rehydrating the food.

Storing & using dried foods:
Dehydration results in a substantial volume reduction, since vegetables and fruit are mostly water. This sometimes feels a little depressing when nine trays of peppers fit in a few small jars, but it also means a lot of food can be stored in a small space. We store most of our dried items in old glass canning jars that we don't trust for canning anymore. They arrange nicely on storage shelves and seal well enough to preserve the food. Sometimes we'll use sealed plastic bags, but these aren't as reuseable. Masking tape labels ensure we know when the food was dried (so it doesn't sit too long) and what exactly it is (you can't always tell which peppers are which, hot or sweet, once they're dried).

Apple slices, halved strawberries, and cherry tomatoes are great snacks just as they are. Others we use in soups and stews, like onions or okra, or as pizza/pasta toppings, like tomatoes, peppers, or mushrooms. These can be easily rehydrated by soaking in boiling water for a few minutes; in some cases I'll just toss dried stuff into a simmering soup broth and let it absorb the liquid already there.

Food preservation methods & supplies: Freezing

2011-11-15T06:00:00.003-06:00

The cheapest route is to reuse containers (such as quart yogurt containers). When we stopped buying food that comes in containers, we eliminated this option for ourselves.
Most hardware stores in our area sell Arrow plastic freezer containers. The square shape makes these among the more space efficient containers we have, but we've found that the lifespan of these is shorter than desired. We've had quite a few develop cracks in the bottom.
This year, we're trying out some Ball plastic freezer jars, also available at our local hardware stores. These are BPA-free, stackable, and tight-sealing, plus they appear to be durable. They are more expensive up front, but we think they may be cheaper in the long run than the alternatives. They're also round, which makes them less space-efficient than the cheaper square ones.
Glass jars can work for freezing some things, but it is important not to fill them too full. We have lots of small glass jars around, and we tend to use these for condiments that we want to thaw in small quantities, such as chutney and pesto.
Freezer bags are convenient for some items (okra and chicken, for example) that don't pack well into solid containers. We keep some on hand for times when we run out of other containers. However, these generally head for the landfill after a couple of uses, so they rank low on the sustainability front.
Freezer paper is our choice for wrapping cuts of meat.

Optional accessories, one cheap, one expensive:

A freezer alarm will beep if the freezer temperature gets too high (whether due to the freezer being accidentally unplugged, the door being left open, or some form of malfunction). This is an inexpensive investment to provide some protection to the large amount of flavor, effort, and money represented by the food in the freezer, though you still have to be near the freezer to hear it (we don't go in our basement every day).
In case of an extended power outage, a generator will provide a true backup. A few years ago, Joanna's parents in Arkansas experienced a severe ice storm followed by a week (or longer) power outage and temperatures in the 70s, a nightmare scenario for a freezer full of a year's worth of food preservation. Eric drove down with a chainsaw and a newly purchased generator--one of the last ones available in Columbia, a couple hundred miles from the storm zone. When generators are needed, they can be hard to obtain. Dry ice can also be used to get a freezer through a power outage.

Tracking frozen items:
One of the keys to making the best use of a freezer is knowing what's in it. We generally defrost our freezer in November or December, and this is a great time to do an inventory. We make a list with all of the freezer contents & quantities, post it in the kitchen, and do our best to check off each container that comes out of the freezer. This way, we can pace ourselves as the winter progresses, making sure to use everything that is available. Come spring, we can also assess whether there were some things that we froze way too much of (shredded zucchini, anyone?), and we can adjust our quantities the following year.

Using frozen items:
We don't generally try to use preserved items in the same way as their fresh counterparts; you won't find a pile of frozen green beans steamed in a pile on our plates in January. Part of seasonal eating is learning seasonal cooking, in which different recipes work best at different times of year. We don't make many stews and soups in summer when produce is at its individual best, but do this all the time with frozen and preserved produce in the winter. It's much more effective to combine these ingredients in diverse dishes that build on the strength of each, but hide the weaknesses. For example, it's incredibly easy to grab a stack of broth, beans, okra, greens, corn, and more to simply chuck in a soup pot with some onion and turn into a nice stew, when many of those served on their own would be noticeably less interesting than the fresh version. Frozen fruit is mushier than the fresh original, but made into a baked good or thawed into yogurt, the flavors come through nicely without noticing the loss of texture. Pre-making soups, sauces, and other mixes to freeze also makes using frozen foods more practical, as they're more space-efficient than their raw ingredients. Finally, some items are best to thaw before use (broth, sauce) while others are best used half-frozen. For example, okra is easiest and least messy to chop when frozen whole and chopped just slightly thawed (a few minutes on the counter).

Market plans (November 12) and other farm happenings

2011-11-11T06:00:00.032-06:00

We will not be at market this weekend, following our biweekly fall schedule. We intend to sell at the final outdoor market next weekend (11/19), the last before Thanksgiving, and then be done for good. Restaurant sales continue to be strong, with a nice set of deliveries this week to Sycamore, Red & Moe, and Uprise Bakery.

As usual, the decision to skip market partly reflects other seasonal needs on the farm. This weekend opens hunting season, and I don't think we've ever gone to market that weekend. I'll be in the woods along with a hunter friend, and Joanna will be doing farm work and waiting for the sound of fresh meat. Deer have been quite active here for months, a large population that could use some thinning to lower pressure on the woods and fields, and I'll be happy to replace wolves for a few days.

Also happening on the farm (apologies for no photos; it's been too busy to remember the camera):

Following our fourth CSA tour, we are now nearly full for 2012 (with two tour attendees still contemplating their decision and two more households on a waiting list in case there is an opening). This is a very good feeling. We are looking forward to the efficiency of a system that provides a home for everything we grow; no more bringing home 30% or more of our harvest from market. The 2012 CSA will be smaller than we need for long-term economic stability, but we're willing to take a lower income next year in exchange for less stress and more on-farm and product efficiency. We (and members) will judge the results at the end of next year and decide where to go from there. We'll certainly be in the spotlight, with little room for disappointment, as we have 3 Columbia-area food bloggers signed up as CSA members.

Winter preparations continue to move forward, as we remove infrastructure, hoe final weeds, mulch beds, seed late cover crops, plant overwintering alliums, maintain compost piles, and more. We had one load of clean straw delivered; it's amazing how quickly a few straw-mulched beds can make a farm look tidy and attractive.

Food preservation is an ongoing feature of life this time of year. We recently took a delivery of six bushels of organic apples from Blue Heron Orchard in NE Missouri. Three of these were intended for friends and neighbors who wanted access to organic apples, and three are for our own preservation and winter storage. We held a marathon apple-processing session on Tuesday afternoon-evening, in cooperation with the neighbor, working together to turn a bushel each of our apples into canned applesauce and nine trays of dried apples. We also made and canned apple butter, and another round of green tomato-apple pie filling, a great winter treat. We've been drying large quantities of green and partially ripe peppers, and will be starting soon on fermenting sauerkraut. We have more food preserved this year than ever; with no more shelving space, we now have full canning jars lining the front of most of our bookcases. A winter project for me is building more shelving/storage area in the kitchen for such preserves.

We've now had close to 3" of rain in the past week, a delightful occurrence. Our stream still has no flow, an indication of just how desperately dry the ground has been. Many tasks are easier now, such as pulling t-posts from beds and moving portable animal fencing. The pig is now doing a much better job of turning up ground than he did in the bone-dry months.

We continue to rotate animals onto new pastures as long as the weather remains nice. Our goat population is larger than usual, with the temporary addition of a buck for breeding purposes. We moved the pig on Thursday to fresh pasture where he can turn in more fescue now that the ground is actually moist. He later escaped after battering down a cattle panel gate, and we found him happily trotting along near the house. Fortunately, he's quite friendly and can be lured anywhere just by running in front of him; he follows behind like a well-trained dog. And fortunately he didn't get into any growing areas or cause any other problems while he was out. We redid the gate with more reinforcement, as befits a large and powerful hunk of live pork. Can't wait for the cool stretch of days we need to start the processing (a goat and many young roosters are on the list, too).

I've finally gotten started on our new chicken house, a larger building intended to overnight-house our growing laying flock in a more secure and convenient setting. Its location will allow the birds access to multiple acres of pasture and woods, including our developing orchard. I'll be sneaking time to work on this when possible, but at least have the foundation done and the frame up. We intend to move the birds in by early December.

Logging is on hiatus as my chainsaw developed an attitude and is in the shop. Just as well, there's more than enough to do as it is. Still, I'm itching to get back to one of my favorite jobs.

Then there's the weekly restaurant sales calls, harvest, and deliveries, along with market prep and attendance (probably) by the end of next week. Things don't really slow down here until well into December.

Thanks to our farm workers

2011-11-08T06:00:00.001-06:00

For the past two years, we've used the help of various part-time workers to keep the farm running and manageable. These folks all have other jobs or occupations, but dedicate a weekly portion of their busy lives to working on the farm and making our life easier. We've had between 10 to 20 hours a week of help since spring, doing a wide variety of farm chores including weeding, manure incorporation, harvest, trellising, animal management, and much more. Over the past weekend, a busy one that included market and our fourth CSA tour, we marked the official end of our worker season with a final work session and subsequent party.

We've experimented with various ways of handling farm workers that both stay above the law (volunteers are technically illegal on a for-profit farm) and are practical for our management methods and budget (our low-cost farm doesn't generate the gross cashflow needed to pay cash wages). Last year we classified our workers as official employees, and paid wages in produce using a law allowing farms to do this without tax withholding; we just had to report the total wages paid in an end-of-year statement. That was still a pain, so this year we converted our workers into customers, who in effect joined a working CSA in which they paid for a weekly share of farm products with weekly work shifts. We recorded the distributions and work hours, and reported the cash equivalent as sales on sales tax remittances to the state. In effect it's the same thing, as we would have had to make the same cash sales to earn the money to pay cash wages to workers, and the government still gets its cut. It also makes the farm more efficient, as we often use seconds or market leftovers as "pay", which they're perfectly happy to take and which uses product that otherwise would be wasted (some have been able to really load up following bad market weeks). Everyone seemed happy with this year's arrangement, which let their households save a lot of money spent on groceries while using only a few hours a week they felt they could spare (a much better deal than going to the gym, for example).

Sunday was a hectic but wonderful day, as we had an extra-large work crew of most regular workers plus a few spouses/partners who don't normally work here, but got a chance to experience the farm and the work that produces their food. It was about the largest single crew we've managed here, and we got a lot done from 9 to noon, including raking a large swatch of leaves for future mulch; distributing 100+ bales of freshly delivered straw around the farm pre-rain; weeding & mulching multiple beds of winter greens; field cleanup of row cover, hoops, t-posts, and more; and so on. By noon we were all starving, and others who couldn't work that morning were arriving, so we adjourned to the house for lunch.

We all relaxed on the porch, enjoying a cloudy but warm afternoon, talking and relaxing while enjoying a good meal largely provided by us in thanks for a good year (ingredients in italics sourced on-farm):

Squash and leek lasagna (winter squash, leeks, fresh goat ricotta, goat milk, herbs, noodles)
Asian cabbage slaw (cabbage, peppers, garlic, cilantro, oil, soy sauce, vinegar, citrus)
Groundnut stew (sweet potatoes, cabbage, okra, onions, garlic, tomatoes, cayenne pepper, organic peanut butter)
Pitas & dip (homemade pitas, hummus of cowpeas, garlic, parsley)

Others brought nice desserts including:
Peach-oat bars
Spice cupcakes

In theory we were going to take people on a long walk through the eastern woods, but everyone was too relaxed following a morning of work and lots of food, so we all just stayed put on the porch and enjoyed the company.

Our heartfelt thanks to these great folks for improving our farm and our lives through all sorts of weather and work this year.

Market plans, November 5

2011-11-04T06:00:00.034-05:00

Joanna will be at market this Saturday with some good seasonal items. There won't be many greens, as the lack of rain has effectively kept these from regrowing. We've had to pull our drip irrigation due to repeated freezes, and sprinklers can't keep up. The plants are alive, and we hope will recover and regrow with potentially wetter conditions upcoming, but for now we're not willing to harvest from them any more. Plus, at our last market two weekends ago, we hardly sold any greens (half pound collards, few pounds of lettuce, few pounds of baby braising mix, etc.) so we're mostly reserving greens for restaurants at this point. Given that we finally recieved some decent rain Wednesday night (over an inch), with more in the forecast for next week, we expect the greens to recover and start growing again, just not in time for this market.

We'll be hosting our last CSA tour of the year Saturday afternoon at 2pm. The CSA is currently about 60% full, and judging from the response to the first three events, could well be nearly full by the end of the weekend. If you're considering it in the background, this would be a good time to let us know.

AVAILABLE THIS WEEK

Napa cabbage: Juicy, tasty cabbages; they range from 3-7+ pounds each. We just love these for slaw, fresh kraut, stir fries, and more (but especially slaw). We can go through multiple heads a week, keeping a big bowl of slaw in the fridge. For more on using fresh fall cabbages, see this post from 2009; it notes that we hadn't yet tried growing these for market sale. Now we have, there are lots, and they're excellent. We charge a high price for these, but for fresh organic cabbage, they're worth it.

Green tomatoes: Like greens, these sold poorly two week ago, despite being abundant and tasty. I wish more people experimented with all the ways to prepare and preserve green tomatoes; local foods will be most successful when customers use the abundances when they're available (another reason we're looking forward to CSA).

Garlic: Some varieties are sold out, but there are good quantities of others. With our only remaining market being the weekend before Thanksgiving, this weekend would be a good time to stock up on some winter storage garlic.

Daikon radishes: A reasonably mild, long white radish. Works well for cooking or pickling, or slicing onto salads. Can have a bit of heat, though less so than many fall radishes, and gets sweet with cold weather.

Watermelon radishes: A pretty green radish with a red core that earns its name when sliced. A bit spicier than daikon, but still sweet enough for use on stronger salads. Also a good stir-fry radish.

Leeks: Several short, thick varieties that have a lot of volume and good flavor. One of our favorite fall/winter meals is potato-leek soup. These should be sliced and given a good wash, as we hilled them with soil to increase the white flesh.

Pumpkins/winter squash: We will have a small quantity of pie pumpkins and delicata squash. These are hard to grow organically, and we spent a lot of time squishing squash bug eggs and nymphs on these plants, so they won't be cheap. The delicatas that we've been eating have been delicious. Sometimes winter squash need some assistance from sugar and spices to taste good, but not these delicatas. We've been eating them straight out of the oven without any additions, even salt.

Herbs: Parsley is available in abundance. We'll also have thyme, oregano, tarragon, mint, and maybe some cilantro.

Bird list & other natural events, October 2011

2011-11-02T06:00:00.003-05:00

October was our driest month yet, with only .60" total rain, following the last three months of July (2.03"), August (1.76"), and September (2.17"), all of which are well below average or desired. On Monday morning we started drilling foundation holes for the new chicken shed, using a tractor-mounted auger, and had to stop because the ground was too hard for the auger to progress very far. We filled the proto-holes with water, let it soak in all day, and were able to complete the work late in the day.

This continues to be the most hawk-rich fall we've had here, with near-daily sightings of Cooper's and/or Sharp-Shinned Hawks (hard to tell the difference, though we think we've spotted unique features of each), along with regular Red-Tails and Red-Shouldereds. Somehow we haven't lost a chicken, though one came quite close: we heard a commotion and went down to find a pile of feathers by the chicken fence and a hen missing in the count. We assumed it was gone, only to find the missing bird later in the day crouched in the underbrush 50' away, where she must have fled after somehow escaping the strike. Lucky hen; the next morning I saw a coyote stalking right where she'd been.

Speaking of coyotes, they've also been the most prevalent and active in our five years here. There's a large pack that uses our stream corridor and can be heard many nights; good fencing has so far kept things stable here. I find the sound of a pack yipping quite beautiful, though eventually I get tired of being woken up (still better than dogs barking, at least coyotes shut up quickly). One neighbor reports they've lost most of their chickens, and I've been told of coyote attacks and issues (some involving goats) throughout the region. We wonder if this boom in coyote numbers relates to last year's very heavy mast (acorn production), which would create a boom in rodent and other prey animal populations that might translate to higher predators this year. This has certainly been the worst vole/rodent year we've had in the fields. They devoured our peanuts, leaving only a slight net gain from the amount that we planted in the first place. Some were eaten in the place, and shells were left littering the bed. We just discovered that some were carried off whole; Joanna found a stash of in-the-shell, uneaten peanuts in a leaf pile at least 30 feet from the peanut bed. The consolation is that 1) we stole some of our peanuts back, and 2) this implies that the problematic rodents have a range that extends outside of the garden fence where the coyotes at least have a chance of munching them. I also suspect that deer are suffering in this drought, as the forest floors here are just dessicated, and perhaps hungry or sick deer are easier prey for a healthy coyote population. We've personally seen a pair of coyotes following a common deer track in our woods.

We missed the peak of waterfowl migration at Eagle Bluffs, but did sneak down for a couple hours last Saturday afternoon, on a warm sunny day, and were rewarded with at least a thousand American White Pelicans both resting and soaring. These huge, white birds are glorious when spiralling up a thermal in large flocks, winking in and out of view as the sun reflects off their wings. A highlight of the day included watching a Pied-Billed Grebe devour a frog after spending several minutes working it into just the right position to gulp it down whole. Other treats included over 50 Great Blue Herons, a variety of ducks, and a nice smattering of hawks and eagles.

