Also, check out our new Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) page for information about CSA shares and a few nice photos from last season. We still have a couple of spots left, so let us know right away if you want to be part of our CSA this year!

Hopefully the warm weather this week will help melt some of the snow that’s taken over the farm this winter…

We are adding two more chicken pick-up days, so this year, you have ten chances to pick up fresh, whole chickens on the farm. Several customers have expressed interest in ordering extra to keep their freezer stocked throughout the winter. Consider reserving two chickens per pick-up day and cutting up one to freeze – don’t let the end of the season put a stop to your supply of delicious, healthful chicken!

Our 2010 turkeys were on the large side, so we’ve adjusted our plans accordingly. This year we’ll shoot for birds averaging in the 18 lb range, though there will probably still be a range of sizes. We had lots of great feedback about the tasty, juicy turkeys that graced many Thanksgiving tables in November. Order yours soon!

We can’t wait to greet new transplants, chicks, piglets, and returning CSA, farmers’ market, or meat customers. Hoping for an early spring this year!

We'll have red beets, chioggia beets, and golden beets...

zucchini...

...and yellow summer squash

kale

collard greens

and swiss chard

lettuce

broccoli

….and more!

We’ll also have a stack of order forms for reserving:

pasture raised pork,

turkey,

and chicken.

Stop by on Saturday between 8 and 12:30 to visit us and support the other local food vendors. We’ll see you there!

3-4 Garlic Scapes

1 T lemon juice

1/4 cp olive oil

1/2 t course sea salt

1 can (15 oz) cannellni beans

pepper to taste

This is as simple as it gets.  Drain and rinse the beans, then put everything in the food processor and go.  You might have to adjust the liquids, or add a little water to get the consistency you’re going for.  Enjoy.

I don’t remember where I heard it, and I don’t fully understand the mechanism by which it works, but somewhere, in the fog of my brain, I remembered that if tender things get an unexpected frost, overhead irrigation can mitigate some of the damage if done before the sun comes out.  Without a sprinkler system, we had one recourse – the watering cans.  Sharon arrived to get some harvest footage and ended up hauling us buckets of water to refill with.  We started with the tomatoes, and moved on to the peppers, eggplants, melons and basil, for a total of nearly two hours of watering.

Once we got that out of the way, we started harvesting.  Chris started with the lettuce, while I bunched kale, but before I had half a dozen bunches picked, I saw our next crisis.  One of our pigs was out with Paul’s cows.  I vaulted the fence and called to Chris to follow with some grain.  In fact, four of the pigs were out rooting around in the meadow with the cows.  They especially enjoyed rooting through the cow pies (cows fed grain actually pass quite a bit of it without digesting it at all) and were quite enamored with the cows themselves.  As the curious cows bent down to sniff these strange little pigs who were frolicking in their field, the equally curious pigs would lift their snouts into the air, and then they’d touch noses for a moment.  It would have been cute, but we had vegetables to harvest for thirty people, we were already two hours behind, and we needed to get those pigs back in their paddock.

Pigs don’t drive.  Cows drive easily – if you’re behind them, you can direct their movements fairly well by getting closer to or farther from them, towards one side or the other.  But pigs don’t drive.  We cut them off from running into the woods, and after about fifteen minutes, we had them back near the paddock they had escaped from.  We lowered the wires, to try to drive the pigs back across the fence, but instead of driving the four escapees back in, the other three pigs came out to join them, and headed for the woods.  Again.  After cutting them off, I went back through the fence for a bucket of grain.  I was fed up with trying to drive them, frustrated, and just about out of ideas.  I shook the bucket, and called them – c’mon pigs, hey pigs, c’mon.  All seven pigs looked up, turned, and headed right for me.  They followed me all the way back into their paddock.  We raised their fence back up, and went back to harvesting.

By ten-thirty, we had harvested most of what we would need for distribution – 60 heads of lettuce, 25 bunches of kale, 10 bunches of collard greens, 30 bunches each of arugula and spinach, and 90 beets.  The kohlrabi we had harvested the day before, and we figured the scallions could wait a little longer.  Five hours after we started, we headed in for breakfast.

The rest of the day was pretty uneventful.  We did morning chores after breakfast, and while the chickens were a little hungrier than usual they did not seem to mind that their breakfast had been delayed.  Scallion harvesting was quick and easy – I’d recommend multi-plant blocks for scallions to anyone – and washing the vegetables went quickly, although I managed to pretty well soak myself in the process.  You know it’s been a wet day when you change into dry pants at breakfast and then again at lunch.

Distribution went really smoothly.  It was great to have so many of the core group members there to help out, explain the system and give suggestions for what to do with kohlrabi and bac choi.  David, apparently, likes to cook kohlrabi with a nice cream sauce.  The members seemed really excited, and it was great to start putting faces with the names I’ve been staring at for months.

By 6:40, everyone had picked up, so we closed up shop twenty minutes early and loaded the extras for the Berkshire Food Project.  It’s nice to know that when we have some surplus, it doesn’t go to waste but stays here in our community.  We dropped off a full crate of bac choi, a crate of lettuce, and two milk crates with various other leftovers.  We went home for a good dinner and a rest, and today (Thursday) is shaping up to be my first day off since sometime in March.

Our chickens went out to pasture on Saturday, and they love it.  After a few extra days in the brooder to wait out the weather, they moved out to the chicken tractor and have been happily grazing since.  They really enjoy pecking around in the grass, looking for bugs and worms, dust-bathing, and doing all the things that chickens love to do.  We move their pen every to fresh pasture every morning when we bring them feed and fresh water, so that they always have fresh forage and so that they are never stuck walking around in their own manure.

