Looking good...

The garden is looking good. Almost all of the potatoes are up, everything else is pretty well established.

Here's the 2008 Garden List: (I'm going from memory so I may have to update later)

Radishes
Carrots (3 types)
Mixed salad greens
Head lettuce
Swiss Chard
Red Pontiac potatoes
German Fingerling potatoes
Blue potatoes
Yukon Gold potatoes
Red onion
Yellow onion
Snap peas
Sugar peas
Golden beets
Parsnips
Canteloupe
Winter squash ( 3 types)
Zucchini
Pumpkin
Summer squash (2 types)
"Luigi" tomatoes
Brandywine tomatoes
Roma tomatoes
Green Zebra tomatoes
Celebrity tomatoes
Yellow pear tomatoes
Orange bell peppers
Hungarian hot yellow peppers
Red cabbage
Kohlrabi
Cauliflower
Broccoli


...and I think that's it!

Finally, the garden is started

I worked my tail off on Saturday, since the weather gave me a one day window to get some veggies in the ground.

I planted 25 sq. ft. each of Swiss Chard, head lettuce, mesclun greens, and mixed radishes and carrots. I also put in 225 onion plants and around 120 hills of potatoes. My gardening muscles were definitely out of shape, I was so sore yesterday that I could hardly move.

This weekend also saw the extermination of a family of squirrels that had decided to occupy the attic above our front porch. My rusty, trusty, Daisy BB gun made quick work of them, with the help of a couple of glue traps.

If the weather cooperates I should get more seeds in the ground this week so that I don't fall too far behind last year's pace.

Hope all you moms out there had a great Mother's Day!

The Not-so-grand Canyons

Last Friday, Mother Nature sent us some rain. Okay, a LOT of rain! Maybe the hardest rain I've ever seen. It was a real gully-washing, frog-strangling kind of rain. We didn't float away, but it did manage to carve some really interesting and complex canyons into our gravel driveway, some of them more than a foot deep.

The force of the water was so great that it washed the gravel all the way to the bottom of our hill, about 50 yards or so. I wanted to fill enough of the gouges so that we at least had a car's width to drive on, so I had to bring the gravel up from the bottom of the hill. To my great amusement, the ground was too wet for me to get any traction with my garden tractor and dump cart, so I got out the wheelbarrow. I don't know if I'd describe the repair work as fun, but it certainly did help me to pass the time, and bashing my shin into the undercarriage of the wheelbarrow, when it's forward progress was suddenly halted by an unseen rock, allowed me to expand my vocabulary of synonyms for those of illegitimate birth. We have an excavation contractor coming in later this week to refill the rest of the driveway and grade it smooth.

I still have nothing in the garden, it's been too wet and too cold, but I did get some tomato seeds from my friend Mark in Pittsburgh. They are from a pair of varieties grown by members of his family for decades, you have to love a tomato named 'Luigi'! I hope they grow well here, I started the seeds indoors as soon as they arrived. Just give me a few days of warm, dry weather and I am ready to spring onto action!

Falling behind the pace...

I am well behind last year's schedule for planting, but there has not been much to do about it. I have not been able to get in and attack the garden too much because it has been too wet, and I made the mistake last year of rototilling wet clay soil. I have managed to get all the debris and detritus of last year's garden cleared away, and I just may be able to do some tilling this afternoon, we will see how wet the dirt is.

Jung Seeds has already mailed me my potatoes and onions for the year, I think they sent them too early. They are currently taking up valuable space in the bottom of our refrigerator, waiting for me to get the dirt ready. Every morning I say to them "Soon! Soon you will be secure in the earth!" Hopefully they don't get too depressed.

Nikki and I are observing "Turn Off Your TV Week" this week, so please do not tell us what happens on LOST, we'll have to wait for a rerun, I guess. I am staying busy by taking down 3 or 4 trees that are either dead or annoying, and I have 3 yards of "traffic bond" in a pile at the end of the driveway for repairing all of the scrapes, gouges, and potholes I plowed into the driveway over the winter. Not to mention that I still have school 3 nights/week. Only 4 weeks left to go, though.

Thanks for staying tuned in to the blog, now go turn off your TV!

Everything is muddy and wet, so it must be spring.