Fall migration has been wonderful here; so many birds use our valley with its mixed trees, pasture, and fields. The western ridge across our stream gets crisp early morning sun that makes bird-watching from the valley a joy. It's been fun to watch some details that often go unnoticed, such as how goldfinches do a little warm-up routine before heading out, a vibrant fluffing-shaking that looks like a dog shedding water, while making a unique cheeping call that I've never heard outside this context. We've seen few unusual birds, but quite enjoy the daily mix of "normal" migrants. Most of the new species are winter arrivals like Juncos, which summer in the far north and winter here, or migrants passing through with just a few observations before they move on.

NEW IN OCTOBER (13 species, some observed earlier this year but not in September)

Wood Duck (occasional visitor to our pond)
Great Blue Heron
Sharp-Shinned Hawk (likely ID but not certain)
Ruby-Crowned Kinglet
Golden-Crowned Kinglet
Eastern Bluebird
Dark-Eyed Junco
White-Throated Sparrow
Catbird
Blue-Headed Vireo
Common Grackle
Song Sparrow
Snow Goose (in migration over farm)
Finch, either Purple or House (couldn't ID for certain)

PRESENT IN OCTOBER (28 species)
Canada Goose
Turkey Vulture
Cooper's Hawk (likely ID but not certain)

Red-Tailed Hawk
Red-Shouldered Hawk
Mourning Dove
Barred Owl
Belted Kingfisher
Red-Bellied Woodpecker
Downy Woodpecker
Northern Flicker
Pileated Woodpecker
Eastern Phoebe
Blue Jay
American Crow
Tufted Titmouse
Black-Capped Chickadee
White-Breasted Nuthatch
Carolina Wren
American Robin
Cedar Waxwing
Yellow-Rumped Warbler
Northern Cardinal
Eastern Towhee
American Goldfinch
Summer Tanager
Black-Throated Green Warbler
Nashville Warbler

MISSING/UNOBSERVED SINCE SEPTEMBER (16 species)
American Redstart
Black and White Warbler
Red-eyed Vireo
Blackburnian Warbler
Red-headed Woodpecker
Least Flycatcher
Tennessee Warbler
Chestnut-sided Warbler
Lark Sparrow
Tree Swallow
Canada Warbler
Killdeer
Magnolia Warbler
Brown Thrasher
Rose-Breasted Grosbeak
Common Nighthawk

The species count will really shrink in November, as many of these birds were passing through in early October and are now long gone. By the end of October our daily observation list is generally down to the winter birds now, with few surprises.

Why we raise and eat meat

2011-10-31T06:00:00.002-05:00

Last winter, the environmental/food website Grist briefly considered hosting an online debate over the ethics and realities of meat production, and we were invited to take part as one of a dozen or so folks with various perspectives on the issue. We carefully wrote up an opening statement on our overall perspective as meat raisers, processors, and eaters. The event never happened, in part because the person organizing it departed for another job, but we still really like our essay. Here's a reworked version, presented for no particular reason other than we think it presents some important and often-neglected perspectives on this complicated issue.

How these goats benefit our vegetable farm

My wife and I currently farm full-time on the fringes of the Ozarks in central Missouri, growing certified organic produce for local markets and restaurants while keeping dairy/meat goats, poultry, and a hog for home use. We are largely food-self-sufficient on the farm year-round, growing & preserving all our own vegetables, doing all our own meat processing on the farm (including hunting), making the vast majority of our cheese and yogurt from on-farm goat milk, and expanding into fruits, small grains, and mushrooms. We’re both serious cooks, and take the sources and quality of our food extremely seriously.

When we moved to this property in 2006, Joanna was vegetarian and I was nearly so. We were thoroughly disgusted with the industrial meat system and found it easier, cheaper, and more comfortable to cook and eat interesting vegetarian meals. This was particularly true during our previous time in rural Virginia where it was quite hard to find meat that met our standards. We love the diversity and skill involved in quality vegetarian and vegan cooking from fresh, whole ingredients, and easily accommodate our many visiting vegetarian/vegan friends without a second thought. Our most-used cookbook beyond Joy of Cooking is Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone.

However, our core principle in starting and operating our farm was self-sufficiency, both economic and culinary, and it quickly became clear that the best way for us to achieve that would involve managing animals for food along with our produce-growing. Our farm is set in a narrow Ozark-type valley, with rich bottomland soil along a small stream hemmed in by steeper, brushy, rocky pastures cut by ravines. While our flatland soil is good, there is not enough properly cultivatable acreage to either make a full living growing & selling produce or to fully feed ourselves on a vegetarian diet. By properly managing livestock on our larger brushy/pastured hillsides (like the one pictured below), which are otherwise unsuited to cultivation agriculture, we can convert static land to healthy human food while relieving pressure on the highest-quality ground. In addition, good animal management can improve both the fertility and ecology of these former prairie areas, which are otherwise reverting to brushy woodlands dominated by thick monocultures of ecologically boring cedar. In effect, rotational grazing of goats is roughly intended to replace the native herbivores like bison, and results in a healthier overall ecosystem.

Moreover, pasturing goats on the slopes also directly benefits our vegetable production by generating on-farm fertility. We collect and compost the manure & bedding from their overnight shelters, which in effect is solar energy collected by the pasture plants and converted to natural fertility by the animals' rumens. We view this as a more sustainable source of vegetable fertility than chemical fertilizers or manure imported from off the farm.

My wife’s current rule is to only eat meat for which she’s taken part in the processing (i.e. on-farm), while I’ve been known to order locally-raised meat in restaurants from time to time. Like most traditional farms, meat is seasonal for us, helping fill the nutritional gap of winter and spring while largely vanishing from our diet through the flush of summer and fall produce. This approach makes our self-sufficient goals far more practical, while still saving us money and reducing our need to import faraway food onto the farm (like the “organic” imported beans we used to buy in bulk to provide protein through the winter).

In addition, our farm illustrates an oft-ignored or forgotten point: even dairy & poultry, mainstays of the vegetarian diet, involve significant management and killing of animals. Dairy animals don’t give milk unless bred, which means you have to dispose of the ever-increasing number of young somehow (especially the males). The same is true for chickens; even though hens don’t need a rooster to lay eggs, they do to make more hens (chickens are far from immortal). And something still must be done with the roughly 50% of hatches that are male. On our farm, we rarely raise animals specifically for meat, mostly eating the meat that allows us to maintain an otherwise on-farm vegetarian diet heavy on dairy and eggs. Thus we raise & eat any unneeded goat kids from the dairying births, and any unwanted roosters hatched our by our hens. The quantity of meat we eat each year is partially determined by the gender ratios of that year’s births. To do anything else would result in either a farm overrun by animals, or the passing off of the problem to someone else by selling the extras and pretending they weren’t going to be killed anyway. When we do raise a meat-specific animal like a hog, it still has secondary on-farm benefits such as natural tillage of fields we wish to replant, fertility generation, and effecient recycling of produce & dairy wastes into human food.

While vegetarian/vegan diets are perfectly healthy and practical for many people, they also rest on assumptions that may not be applicable to all contexts. There are many cases where raising meat ends up being cheaper or more ecologically sound than the equivalent food value in plant matter, largely depending on which kinds of principles and goals are most valued by those involved. The claim that plant protein is more efficient and sustainable to raise than animal protein is only true for the highest-quality farmland; areas that are more marginal (like hillsides) or ecologically sensitive (like grasslands) can easily be degraded or destroyed by crop agriculture but preserved or even enhanced by proper animal agriculture. The young goats shown below are happily using a landscape which would otherwise be unsuitable for agriculture, while generating fertility and human food.

From a land-use perspective, much of the world's surface will never be densely populated, and thus can be managed in three ways: tillage agriculture for crops, pasture agriculture for animals, or left alone. The third option is excellent for specific areas of special ecological or cultural significant, like national/state parks or conservation areas, but is not practical at a large scale. The first option, again, is only practical for landscapes and climates already suited for sustainable crop agriculture, which is a relatively small fraction of the world's overall natural landscapes. Properly-done animal agriculture allows for a more natural and low-impact way to manage areas like grasslands and hillsides, even if it's less efficient per unit area than crop agriculture in a think-tank world.

This is also true from a national or local self-sufficiency standpoint. Imagine a nation or region which consists mostly of poor cropland but good grassland/pasturage (like parts of Africa and South America, or central/southern Missouri). If animals are forbidden for ethical or carbon reasons, that region will have to either import more of its food from elsewhere, or grow it using methods which are not ideal for that area. Forcing that choice makes no sense.

I'll happily grant that using good farmland to grow food crops for confined animals is poor practice. So is plowing under native grasslands and erodable hillsides to grow food crops for humans, or growing water-intensive vegetables in deserts like Arizona and California. Choosing the lowest-impact and most sustainable use for all types of climates and landscapes in the world will inevitably lead to some areas benefitting more from animals than crops, and we shouldn't reject that out of a knee-jerk disgust for current poor animal management practices in the modern industrial system.

An individual has every right to choose a no-animal-product diet for their own reasons, but keep in mind that all food choices, and all purchases, are in effect votes on how we want the local and world food system to work. Rejecting all meat or animal products in essence is a vote for dedicating more and more landscapes to crop agriculture regardless of whether they are properly suited for it, and in many places increasing the local environmental impact while decreasing the local ability to be self-sufficient. And I've barely touched on the environmental issues surrounding the theoretical elimination of manure as a natural fertilizer versus expensive, oil-based replacements, or the potential health and cost issues of replacing natural meat nutrition with more processed meat replacements.

In effect, we'd rather choose properly managed animals in a diversified locally-self-sufficient system than crop monocultures in a globalized vegan one. We'd rather kill our own animals raised on local hillside pastures than import monocultured soybeans in the form of tofu and other highly processed non-animal food products. We have no personal issue with individual vegetarians and vegans, having been there ourselves and loving vegetarian/vegan cooking, but would prefer those movements as a whole to be more aware of the large-scale ramifications of their advocated goals.

Exploring the Niangua River valley

2011-10-26T06:00:00.027-05:00

We enjoy short road trips, hopscotching around Missouri backroads to find interesting landscapes, locations, and views. Missouri is such a diverse state, we'll never run out of worthwhile places to explore. Last fall we took a great overnight tour of NW Missouri, exploring a variety of state parks, conservation areas, good food, and more. This year, we headed southwest for an overnight trip to the Niangua River valley of west-central Missouri. The first day was a little odd, as things didn't turn out quite as we hoped/expected, but the second day was near-perfect and sent us home feeling quite happy and refreshed.

Day 1, we got up before dawn, did animal chores, and hit the road as soon as we could, with the truck loaded up on sleeping pads, blankets, and good farm-sourced food. We take back roads as much as possible when we travel, as we hate and fear highways while much preferring the relaxation and scenery of normal roads. The extra time it takes to get somewhere is, in our view, more than paid back by lower risk and greater happiness. So after an enjoyable drive, we arrived at a Niangua outfitter to rent a canoe for the day.

The Niangua has a reputation as a party river during the summer, but we hoped it would be quieter in mid-October. Relative to normal, I guess it was, but there were still plenty of people around. The outfitter, who had promised us an 8-mile float until dark on the phone the day before, informed us on arrival that we could only do a 4-mile float and had 4 whole hours to do it in. So we took a very slow-paced float, pausing often to rest and watch birds, and hardly paddling at all except for one stretch of strong upstream wind. The river was still pretty populated, as we dodged oblivious fly fisherman at many riffles, eventually starting to bang our paddles on the canoe as we approached to avoid getting a backcast in the eye. We also paused often to let other floating parties pass by, trying to maintain some solitude. The scenery was pretty, the water nice and clear like a good Ozark river such that the fish-watching was as good as the bird-watching, but it was definitely the Niangua: a regular pattern of sunken beer cans along the bottom was an obvious reminder of the river's dominant visitors, as were all the lures in the trees. It was nice to be in a canoe again, but it wasn't the highlight of the trip.

With our shorter-than-expected float, we got off the river by late afternoon and headed for our overnight destination, Bennet Spring State Park. This was a new location for us, and we hoped it would be similar to Roaring River State Park, one of Joanna's favorites which combines a trout hatchery with beautiful scenery and lots of good, remote hiking trails (we wrote about it here, toward the bottom). Bennet, though, felt like it belonged on the Niangua: packed with trout fisherman in expensive gear angling in the spring-fed channel for released fish, rampant screaming kids, highly developed features (the "park store" looked like a Bass Pro outlet; we couldn't find a single book), and crowds of RVs with satellite dishes. We hiked a few of the shorter trails in the immediate spring/campground area and found them poorly maintained if not entirely neglected: badly signed/marked, with lots of ankle-threatening washouts and holes. We also didn't see another person on these trails, despite the population density; neither did we see anyone else in the very well-done Nature Center. We shrugged, enjoyed a dinner of squash-and-leek lasgna, cabbage-pepper slaw, homemade rolls and more, before bedding down in the truck for a mercifully quiet night. Luckily I woke up the next morning before dawn, preventing the indignity of being rousted by the tornado-like "time to fish" siren.

To be fair, it's great that state parks and other outlets provide lots of different ways for people to enjoy the Missouri outdoors. What we found on this day just wasn't what we were looking for, any more than the long remote hike we took the next day would appeal to some others.

The next day, we needed to get away from people and chose a long hike into the hinterlands of Bennet, heading for an intriguing natural geologic feature miles up the valley. The trail led us through an enjoyable diversity of landscapes, ecosystems, and elevations, rambling from upland oak glades to stream-bottom forests, open fields, and lots of interesting rock outcrops. It still wasn't well-marked and the printed trail map was poorly done and nearly worthless, but the trail itself was clearly visible and enjoyable. Photos above show the dry stream branch miles above Bennet Spring (which steals its water), and Joanna investigating a large and well-preserved stromatolite in the stream bed.

We encountered plenty of birds, including large flocks of robins & yellow-rumped warblers, along with clouds of crows and vultures more than 50 strong. This baby three-toed box turtle was a highlight, along with various butterflies and more on a gorgeous warm fall day. Then we arrived at our destination, the Natural Tunnel:

This glorious feature tunnels beneath a limestone ridge for more than 200', forming a cutoff for the stream branch which used to circle well around this ridge before typical Ozark karst erosion developed a shortcut (similar to our local Rock Bridge State Park but longer and more remote). Now the old stream channel is an abandoned bed, and the stream plunges through this instead. We had the place to ourselves, and spent plenty of time exploring and photographing it. Here's my favorite shot:

We did eventually have to leave, and headed back along a different trail, which offered even more scenic, ecological, and geologic variety, including this impressive stream bluff:

Heading north for home, we intentionally took a lot of back roads, exploring the remote parts of the Niangua valley that aren't overrun by beer- and trout-fueled tourism. A good map, good instincts, and patience can reward you with very neat finds in almost any part of rural Missouri, and this was no exception. Small dirt roads gave us this blufftop view of the river, and these well-preserved cross-beds in sandstone.

Oak-prairie glades and savannas are common, on steep hillsides and valley bottoms, as the back roads wind through a mix of private and conservation lands. We'd particularly like to return to the 7,000+ acre Lead Mine Conservation Area, which we couldn't do much more than poke our noses into at a few points. It's also worthwhile to have some interesting guides and references; one of our favorites is Geological Wonders and Curiosties of Missouri, available from the Missouri DNR online store. This book is old and somewhat outdated, and many of the features described and listed are on private land where you can't (or shouldn't) get to them. But they're still fun to read about, and enough are findable with some skill and patience that the book is a worthwhile asset. For example, at one point we noticed some unusually folded rocks in a roadcut, looked up the area, and confirmed Joanna's rough memory that there were several suspected meteorite impact structures nearby. Cool.

The entire afternoon, I was searching for one thing in particular: a good open view of the overall landscapes. The Ozarks are difficult to photograph well; in person you can see and feel the rolling topography, the glades and forests and open ground, and feel the remoteness and variety of the ground as you wind through it on dirt roads and rugged trails. As one writer noted, what the Ozarks lack in elevation they make up in steepness. But a camera's lens is almost always too small to convey the sense of place, and ends up looking like just another forest or hill. Then we rounded a hilltop bend on an obscure one-lane gravel track, crossed a cattle guard, and hit the brakes in satisfaction. A quick hike up into an unposted ridgeline bluestem pasture, and I had my Ozark scene. Prairie grasses, rock outcrops, hills in fall color, small farms in the bottoms, and a nice limestone bluff along the Niangua in the background. Here was the Ozarks we'd been enjoying all day, captured in one perfect location.

I could have stayed on that ridge for hours, but the sun was dropping west and we had to get home by dark to take care of farm animals. So we wound north a while longer, eventually emerging onto "better" roads that took us north, across the Missouri River at Boonville, and back into the familiar terrain of home as the sun set. A thoroughly enjoyable day, and one that nicely balanced the deep sense of place we get from rarely leaving our own farm. This is the Missouri we love.

Our deep thanks to the friends who did evening and morning animal chores so we could be gone overnight.

