Slow Food and Blue Tailed Skinks

The Slow Food Farm Tour on Sunday was awesome! The Slow Food crew had everything organized and under control, so we were able to focus on sharing our farm with new people. There was a great turnout, and despite the July heat, everyone had a great time checking out our veggie patches and picking Flower Hill flowers. This was the first Slow Food Farm Tour, but it was such a smashing success that more should happen soon!

Last Thursday evening, we were working in one of our circle beds, doing some transplanting with the help of a workshare member, when we were startled by quite the menagerie of critters. We found a baby rabbit, a box turtle, a field mouse, a blue-tailed skink, and what looked like a young Midland Brown snake! And the other day we found a newt burrowed into one of our beds. This is why we love our no-till system. Although the rabbit and the turtle might nibble a few of our crops, we would much rather be able to coexist peacefully with the wildlife than make our farm space inhospitable by using heavy machinery.

Starting to feel like summer

With the temperatures soaring into the nineties, it's time to shift into our hot-weather schedule! This means early mornings followed by a tactical retreat to inside chores (like writing this blog) during the brutally hot midday. Even the chickens take an extended siesta in the shade. Luckily, with daylight hours stretching indecently into the evening, all the work manages to get done.  With the advent of summer heat, our spring crops (like peas and lettuce) are making their exit, and summer crops (like squash and beans) are starting to come on. There hasn't been rain for awhile. Luckily we captured about 1100 gallons of those April/May showers and that H2O bank is seeing us through nicely. Still, we wouldn't complain if the predicted rain gave us a break from hand-watering!

Another six healthy chicks hatched this week, bringing our total chicks for the year up to 26. That should be more than plenty for our flock to replenish itself! Going into fall we should have about a dozen new laying hens and a dozen roosters in the freezer.

This week everyone is getting salad mix and peas, as it might be the last for a while. Some of you are also getting kohlrabi, a bulb related to kale and broccoli which you can eat raw or cooked. It goes great in slaw or chicken salad, or you can slice it and roast it, or throw it in a stir fry.

We hope you are enjoying the last few weeks of spring, and managing to keep cool!

We moved!

We have relocated to Missouri, where we will be farming west of St. Louis, and attending St. Louis area farmers' markets. We are entering into an exciting partnership with Flower Hill Farm  in Beaufort, MO. They are a Certified Naturally Grown (CNG) cut flower farm, selling to florists, wholesalers, and farmers' markets in St. Louis. They are looking for a little extra help, so in exchange for helping them out, we can live and farm on their land! We will continue to offer our unique farm shares, with the possible addition of weekly flower bouquets, and will sell at farmers' markets. Since we will be living on the land, we also hope to add chickens and rabbits to our operation. We look forward to an exciting new season and meeting fellow local food enthusiasts!

Summer is in full swing!

Our summer crops are prolific! We have summer squash and green beans galore, as well as cucumbers, basil, and beets. Although our spinach is over, we still have plenty of chard and kale. We also have beautiful rainbow carrots. Our garlic is just about ready, we’ve pulled a few heads, but are going to leave most of it in for another week or two.

We pulled all our pea plants finally, and in their place planted some fall broccoli, radishes and carrots.

We got quite the storm on Tuesday, and although we couldn’t work in the fields, we are thankful for the rain and the cooler temperatures that followed. We are harvesting new potatoes this week, to do this we feel around under the potato plants, grab a few and then let the plant keep growing. These early potatoes have thin skin that breaks easily (but is great for mashing), and they do not store as well.

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Our purple green beans flowering

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