Last weekend I ordered the seeds I need for this year, my potatoes, and my onion plants. I did remember to look at my advice to myself from last year and ordered more potatoes.

I decided not to grow white onions this year because they just don't keep, so it will be yellow and red onions only. I don't think there is all that much difference in flavor between yellow and white onions anyway. I just pulled the last red onion from last year's garden out of the cellar last week, so I need to grow just a few more this year.

I have a little more than half of the garden beds planned out for this season, I'll probably finish doing that on Sunday. I'm not trying to jam plants into every square inch like I did last year, just trying to keep things close enough that weeding is reduced. 2007 was a very instructional year, though, because it showed me just how much food you can produce out of 1000 square feet. I'm sure that with practice you could even do a lot more.

Not much else is going on, things are very busy with work and school, but staying busy is good for me.

The 22lb Ham

Once again the farm was the scene of an Easter ham-apaloozza. We had our processor smoke an entire ham from Pepper the 280lb pig last fall, and we pulled it from the freezer last week. We beat last year's 19lb ham by a fair margin, this one was 22lbs. It took 7 hours in the oven, but it was worth the wait. We got lots of compliments on the ham, and we had a great variety of delicious side dishes brought by our guests. It was a fun afternoon.

Getting ready to start putting some seeds into the mini greenhouse this week, and I'll be making my spring seed order soon as well. I have a few new weird vegetables I want to try this year, I'll post a description of them soon.

Winter is still throwing it's last gasps at us, it's been a crazy one. The nearest city to us, West Bend, has now certified this winter as having the most snowfall since they began keeping weather records. I'm glad we spent the money for a new transmission for the plow truck last summer.

Keep checking back,I promise I'll be posting more often again now. Think Spring!

It's March already?

I guess we are starting to see some signs of spring. We've had two days in a row now of temperatures above freezing, so that is a start. We have received over 8 feet of snow on the farm this winter, so spring is being eagerly anticipated.

Pretty soon it will be time to start some seeds inside, I wil have to look back in the archives and check out my garden planner to see exactly when I have started in the past.

Here's to an early spring!

Winter update

Just to add a bit of information to the previous post, we just had one of the more dramatic weather swings that I can remember. We had a nice little break from the weather and it warmed up into the 40s on Monday, continuing into yesterday. Yesterday evening that all changed...

It was 46° at 3pm yesterday, this morning at 7am it was -12°, and the windchill was between -30° and -35°.

The wind was blowing so hard last night that it was just a constant roaring hummm. Luckily for us, the pioneers that built our house put it in a good spot, sheltered from the prevailing winter winds by the hill. Somewhere along the way another owner planted a small windbreak of pine trees, which also helps a lot. I think I'd like to extend that windbreak a bit this summer by planting some more pines. I may not be around to enjoy the benefits of it, but someday a future owner might thank me.

A REAL winter

We are having a real Wisconsin-style winter this year, just like the ones I used to know ( to coin a phrase). The temperature has been pretty consistently below zero every day this week, and on Monday we received a little over 14" of snow in about 10 hours. Other than an early January thaw, we have had cold and snow since right around Thanksgiving.

I think we are going to get out and enjoy some of this snow tomorrow and go skiing at Sunburst, which is a ski hill right down the road from us. It's isn't exactly Summit County Colorado, but it's close and it's better than nothing.

Absolutely nothing is happenning in farm news, other than I might try to get some cleaning and organizing done out in the barn this weekend. My tools seem to be spreading themselves out and I spend more time looking for tools and hardware than I do actually fixing anything. If I get that done, I'll try to get out on Lake Twelve for some "hard-water" fishing on Sunday.

Happy New Year

I realize I have all but abandoned the blog since the last frost, sorry about that!

We are now in the planning stages for next year and there are going to be some dramatic changes in our approach.

Perhaps the most noticeable change will be the lack of livestock. We won't be raising any animals in 2008. As much as we enjoy our farm-raised meat and eggs, we need to take a summer off and take care of some much needed maintenance. It will also be nice to be able to leave the farm for a weekend if we desire and not have to worry about the critters! I wil definitely miss our pasture-raised pork, hopefully we can find a local farmer to buy some from. Grocery store pork just doesn't taste right anymore.

