March Madness

Market List; Salad Mix, Slow Food Cayuga Duck eggs, Chicken Eggs, Grass Fed Lamb, Smoked Tomatillo Salsa, there are a few Pickled Items left but running really low.


This has been a Winter to remember for sure. As another farmer said, it's either frozen or mud up to your knees. It's been an extremely hard winter on all of the animals and ME as I am here most of the time by myself taking the brunt of it. The hay shortage, lack of sunlight and warmth have made for a stressful and expensive cold season. Recently however, we caught a bit of a break-even though we had to work harder during it.


Many of you know that we belong to a program called Wwoof - It stands for World Wide Organization of Organic Farms. Its a really cool program, allowing people to learn about Farming while traveling around the US or the world, whichever takes your fancy. We've had Wwoofers(that's what they call the volunteers) from China, England, St. Louis, Illinois, Idaho, California and Pennsylvania. Most everyone takes it seriously, however like the communes of the 60's, sometimes there are people just looking for a free ride. We've been pretty lucky and only had one disappointing experience. A couple of weeks ago,we had an awesome Wwoofer land on our
farm.

This guy here, Charlie is helping to unload the hay. This picture is a good example of some of the issues around here. With the hay shortage, we've been having to bring in these monster bales of hay. What you see in this pic is 3 bales, 8X4X3. They weigh in at about 350 lbs. Instead of flaking off, they unfold like a ribbon and the barn doorway is too short to use the tractor in to lift them up and place them where you want them so they have to be muscled in by hand. No easy feat. Where we could just stack 16 square bales on the gangplank that runs from one section of the barn to the other, now we have to get it into the barn in order to keep it dry, cut the bale, cut the flake off and stack it on the gangplank to be unstacked and put into the feeder at various times. It must be wrapped in the barn to keep the animals out and off of it to keep it dry and clean, and then unwrapped each time that you finish the bale, cut and flaked again and then rewrap. It's a nightmare. ANYWAY, I digress. Charlie came to work for 13 days. The deal is with Wwoof, you provide a place to sleep and food and of course education about farming. They provide muscle, enthusiasm and a certain lack of tiredness that we have. I always try to vary education opportunities, some animal stuff, some vegetable stuff, things we always have to do like some barn clean out.
So here is what we did; Cleaned out the sheep section of the barn, trimmed the chickens wings, filled and seeded trays for this Spring's crops, put hay in the barn, he made a special project out of pulling out the tarps that we used every year in the garden, rolling them up and stacking them outside the garden, planted 500 ramps(our new Slow Food Grant), dug up the Quince trees in the high tunnel (another Slow Food Grant) and planted them outside, pulled up all the fence posts in the garden, planted onions and helped with the animals every morning and night. It was a very productive 13 days. He was easy to get along with and grateful for every scrap of knowledge and food that came his way. If you want to read about his side of it, he's blogging about it at
                                                      www.charliewwoofs.blogspot.com.

So we have about 20 varieties of tomatoes started in the germ chamber, bok choi, brussels sprouts, sprouting cauliflower and peppers too. We're looking forward to some sunshine and fresh vegetables. 

Last year we had Egyptian Walking Onions all Winter but this year, every time I see a little green, they get beat down with snow and ice. They'll be back but not for awhile. 

We'll see you Saturday at the Montessori school. 

God's blessings on you and yours,

TTFN, 

Bill and Sam