Commodity farmers are not the only farmers

2011-10-24T06:00:00.001-05:00

The Kansas City Star ran a very nice editorial recently, arguing efficiently and accurately for an end to many commodity support programs that unevenly benefit a small niche among American farmers. This line captures the point nicely:

Nearly two thirds of the nation’s farmers — growers of fruit, vegetables, nuts, beef and poultry — do without direct subsidies. The budget crisis is a signal that it’s time for the rest of the farm sector to get along with a lot less of what amounts to corporate welfare.

This disparity highlights the hypocrisy inherent in the USDA's dual approach to "farm" policy and public nutrition. USDA spends a token amount of money and a lot of hot air promoting a balanced diet heavy on fruits and vegetables and talks up healthy eating habits. It also has various small (relative to commodity handouts) side programs throwing token grant money at "specialty crops" and other supposed niche farms. In case you were wondering, here are the USDA's own words:

Specialty crops are defined as “fruits, vegetables, tree nuts, dried fruits, horticulture, and nursery crops (including floriculture).”

Then USDA spends far more on propping up a few selected commodity crops, a fraction of the total diversity of food crops raised in the US, whose abundant presence in the food system makes a nice inverted pyramid from the desired result: corn- and soy-based junk foods are pervasive and absurdly cheap, grain-based meat/eggs/dairy (particularly from feedlots) are prevalent and cheaper than a real market cost, while fruits and vegetables are harder to find, more expensive, and mostly without any direct government support at meaningful scale relative to commodity spending. No amount of healthy-eating cheerleading can counteract the basic economics behind junk food being cheaper due to commodity subsidies.

What is inherently different about commodity crops like corn and soy, as compared to fruits and vegetables, that makes the one deserving of heavy-handed subsidies and the others not? They're no riskier than produce, which face similar pest, weed, and weather concerns while being harder to store, transport, and market. Corn- and soy-based products have higher consumer demand than fresh produce. Commodities hold no inherent public health or social benefit as compared to fresh produce, and take no more skill or risk on the part of the farmer. So why are the nation's commodity farmers perpetually presented as desperate struggling honorable souls who need government largess, while produce growers are generally left to fend for themselves, if not criticized or ridiculed for their products being too expensive or hard to find?

Or to phrase it more accurately for my views (and to mirror the Star): if produce growers can be expected to fend for themselves in the free market, so can commodity growers. And if customers were asked to pay the actual free-market costs for commodity-based foods, they'd find our food a lot more attractive.

Advocating reform of ag subsidies is not (or should not be) an attack on commodity farmers; it's a request to apply farm policy fairly across the board. Few farmers, of any kind, are really ever in good economic shape, and commodity farms are an important part of the social and economic fabric of rural America. Farming of any kind is quite simply a difficult and risky a business, and there is a strong case for keeping farming as a whole a more stable long-term business model throughout the country. So reform can't be something sudden, just pulling the rug out from under commodity growers. What's needed is a two-fold approach:

1) Reforming commodity programs from handouts to basic crop/farm insurance, such that farmers profit or lose on the open market like other businesses, but have basic protection from the disastrous years and bankruptcy that farms are uniquely exposed to, and that private insurance can't or won't provide affordably (if at all).

2) Applying such programs equally but proportionately across the board to all kinds of farms, ending the commodity favoritism that skews both agriculture and public health in the wrong direction.

Fall farm status & projects

2011-10-22T06:00:00.002-05:00

Fall is just as busy, and sometimes feels busier, than summer. The growing areas are managed just as much, with the addition of all sorts of other cool-weather seasonal projects. Slowly things calm down as given areas/tasks are finished for the year, but it really takes until nearly Thanksgiving for us to feel the effects. Here's a wordy look at some of the different things we're doing this time of year on our very diversified farm. Though it seems like a lot, we enjoy most of it, and it all ties into our fundamental goals of personal independence, active outdoor work, and excellent food.

Final harvest

As much work as regular weekly harvests for market and restaurants are, there's a large pulse of salvage work that comes with the hard freezes. We are very serious about minimizing waste, and refuse to just dump or abandon food we worked hard to grow. It takes extra time to strip most of the usable immature peppers, green tomatoes, and more from plants; bring in all winter squash and other crops; and do what we can to preserve them. From freezing and canning lots of relishes and preserves, to regular batches of food dehydration, to simple space management in our storage areas, fall harvest creates a lot of extra work. Below, a small portion of the pre-freeze harvest extravaganza

Growing area cleanup & prep

As individual crops finish for the year, any remaining plant material is pulled out and either fed to the animals (e.g. beans, peppers, corn/sorghum) or hauled off for composting (e.g. tomatoes, zucchini). Below right, frost-killed tomato plants waiting to be pulled along with their trellising. Irrigation lines are pulled, drained, bundled, and stored in the barn rafters for next year. In some cases we'll spread and incorporate aged goat manure, depending on the past and future crop & fertility rotation in that bed. We don't like any growing areas in bare soil for long, so when possible beds are either planted in winter cover crop like rye, vetch, and/or oats; or mulched with straw or aged leaves. We're moving aggressively to limit our off-farm straw purchases, so raking fresh and spreading aged leaves becomes a more important fall task every year (see below).

Leaf mulch collection

Mulch is a very important aspect of our farm management, especially as we refuse to use plastic sheeting for weed control (too much oil, too much money, too much waste). Natural soil covers like straw or leaves help retain moisture, suppress weeds, add organic matter to the soil, and protect against winter freezing of soil and winter crops. We're trying to limit our off-farm straw purchases for financial and agricultural reasons (last year we spent $1,000 on local straw, which carries a lot of obnoxious weed seeds and is still grown under conditions not entirely known to us). So every year we spend more time in the autumn woods, raking tracts of leaves into piles which are allowed to sit for a year, gently decomposing into a much denser, nutrient rich material that is more efficient to collect, handle, and spread. This leaf mold (after being aged for a couple more years) also forms a core component of our homemade potting mix (again saving money). Above left, a lovely pile of this condensed material.

When we calculate the time we spend raking and managing leaves, compared to the off-farm cash flow of purchasing large amounts of straw, it comes out close to even, without considering the side benefits of (a) a clean, known source for the leaves with few weed seeds and no unknown additives, (b) better soil nutrients from decomposing leaves than straw, (c) less fossil fuel use for short truck runs of leaves from our own woods than the large machinery needed to plant, harvest, bale, and transport straw from off-farm, and (d) a more reliable commodity that's less subject to price, weather, and demand fluctuations.

General cleanup

There is a surprising amount of overall cleanup to do on the farm before winter comes. Collecting various tools, hoses, and other items that might be sitting around; moving equipment under cover; collecting and stacking T-posts, trellis panels, and other infrastructure; collecting all bits of trellis string; staging hay and feed where we want them; preparing winter quarters for animals; tool maintenance and storage (cleaning, sharpening, oiling, etc.), and more.

Overwintering crop planting

There are many items that can be, or need to be, transplanted or seeded in fall to achieve the proper growing season. Garlic is an obvious example, but there are various other alliums (some onions, garlic scallions), greens (collards, kale, sorrel), and others (strawberries) that we manage in the fall for spring or even summer harvest. Winter cover crops are another important category. So even while the farm overall is shutting down, we're still putting new crops in the ground into November. Below left, a decent stand of oats that will eventually winter-kill into soil cover. Below right, ex-pepper and -edamame beds that have been manured and readied for fall garlic planting next week.

Seed saving & cleaning

We save our own seed for a growing list of crops & varieties, and many of the tasks related to seed saving occur in the fall. Some seeds (such as dill and cilantro) were collected over the summer, set aside during the busy season, and now need to be winnowed with a fan to sort the seed from stems, dust, etc. Summer squash seeds need to be scooped out from the hard, winter-squash-like baseball bats that we intentionally allowed to grow to absurd size, even as we shuddered each time we looked at the monstrous overgrowns (or realized that we could still sell them for $1/each at market...). Melon seeds that we set aside from perfect melons, rinsed, and left to dry need to be packed up. A selection of the best onions that we grow need to be selected and set aside to replant for seed next year. Tomato seeds from a variety that we really like need to be fermented and saved, just in case we can't buy more seed for it. Our winter-keeping tomatoes need to be set out carefully on shelves to store, so we can save seed from the longest storing ones come mid-winter. With some crops, such as cowpeas, the seed and the food are one and the same, and a nice selection of seed simply needs to be separated out from the eating supply. Below, saving summer squash seeds from a mature specimen.

Logging

Every fall and winter we work to clear more overgrown land (mostly cedars), seeking both to bring pasture back into production and to generate the lumber and firewood we need to maintain and build the farm. Much of this work also has environmental benefits, from increasing bird/wildlife habitat and plant diversity to decreasing soil erosion through thicker ground cover once the dense cedars are gone. Last year we had an extra push to get started on logging, as I needed fresh lumber to build our goat/dairy barn before winter weather arrived. This year I have a similar goal, to build a bigger and better chicken house that can accommodate our growing flock. I have a milling date set with our portable sawmill folks at the end of the month, and need to get enough ground cleared and enough logs down to be ready for milling, then construction. This includes pouring the foundations while nights are still mostly above freezing. There are many more areas to work on over the winter, but the chicken-shed-specific work has a high priority right now. Below, the future site of a long-term chicken house and pasture.

Goat breeding

If you want goat milk, you have to get goats pregnant (rather, a buck has to). We try to breed our goats in November, aiming for an April kidding date. This involves hosting a buck for a month, as goats only go into heat for a day or so every three weeks. Pasturing the does with a buck for a month generally gives us two shots at successful breeding. We don't actually have to handle the herd much differently, but it is another management item to pay attention to this time of year.

Butchering preparations

As on all traditional farms, fall and early winter are meat season. We do all our own meat processing on the farm, because we don't want to pay anyone else to do it, like the ability to make cuts just the way we want, can use more of the interesting parts this way (like saving hog casings for sausage), and minimize any stress on the animals since there's no transportation or fear. We'll only be doing one goat kid this year, as the other two are does which we intend to breed as future milkers. But there's a much larger pig than last year, several rounds of developing roosters, and one or more deer once the season opens in mid-November (given how many we've seen in the last few weeks, I'm quite antsy for this). Prepping for this work includes making enough freezer space for all the meat, ensuring we have freezer paper and other supplies on hand, and watching the weather for appropriate multi-day conditions. We also try to have most other weather-dependent farm work done, so we can take advantage of butchering weather without competing needs.

Firewood moving/winterization

Just getting the house ready for winter takes a bit of time. Collecting and moving firewood into position, having the chimney swept, moving storage foods (onions, potatoes, garlic, apples, etc.) into the back rooms which we don't heat and which stay at a nice stable 40 degrees all winter, changing out sets of seasonal clothing, etc.

Cheesemaking

I've been putting extra time into making rounds of hard cheese to store over winter; we already have more wheels of these waxed and aging than years past, with up to two more months of milking to go. We also freeze milk to get us through the non-milking months; this works well enough for basic cheeses, yogurts, and baking.

Normal farm work

Among all this seasonal stuff, we're still harvesting regularly for biweekly market and weekly restaurant sales, including all the container washing, produce handling, calling around, etc. that accompanies these jobs. There's still weeding and watering to be managed, various daily chores, and so on. Like I said, fall is just as busy as summer, just with shorter days. Longer nights can mean more sleep, but also unintentionally late nights as we stay up trying to get cooking, office work, and housework done now that daylight is too precious to waste. That's life.

Market plans, October 22

2011-10-20T06:00:00.000-05:00

We'll be at market this weekend with a wide variety of produce, hoping to be noticed among the expected glut of produce salvaged from frost-sensitive plants.

Napa cabbage: Big, beautiful, juicy, tasty cabbages; they range from 3-7+ pounds each. We just love these for slaw, fresh kraut, stir fries, and more (but especially slaw). We can go through multiple heads a week, keeping a big bowl of slaw in the fridge. For more on using fresh fall cabbages, see this post from 2009; it notes that we hadn't yet tried growing these for market sale. Now we have, there are lots, and they're excellent.

Green tomatoes: I suspect the market will be overrun with post-freeze salvage produce like green tomatoes, which is always frustrating as the supply way outstrips the demand. I wish more people experimented with all the ways to prepare and preserve green tomatoes. We have...let's just say an abundance.

Green peppers: Same as tomatoes, above. Our plants were loaded with developing fruit coming into this week of true freezes. We'll be drying multiple batches of these, but hope at least some will sell. The pig doesn't like these as much as green tomatoes, so some may end up as compost.

Garlic: As before, we'll be bringing a large quantity of garlic, expecting people to be interested in both seed and storage garlic. Several varieties are sold out or low, but the overall quantity and diversity remain. We'll start planting our own stock in the coming week.

Baby greens mix: Our very nice mix of young greens, including arugula, tat soi, mustard, mizuna, beet greens, and more. Great for sauteing, braising, soups, pastas, and more, or for strong/spicy salads. Featured on the menu at Red and Moe lately.

Baby lettuce mix: Tender young lettuce greens, great for salads with the season's last summer produce.

Daikon radishes: A reasonably mild, long white radish. Works well for cooking or pickling, or slicing onto salads. Can have a bit of heat, though less so than many fall radishes, and gets sweet with cold weather.

Anaheim hot peppers: Mild-medium heat, great flavor. Small ones harvested pre-frost, great for stuffing with cheese and roasting, or for chopping into sauces.

Other greens: Collards and mizuna for sure.

Leeks: We love leeks, and these should be quite good with a few frosts under their belt. The stalks aren't quite as long as we had hoped, but they are relatively thick, and they are tasty.

Herbs: Parsley is available in abundance. We'll also have thyme, oregano, sage, tarragon, mint, and maybe some cilantro.

The downside of dry

2011-10-16T06:00:00.003-05:00

It's been very dry most of the summer; readers of this blog know that. Although the drought has been frustrating at times, we'll still take this year's weather over the last few absurdly wet ones and all the issues too much rain causes. But the opposite of bad isn't necessarily good; farming is the art of keeping your balance as the weather gives you whiplash. While some problems with drought are obvious (plants need water to grow), others are more subtle for non-farmers. Here's a look at some of the issues we've faced in dealing with 3 1/2 months of overly dry conditions here.

First, the conditions we've actually seen. Through June, we were in normal to too-wet conditions. We recieved 1.09" on July 3, and then the spigot was turned off. Since then, we've only gotten over .5" in a day 4 times, never again over an inch. Total on-farm monthly rainfall through July, August, and September was at or below 2". October has been the driest yet so far.

It's important to keep in mind that drought (and rain) can be very localized, far more so than temperature. If we're having a heat wave, likely much of Missouri is too. But rain can be drastically different over short distances, leaving individual farms and plots of land under very different conditions even in one locality.

The image below, from the National Weather Service's extremely useful and addictive Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service, shows total rainfall across Missouri for the last 30 days (as of 10/14/2011). Our farm is marked with a black dot near the center of the image; note that there is a rainfall difference of nearly 2" between the northern and southern ends of just our county. The data are pretty accurate for us, at least: we recorded 1.43" of rain on the farm from 9/13-10/14, right on the 1"-1.5" line mapped by shades of green. It's worth noting that the color scheme here could be misleading to some: in my world, red implies drought and green implies lush times, though the opposite is true here (check the scale at right).

Part of the story, though, is that most of that rain has come in sporadic, small doses that never have much effect. Rather than a good one-inch soaker that really filters in and helps crops, the rain since July has mostly been little drizzles that move the dust around and vanish the next day. Over the last week, we technically broke a 21-day dry spell, but only with individual totals of .11" followed by a windy dry day, then .14" followed by two windy dry days, such that whatever moisture entered the soil vanished very quickly and never made it to any plants' root zones in meaningful quantities. Thus even the few inches of rain we've had each month this summer is misleading, because almost none of it has actually mattered.

So what?

Irrigation has become a serious issues. Vegetables take a lot of water to grow; a good rule of thumb is 1"/week. At best we've had half of that over the summer, and it's really even less since most of the rainfall has been in small batches that doesn't soak in. Thus we've been running our drip irrigation lines heavily trying to keep things happy. But we've started to take the drip lines out in places due to frost, so in places we have had to start using sprinklers, which are far less water-efficient due to wind and evaporation, but can cover larger areas more consistently. Newly seeded or transplanted fall crops, like spinach and strawberries that we intend to overwinter for spring CSA, take extra work to keep alive in these conditions.

The problem has gotten worse toward the end of the season, as we start pulling out production crops and trying to establish dense winter cover crops like oats, rye, and vetch whose job is to grow into a nice thick stand before winter and protect the soil from freezing (or blowing away; see below). Instead, these either haven't germinated, have taken lots of sprinkler/hose watering to germinate, and/or have barely grown. The paired photos below show one of our northern fields which was planted in rye/vetch almost a month ago in antipication of forecasted rain which never meaningfully materialized. The seeds germinated and grew about an inch, but have looked the same (below right) ever since. This should be a good, lush, soil-protecting stand by now. Instead there are clouds of soil blowing around on windy days, and the plants are alive but barely growing. We have far more bare soil on the farm than we're comfortable with, but can't get cover crops to grow well enough in this brutal combination of drought, warm weather, and regular high-wind days that suck the moisture from everything. Even running sprinklers on this field hasn't had much effect.