There will also probably be some big changes in the garden. Right now I am thinking about dedicating 6 of the 10 garden beds for Nikki and I, and then growing just 3 varieties of vegetable in the remaining 4. As much as we enjoyed doing the GardenShare program this year, it was occasionally nerve-wracking. I would like to concentrate on just a few vegetables grown for sale to local restaurants and co-ops, much like we did with our grapes back in '05.

Other plans for 2008 include having a couple big parties out at the farm. We hope to have at least 2 shindigs this summer, or perhaps even a hootenanny! We'll keep you informed, so make sure your tent is ready to go!

First frost

We had the first substantial frost of the fall on Saturday. I rescued a peck of tomatoes and enough other veggies to fill a beer case, so that will be the end of the season.

I think I will not bother with sweet potatoes next year, they just aren't meant to be grown this far north. Out of 25 plants set out, I ended up with one decent sized sweet potato that wasn't munched on by moles or mice or whatever it was that ate the ends off of them. Even counting the munched-on ones I ended up with less than a handful. I have learned how to grow your own sweet potato sprouts, so if I do grow them again I will do it that way.

I think all of the turkeys are sold for Thanksgiving, I haven't done a very good job of keeping my paperwork on them in order this year. I will have to sit and chart out all those who ordered them. if you ordered a turkey , email me and tell me so, just in case.

Not much else going on. I have been interviewing for different jobs, since I have serious doubts about the future of the little Milwaukee brewery in the face of the Miller/ Coors merger. There are some great companies out there and I am hoping for an exciting new career.

Cheers!

He's still missing...

No, I have not gone officially missing , and I have not spent the last month looking for the missing duck. But there has been no sign of him, he must have flown south on us.

We got the pigs back from Kewaskum Foods on September 19th and quickly got them distributed to our customers. We have received rave reviews from all parties, I believe they are even tastier than last year's. I have had many home-grown BLTs already.

Speaking of BLTs , the garden is still going strong and we have lots of late-season produce that I need to do a better job of harvesting and taking care of.

It has been a lot of fun this summer as we have more and more meals that consist mostly of food that we have grown ourselves. Our grocery shopping now usually just means picking up some milk and fruit, with a few staples every now and then.

Not much else new, I'll try to do a better job of updating this month.

The Case of the Missing Duck

Last week Thursday I got home from work and decided to feed and water the birds, when I noted something amiss...

One of our ducks was missing! It was the drake Blue Swedish, the two hens were still sitting in their normal spot next to the stable. I started walking around the farm looking for the duck or for a bunch of feathers indicating that something had snatched it up for lunch.

I combed the place and couldn't find anything, no duck, no feathers, no nothing. Nikki had seen a yellow lab in our yard the week before, so my working hypothesis was that someone's dog had nabbed it. Nikki and I went up to Chippewa Falls this weekend, so before we left I set up my motion-activated deer scouting camera on the fence near the duck's wading pool hoping to get some photographic evidence.

My sister-in-law Jackie took care of the farm in our absence and had some further information on our return. On Saturday afternoon she saw 4 large dogs down by our woodshed, which is where I killed the chickens the weekend before. My guess is that it was these dogs that grabbed one of my ducks. The scouting camera was full of pictures, so I am going to get those developed tomorrow. It will probably just show our dog, Cash, running around, but maybe I'll get lucky.

Hearing that we have 4 dogs running around together in the neighborhood is a little worrying, I don't know if they are from an area farm or if they are wild dogs in a small pack. I hope to see them myself soon so that I can see if they have collars or if they are obviously feral.

Wow, it's been a while

Sorry I haven't updated the weblog in so long. Let's see, what is there to report?

The Garden Share program was nearly a complete success, the last week got cut off due to severe punishment from Ma Nature. We had a month of heat and drought, followed by 2 weeks of non-stop rain. Between the weeds and the slugs the garden took a beating and we just didn't have enough stuff to put together a box on the last week. I probably could have assembled enough produce to make it, but it would have been pretty sorry looking. We are nearly recovered now, the late cauliflower and broccoli are getting ready to harvest and there a few other late season veggies around. I've got 13 qts of tomatoes and 7 of salsa in the root cellar already, and hope to get 5-10 quarts of tomato sauce put up before too long.