The “chicken tractor”, as we call their portable pen, gives the chickens the advantages of free-ranging without the threat of predators.  Our chickens live in the fresh air and sunshine, have shelter from the wind and the rain, and are safe from all the other animals around who like a chicken dinner as much as you or I do (foxes, weasels, mink, raccoons, skunks, coyotes, owls, hawks, stray dogs…).

The nutrition that the birds get from pasture is far superior to anything they could get inside and this leads not only to healthy chickens, but to healthier meat.  The meat from birds raised on pasture has been shown to have high levels of omega-3 fatty acids and conjugated linoleic acids, a cancer-fighting antioxidant.

We still have spaces open for chicken shares, including our first pick-up on June 19^th.  To order, just download an order form and mail it in; you can order your Thanksgiving turkeys and pork shares at same time.

On the vegetable front, things are really growing.  Red and green lettuces are filling out and the kale, collards, and chard are all putting out nice-sized leaves.  The cabbage and broccoli plants look strong, and every time I peek under the row cover at the beets, I’m amazed.  Our first batch of arugula took a hit from the frost and the flea beetles, but we’ve transplanted another batch and seeded a third, both under cover, so there should be no shortage there.  Our carrot germination was spotty, but we’re all set to seed some more in the next few days.  The last of the potatoes will go in the ground tomorrow, and we’ve got more than thirty flats of things to transplant in the next couple of days – beets, cauliflower, spinach, scallions, pac choi, more broccoli, lettuce and more, then a short break from transplanting before the really tender things – melons, tomatoes, peppers and eggplants.  If you’d like to see a list of all the things we’ll be growing this year, we’ve posted one here.

I should probably start with the chicks.  We picked up our first batch of chicks at the post office just about two weeks ago and they certainly were cute.  They’re growing great – they approve of their brooder and their feed, and they really enjoy when we bring them a snack of worms.  Here they are just after arrival.

Since those pictures were taken, they have at least quadrupled in size, and started to feather out quite a bit.  We’re getting their portable pen ready and they should be out on pasture in a week.

We’ve been spending a lot of time getting plants in the ground.  Onions, leeks, scallions, kale, collards, green and red cabbage, broccoli, beets, swiss chard, pac choi and several varieties of lettuce have all been transplanted.  We’ve also done some direct seedings of peas, arugula, carrots, and red potatoes.

The pigs are getting bigger – we have a great time watching them play with each other, trying to flip each other over with their snouts and spinning around in circles.  We even had to put an addition on the pig house, since they were getting too big to fit in there all together.

We also had a great CSA potluck this Sunday – it was so good to put faces together with names, and people brought some really delicious dishes.  I’m definitely looking forward to a lot more opportunities for events like this.

Three little piglets, chowing down

On Friday, Ashley and I went to pick up some piglets.  We got seven beautiful Yorkshire-Duroc crosses from a farmer in Williamstown, and brought them home in a crate in the back of the truck.  It was fun to watch the people behind us as at traffic lights as they noticed our exciting cargo.  When we got back to the farm we formed a little piglet brigade to pass them out of the crate, across the fence, and into their temporary training pen.

Out of the truck

Over the fence

And into the pen

The training pen serves to keep the pigs in while they learn about electric fence.  Pigs first instinct when shocked by the fence is to try to run through it, so by putting electric fence in front of a physical fence, they learn quickly that they don’t like the shock, and by the end of the week, the psychological barrier of the electric fence will be fully sufficient to get them onto more expansive pastures.  It’s amazing to see how much rooting they have done in just two days.  They have totally torn up all the sod and are doing a number on the multifloral rose bush that is in their paddock.

Quite a variety

The piglets are from two different litters, and are all sorts of different colors.  The two all-pink piglets reflect the Yorkshire side of the family (Babe, the pig from the movie, was a Yorkshire) and the red comes from the Duroc side.  The black spots seem to come up only in the crosses, but they make for some beautiful piglets.  As we watched the pink pigs out there today, we started to worry that they were getting sunburned.  Light colored pigs, like some people, don’t do well if they spent all day in the sun and, even though it has felt like June the last few days, it’s still only April and none of the trees have started to leaf out yet.  So, we built them a little A-frame shelter and it didn’t take too long for them to decide that it was a good place to hang out, although sometimes they still prefer to pigpile under the rose bush.

If you want to make friends with them, bring up some food scraps for them (no bones or pork) and they’ll love forever.  We’re currently feeding them local grain from Lanesborough and supplementing with our own kitchen scraps, and they love both.

Piglets are friendly, especially when you are feeding them

Of course, if you are interested in knowing your food, we are taking orders for these guys now, to be ready in the fall, as whole or half  pigs.  Read more about our pastured pork share here, or download an order form.

We’ve also made  great  progress on the greenhouse since everyone came by to help put the cover on.  We built an awesome set of tables, did some wiring, set up the heater and thermostat, and finally, got to planting in it.  The first of the flats we seeded in there this week were starting to germinate today – cabbages, kale, lettuce, and broccoli all peered out at me from a sea of soil blocks this morning as they got their twice-daily dose of water.  I’m hopeful that in the next few days we can even set up a system to gravity feed water from the brook, although I do enjoy the twice-daily hauling of buckets from the brook.

Saturday morning - already I can't believe it was ever this empty