Soil hardness increases as the ground dries out. This can make it hard to turn in manure or otherwise work the soil, and has been especially frustrating for handling fences and posts. The portable net fencing we use for goats and pig has gotten harder and harder to set up and move, as the posts won't go into the rock-hard soil. We had a mass goat escape recently as a fence post just fell over, opening a gap, and a similar thing happened to the pig fence. As we clean out beds of peppers (below left), tomatoes, cucumbers, and other items that were trellised using T-posts and string, we find that the posts just won't come out of the hard ground. We've been digging them out with shovels one by one: the one shown below right wouldn't come even with that pit dug around it. Also notice how dry the ground is; most of the pepper plants are healthy, like the one next to Joanna in the photo, but there isn't much moisture to spare down there and it's taken a lot of irrigation even so.

Rodents have become more and more frustrating this year. We always have some damage from voles, it's part of the trade-off for permanent no-till vegetable beds, but they've been especially aggressive in tunnelling and damaging things this year. We think it's largely due to the drought; the only water available on the farm comes from our irrigation lines, and the voles naturally tunnel along right underneath, messing up the root zones, collapsing plants, and eating root crops like peanuts which they find there. They can also start gnawing on the irrigation lines themselves, looking for water. Many of our young blueberry plants have been mostly undermined and thus near-killed by rodents; you can practically reach into the caverns excavated within their root masses, where the water is. Snakes are the best defense against rodents, but we've seen very few snakes this year for unknown reasons.

Pastures, of course, suffer too. We keep our goats on pasture 24/7 from late spring through fall, rotating them regularly to new ground. Usually this allows the pastures to recover and regrow after grazing, but this year they've stayed brown and dead post-grazing. We know we're managing our pastures well overall because our milk yields this year have been equal to or higher than last year, even with drought-stressed pastures, but we're now running out of places to graze and the yields have really started to drop. In a wet year we can start over on pastures grazed early in spring, but those haven't regrown much this year. One farmer at market told me that they normally don't start feeding out hay to cattle until December, but this year they've already started. We're trying to supplement with bean plants and other farm-generated material, but are having to use more purchased hay than desired as well.

Wind/erosion was mentioned above, but needs more explanation. As soil dries out, it becomes more prone to windblown erosion. We've had a lot of windy days this summer, even with our protected valley, and many days you can see soil blowing away. Often this is the really good stuff, and it's a real loss. We take soil conservation very seriously, it's one of the benefits of our permanent no-till vegetable beds with sod aisles, but we can do relatively little against windy drought. Mulch can help, but this dry year has struck in the middle of an intentional transition away from purchased straw mulch (expensive, seedy, otherwise problematic) to on-farm mulch sources like aged leaves, meaning we don't have as much on hand as past years. Increased cover-cropping is another way to hold soil in place, but as discussed above, it's been much harder to get these to germinate and grow under such dry, windy conditions. We're losing far less soil than your average bare giant commodity field, but we still care about it. Plus, high winds and low humidities are just personally uncomfortable: we have to drink a lot more water even on cool days and be otherwise careful of conditions.

Pig rooting becomes less effective. One of the side benefits of pasturing a pig is its ability to naturally root up unwanted grass like fescue so we can reseed and improve the pasture: it's an edible tiller that fertilizes as it goes. However, this year, the ground has been so hard and dry that wherever we put him, the pig hasn't been able to do much with it. We've run a hose and sprinkler out to him, which creates a small wet zone that he indeed has turned up nicely. But that's not practical at a larger scale, and so we've lost most of the year's potential pasture-improvement benefit. Instead he's mostly just hard-packed anywhere we've pastured him, making things worse instead of better. This one we didn't see coming.

Still better than monsoon, though. We'd like a nice balanced year sometime, but will keep plugging along with what we get. We've seen some form of the two extremes these past two years, from way too wet to way too dry, so are getting a handle on managing both. Overall, dry is better. But is a nice, soaking 1" of rain too much to ask even once a month?

Market plans & CSA tours

2011-10-13T06:00:00.010-05:00

We will not be at market this coming weekend. We currently plan to attend three more markets (unless bad weather intervenes):
October 22
November 5
November 19 (just before Thanksgiving)

Last week we gave a preview of some items available for the rest of the season.

Our CSA tours last weekend went well, we thought, with interested people enjoying beautiful weather to tour the farm and some good discussions of farm management methods and CSA details.
We are starting to officially sign up people with a $50 deposit to guarantee a space in the 2012 program. Our goal is to have all slots reserved with this deposit by mid-December, and to take the first real portion of payment in mid-January (we're targeting a three-part payment plan for the year, maybe Jan-March-May?). Given that we consider the CSA to cover January-December of a given calendar year, it will be best to start the program off right with all members signed up. At the same time as the January payment, we intend to distribute the first share of the year, composed of winter storage items possibly including garlic, onions, sweet potatoes, winter squash, leeks, cabbages, and/or more.

Many people responded to the first tour offerings with interest but regret that they were out of town or otherwise unavailable that weekend. Thus we will be offering two more tour days:
Sunday, October 30, 2:00 pm
Saturday, November 5, 2:00 pm

We hope these dates will accomodate many interested people, and we can move toward really filling up the program. If you're interested, please consider making time for one of these events, and/or otherwise letting us know of your serious interest in the CSA. As before, we ask for people to RSVP for the tours so we know what to plan for. We'll be accepting reservation deposits at the tours or at market on days we're there (or we can work something else out). Just to be clear, like most CSAs, deposits and payments are non-refundable.

Farm insurance is worthless, 2011 edition

2011-10-11T06:00:00.001-05:00

Back in early 2010, we wrote a long post discussing our concerns and negative experiences dealing with farm insurance, in theory a necessity for running a food-production business in this litigious and paranoid culture. In effect, our experience-based argument was that farm insurance (and most insurance) is either a scam or a waste of money, and doesn't actually protect a small farm because the insurance company can always find a way to back out of the supposed commitment (while keeping your money), and any real farmer doesn't have the time or money to fight.

A few days ago, I exchanged a few emails with a farmer from southwest Missouri, who is dealing with precisely this problem and wrote to us (and others) for advice. With their permission, here is the email exchange, kept anonymous by request. It speaks for itself as regards this issue:

EMAIL 1:

I have a CSA in Southwest Missouri. This was our first year. We just received a call from our insurance company saying they are cancelling our farm insurance because we get too much exposure. Was wondering if you could share the company you use so we can have some options. I have asked several people. thanks.

MY RESPONSE:

That’s terrible to hear. We have found the insurance industry very frustrating to work with, as no insurance company really cares about or understands small/direct-market farms, and we don’t fit into any of their pigeonholes. As far as we’re concerned it’s an expensive scam that offers no meaningful protection, since it’s so easy for the company to drop you or shirk their responsibility if you try to make a claim. What kind of coverage are they dropping? Basic damage coverage, like property, or product/customer visit liability? If interested, you can read more of our thoughts/experiences with farm insurance on our blog at:

http://cherthollowfarm.blogspot.com/2010/02/liability-and-insurance-on-market-farm.html

I’m a little uncomfortable sharing our insurance details over email with an unknown person, since it is such a problematic subject, but suffice it to say we’ve not found a company we feel good about. May I reproduce your email (anonymously if you like) on our blog, and/or forward to other farmers I know in the area, to see if others have input on the question?

EMAIL 2:

After I wrote a few people trying to come up with insurance, I realized how invasive I was being. Wasn't trying to pry.Yes, you can reproduce my email. Rather not have my name attached and I will follow your blog. We had farm and property insurance and all of a sudden we got a letter saying the company was going to stop insuring any property that could not be seen from five other properties. We can only be seen by one other farm and he has to be wanting to look our way.

So we called the broker and he said not to worry. Said he had lots of companies and he would get back to us. Soon he sent a bid for insurance more that one forth higher than we were paying before and he accepted our payment after he took what seemed like a hundred pictures and asked over two hours worth of questions.

Then they wanted us to produce books on our U pick orchard which we declined to do because we don't separate it from the other things we do here and thought it not to be their business. Well, to make a long story short, they called and the exact quote was

" we have been on your website._______ Farm is much too visible and we are going to decline insuring you. We will insure you to the end of the month and prorate your payment." So , here we are, today is the 7th and we have no insurance past Halloween. Of course, no insurance, no home loan.

This is not the only problem we face. We are trying to refinance the farm at a lower interest rate and no one loans to a "working farm". Hobby farms only. So I guess for that we will go to Farm Bureau. I am not a conspiracy person , yet I do believe they are trying to get rid of small farmers in order to get a higher tax rate on the land and because he who rules the food supply rules the world.

Thanks again for replying. We will find insurance somewhere before the first and I may just take down the website for now. Didn't know about your blog when I wrote the first time. I was just trying people from Missouri who had agricultural tourism.

Thanks.

Thoughts or recommendations for this person?

Bird list & other natural events, September 2011

2011-10-08T06:00:00.022-05:00

It's dry; our on-farm rainfall totals for the past three months are July (2.03"), August (1.76"), September (2.17"). Most of that came in little spurts here and there, never enough to really soak in and reset the water clock. The ground is rock-hard, dust rises from our field roads, pastures don't regrow after goats have browsed them, trees, plants, and crops all wilt. We're watering like crazy trying to keep things alive, especially young seedlings and transplants; greens don't regrow as fast which cuts into our sellable yields. We had our first light frost September 14, and several more between then and early October, when we recieved two killing frosts in the low areas of the field.

Coyotes have been very active the past few weeks; we hear our local pack regularly in the evening and overnight hours. They tend to travel along the Silver Fork valley, just north of us, but definitely move up and down our side valley as well. Multiple times we've seen coyotes along our forest edges, including a pair in the orchard just a few days ago, and find their scat on our roads now and then. Like hawks, I enjoy their presence and hope they'll leave our animals alone; they're a very neat animal to see and are an important part of the food chain here. Others in the area are reporting lots of coyote activity too, and some attacks on livestock, though I remain more concerned about the various packs of domestic dogs allowed to roam freely in our area. Good fencing goes a long way toward hopefully allowing nature and domestic animals to coexist.

September marked the opening of fall bird migrations, as you'll see from the 26 new species observed on the farm compared to August. Many of these were only seen a few times as they passed through, but did find something they liked about our ecosystem long enough to pause and be noticed. Hawks have been very active this fall, including a beautiful but annoying Cooper's Hawk which will....not....leave...., just keeps hanging around benefiting from the plush populations of warblers passing through but forcing us to confine the chickens far longer than we've ever had to before.

I've been carrying binoculars most mornings as I go out to milk and do animal chores, as there are often thick mixed flocks of birds flitting around the diverse habitat of our main field/pasture, highlighted in the clear light of morning sun. Fall migrants don't sing or call as much as spring migrants, and are generally drabber in color and patterning, so it takes more work and observation to identify and distinguish them. It's an enjoyable challenge most of the time, and really helps us understand our surroundings more thoroughly.

Publishing a month-long list certainly obscures the day-to-day and week-to-week changes in migrant behavior. Some birds, like the Broad-winged Hawk, are long gone by the end of September. Others, like the White-Throated Sparrow, showed up October 1 and just missed being included (they could easily have been here one day earlier and just went unnoticed). But the lists still give a sense of the diversity we observe and interact with here.

NEW IN SEPTEMBER (26 species, some observed earlier this year but not in August)

Canada Goose
Red-Tailed Hawk
Black and White Warbler
Red-eyed Vireo
Black-throated Green Warbler
Nashville Warbler
Blackburnian Warbler
Red-headed Woodpecker
Grey Catbird
Brown Thrasher
Northern Flicker
American Redstart
Least Flycatcher (likely, unconfirmed)
Cooper's Hawk
Red-eyed Vireo
Cedar Waxwing
Magnolia Warbler
Rose-breasted Grosbeak
Common Nighthawk
Tennessee Warbler
Chestnut-sided Warbler
Yellow-Rumped Warbler
Lark Sparrow
Tree Swallow
Canada Warbler (new species for the farm)
Killdeer

PRESENT IN SEPTEMBER (31 species)
Turkey Vulture
Red-shouldered Hawk
Broad-winged Hawk
Mourning Dove (inc. 2 recent fledglings observed by the barn at the end of the month)
Yellow-Billed Cuckoo
Barred Owl
Whip-poor-will
Ruby-throated Hummingbird
Belted Kingfisher
Red-bellied Woodpecker
Downy Woodpecker
Pileated Woodpecker
Eastern Wood-Peewee
Eastern Phoebe
Great Crested Flycatcher
White-eyed Vireo
Blue Jay
American Crow
Tufted Titmouse
Black-cappeed Chickadee
White-breasted Nuthatch
Carolina Wren
Blue-grey Gnatcatcher
American Robin
Northern Parula
Summer Tanager
Scarlet Tanager
Northern Cardinal
Indigo Bunting
Eastern Towhee
American Goldfinch

MISSING/UNOBSERVED SINCE AUGUST (8 species)
Fish crow
Eastern Kingbird
Grackle
Golden-winged Warbler
Great Blue Heron
Wood Thrush
Louisiana Waterthrush
Field Sparrow

Market plans, October 8

2011-10-07T06:00:00.001-05:00

We'll be at market this Saturday, kicking off a busy weekend for us. Saturday and Sunday afternoons we're hosting CSA farm tours for interested customers; please let us know ASAP if you're interested in attending. Many have written to say they're interested but out of town that weekend, and we will be holding more events later in the year, but both of this weekend's tours will be happening as we have signups for both days and can still accomodate more.

At market this weekend:

Garlic: We are sold out of two varieties (German Extra Hardy and Chet's Italian Red), but have all the others. Like the last market we attended, we'll be bringing extra garlic as people tend to start stocking up this time of year, and looking for planting stock as the planting season is about to start (mid-October through early November).

Onions: We've sold most of the braids we initially made, and it's so dry here the onion necks won't braid properly, so we may end up just selling some loose.
Green tomatoes: A nice seasonal specialty, explore all the possible uses for these underappreciated items. We love the traditional Southern way, skillet-fried in fresh-ground cornmeal, but there are so many more options. Find lots of ideas in past blog posts here and here.

Greens: Mustard, chard, and kale will all be available as loose greens. Lots of uses for these; saute them with garlic, chop into soups and stews, top pizzas, etc. We may have some baby greens to offer, though it depends on on total yield and restaurant needs.

Sweet peppers: Our usual mix of shapes and colors, great for eating fresh or almost any cooking use. Our top uses are pepper salads, and cooking/roasting for sauces.

Hot peppers: Anaheims & jalapenos. Anaheims can be roasted and frozen for later sauces (or make & freeze the sauce now), and are excellent dried if you have a food dehydrator. Jalapenos can be dried as well, and exceedingly useful.

Daikon radishes: A reasonably mild, long white radish. Works well for cooking or pickling, or slicing onto salads. Can have a bit of heat, though less so than many fall radishes, and gets sweet with cold weather.

Peanuts (hopefully): Fresh green peanuts, perfect for Southern-style boiled peanuts. We haven't found time to do a test dig yet, but we know there are (or were) some peanuts down there because there are vole holes in the bed and peanut shells at the surface in places.... We hope they've left some for us, and we hope to get some to market on Saturday.
Herbs: Parsley, cilantro, dill, thyme, oregano, tarragon, sage, mint & possibly more.

Rest-of-the-season preview:
We plan to continue on the every-other-week market schedule for the rest of the season, assuming weather cooperates. So, the current plan is that we will be at market on Oct. 8, Oct. 22, Nov. 5, and Nov. 19. Here are some of the product that we expect/hope to bring in the remaining weeks.

Leeks: These look big and beautiful. We usually like to wait for a nice cold spell to start harvesting these, as it improves the flavor. They'll need a good cleaning before use, becuase we hilled them with soil to get a nice, long blanched stalk.

Chinese cabbage: We have quite a few heads of Bilko cabbage, a very tasty variety. The heads are large and may look daunting, but they store well and are so good that we power through them in the kitchen. A huge bowl of slaw can disappear very rapidly at our table.

Sweet potatoes: We had a reasonable yield this year, in spite of some rodent damage. These are currently curing, a process that enhances the sweetness & overall quality. The varieties that we grow produce mostly smallish roots that are perfect for cubing and roasting. Yum.

Winter squash: These are also curing, for the same reasons as sweet potatoes. We'll likely bring some of the Delicatas and/or Acorn squash to market, since these are short-storage varieties. The long-storing butternuts we'll reserve for CSA members after the new year (when the flavor tends to be best anyway).

Parsnips: We expanded our parsnip planting compared to last year after reasonable success, though we're a bit concerned about possible damage from carrot flies or other burrowing insect pests based on a couple of roots that we've looked at. Plus, we've had to irrigate these a lot, and rodents have been burrowing right along the irrigation in other beds; that's not a good combination for a root crop. We won't know the yield until we harvest, and these benefit from remaining in the ground until late fall/early winter.

