This Week in Your Box …..
Bell Peppers: Green Bell Peppers
Cherry Tomatoes: Red Jasper Cherry
Tomatoes Heirloom: The heirloom tomatoes are taking their sweet time ripening but I’ll offer them this week to those who don’t mind a mixed bag. You may get any combination of Amish Paste, Orange Jazz, Green Zebra, Early Girl and San Marzano.
Cucumbers: Choose from Lemon, Marketmore (green) and Armenian (burpless)
Cauliflower: Just a couple heads left
Basil: Bunches of 6 stems
Potatoes: Choose between Norland Red and Kennebec White. This is a 2lb bag
Jalapeno Peppers: A pint of hot peppers ready for stuffing or shish-ka-bobs on the grill
Shishito Peppers: A pint of mild pepper much like bell peppers but with a thinner skin. These dry wonderfully too to save for later.
Broccoli: Just a couple small heads left of the Green Belstar and a bit of purple sprouting broccoli so I will mix them this week to share with as many people as possible.
Bunching Onions: Bunches are made up of the white and purple green onions.
Summer Squash: Summer squash production is beginning to slow a bit. Choose from zucchini and crookneck for swapping or add scallop or 8-Ball as an extra this week.
Red Beets: I’m so impressed with these Red Ace beets. They have been a super producer all spring and summer. They just keep growing! This week, beets are a 1 1b bag without tops. Beet tops can be added as an extra if you love them.
Swiss Chard: The battle with the bugs continues but I can share a few bunches of Rainbow Swiss Chard again this week.
Mixed Kale: This week offers a mixture of flat leaf Lacinato, Toscano and curly red Russian kales mixed into the ½ lb bunch.
Extras:
1. Eggs
2. Garlic Basil Pesto: 8 oz container made with garlic scapes, basil and cashews. I have frozen it so give it a stir when you get it home.
3. Soothing Salve for your skin: I find so much relief from all this hand washing and skin irritation with this homemade salve recipe.
4. Dried Pepper Flakes made from my own mixture of dried Poblano, red and green bell, hot padrone and paprika peppers
5. Flower Bouquets from Pistil Farm: Corinne is back on our menu this week with her seasonal bouquets of flowers from her farm. Enjoy!
6. Strawberries
7. Mixed Broccoli (Purple Sprouting and green Belstar)
8. Scallop Squash (Y star variety) 9. 8 Ball Summer Squash
10. Beet Tops
What’s Happening on the Farm?
This week I needed to shift my attention to the poultry for a couple days. Periodic health checks, coop repairs, cleaning of coops and cleaning nesting boxes is essential to maintain good health which results in healthy eggs. The heat is particularly difficult for chickens so I have to scrub out their wading pools and waterers at least once a week. Fresh litter in the coops and nesting boxes help keep the eggs clean and reduce fly populations. The hens spend most of their day outside in fresh air, only using the coop to lay eggs and seek protection at night. The chicken manure and litter is held in reserve for soil amending after crop harvesting has been completed. This eliminates any risk of E. coli contamination. Manure amendments are only added in fall and during winter. My Breggfast Bus (the yellow coop) also needed new perches. When 30-35 hens rest inside at night, that’s about 80-100 lbs. of weight on the perches. Three of the five perches had broken so I spent one whole day crawling inside and rebuilding the perches. It’s a good thing I’m a small person because I had to do some bodily contortion moves to get myself back out once I had the perches in place.
The Breggfast Bus was the first coop I built in 2017. I used an old firewood trailer so I could move it around the perimeter of the farm for pest control. The hens eat weeds and bugs in addition to their daily grain ration. Then I modified my mom’s old stained glass sandblasting box to be half of the coop. The arm holes are now the doorways to the nesting boxes. Then I built on the rest of the coop frame and roof. The floor is steel mesh so the droppings fall through wherever the coop is parked. A simple rinse out with the hose keeps it fresh and clean and the manure fertilizes the soil.
The 60 new hens are almost all laying large eggs now. It’s a long wait for them to reach this level of maturity. Many folks just don’t want to buy medium sized eggs. Luckily I found a willing bakery who accepts them to make ice cream. Did you know it takes a dozen eggs to make 1 gallon of ice cream?
I noticed the night temperatures are beginning to drop which slows down production of summer crops. The strawberries are a bit smaller and the heirloom tomatoes are taking their sweet time to ripen. Fall is right around the corner. I’m replanting fall crops now so we have some spring varieties to start with in April and May. I’m staging rice straw to mulch the strawberries for winter and removing lots of crop residue preparing for the fall tilling. I have to buy this from my old rice farm contacts in Davis, CA. It’s not available in Oregon but is simply the best straw to use for mulch because it doesn’t have any seed. All crop residue either goes to the chickens or into the compost. Nothing is wasted. Invasive weeds are piled and covered until I can burn them in the fall.
The last poultry issue I addressed this week was feed. For the last month, supply of the Certified Organic Soy Free poultry layer grain has been extremely limited because of the pandemic. I have been driving to Medford, Central Point and even White City just to buy 10 or 11 bags at a time which is all that they had with no ETA as to when they might get more. At great expense this week I ordered a whole pallet of grain so I have at least enough for 100 more days. My hens eat 20 lbs of grain a day and every 40 lb bag is $24. It was a big job to hook up the tractor trailer, tow it into town twice because they didn’t have enough to fill my order, and then offload it when I got back to the farm. This is normal farm life stuff but I thought I’d share something different with you this week to explain what goes into growing your food so carefully. Many people don’t know how much work and dedicated effort it takes to deliver a soy-free, certified organic egg. You can now find Daily Blessings Farm Eggs at the GP Farmers Market on Rogue River Highway.
Eat well and stay healthy! Blessings,
Carrie
