Our Farm Share is starting!

Welcome to the first week of the 2017 Rosy Buck Farm share! We are looking forward to providing you with delicious vegetables all summer long. This week many of you will be receiving garlic scapes. These delicious and mild curlicues occur when the garlic plant sends up a flower stalk. Since we want the plant to put its energy back into the bulb, we snap the tender stalk off and get to eat it! You can use them anywhere you would use garlic, we love them in eggs, pasta, pizza, or sauteed with veggies. The scapes are also mild enough to put in a potato salad, chicken or egg salad, or anywhere you want to spice things up.

Many of you are also getting radish pods, which look like funky green beans. All radishes put out seed pods after they bolt and flower, but usually they are very tough and stringy. This variety of radish, the Rat's Tail Radish, is grown only for the pods, you don't harvest the radish at all. These crunchy pods are great in salads or wraps, and have a light radish taste. They can have a bit of heat to them, like a radish, but if you give them a quick stir fry or a light roast they mellow out!

We are busy getting all of our starts out of the greenhouse and into the field, it seems like there is always more than we have time for! Last week we put out a bunch of cucumbers, eggplant, peppers, and tomatoes, and two days later they were all bitten off at ground level by rabbits. Needless to say, we were a bit upset, and are now trying to figure out the best rabbit deterrents. Delta, our Great Pyrenees, is great at keeping deer and chicken predators away, but rabbits are below her radar.

We also had a surprise hatching of chicks over the weekend, which is always fun. This hen apparently decided that behind an old bike in the shed was a good place to go broody, and now we have 10 new chicks! As an added bonus, we think most of them will eventually lay olive-colored eggs like their mother. 

The above photo is our daughter in a little tent we made for her one  day out in the field, we are always trying to find ways to keep her occupied and out of the sun! 

Spring is here!

We enjoyed our winter "break," though with markets until Christmas, seed orders in January, and planting by Valentine's day, it went by fast! But we still had a great time visiting family out in Massachusetts and planning for the upcoming season. Now we have been planting both inside and out for a good six weeks and both the greenhouse and the fields are full of spinach, pak choi, salad mix, onions radishes, beets, carrots, collards, cauliflower, peas, and more! Our goal is to double production from last year and so far we are on track. Since our beds are already built and full of healthy compost from last season, we are well ahead of where we were this time last year. 

The big news of winter is that we are expecting another baby! Holly is due in late July, so we will just see how that affects everything. She still has no trouble tackling farm work, although bending over too much is starting to get uncomfortable, and there is a lot of bending over in small-scale no-till farming! But, we have plenty of support and can't wait to meet the new little one! We keep thinking back to when Holly was pregnant with Mira, and we were hitchhiking in France and having to haul heavy backpacks around, thank goodness that isn't the case this time!

Even with the cold snaps, fertility is everywhere; one of our hens went broody and successfully hatched an even dozen chicks who are all healthy and active! So far they have been in their own cozy, protected room in the barn but soon we will start letting them outside. We have two other broody chickens who are also sitting on large clutches so we might not have to buy in any new chicks this year!

Farmers' markets are fast approaching, and we are excited for our second year here in Missouri! We can't wait to get back to Schlafly and Wildwood. We still have some spaces left in our Rosy Buck Farm share, check out our Build Your Basket page to see all of our options! Until next time!

Riding the heat wave

This week has been quite busy! Last Friday we finally put in about 100 asparagus crowns that another farmer gave us. We have to wait two years before there will be enough for a harvest, so it’ll be a while before we can enjoy the fruits of our labor, but then they should last up to 20 years! Our poultry family continues to grow with this week’s addition of three ducks, one guinea, and 25 more chickens. The new chickens are great for our egg production, but we don’t have all of their housing quite set up yet. Our current priority is making more chicken tractors so that we can get them out of the barn and onto pasture. With the recent heat wave, we have been adjusting to a new schedule--now it’s too hot from about 11-4 to do anything out in the sun, so that time is spent on indoor or shady jobs, and then we’ve been staying out in the field until about 9:30, enjoying the cooler evenings. Another challenge with the heat is keeping our cooler-weather crops, like our lettuce mix, from bolting and getting bitter. We want to be able to provide lettuce all summer, so we have erected some shade cloth over our lettuce bed, in the hopes that it will last a little longer. Our new fences seem to be protecting our little crops from deer, so now our focus is deterring the neighborhood rabbits. Perhaps a Rosy Buck puppy is in the future.

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!