The chickens, ducks and turkeys are doing well. I sent 4 chickens to freezer camp on Saturday, was hoping to get 8 done, but the hornets found me and so I quit after 4. Some of them were still a a little small anyway. Really big drumsticks on them, though.

The big news is that we took the pigs to the butcher this morning. It was a lot of work getting them into the truck, I ended up taking them in two trips. Pepper, which is the pig Nikki and I are keeping for ourselves was by far the biggest, weighing in at a whopping 280 pounds! She gave me a hell of whallop when I was loading them up, I was closing the tailgate of the pickup when she gave it a mighty shove that sent me flying about 4 feet backwards onto the ground, then she had the nerve to stomp on me as she jumped off the truck. I also had to basically pick up Apple and throw her into the truck because she would not climb the ramp for a bribe of any type. Moving 236 lbs of wriggling pig is a bit of a chore. So I am little bruised and battered, but the job is done.

I will be picking up boxes and boxes and boxes of pork on Wednesday September 19th for all of you that ordered a pastured pork half. I will be emailing all of you that information as well as what it's gonna cost you to get some meat.

Cheers!

Garden lessons for '08

Here are the things I have learned so far from this years' garden that should be applied to next year.

- You CAN plant sweet corn too close together
- Grow more potatoes
- One zucchini plant is enough. Really. Even when you are selling produce. I mean it!
- Mr. Stripey tomatoes are fairly tasteless and they crack.
- Grow more Brandywine tomatoes
- Did I mention that you should grow more potatoes?
- Stagger plantings of cauliflower, no one knows what to do with 15 heads of cauliflower
- German Yellow tomatoes are very susceptible to Blossom End Rot
- Don't plant your pumpkins in May unless you want pumpkin soup in August
- You go through more carrots than you'd think
- 18 square feet of chard is enough chard to supply yourself and the 3 neighboring counties all summer
- Same thing with salad greens
- Those fingerling potatoes are really quite amazing

Lost post!

I thought I had added this post a month ago, but I guess I didn't. I wrote this after having my first "all-farm BLT":

Wednesday was the day. The day I had been building up to the ;last 2 years, all of the preparations were in place, all of the hard work complete, my patience at last rewarded, it was time to enjoy the fruits of my labors.

As you remember, we raised a couple of pigs on pasture behind the barn last summer. I saved one package of bacon in the freezer from last year's pig for just this moment.

I calibrated the toaster with a few 'test slices" so that the toast would be the perfect tawny amber, a hearty crunch, but with a little 'give' to the center of the bread.

I walked up to the garden and selected a beautifully ripe Brandywine tomato, an heirloom variety with deep burgundy flesh, and nearly large enough for a single slice to cover the sandwich. It seemed heavy for it's size, an indication that it was at the peak of it's flavor. A small head of Buttercrunch lettuce, bright green against the faded gold of the straw mulch, joined the tomato on our trip back to the kitchen.

The bacon was laid into a cold cast iron skillet, and carefully monitored while cooking to perfection. It's double-smoked aroma filled the kitchen.

It was time. I assembled the ingredients, gave the sandwich a quick slice on the diagonal and dove in.Utter bliss permeated every cell of my body as I savored this sandwich, the most incredible combination of flavors known to man, and knew that each of it's principal ingredients came from within 300 yards of where I sat.

A funny fishing trip...

This doesn't have much to do with the farm, but it was so funny that I have to share my fishing experience from yesterday.

I grabbed a 6 pack of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and the dog and loaded up my jon boat into the back of the farm truck and went down to this little lake near us that they just opened a public access for, just to see what it was like.

As I was putting the boat in the water , I noticed this ENORMOUS inflated thing on the beach on the south side of the lake. It was hugely huge, had to be at least 40 yards long and 15 feet high. This will come into the story later.

I fished along a weed line for about 30 minutes and had nothing so I rowed (no motorized boats allowed on the lake) over near a bunch of cattails. I caught a nice walleye and a couple of good sized bluegills over the course of about 40 minutes. Not too intense, it was turning into a nice relaxing afternoon, which is exactly what I was after.

