Happy Weekend everyone!
This is your friendly weekly reminder that the Farm Stand is now open for orders (until Monday at 8AM).
This week on the farm, we have been busy planting crops whenever the fields have been dry enough to quickly get in and out again. We love the rain but too much will saturate the soil and make it impossible to prepare with the broadfork (loosens the soil without damaging the structure or the soil-food-web) so we watch eagerly for little windows of ideal planting weather and get as many plants in the ground during those (brief!) times.
We also welcomed the first of our poultry for this year. Over the last few years we have noticed that the areas of our baby fruit orchard where we housed chickens were much healthier than the areas without chickens. We have read that this can be a great permaculture solution as the chickens eat pests that plague the trees as fertilize the soil to build their strength. This year, we have plans to build a large chicken coop for enough birds to patrol the entire orchard. Many of you have told us you are interested in organic meat chickens so we have ordered 300 meat chickens. We have ordered three different varieties (White Rock, White Giant and Buff Orpington; we will also keep working on building up our Bresse breeding flock!) so that we can see what works best on our farm and which meat you prefer. We are hoping to maintain breeding flocks of all but the White Rocks. We have also purchased a small number of heritage Orlop Bronze turkeys which should be full sized by about Thanksgiving.
This week on the menu, we will have the same offerings as in recent weeks with the addition of a few new spring herbs, veggies and ready-to-saute frozen gourmet mushrooms.
The mushrooms were this week's little experiment...it is hard to predict how many will be ready in a given week and we never want to over predict and not have the products we have promised for your baskets. Last week I cooked up all of the extra mushrooms we harvested and froze them in meal sized portions. They have made for some quick and amazing weeknight meals. They are flat packed so thaw quickly on the counter and are fully cooked, ready to crisp up in some herbs and butter in a matter of minutes.
Remember that if you need a mid-week farm food fix, our farm stand is now open daily for farm pick up (including same day click and collect) Mon-Thursday.
Happy shopping!
Your farmers,
Greg and Kate.