More ways to use green tomatoes

2011-10-06T06:00:00.001-05:00

Green tomatoes are generally abundant in the fall, but this year they are especially prolific. The hot summer weather was hard on tomato plants, but once the plants recovered from the heat, they put on new growth and new tomatoes--lots and lots of new tomatoes--but not early enough for them to ripen before frost. Our tomato plants aren't alone in this; all of the growers that I talked to at CCUA's Hootenanny said the same thing; everyone has big beautiful tomato plants loaded with perfect green tomatoes that just aren't ripening.

Last year we brought lot of green tomatoes to market, and virtually no one wanted them. This is a shame, because there are many diverse and delicious ways to make good use of green tomatoes. So if you want to support local growers, think about working some green tomatoes into your cooking and maybe preserving some for the winter. For cost-conscious shoppers, learning to use green tomatoes is a good idea; the supply tends to be high and the demand low. Many growers are likely to have bulk quantities available at a very reasonable price.

Here's a run down of some of our favorite recipes that expands on last year's descriptions of using green tomatoes. At the time, we made reference to a recipe for green tomatoes baked in a pie. We have since tried that recipe and can highly recommend it.

Green tomato pie

The recipe is from In a Vermont Kitchen, p. 373 (& can be viewed in the google book preview). It makes a fantastic dessert that is very similar in flavor to an apple pie made with sour baking varieties like Granny Smith.

Canned green tomato apple pie filling

The above recipe is for fresh eating, but green tomatoes can also be included in a canned pie filling for enjoyment during the winter. The cookbook So Easy to Preserve has just the recipe that we've used. We don't reproduce unadapted cookbook recipes online, as we believe authors are entitled to their copyright, but encourage you to look up these books and/or try similar recipes wherever you can find them. It's so nice to crack open a jar in the winter and make an easy pie sourced from the farm.

Green tomato chutney

Our favorite recipe is for a green tomato apricot chutney from Sundays at Moosewood (p 317). We freeze this in small jars and enjoy it on bread all winter and spring. Joy of Cooking also has an excellent green tomato chutney recipe (p 847 in the old edition).

Pickled green tomatoes

This will be our next experiment with green tomatoes. Anyone have a favorite recipe?

Handling fall frost

2011-10-03T06:00:00.006-05:00

Saturday night we had a good, solid frost here in the valley. It wasn't our first, we've had three light frosts since September 14, but it was by far the strongest and enough to end the season for a number of things. We knew it was coming and prepared as much as practical, including making some choices on what to protect and what we were ready to let go. The average first frost in central Missouri is October 15, while northern Missouri averages around October 1. Given that our narrow valley puts us in a climate setting significantly north of our actual location, an early October frost isn't terribly unusual.

We're used to the weather patterns here, in which a clear, still night can result in a frost. Fall always brings a pattern of strong cold fronts that sweep through, with clouds clearing rapidly post-front into a still, clear night that allows cold air to pool and settle on our narrow valley. Any time the overnight forecast for Columbia reaches 40 or below under these conditions, we know to expect frost. With a forecast of 37 for Saturday night, we knew it would be a real freeze.

Sure enough, when we went out at dawn, frost extended throughout our main field and up the pasture slope beyond. Above left, a frozen-solid sheet protecting tomatoes, taken near 9am as the sun finally started to thaw things out. Above right, some very nice frost crystals on bush bean leaves. We also had a few rows of new kale and collard transplants, which normally can handle frosts, but were so young we covered them just in case. Their cover was frozen solid both nights, but the plants are fine. We hope to be harvesting these for CSA in early spring.

We made some choices on what to protect and what to let go. Our tomato plants are mostly lush and healthy, but some recovered better than others from the August heat wave that stopped all flowering and fruiting for a while. The southern end of the main tomato rows, to the right in the photo above, look nice but have almost no fruit on them. The northern end is loaded with green fruit we hope can still ripen, so we focused our efforts on covering those and left the others open; they won't be doing much more anyway. You can see various row cover fabrics and cheap sheets covering the better tomatoes in the middle distance (row cover at back is over cabbages and greens for insect protection, not frost). In this photo, too, you can clearly see frost extending across the area.

The zucchini we decided to sacrifice. This final planting has been producing amazingly, very stable and healthy for a long period of time, but sales have been going down significantly. We pick these daily to get the most efficient harvest of high-quality baby squash, and that isn't economically efficient if people don't buy them. So over the last week we've been paying less attention to them, and let the weather have its way with them. We salvaged one last bulk harvest of all sizes, which will feed a happy pig for a few days.

The peppers, on the other hand, we definitely wanted to save. Peppers mature very slowly, and though these have been producing well for us, they're still loaded with green fruit that we want to give every chance to mature. So we draped row cover over these, pinning it in place on the trellis string with clothespins, both Friday and Saturday nights. This worked; despite the zucchini freezing solid in rows 30+ feet uphill, these suffered little to no damage. With at least one more week of warm sunny weather coming up, we'll get a lot more peppers now.

We spent Sunday morning with our regular work crew, cleaning up the frost-killed plants, mostly tomatoes and zucchinis. After stripping the fruits for pig food or our kitchen, we chopped the large, viny, bushy plants into shorter chunks and trucked them up to a high ridge far from the field. We'll compost all these remains, but don't want them sitting around near the field spreading insects and disease. Filling the truck multiple times involved some fun stomping down of the remnant to squeeze more in, feeling like an old-time grape stomping or hay-stacking.

Many other items don't care about frost, or were already dealt with. Leeks and parsnips actually benefit from a few freezes before harvest, and many fall items like greens, chard, and cabbages don't care. Sweet potatoes and winter squash were mostly harvested already and are currently curing for proper storage and later distribution, though we covered some remaining winter squash to allow more to ripen.

The first real frost always creates a pulse of urgent work, but afterward it's nice to start cleaning up and finishing beds for the winter. We're mostly grateful for the continued dry conditions (~2" of rain in both August and September, with no rain since 9/18) as it makes fall work much easier and cleaner. Conditions are perfect for cleaning out beds, spreading & incorporating manure, getting cover crop seeded, and more. Eventually we really need some rain for the health of pastures, fruit plantings, and more, and just so we can finally take a break indoors, but in the meantime we're really getting work done and moving nicely toward next year.

Market plans, October 1

2011-09-30T06:00:00.022-05:00

We'll be skipping market this weekend, in keeping with our every-other-week plans for the fall. This is especially necessary this week for several reasons:

(a) we expect a frost both Friday and Saturday night, and need time to deal with that (it's technically not our first, that was 9/14, but this one may be stronger). We'd rather deal with that properly than go nuts trying to do market prep and market itself along with frost management.

(b) with plans to attend various events in Columbia later on Saturday, including the Farmageddon film & disussion panel that night, we'd be overstretched and exhausted.

(c) sales of the non-garlic produce we brought were once again poor, including only 3 lb of the fantastic mixed baby greens that we've grown for years and never had trouble selling before. So we'll work harder to market that mix to other sources instead.

(d) the dry weather means that we can do a lot of important fall projects that will put us in a better position for next year; these include hauling and incorporating manure into beds, hauling leaves from the woods for mulch, cleaning up crops that are finished and composting them to limit overwintering of insect pests, and much more. Skipping market saves us several otherwise lost work-days we can invest in the future.

We'll be back next weekend, October 8, with more garlic, onions, another shot at greens, possibly cabbage, green peanuts (if frost kills them back), and more.

More CSA Details

2011-09-27T19:11:00.001-05:00

We've collected many names from folks potentially interested in the 2012 CSA, and will continue trying to hold on-farm events to build that connection. Meanwhile, we've roughly fleshed out more details on the CSA's structure, though these are all open to discussion with interested parties. For information and reference, here's what we're leaning toward at the moment (also available on our website).

The CSA will be a single-farm CSA; everything distributed will come from this farm only, and customers will share in the risks and rewards of this single farm. As Localharvest.org accurately puts it: "...implicit in the CSA concept is the idea that members share with the farmer the risk that some crops might do poorly due to bad weather, pest problems, and the like. With so many crops included in a CSA, it is expected that even if some languish, others will flourish and there will be plenty of food overall. Members pay the same whether it turns out to be a bumper year or a skinny one." We strongly suggest potential customers, particularly those new to CSA, read through Localharvest's excellent collection of information and guidance on defining and choosing a CSA.

Farm tours for prospective members
Starting in October, we'll be hosting several on-farm events for prospective members interested in learning more about the farm and the CSA. The first two will be held on:
Saturday October 8, 2pm
Sunday October 9, 2pm
If you're interested in attending any of these events, or to discuss the CSA, please contact us or call 474-0989.

Details While we haven't settled on the exact structure of the CSA, partly to wait for input from potential members at fall on-farm events, here is a rough look at the structure we're leaning toward:

Share sizes:
Full share, suitable for a family of four that uses some produce or a single/couple household that cooks regularly.

Partial share, intended for one-person households. In theory we'd like to do just one share size, but we know of interest from a number of one-person households. These may be limited in quantity, because the reality is that the work of administration, packing, delivery, etc. is the same for a full share as a partial share, and so it is less efficient overall.

Price: Not yet set in stone, but approximately $1100 for a full share, $700 for a partial share, plus sales tax.

Deposit: We generally want to wait until after Jan. 1 to accept full payment for accounting/tax purposes. But we will likely set up a system for households to guarantee a membership slot by putting down a small deposit in advance.

Payment plan? This can be a difficult single payment for customers, but part of the core value of CSA is financial & planning stability for the farm, which means up-front payment. We're considering how to balance these needs and don't want this to be a deal-breaker. Payment plans also mean more administrative time, so we're likely to offer this option but charge a fee to offset the extra time that it takes us to track, request, and handle multiple payments.

Limited share customization: We intend to build an online system that allows members make limited requests to customize their shares. A day or two before each share distribution, we plan to post online what we anticipate to be the "standard share" for the week. Members will have the option to opt out of given items, and when available, request extras. This is a compromise between full customization, which is not practical on our end, and complete inflexibility in share content. A CSA should encourage members to try unusual produce, but some folks simply don't like certain products; if certain products won't be used or appreciated in one household, we'd rather be able to free those items up for a household that really likes them. Similarly, we want to share the bounty when it is available, but we don't want to overwhelm a member's kitchen with lots of extra product unless they are prepared to use it. Those who request a lot will get the best overall deal, but this allows others to take lesser amounts when desired.

Share splitting: We request that shares not be split among more than one household for several reasons. Customization of shares (described above) would be neither fair nor effective with multiple households drawing on one share. Membership also includes benefits such as on-farm events, and we cannot provide these benefits to multiple households for a single share price. Finally, we feel strongly that a core strength of CSA is the members' connection to the farm and their understanding of the farm's methods, and this is diluted by share-splitting.

Distribution pattern: Each household will receive a weekly share during the core growing season. Most shares will be distributed late week (probably Thursday?). There will also be an early week share-distribution day (Sunday/Monday?).

Distribution calendar: Weekly May-October/November, monthly or occasionally through winter and spring.

Share contents: Diverse seasonal produce and herbs May-November. Storage or off-season items through winter/spring (garlic, onions, root crops, mushrooms, possibly dried beans/corn, etc as available).

Disribution location: We're leaning toward home delivery for those who live in central Columbia or along our route into/out of Columbia. There may be an extra fee for deliveries that require a lot of extra driving. This is a detail we'll have to work out based on where member live &/or work. On-farm pick up could be a possibility for a small number of members, but we don't want to do too much of this out of respect for neighbors' privacy and the practicality of receiving regular visitors while running a farm.

Are work shifts required? No, we will not require paying members to take part in work shifts. While this is ideally a way to involve members more directly in the farm, it can also be hard to organize and manage effective work for very short-term and occasional visitors, and we don't think the hassle will be worth the benefit.

Special benefits: Farm events like bird & nature walks, on-farm meal invitations, kids' activities, newsletter with cooking/preservation advice & ideas, etc. Limited quantities of eggs and raw goat milk (for cooking or cheese/yogurt-making) may be offered for sale to members, depending on production and circumstances.

Farmageddon film in Columbia this weekend

2011-09-26T06:00:00.000-05:00

This Saturday, October 1, the Citizen Jane Film Festival in Columbia will be showing a film we've been eagerly awaiting. Farmageddon is a documentary covering the increasing intrusiveness of government regulation in the small, direct-to-consumer farm world. This is an issue we've been writing about for years, both from our own experiences and those we've been told of and read about. I don't know whether a film can change anything, but we're interested to see it. One review sums the concept up nicely:

Farmageddon explains that there are "two competing food systems" in the US — Big Ag and Small Farms — and the shows how the Federal laws created to help large corporate businesses now are being used to harass and destroy the healthy competition from small sustainable farmers.

Under the banner of "food safety," burdensome new Federal fees and regulations are being instituted that will drive many small food producers out of business. Proposed laws would give USDA expanded powers to conduct raids on small farms. In chilling detail, Farmageddon documents repeated instances of government agencies resorting to surveillance, intimidation, search warrants, criminal investigations of innocent farmers, confiscations, destruction of property, media distortions and outright lies.

This is a difficult issue, because it challenges many of the boundaries in our political system. Small farms and local foods tend to be supported by liberal-leaning citizens, who also tend to believe in government regulation and intervention as a force for good, such that stories like these are jarring. On the other hand, most advocacy for deregulation and smaller government comes from corporate Republicans, who don't know (or care) that people like us exist, and still view farming as something that government should be heavily involved, through subsidies, protectionist tariffts, price supports, and lobbying influence from Big Ag. You won't find many small-government Republicans willing to grant farmers the right to sell raw milk or butcher meat on their farm, and you won't find many Democrats willing to pull back from food safety and other regulations to grant more personal responsibility to citizens, even if it benefits small farmers and personal health.

In another quote from the review above,

As D. Gary Cox, General Counsel of the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund tells Canty: "Consumers have a fundamental, inalienable right, to produce and consume food of their own choice. And a consumer has a fundamental right to enter into a one-on-one contract with a farmer or even an agricultural producer to obtain the food that the consumer wants."

But that's something that runs against the grain of established wisdom and policy from both our main party platforms. There is great potential for stimulating discourse here, and I hope many people who are at all interested in food and farming will attend. There will be a panel discussion after the film, in which I have been invited to participate. Should be an interesting time, and I hope many people come out to take part. Here's the official brochure from the festival:

Market plans, September 24

2011-09-22T06:00:00.019-05:00

We'll be back this week with an array of interesting items. Overall the stand will be smaller from now on, as we intentionally cut back on fall planting to allow more freedom to work on our CSA transition. For example, we've recently been establishing plantings of spring-yielding items like sorrel, spinach, and strawberries which we intend to use for early shares.

That being said, there will still be produce into October, and I think we'll continue our every-other-week market attendance. I realize that's probably annoying to customers and less than ideal business practice, but it works very well for us in terms of still making sales while gaining more time to work on the farm.

We're starting to do some restaurant sales on the weekend, especially to Red & Moe. This cuts into our market supply but makes our harvest & sales workload more balanced and reliable compared to the uncertainty of market. Thus, most of the items below may or may not show up on the stand depending on restaurant orders through Friday.

AVAILABLE THIS WEEK

Garlic: 11 varieties available. This is a good time to start thinking about stocking up for winter, or buying seed stock for October planting. We'll start bringing more than usual to account for the uptick in demand this time of year, and several varieties are starting to run low (Chet's is already gone).

Onions: Long braids work really well for households who want to stock up for a few weeks. These are really efficient for us to offer, and we like selling them this way, but at some point we may offer loose onions as well.

Green beans: Nice, young mix of heirloom beans with nice texture and flavor.

Mustard greens: Large leaves excellent for sauteeing or soups; I love these skillet-cooked with garlic and vinegar.

Mixed baby greens: A nice mix of spicy, flavorful greens good for cooking or strong salads.

Summer squash: These are still producing wonderfully, especially for a long-lived organic planting. Young, tender, and tasty.

Cucumbers: These are nearing their end, but there should be some of our tasty color mix available.

Sweet & hot peppers: Color mixes of sweet peppers, along with mildly hot Anaheim peppers.

Herbs: We will have cilantro, dill, parsley, thyme, oregano, mint, tarragon, sage, and possibly more depending on what looks good at harvest time.

Late summer on-farm meals

2011-09-20T06:00:00.009-05:00

We were drawn into farming for the food, and do our best to maximize the quality, freshness, and diversity of our meals. Here's the latest in our series of photo essays documenting some of the on-farm-sourced meals we eat, which we hope serve as inspiration to customers and others interested in the value of local foods. These photos cover late August through mid-September. As always, ingredients sourced from our farm listed in italics.

At left, enchiladas: fresh-made tortillas, fried potatoes, fresh goat cheese, onions, peppers, roasted pepper sauce, topped with cilantro. At right, skillet greens: baby brassica mix (mustard, arugula, tat soi, mizuna) sauteed with garlic, sweet red peppers, and balsamic vinegar.

At left, potato pancakes (shredded potatoes, onions, zucchini, egg, flour) & applesauce (organic Missouri apples from Blue Heron Orchard). At right, pseudo-fried rice (organic brown rice, shiitake mushrooms, onions, zucchini, peppers, roasted pepper sauce).

Similar vegetables, different treatments. At left, vegetable stew: onions, garlic, okra, peppers, tomatoes, zucchini, potatoes, cowpeas, water. At right, curried vegetables: organic coconut milk, onions, sweet peppers, hot peppers, zucchini, okra, potatoes, green beans.