All of a sudden about 50 kids come shouting and hollering down on that beach, they push this huge inflated thing out into the water underneath a tall diving board. Then they line up on the dock and start jumping on to this thing and bouncing off of it. They are making the most godawful racket and a lifeguard is constantly shouting at them through a bullhorn. My serenity wass destroyed, but I was still catching the occasional fish so I decided to tough it out for another half hour or so.

About the time I decided this, I reel in one of my two lines to cast it back nearer the cattails. I notice half the nightcrawler got nabbed, so I reel in the other line to cast it near the cattails and then I will change the crawler on line #1. As I am doing that, I hear a rattling in the front of the boat, I look over just in time to see fishing pole number one thrashing around and go over the side of the boat! That half a crawler was dangling in the water and a big old walleye nailed it and stole my fishing pole!

By this time I am just laughing like crazy, what else could go possibly wrong!? I decide to call it a day. I had some water in the boat that I wanted to bail out before I started rowing to shore, so I dump the fish from my bucket onto the floor of the boat so I can use the bucket to bail water. I'm bailing the water, watching the fish flop around in the boat, when the one really nice walleye that I caught, about 18", gives a tremendous heave and jumps back into the lake! I was laughing so hard I was crying.

To top it all off, as I was rowing back to the dock, Cash the dog decided he wanted to go for a swim so he jumped out of the boat and swam to shore. That gave me the opportunity to spend time with a soaking wet dog in the cab of the truck, and of course he wanted to lay his head on my leg while I was driving home!

Pork order forms are out!

I emailed pork order forms to our customers today. If you ordered half a hog from us and didn't get a form, let me know!

Finally got some rain yesterday, we were getting awfully dry around here.Not much else has been going on. I had a rebuilt transmission put into Black Betty, the farm truck last week, so she's in fine shape to take the hogs to market. I found a GIANT squash in the garden of a variety that I don't even remember planting, it must have been one of the plants I picked up at the garden center when they were closing everything out. It's about as big as a basketball and growing.

Please get those forms back to us by the first week of September, we need to know how you want those pigs!

Canning season has begun!

I started canning things that were otherwise going to go to waste this weekend. I did 4 pints of pickled beets, which were slightly disappointing. I used the Chioggia beets, which have great alternating bands of red and white, like a bulls eye, unfortunately 30 minutes in the canner cooked pretty much all of the color out of them. I also canned 6 quarts of spiced red cabbage relish. It smelled great when I was cooking the pickling liquid, lots of different spices in there including mustard seed, mace, coriander, allspice, and cloves.

I also started an experiment in homemade sauerkraut, about 12 pounds of cabbage went into it and it is trying to ferment down in the root cellar. This week I am also going to start a crock of pickles, there are starting to be enough of them to pick some every day. This year I will actually follow the recipe I have for pickles, since trying to "wing it" last year left us with jars full of tasteless flabby trash. I found a recipe for bread and butter zucchini pickles that I am considering trying, we have an awful lot of zucchini still!

The tomatoes are really starting to come in now, so far the Black Krims are my favorite. I still haven't made an "all-farm" BLT with the last of last year's bacon, but that might just change tonight. And no, I am not baking the bread myself, but I might make homemade mayonnaise.

What is a Garden Share?

This is!

That's representative of the box our customers receive every Friday. The idea is that they pay a set amount in the spring for 10 weeks of boxes of produce from the garden, basically buying a "share" of the garden. This box is from 2 weeks ago. It included heirloom beets, cauliflower, banana peppers, broccoli, radishes, multi-colored carrots, zucchini, white onions, leeks, snap peas, a big box of salad greens, and baby red potatoes

In other news, Pepper the Pig decided to fall sick again on Sunday. She was stumbling around like she was drunk, and generally being uncoordinated. I figured out yesterday that she probably had an inner ear infection, so I used an old-time remedy and poured a capful of rubbing alcohol into each of her ears. I figured I would have to do that every day for 3 or 4 days but, incredibly, she was acting completely normal within 3 hours! A modern operation would have had that pig on a full course of penicillin for 2 weeks, or just culled her to save cost! I am a little tired of the drama from Pepper though, she had better be one delicious pig to make up for the hassle she has given me. Speaking of that, the appointment has been made and the pigs are going to the butcher September 10th.