At left, simple pasta: organic penne, sweet red peppers, onions, garlic, herbs, Goatsbeard aged cheese. At right, one of many pizzas: fresh-made crust with tomatoes, shiitake mushrooms, zucchini, fresh-made goat ricotta, pesto. Other recent pizzas have included potatoes, rosemary, caramelized onions, peppers, herbs, and more.

Bland colors but great taste. At left, shepherd's pie: potatoes, fresh sausage (goat, pork, garlic, sage), shittake mushrooms, sweet corn, garlic, herbs, goat cheese. At right, roasted potatoes with rosemary.

Easy skillet meals. At left, quick saute of red onion, sweet & hot peppers, garlic. At right, fried potatoes.

Desserts. At left, fruit salad: watermelon, cantaloupe, blackberries, local peaches, local apples. At right, caramel layer cake (including our eggs & goat milk) with local peaches.

Farm visit for prospective CSA members

2011-09-17T06:00:00.003-05:00

Now that we're officially converting to a CSA model for 2012, we've updated our website with more information, including the current official brochure. Take a look if you're at all interested.

We are scheduling several farm tours in early October for potential CSA members. These events will provide a chance for interested folks to visit the farm, see how we manage it, and discuss details and options for the 2012 CSA with us directly. We feel strongly that all customers should visit the farm before signing up, and this will be the first official chance to do so.

There is no obligation or payment attached to these events other than an expressed interest in CSA membership next year. We would like to start truly gauging interest and making serious contacts with potential members, and this is a good way to start. Occasional off-season shares may begin as early as January with storage items such as garlic, onions, root crops, and more. We will also be working on seed orders and planting plans in early winter, so having an early understanding of potential interest and membership is important to us.

EVENT TIMING

Based on feedback from those who have signed up at market, weekend afternoons are the best option for the majority of people. Thus we will be holding the first two events on:

Saturday, October 8, 2:00 pm
Sunday, October 9, 2:00 pm

It usually takes a couple hours to show people around the farm and discuss all the different things happening here. There will also be discussion of CSA details, so we expect these to potentially last until 5:00 pm. Because the farm is very spread out and not really set up for people to wander about on their own, we do ask that visitors arrive punctually at 2 pm so we can all move about the farm as a group and discuss things together.

Even if you've been here before, this will be an excellent chance to come back, and take part in important discussions of next year's setup. If you're at all interested in joining up next year, please consider coming out that weekend.

HOW TO ATTEND

Please email (contactus@cherthollowfarm.com) or call (573-474-0989) to reserve a place on one of the days. Knowing the tour size and attendees ahead of time will make life much easier for us. If you cannot make either of those dates, but are interested in the CSA, please let us know that too and we will work on having you out another time.

For those who have not been here before, we are located 12 miles north of Columbia, not far off US-63, roughly a 20 minute drive from downtown. Access to the farm is via a gravelled private road that can accommodate most vehicles except the fanciest and lowest-riding (our 1993 Honda Accord handles it just fine).

Market plans, September 17

2011-09-16T06:00:00.002-05:00

We will not be at market this weekend. Last week's income didn't really justify returning with the same mix of items, so we've been working to arrange other sales venues for some of it, and just preserving the rest or sending it home with our workers. In addition, we have a lot of on-farm projects to work on and with fall coming on (we got a light frost Wednesday night) we'd like to truly get started on our off-season task list.

We still have a good quantity of garlic remaining, and have recieved numerous inquiries from people looking for a winter supply and/or planting stock. From this point on we'll probably come every other week or so, as we did last year in the fall, balancing the long time commitment of market with the desire to meet demand for fall garlic sales. There will be some other fall items available, like cabbage, radishes, and greens, but these are more stable in the field and so can adapt to an alternating market schedule the way regularly-harvested crops can't.

Our apologies to those who will miss us, but it's just not worth it overall right now.

How bird watching helps our chickens

2011-09-12T06:00:00.030-05:00

We keep our chickens truly on range; they have a large fenced-in yard but are otherwise unrestricted during the day (we lock them in a secure shed at night). This gives them all the room they need, but doesn't protect them from aerial predators, which can be a real problem (chicken is a much easier, and tastier, treat than most wild game). Many folks raising chickens on range end up using various forms of moveable enclosed pens, so that the chickens are on open ground but still protected (and restricted) within that pen. As avid birders, however, we've been able to observe and predict many aspects of hawk behavior, allowing us to manage our chickens more effectively on range while minimizing restrictions and losses on our farm.

For example, in our location, only certain types of hawks bother our birds. Summer resident populations of Red-shouldered Hawks and Broad-winged Hawks seem to ignore our birds; we've never knowingly lost a chicken to these hawks, though they're present nearly every day and certainly capable of taking one. All the hawk losses we know of have come from Red-tailed Hawks and Cooper's Hawks, almost always during spring and fall migration as new and hungry hawks move through the area. Knowing the difference between these hawks, by sight and by call, helps us decide what to do with the chickens. A Red-shouldered circling directly overhead is no problem; hearing a Red-tailed scream, even far away, may have us heading for the chicken yard to chase them under cover. Interestingly, the chickens themselves seem to have learned this. The dominant rooster, who watches over the rest of the flock, will ignore a Red-shouldered's call too, but will react strongly to a Red-tail.

Paying attention to migration patterns also helps. For example, we know that September is a peak time for migrating hawks, and we are always more alert for hawk behavior (and chicken noise) during that time. In past years, we've found that once a migrant announces its presence by taking a chicken, it will continue to hang around looking for another one (smart bird). Locking the chickens under cover for a few days will eventually convince the hawk that no more meals are to be had, and it moves on.

Toward that end, our main chicken shed has an enclosed run attached, made of old chain-link dog kennel panels that we've picked up here and there at auctions and garage sales. Though it's hard to see in the photo above, this is covered by a mixture of cattle panels and other fencing, just enough to keep a hawk out. Most of the year, we just leave the doors open on this so the chickens can come and go as they please. During hawk season, we can shut the doors, giving the birds some room to move around while keeping the hawks out. It usually only takes a few days. This approach is ugly as sin, but effective and flexible; we can easily take it down or rearrange it as necessary, unlike a more permanent structure. We do intend to build a better and more permanent chicken house/run in a different location this winter, but this setup has worked very well for the first few years of experimenting with chicken management.

Another aspect of chicken protection involves raising young birds to maturity. We've had several batches brooded by good hens, and also started incubating our own this year. Younger/teenage chickens are by far the most likely to get nailed by a hawk. Like human teens, they think they know everything but have no clue, don't listen to their wiser elders (like the roosters that tend to warn of hawks), and thus are vulnerable to threats the adults are better at avoiding. So we take extra care to protect, or restrict, any young birds we have around during migration season, because they're far less likely to stick to cover and pay attention to what's overhead.

Simply paying attention to bird behavior on the farm can pay real dividends. This past Friday, while working on market harvest on our main field, I heard an odd noise and glanced up to see what looked like a Cooper's Hawk land in a tree over our pond. I investigated (having binoculars with me) and was able to get very close to this beautiful and often hard-to-observe bird. They have a subtle call, which I've learned to identify; it can be the best alert to their presence since they like to skim through woods and otherwise stay hidden. These guys are really neat birds, but absolute death on chickens (they also have a reputation for raiding bird feeders and picking off snacks in front of horrified suburbanites). Having noticed the farm's first migrating hawk of the fall, I was able to go get Joanna and chase all the chickens in under cover, where they've been restricted the last few days (it was hanging around the field again on Sunday). Without close attention to bird patterns, we likely wouldn't have known it was there until a chicken went missing.

Protecting our layers from hawks is particularly important this year, as we've begun expanding our flock through on-farm breeding. We purchased a basic incubator, and have hatched several rounds of eggs from our existing layers (a mix of Black Ameraucanas and Rhode Island Reds, with roosters of both breeds). These birds, like the young ones shown above, should give us a good batch of chicken meat for the winter (we haven't had much in the past few years) as well as a larger supply of eggs so we can offer at least some to 2012 CSA members. Thus we're happy to combine the enjoyable hobby of birding with the practical value of paying close attention to the farm's wider ecosystem and applying such knowledge and observations to better farm management, such as only restricting our chickens when we really need to.

Market plans, September 10

2011-09-09T06:00:00.039-05:00

We may be ready to move on from market, but the farm isn't. A variety of items are still yielding, although this week's wonderfully cool weather has naturally slowed down the production from heat-loving items like okra and squash. We're moving onto the downward slope from the peak of summer production, and have intentionally cut back on fall plantings to give us more time to plan and prepare for next year (insect pressure and drought have also made some of these cuts for us).

AVAILABLE THIS WEEK

Green beans: Nice mix of heirloom beans, picked small for good tenderness and flavor.

Summer squash: Small, tender, high-quality squash for all sorts of uses. Try making a batch of zucchini relish; we tried this recipe this year and really like it (we replaced some of the bell peppers with Anaheims).

Cucumbers: A mix of standard greens, sweet heirloom yellow/whites, and picklers. The whites and yellows are extra-sweet but seedier, while the greens are pretty standard. This last planting is starting to decline, so they may not be available much longer.

Hot peppers: Green anaheim & jalapeno hot peppers.

Sweet peppers: Delicious red and yellow sweet peppers are yielding nicely. We have several varieties of open-pollinated/heirloom sweet peppers that we think have amazing flavor and can be used just like bell peppers: Doe Hill Golden Bell, a sweet, roundish, yellow-orange pepper that is Joanna's favorite; Sheepnose Pimento, a sweet red pepper shaped similarly to the Doe Hill; Chervena Chushka, a pointy sweet red pepper with nice thick walls; and Jimmy Nardello's Italian Frying Pepper, an all-purpose narrow pointy pepper that is Eric's favorite.

Edamame: Last week for these. The two plantings timed to continue past this were ravaged by rabbits while young.

Okra: Our usual two varieties.

Garlic: We're nearing the end on one or two varieties, but there's still plenty of diversity.

Onions: Market table space is currently very limited for us at the moment, so we're selling onions by the braid; look for them hanging off of the tent. Both yellow and red onions are now cured. These are good storage varieties, and we personally plan to be eating from this batch of onions through March. We expect some percent loss in storage over a period of seven months, but storage of few weeks to a couple of months should be no problem for these when hanging these braids in normal kitchen conditions.

Herbs: Parsley, sage, thyme, mint, tarragon, oregano, and possibly more depending on what looks good at harvest time. Green coriander from the spring cilantro planting is done, but we may have a very limited quantity of fresh, young cilantro leaf bundles from our fall planting. We'll also have bundles of garlic chive flowers; these edible blossoms can be put on salad, snipped onto pasta, or used as a garnish, for example.

Why market isn't working for us

2011-09-06T06:00:00.002-05:00

When we founded this farm, and especially when we decided to go full-time, we assumed we would be production-limited. That is, our main challenge would be growing enough product to meet demand and make the income we needed. We figured that with good quality, good marketing, and organic status, our products would be popular and in demand in a generally educated, liberal college town with a large farmers market and many locally-oriented restaurants.

We were wrong. This year especially, we aren't coming close to selling what we grow, and that's a real problem. After a decent spring, our market sales have gone down significantly compared to last year. We've also had some crop failures or disappointments, but even judging just by what we actually bring to market, sales are well below production. I ran some numbers from last week's market (we keep clear records on exactly what we bring to, and from, market) and the data bear this out. The table below uses numbers from all the perishable items we brought to market (everything but garlic and onions), in other words everything fresh we need to sell that day or it's lost income. The first column shows the product's value as a percentage of the total value on the stand; the second column shows the percentage of that item that actually sold. The products are in order of lowest total value on the stand to highest. I've intentionally left out the actual product names; the point is the overall pattern.

%value %sold

1      100
3      78
4      83
4      100
6      100
9      96
9        59
10      27
12      33
12    100
13     33
17      66

Overall, we only sold 68% of the total potential value on the stand last weekend. While we can often sell out of small specialty items, we are not making the larger-scale sales needed to really bring in income. We can't make a living selling just niche products like garlic, herbs, and edamame; we need the regular sales of tomatoes, squash, cucumbers and the like, but customers are choosing not to buy those items from us in meaningful quantities. Running these numbers confirmed what I'd been instinctively seeing all summer: we're bringing home a lot of very high quality produce, while overall earning less than last year. That doesn't work for us. So what's going on?

First, here's what I think we've done right over the past few years:

Good marketing. We have a good web presence, with a website that draws many compliments and a reasonably well-read blog that provides useful and timely information, including cooking ideas and advice. We've been featured in most Columbia-area publications, sometimes more than once, and have been written up in many local food blogs. We're still one of the few area farms with a decent online presence. We've held multiple on-farm events targeted at our core audience, including open houses, multiple on-farm meals for the local Slow Food chapter, and other events. We've also cooperated with Slow Food in doing many events at area schools. We have a clean, attractive farm stand with clear branding that we receive compliments on every week. We've presented ourselves, accurately I think, as good examples of the kind of farmers consumers say they want to support: ethical, organic, foodie-minded, hard-working, full-time, environmentally aware, professional, etc. We refuse to mess with Facebook and Twitter, but given that virtually no other farm in the area does those things either, I can eliminate that as a core problem. I can't see what more we could reasonably do to present our story, our message, and our products to the intended customer audience.

Good quality. I know our products are as good as you can get around here. I know it because we have extremely high personal standards for food, and we eat mostly our own products. I know it because some of the best chefs in town, like Mike Odette and Trey Quinlan, tell us our products are excellent and continue to buy what they can from us. I know it because we go out of our way to grow, and market, really fresh items. We never sell fresh produce more than a few days old (other than cured/dried items), keep multiple storage areas at different temperatures to ensure proper storage conditions, handle things carefully, cool produce quickly, keep backstock in insulated coolers at market rather than piling it in the open, minimize sun exposure on produce at market, and so on.

Good philosophy. People say they want organic. Survey after survey, media story after media story, the growing demand is for organic. We're as organic as it gets; we stay away from all sorts of inputs and methods that are technically allowed but not as philosophically organic as customers think. We live the ethics we propound; generating little waste, emphasizing environmentalism and conservation, growing our own food, going out of our way to support other local farmers and businesses, etc. We are who we say we are, and we are who the general consumer base says they want to buy from.

What's wrong? So why aren't our products more popular? Why do most market customers not buy from us at all? Why do those who do, tend to buy $5-$10 at most?

Price. I can only see one place where our farm does not match up with others in the pantheon of consumer desires, and that's price. We're expensive compared to most stands at market, though I'd argue we're pretty competitive with most organic produce in area grocery stores, especially when relative freshness and quality is taken into account. And our market prices match up well with the other few certified farms at market; we're not out of line relative to our niche.We're often more expensive than wholesale organic, but that's hardly surprising since much of the industrial organic system is built on cheap migrant labor and subsidized desert irrigation, just like its conventional counterpart. We can make sales of items other market stands don't have, like diverse garlic and edamame, but not anything for which we have competition, like squash, cucumbers, or tomatoes. That tells me it's a price issue, because the quality is good and the quantity is there.

When you walk down the aisle at the farmers market, we look expensive because we're directly competing largely with part-time farms which, even when well-meaning and well-run, have off-farm and/or retirement incomes and otherwise aren't treating their business the way we treat ours, as a full-time long-term profession and not a source of cash on the side. It's not hard to make a profit selling produce (especially if you don't account for the value of your labor), but it's awfully hard to make a real living. Our prices have to include insurance, retirement savings, health costs, long-term rolling averages of inevitable crop failures, home repairs, etc...all things that people with jobs or outside incomes just don't need to think about earning from produce. I think I can count the number of real full-time professional farms at our market on one hand (there are over 70 overall), though I suspect most customers don't realize that, and some of those farms have to make sales in big-city markets like St. Louis to stay in business, despite our market location in a city of 100,000. It's like trying to run a professional auto repair shop with five neighbors doing quickie $10 oil changes in their garages because they like working on cars in their spare time.

Customer spending. In no way do I intend to demean the many loyal and interested customers we do have. But the reality is, there just aren't enough of you, and the per capita spending just doesn't work for a full-time farm. I wish I had time to keep data on every transaction amount at market, but I'd confidently say that our median purchase is less than $10, with a long tail toward $2-$4 and only a couple people who spend more than $20. If you figure a professional market farm has to earn at least $1000 per market (gross) to even have a chance (30 markets x $1,000 = $30,000 gross income, still not very much), then that's roughly $4/minute in sales for a 4-hour market. Business isn't anywhere close to that, either in quantity (lots of customers) or magnitude (significant single purchases).

According to 2009 USDA numbers, the average weekly grocery bill for a 2-person household could range from $80 to near $160. Assuming we're targeting the middle-upper range of that spectrum, our normal market sale of around $10 is anywhere from 6%-8% of the total weekly grocery budget of an average market customer (even at the low end, it's only 12%). Given that the USDA thinks vegetables should be 25% or more of any given meal, that's a big gap in potential spending, and that's really hurting us. Either people aren't eating many vegetables, or they're not buying them from us despite being theoretically/statistically able to do so. Granted, we don't grow everything people could want, but we have a lot more diversity than most customers choose to purchase from us.

Using the $1,000 threshold mentioned above, even at $4/customer we only need 250 customers per Saturday to buy from us, out of the 3,000-4,000+ customers the market estimates attend every week. Our internal numbers tell me we're getting far less than that; I think we're more in the 70-100 range. That tells me that a farm like ours simply is not of interest to most market customers, even though it's theoretically supposed to be. People vote with their wallets, and we're not getting elected (note that I wrote about concerns with market last year, too).

Recession. This is the easy out, simply accepting that we're in a bad economic time and lots of businesses and individuals are hurting, and people are cutting back and looking for cheaper options. Overall, it's true. But what I'd like to know is, are people cutting back the same everywhere? Our sales this summer are down roughly 30% from last year (still not a great year). Is the same true for cell phone and electronic sales? Jewelry? Clothes? Cable/satellite TV? Tobacco? Will the Mizzou football stadium be 1/3 empty this year, with people refusing to pay huge markups for generic food and beer? If all of that is true, then fine, the recession is really here. If not, I'm curious why our food is high on the list of early budget cuts when other things apparently are not. Even with tightened belts, there are enough people in Columbia and/or enough coming to market to make even $5-$10 individual sales worth it, if the total purchasing activity was there at our stand (which it isn't; see above). Virtually anyone can afford $4-$5 at a weekly farmers market, if they chose to spend it with us; that's just not happening.

Going CSA. The situation described above is one, among many, reasons we've decided to change our business model to a CSA next year. While we still have to do the work to find and retain customers, going CSA gives us access to the entire area population instead of the small niche of market-goers. It guarantees an end home for what we grow, and lets us focus our work, skill, and stress on production, not marketing. It removes individual product prices as a factor in consumer behavior, replacing it with an annual return on investment that will be easier for them to judge and value. Long-term we still have to manage the farm well enough to grow enough product to support enough customers to make a good living, and that's an ongoing learning experience, but it takes most of the uncertainty and inefficiency out of the sales end of things. And so CSA, we think, is a far more sensible business choice for us than the farmers market, with its increasing uncertainty, cost, and inefficiency, has become.

Bird list & other natural events, August 2011

2011-09-03T06:00:00.003-05:00

Good riddance to August, honestly. We won't miss it overall, from low sales to production problems to intense heat and more. We recieved less than 2" of rain for the whole month, which is preferable to overly wet though still problematic. But even an obnoxious month has its bright spots, and some pretty neat things happened within the farm's ecosystem over the past 31 days.

Amphibians & reptiles. Though our stream has largely dried up, a few hardy aquatic animals cling to life in the remaining stagnant pools, somehow dodging raccoons, herons, kingfishers, and other predators drawn to these hot spots. We've seen fewer adult snakes compared to the past few years, and wonder whether that's contributing to our increased rodent troubles, but Joanna was very excited to find a nest of black rat snake eggs tucked into a pile of old straw. This location was conserving moisture as well as anywhere on the farm, and the eggs are just starting to hatch, as you can see above.

Insects & spiders. Spiders are always active this time of year, lacing the woods and paths with webs that inevitably wrap onto our faces. We can't even begin to study and identify all the unique species we have, but these big yellow Garden Spiders are especially impressive. Horseflies have also been prevalent, especially in the cooler evening hours which are otherwise so nice for work. Here's a good look at one of these ^%$#@. They also torment the pig and goats.

Bats. Most evenings, at dusk while I'm doing animals chores, I can see one or more bats circling the fields doing their part on insect control. Rarely do we ever get to see one up close, however. This one somehow fell from the goat barn door and into Joanna's hair one morning. It seemed stunned, or at least petrified, so we carefully scooped it up with a clean cloth and took a few photos before placing it safely up on some hay bales to recover.

Birds. Mostly a quiet month similar to July, with a lot of increased activity in the last few days of the month as the early fall migrants begin to pass through. Most of the new birds for this month have shown up in the past week. Some we haven't been able to identify, due to typically drab fall plumage and brief views (especially within the context of farm work), but we do our best. All sorts of birds like our sunflower planting, with even Downy Woodpeckers clinging to the heads as they work out seeds. Ruby-throated Hummingbirds have been especially prevalent lately as well.

Interestingly, the Broad-winged Hawks which were so prevalent throughout their breeding season have been entirely silent and mostly unobserved this month with only two sightings (which I think are the juvenile), while the Red-shouldered Hawks which are usually quite active (but mostly vanished while the Broad-wings were here) have returned with style, soaring and vocalizing every day lately. Not sure if there's a direct correlation, but it's interesting. And we went all month without seeing or hearing a single Red-tailed Hawk, which is great for chickens but unlikely to last. September is the month when migrating hawks tend to start preying on our flock.

NEW IN AUGUST (10 species, some observed earlier this year but not in July)
Fish Crow (unusual for us, identified clearly by voice)
Eastern Kingbird (only one other record here in five years)
Red-winged Blackbird (flocks passing over and through, mixed with Grackles)
Grackle (same as above)
Black and White Warbler
Red-eyed Vireo
Black-throated Green Warbler
Nashville Warbler
Golden-winged Warbler
Blackburnian Warbler (we're 90% certain of this)

PRESENT IN AUGUST (36 species)
Great Blue Heron
Turkey Vulture
Red-shouldered Hawk
Broad-winged Hawk
Mourning Dove
Yellow-Billed Cuckoo
Barred Owl
Whip-poor-will
Ruby-throated Hummingbird
Belted Kingfisher
Red-bellied Woodpecker
Downy Woodpecker
Pileated Woodpecker
Eastern Wood-Peewee
Eastern Phoebe
Great Crested Flycatcher
White-eyed Vireo
Blue Jay
American Crow
Tufted Titmouse
Black-cappeed Chickadee
White-breasted Nuthatch
Carolina Wren
Blue-grey Gnatcatcher
American Robin
Wood Thrush
Northern Parula
Louisiana Waterthrush
Summer Tanager
Scarlet Tanager
Northern Cardinal
Indigo Bunting
Eastern Towhee
Field Sparrow
American Goldfinch

MISSING/UNOBSERVED SINCE JULY (5 species)
Red-Tailed Hawk
Kentucky Warbler
Common Yellowthroat
Chipping Sparrow
Brown-headed Cowbird

Market plans, September 3

2011-09-02T06:00:00.001-05:00

NEW THIS WEEK
Green beans: These are just coming on, with small quantities this week, but they're quite tasty.

ALSO AVAILABLE

Summer squash: Lots of small, tender, high-quality squash for all sorts of uses. We go through many pounds of these a week ourselves. Try making a batch of zucchini relish; we tried this recipe this year and really like it (we replaced bell peppers with Anaheims and cut the sugar a bit).

Cucumbers: A mix of standard greens, sweet heirloom yellow/whites, and picklers. The whites and yellows are extra-sweet but seedier, while the greens are pretty standard. Pickles, cucumber salads, gazpacho, fresh snacks...there are many ways to use lots of fresh cucumbers.

Hot peppers: Green anaheim & jalapeno hot peppers. Stuff anaheims with chevre and roast for a tasty meal or snack; roast with tomatoes and/or tomatillos for excellent salsa; include in any sauce or stew for good flavor and a light heat. Jalapenos make great salsa and more.

Sweet peppers: Red and yellow sweet peppers are starting to yield well, though slowly. We don't grow full sized bell peppers, but we've found several varieties of open-pollinated/heirloom sweet peppers that we think have amazing flavor and can be used just like bell peppers. These include: Doe Hill Golden Bell, a sweet, roundish, yellow-orange pepper that is Joanna's favorite; Sheepnose Pimento, a sweet red pepper shaped similarly to the Doe Hill; Chervena Chushka, a pointy sweet red pepper with nice thick walls (& very slow to ripen this year); and Jimmy Nardello's Italian Frying Pepper, an all-purpose narrow pointy pepper that is Eric's favorite.

Salad/sauce tomatoes: Golf-ball-sized tomatoes with firm, meaty flesh and good flavor. Great for roasted salsas or sauces; also for salads because they hold together and don't splort everywhere.

Edamame: Nearing the end of these. We were both stung by ground-nesting bees while picking this week, and have just about had it with edamame.

Okra: Two varieties, really producing well right now. Fry it in salted cornmeal, add to soups/stews/beans, use in Indian cooking...Okra also freezes very easily; just pop it in a freezer bag (no blanching) for easy use in winter stews. We freeze it by the gallon this way.

Garlic: All varieties available this week. Roast it, grill it, make salsa, make pesto...what meal doesn't use garlic this time of year?

Onions: Market table space is currently very limited for us at the moment, so we're selling onions by the braid; look for them hanging off of the tent. Both yellow and red onions are now cured. These are good storage varieties, and we personally plan to be eating from this batch of onions through March. We expect some percent loss in storage over a period of seven months, but storage of few weeks to a couple of months should be no problem for these when hanging these braids in normal kitchen conditions.

Herbs: Parsley, sage, thyme, mint, tarragon, oregano, green coriander, and possibly more depending on what looks good at harvest time.

Market plans, August 27

2011-08-26T06:00:00.017-05:00

This past week we ended up with an unexpected 4-figure plumbing issue that at least didn't do any long-term damage, though it certainly wiped out any profit we might have made lately. August is always a bit of a slog, as we start to get tired and look forward to fall, but it's been especially frustrating this year. On the good side, the weather has been gorgeous lately and our latest plantings of squash and cucumbers are performing wonderfully at the moment. We've also had good yields on small plantings of watermelons and cantaloupe, which are grown only for us but have been delightful additions to our summer diet.

I'd like to be writing more for the blog; there are no end of both on-farm and larger policy issues to discuss and document. But it's just too busy, I'm too tired, and have wanted to spend that precious sitting-down time on other things like good books or napping. Apologies for a less regular blog lately, but it's free, so that's life.

MARKET THIS WEEK

Photos below are from this time, 2010, but are a good representation of some market items available this weekend, though the variety ratios may be a bit different. Just a reminder, everything we sell at market is only a few days old* and should have a shelf life throughout the week or longer; save yourself mid-week shopping by picking up a good supply of produce.

*Exceptions being cured and shelf-stable items like garlic and onions.

Summer squash: Lots of small, tender, high-quality squash for all sorts of uses. We go through many pounds of these a week ourselves. The short, stubby ones in the photo above weren't grown this year, but the other varieties are the same.
Cucumbers: A mix of standard greens, sweet heirloom yellow/whites, and picklers. The whites and yellows are extra-sweet but seedier, while the greens are pretty standard. Pickles, cucumber salads, gazpacho, fresh snacks...there are many ways to use lots of fresh cucumbers.
Hot peppers: Green anaheim & jalapeno hot peppers. Stuff anaheims with chevre and roast for a tasty meal or snack; roast with tomatoes and/or tomatillos for excellent salsa; include in any sauce or stew for good flavor and a light heat. Jalapenos make great salsa and more.
Sweet peppers: Red and yellow sweet peppers are starting to yield well, though slowly. We don't grow full sized bell peppers, but we've found several varieties of open-pollinated/heirloom sweet peppers that we think have amazing flavor and can be used just like bell peppers. These include: Doe Hill Golden Bell, a sweet, roundish, yellow-orange pepper that is Joanna's favorite; Sheepnose Pimento, a sweet red pepper shaped similarly to the Doe Hill; Chervena Chushka, a pointy sweet red pepper with nice thick walls (& very slow to ripen this year); and Jimmy Nardello's Italian Frying Pepper, an all-purpose narrow pointy pepper that is Eric's favorite.
Salad/sauce tomatoes: Golf-ball-sized tomatoes with firm, meaty flesh and good flavor. Great for roasted salsas or sauces; also for salads because they hold together and don't splort everywhere.
Edamame: This should be the largest amount we'll have at once this year. We're in the heart of the last good plantings; those after this were devastated by voles and rabbits and will be producing little to nothing. These may last more than 15 minutes for once!
Okra: Two varieties, really producing well right now. Fry it in salted cornmeal, add to soups/stews/beans, use in Indian cooking...Okra also freezes very easily; just pop it in a freezer bag (no blanching) for easy use in winter stews. We freeze it by the gallon this way.
Garlic: All varieties available this week. Roast it, grill it, make salsa, make pesto...what meal doesn't use garlic this time of year?

Herbs: Parsley, sage, thyme, mint, tarragon, oregano, green coriander, and possibly more depending on what looks good at harvest time.

NO LONGER AVAILABLE

Cherry & slicer tomatoes are done; disease is rapidly taking hold and reducing both yields and quality below what we're willing to take to market. Another, later planting of regular tomatoes is also going downhill fast and may not yield much fruit. Other folks we know have also struggled with tomatoes this year, which is really frustrating given that we expected the dry weather to reduce problems compared to the wetness of the last few years. Such is farming.

Tomatillos are done, too, for similar reasons. These always start to tail off about this time, and we want to hold back the remaining harvests for our own preservation, as we haven't put many up yet.

Market plans, August 20

2011-08-19T06:00:00.004-05:00

Finally received some rain on Tuesday, 0.77", which is far from enough to truly break our local drought but still very welcome.

NEW THIS WEEK

Summer squash: Our nice mix of young heirloom varieties returns from a new, healthy planting. Should be a good quantity of these, with so many uses.

Cucumbers: After our first planting was a near-complete failure, the second planting looks great and we'll have some early-ripening fruits. A mix of standard greens, sweet heirloom yellow/whites, and picklers.

ALSO AVAILABLE

Hot peppers: Green Anaheim & jalapeno hot peppers.

Sweet peppers: Red and yellow sweet peppers are just beginning to ripen. We don't grow full sized bell peppers, but we've found several varieties of open-pollinated/heirloom sweet peppers that we think have amazing flavor and can be used just like bell peppers. These include: Doe Hill Golden Bell, a sweet, roundish, yellow-orange pepper that is Joanna's favorite; Sheepnose Pimento, a sweet red pepper shaped similarly to the Doe Hill; Chervena Chushka, a pointy sweet red pepper with nice thick walls; and Jimmy Nardello's Italian Frying Pepper, an all-purpose narrow pointy pepper that is Eric's favorite.

Cherry tomatoes: Heirloom mix, lots of different flavors and colors. Really producing well; we're actually harvesting significantly more than are selling, which is very frustrating. We've been drying them in large lots, 10+ pounds at a time, which makes for great winter food but is a lot of lost income.

Tomatoes: These, on the other hand, are struggling with disease and pests. We won't be bringing any slicers this week, reserving the harvest for our own home canning, but will have a good quantity of the smaller roasting/salad tomatoes which are very good for salsas and sauces.
Edamame: Get there at opening bell if you want them. One of the few things we can't match demand on, but we just can't handle the picking time and labor it would take to seriously increase our production. If you miss them at market, try Root Cellar.
Okra: Two varieties, really producing well right now. Fry it in salted cornmeal, add to soups/stews/beans, use in Indian cooking...Okra also freezes very easily; just pop it in a freezer bag (no blanching) for easy use in winter stews. We freeze it by the gallon this way.

Tomatillos: For a really easy, excellent sauce, spread tomatillos, tomatoes, garlic, and peppers on a baking tray, coat all with a bit of oil, and roast at 400 for 30 minutes before blending and adding salt. That's all it takes.
Garlic: All varieties available this week. Roast it, grill it, make salsa, make pesto...what meal doesn't use garlic this time of year?
Herbs: Parsley, sage, thyme, mint, tarragon, oregano, epazote, maybe a last little bit of basil, and possibly more depending on what looks good at harvest time.

Market plans, August 13

2011-08-12T06:00:00.044-05:00

We had family visiting most of this week, which went very well and was great fun, but naturally means we're now behind on many tasks. Thankfully the current and upcoming cool weather will help us catch up. It's still very dry here; we've had little to no meaningful rain even with widespread storms multiple times in the area and across the state over the last week. Our pastures and paths have deep, spreading cracks in them and anything not on irrigation is looking decidedly parched.

Mid-August is a difficult time to farm near a college town. Everything kind of dies for a few weeks as people take vacation, prepare for the semester, etc. The restaurants we work with recognize this down-turn, and don't order much (if at all) because business is slow (Sycamore closes for a week of vacation), and market has not been very good lately. Yet, of course, this is the natural peak of summer production with lots of fresh items coming on regularly that can't/shouldn't be stored long, and farmers are all trying to sell the abundance to a limited audience. So we're doing lots of home food preservation and cursing the lost revenue. Last week we couldn't sell out of tomatoes or cherry tomatoes, and garlic sales are noticeably slower than last year. Okra has done surprisingly well. Overall I'm seeing a lot of produce unsold at the end of market, across the board. More vendors, less customers/customer spending, more production per vendor, equals lower sales and income. Frustrating. But every meal we prepare and eat at this time of year is deliciously fresh & flavorful, so that counts for something at least.

This week's market will look a lot like last week's, with possible (or soon) addition of cucumbers and squash, both of which are close to yielding on a new planting.

AVAILABLE THIS WEEK

Hot peppers: Green Anaheim & jalapeno hot peppers.

Sweet peppers: Red and yellow sweet peppers are just beginning to ripen. We don't grow full sized bell peppers, but we've found several varieties of open-pollinated/heirloom sweet peppers that we think have amazing flavor and can be used just like bell peppers. These include: Doe Hill Golden Bell, a sweet, roundish, yellow-orange pepper that is Joanna's favorite; Sheepnose Pimento, a sweet red pepper shaped similarly to the Doe Hill; Chervena Chushka, a pointy sweet red pepper with nice thick walls; and Jimmy Nardello's Italian Frying Pepper, an all-purpose narrow pointy pepper that is Eric's favorite.
Cherry tomatoes: Heirloom mix, lots of different flavors and colors. At peak of production right now.

Basil: There are so many things you can do with lots of basil: make pesto, put leaves on sandwiches, add to Thai/Asian cooking, infuse in sugar syrups for desserts and drinks, etc. It's also easy to preserve, either by making and freezing pesto, or by packing the leaves directly into olive oil and freezing in small jars. Basil will store well in a jar of water on the counter; it will turn brown in the refrigerator. We're harvesting from our last planting of basil, and availability may begin to dimish after this week.
Edamame: Get there at opening bell if you want them. One of the few things we can't match demand on, but we just can't handle the picking time and labor it would take to seriously increase our production. If you miss them at market, try Root Cellar.

Tomatoes: Small-medium slicers, red and orange. Dry weather is contributing to very nice flavor and quality, great for all tomato uses. Some of the tomato plants are experiencing an outbreak of what we believe is tomato spotted wilt virus; this isn't affecting fruit quality but it may cut the harvest short.

Okra: Two varieties, really producing well right now. Fry it in salted cornmeal, add to soups/stews/beans, use in Indian cooking...Okra also freezes very easily; just pop it in a freezer bag (no blanching) for easy use in winter stews. We freeze it by the gallon this way.
Tomatillos: For a really easy, excellent sauce, spread tomatillos, tomatoes, garlic, and peppers on a baking tray, coat all with a bit of oil, and roast at 400 for 30 minutes before blending and adding salt. That's all it takes.

Garlic: All varieties available this week. Roast it, grill it, make salsa, make pesto...what meal doesn't use garlic this time of year?

Herbs: Parsley, sage, thyme, mint, tarragon, and possibly more depending on what looks good at harvest time.

Market plans, August 6

2011-08-05T06:00:00.028-05:00

Busy week, and we have family visiting next week. Still dry; we got around 0.6" Saturday but nothing since. Our July rainfall totalled 2.03". Tuesday's high of 107º resulted in some sun-scalded tomatoes, but the coming week's forecast back in the high 80s/low 90s looks quite attractive. Planting/seeding of fall crops needs to happen this time of year, but is hard to get right under these especially hot and dry conditions. Harvest work takes up more and more time as all the summer production really takes hold; the next plantings of cucumbers and beans are growing fast, while squash is about to start yielding again. Add home food preservation of fruits and vegetables, and you have two very busy farmers here.

NEW THIS WEEK

Peppers: Possibly the first few hot and sweet peppers; plants are loaded and starting to ripen.

AVAILABLE THIS WEEK

Cherry tomatoes: Heirloom mix, lots of different flavors and colors. Nearing peak of production right now.

Basil: This is at peak quality right now. There are so many things you can do with lots of basil: make pesto, put leaves on sandwiches, add to Thai/Asian cooking, infuse in sugar syrups for desserts and drinks, etc. It's also easy to preserve, either by making and freezing pesto, or by packing the leaves directly into olive oil and freezing in small jars. Basil will store well in a jar of water on the counter; it will turn brown in the refrigerator.

Lime basil: We'll have a limited quantity of lime basil. Lime basil is excellent when infused in a sugar syrup and served over peaches. We've also added it to shortbread cookies and served it minced in cucumber salad. All very tasty. Already close to the end of production.
Edamame: Get there at opening bell if you want them. One of the few things we can't match demand on, but we just can't handle the picking time and labor it would take to seriously increase our production. If you miss them at market, try Root Cellar.
Tomatoes: Small-medium slicers, red and orange. Dry weather is contributing to very nice flavor and quality, great for all tomato uses. Some of the tomato plants are experiencing an outbreak of what we believe is tomato spotted wilt virus; this isn't affecting fruit quality but it may cut the harvest short.

Okra: Two varieties, really producing well right now. Fry it in salted cornmeal, add to soups/stews/beans, use in Indian cooking...Okra also freezes very easily; just pop it in a freezer bag (no blanching) for easy use in winter stews. We freeze it by the gallon this way.

Tomatillos: These had a sudden spike in production in our Monday restaurant harvest, so there should be a lot at market this week. For a really easy, excellent sauce, spread tomatillos, tomatoes, garlic, and peppers on a baking tray, coat all with a bit of oil, and roast at 400 for 30 minutes before blending and adding salt. That's all it takes.
Garlic: All varieties available this week. Roast it, grill it, make salsa, make pesto...what meal doesn't use garlic this time of year?
Herbs: Parsley, sage, thyme, mint, dill heads, and possibly more depending on what looks good at harvest time.

Bird list & other natural events, July 2011

2011-08-02T06:00:00.001-05:00

A hot, dry month, but lots going on in the farm's natural world. Multiple bird species are nesting and raising young, including these eastern phoebe chicks:

The above-left chick was first to leave home, surviving the two-story drop from its nest on an upper-level light beneath our roof eave. Its siblings, above right, took a little longer to get up their nerve. Anthropomorphization or not, I just love the expression on that chick's face.

Our local pair of broad-winged hawks, which we've been watching carrying food into a nest site somewhere on the ridge west of our field, seem to have successfully raised their chick as well. We were able to observe some of the first flights of the young hawk; the parents continued to bring it food while teaching it to fly and hunt. They use a very different "language" when interacting with their chick, just as domestic birds do, and it was a real treat to observe this first-hand. After a few weeks of all three cruising together along the field, they seem to have partially separated, as one (we presume the juvenile) has started exploring other areas of the farm that we haven't seen the adults on all year (they're still in their old territory).

Other, somewhat less welcome, species have also been around. Below left, a cowbird chick in an indigo bunting nest. Cowbirds don't raise their own young, but parasitize other species by leaving their eggs in the nests of smaller birds. When the larger cowbird chick hatches, it demands and gets all the attention of the parents to the detriment of the natural young. Under this big-mouthed brute are two much smaller bunting chicks it's all but trampled to the bottom of the nest.

Below right, our first skunk of the year, in a field live trap intended for raccoons. I draped an old sheet over the trap to quiet it (and block any emissions), hooked a long rope to one end, and gently dragged it off away from the vegetables before gingerly opening the trap and letting it loose. I'm really glad it didn't cut loose on any produce.

We were able to take a few hours away from the farm in mid-July, and headed down to Eagle Bluffs Conservation Area to see what birds were around mid-summer, while taking a first-hand look at the rising Missouri River. The loose rock rip-rap below this picnic bench (below left) serves as a winter hibernaculum for various snakes; we've often seen throngs of them here in the spring and fall. Good thing they're all dispersed for summer. I managed to get a nice shot of a dickcissell (below right), a prairie bird we hope will start appearing on the farm as we clear and restore more land.

JULY BIRDS ON THE FARM

Lots of birds are in various parts of the nesting cycle, making them more or less easy to observe and hear at various parts of the month. Our daily records are too detailed for this post, but help us notice when something vanishes and reappears, often a good indication of nesting behavior. This is effectively the same list as June, with a few oddballs coming and going.

PRESENT IN JULY (42 species)
Great Blue Heron
Turkey Vulture
Red-shouldered Hawk
Broad-winged Hawk
Red-Tailed Hawk
Mourning Dove
Yellow-Billed Cuckoo
Barred Owl
Whip-poor-will
Ruby-throated Hummingbird
Belted Kingfisher
Red-bellied Woodpecker
Downy Woodpecker
Pileated Woodpecker
Eastern Wood-Peewee
Eastern Phoebe
Great Crested Flycatcher
White-eyed Vireo
Blue Jay
American Crow
Tufted Titmouse
Black-cappeed Chickadee
White-breasted Nuthatch
Carolina Wren
Blue-grey Gnatcatcher
American Robin
Wood Thrush
Northern Parula
Louisiana Waterthrush
Kentucky Warbler
Common Yellowthroat
Summer Tanager
Scarlet Tanager
Northern Cardinal
Indigo Bunting
Eastern Towhee
Field Sparrow
Chipping Sparrow
Brown-headed Cowbird
American Goldfinch

UNCONFIRMED
Black and White Warbler (heard)

Black-Crowned Night Heron (pretty sure I saw a pair fly over one evening)
Juvenile Bald Eage (we both saw this, but it flew over too fast)
Eastern Bluebird (think we heard multiple times, but no definite record)
MISSING FROM LAST MONTH
Brown Thrasher

Market plans, July 30

2011-07-29T06:00:00.034-05:00

We haven't had meaningful rain since July 3, with near-continuous sun and high heat. Good for summer produce overall, but getting to be a real problem in other ways. As I write this Thursday night, we're watching a line of storms just to our south, crawling east along I-70 with some nice rainfall that looks like it won't get this far north. If we don't get rain this weekend, we're going to start having trouble. Our pastures are drying out and suffering, and irrigation can only do so much for some crops (plus it is starting to get expensive). Fruit plantings, mushroom logs, and other things get hard to keep up with under these conditions. With Tuesday forecast back up at 100 degrees, we could use a bit of balance in the weather.

AVAILABLE THIS WEEK
Cherry tomatoes: Finally hitting their stride, should be a good starting quantity.

Basil: This is at peak quality right now. We brought a lot of basil last week, and hardly sold any. There are so many things you can do with lots of basil: make pesto, put leaves on sandwiches, add to Thai/Asian cooking, infuse in sugar syrups for desserts and drinks, etc. It's also easy to preserve, either by making and freezing pesto, or by packing the leaves directly into olive oil and freezing in small jars. Basil will store well in a jar of water on the counter; it will turn brown in the refrigerator.

Lime basil: We'll have a limited quantity of lime basil. These plants are also at peak quality right now, and that doesn't last long with this variety, so get it while you can. Lime basil is excellent when infused in a sugar syrup and served over peaches. We've also added it to shortbread cookies and served it minced in cucumber salad. All very tasty.

Edamame: Get there at opening bell if you want them. One of the few things we can't match demand on, but we just can't handle the picking time and labor it would take to seriously increase our production. If you miss them at market, try Root Cellar.

Tomatoes: Small-medium slicers, red and orange. Good flavor and quality, great for all tomato uses.

Okra: Fry it in salted cornmeal, add to soups/stews/beans, use in Indian cooking...

Tomatillos: These are driving me crazy this year, loaded with flowers and small fruit but stubbornly maturing really slowly such that I keep getting low yields at any given harvest. We'll have whatever is ready.

Garlic: I sold far less than my usual average last week; I hope that's a glitch. We should have almost all the varieties this week. Roast it, grill it, make salsa, make pesto...what meal doesn't use garlic this time of year?

Herbs: Parsley, sage, thyme, garlic chives, mint, and possibly more depending on what looks good at harvest time. We might have some dill heads this week.

Quick notes: The new Root Cellar, Red and Moe pizza

2011-07-27T06:00:00.035-05:00

The New Root Cellar

Tuesday afternoon we delivered produce to the newest downtown grocery store, the re-imagined, relocated, and reopened Root Cellar. Under new management, with whom I've had good interactions so far, the store is hoping to build its brand as a worthwhile downtown source of fresh/local/organic foods. I love the new location, on the NE side of downtown right by the bus station with actual lot parking, and a very attractive interior.

We're starting small, as are they, but hoping to build up a good relationship with them as a reliable supplier of good produce. I hope any local readers will stop by and give them some support. They're currently stocking our edamame, okra, and two varieties of garlic, and will see how those sell as we move forward. Their Google Maps listing has the new location right and they have a page on Facebook.

Red and Moe Pizza

Red and Moe opened last fall, focusing on high-end pizza but with other worthwhile menu options as well. They're focusing very heavily on fresh, local ingredients and have rapidly become a loyal and important customer for us. We've eaten there multiple times and found everything to be perfect. Everyone I know who we've convinced to go there has also loved it. Last week, our most recent visit, we had (copied from the online July menu):

- panzenella with marinated squash, cherry tomatoes, fried capers, fresh mozzarella, fresh basil, and balsamic vinaigrette

- gnocchi with savory greens, filet beans and a sage-walnut brown butter topped with olive, goat cheese, and celery salad

- goatsbeard walloon and fresh goat cheese, with zucchini, cherry tomatoes, chopped olives, and chert hallow garlic scape pesto

These featured our cherry tomatoes, squash, filet beans, and garlic and were all fantastic. I've seen a little rumbling online that their prices are high, but so what? You get what you pay for. They're investing in paying good prices to good local farms, and in preparing those high-quality ingredients in very good ways. Their menu is creative and worthwhile, always changing with the seasons and whatever they can source in the area, to the point of regularly buying large batches of in-season items for preservation and later use; their winter menu will still be largely locally-sourced due to the work they're putting in now.

Good for them. Most of us can afford a $15 meal now and then, and it's well worth the investment for culinary and ethical reasons. Money spent there is staying in our community more than almost any other option in town; please go reward them for the extra effort it takes to do that.

Agricultural flowers

2011-07-25T06:00:00.005-05:00

Everyone loves wildflowers, and domestic decorative flowers, but few ever take the time to really look at the flowers of common agricultural and food crops. In many cases, these are every bit as complex and fascinating as their more famous counterparts. If nothing else, looking at them gives a bit more context to where our food comes from.

Here's a photo essay of some common flowers in our fields during the summer. I'll label them after each photo, so you can try to guess what they are. Even I had to check on a few, out of their field context. Photos by Joanna.

Above left, filet bean. Above right, pole bean.

Above left, chard. Above right, okra.

Above left, cilantro/coriander. Above right, dill.

Above left, corn. Above center, mutant corn with male & female parts together. Above right, sorghum.

Above left, cowpea (similar to black-eyed pea). Above right, peanut.

Above right, cucumber female blossom. Above right, cucumber male blossom.

Above left and right are both edamame, Shirofumi variety.

Above left, sunflower. Above right, sunchoke (Jerusalem artichoke).

Above left, tomato. Above right, pepper.

Above left, tomatillo. Above right, potato.

Above left, summer squash female. Above right, summer squash male.

July farm food

2011-07-24T06:00:00.035-05:00

A look at the various diverse meals we've been eating over the last month, sourced primarily from on-farm and local ingredients. Who says local foods are boring or constraining? Hopefully these photos and descriptions provide inspirations for good meals from good sources. As always, all on-farm-sourced ingredients listed in italics.

Skillets

On left, cast-iron-saute of squash, carrots, onions, beets, kohlrabi, herbs, & potatoes from Joanna's parents (brought in a late June visit), sauteed in oil & seasoned with salt. On right, similar saute of squash, tomatoes, onion, garlic, cabbage, plus some leftover rice & noodles, seasoned with salt, pepper, paprika, cider vinegar. These dishes are so easy, so quick, and taste so good. They rely on good, fresh ingredients; I suspect the same thing made from store ingredients wouldn't be nearly as tasty and would demand other flavorings.

Meats

On left, platter of smoked goose breast (last of our ex-flock, frozen from last year), pickles, aged goat cheddar. On right, fish tacos of fresh bass filets (caught by a friend), sauteed squash, tomatillo-tomato-pepper salsa, cucumber, goat feta, in fresh-made wrap. Smoked goose breast has to be one of the best meats we've ever made/eaten. Not pictured, a pork roast smothered in herb-garlic-mustardseed paste for amazing slabs of flavored meat; see Breakfast below.

Italian bakes

On left, calzone of goat ricotta, herbs, garlic, in fresh dough, with tomato-basil sauce. On right, lasagna of noodles, squash, garlic, herbs, fresh sliced tomatoes, goat ricotta, and white sauce made with goat milk, flour, butter; also pictured, tomato slices, Uprise bread and goat riccota. We make these often in the winter as well, with preserved ingredients, but there's nothing like fresh.

Breakfasts

On left, fried eggs, fried new potatoes, sauteed squash-tomatoes-onion-garlic hash. On right, fried eggs, fried new potatoes, roasted herbed pork slices, fresh tomatoes garnished with borage flowers, local peaches. Good hearty breakfasts that get sweated right off.

Pizzas

On left, fresh crust with garlic, rosemary, potatoes, herbed goat ricotta, olive oil. On right, tomatoes, herbed goat ricotta, basil, garlic. So easy, so good. Only Red and Moe can match homemade pizza.

Grab-bag 1

On left, psychadelic borscht with heirloom beets, onion, goat yogurt. On right. baked polenta with fresh-ground cornmeal, garlic scape pesto, aged goat cheddar. This borscht looked as ridiculous in real life; it's not the color balance in the photo. The same thing made with "normal" red beets had a boring deep red color; gotta love heirlooms.

Grab-bag 2

On left, peach pie from local peaches. We bought/salvaged 9 pecks of 3rds peaches from an orchard near Franklin, MO and spent a tired Saturday afternoon processing and freezing them, feeding the damaged scraps to the pig and making this pie as a reward. On right, cous-cous with parsley, herbs, garlic, onion, cucumber, fresh pickle, aged goat cheddar, on fresh tortilla made from fresh-ground Missouri wheat flour.