the stork brings babies, and the heron...

Our volunteers are a great source of new stories, since otherwise the four of us (Katie, Don, Melissa and I) spend a lot of time working together and run into telling the same stories over and over. This past week we've had a great blue heron on the farm - he's been here before but usually just in the pond at the bottom of the fields. But recently he's been walking through the collards, standing between the compost piles and the hoophouse, and hanging out with the cows in their pastures. He's incredibly beautiful. One of the volunteers saw it and told the story of first seeing one just before she gave birth, and how she was convince then that maybe the storks really do bring the babies.

This week Don and Bridget are off on vacation, so it’s a bit of a test run for us apprentices to run the farm. So far things are going pretty well, although we had some very sad news. On Sunday afternoon, I hadn't seen Charlie, the Jersey calf, in a whole day. I asked around but no one else had seen him. Chloe was mooing like she was looking for him. But I checked Chloe, and her udders didn't seem full, so I figured he had to just be lost, galavanting around somewhere, since he had to have drunk something from Chloe recently. But when we still couldn't find him Monday morning and Chloe's moos became more frantic, we knew something was up. So while I was pouring the milk off, Katie and Melissa went looking. They found him dead without a scratch on him. We called Jason and Amy, our neighbors who run a dairy. They came over and looked to see if he had an infection where he'd been elastrated, but found nothing - even said he looked like a "beautiful, healthy calf".

it's been a hard week because of it. Although I know that sometimes calves just die, it's hard when it's not expected and when we don't have a solid explanation. And it's also hard when we have few enough animals that we form a close bond with them individually. It's also been an adjustment in work schedules. Since Charlie isn't drinking from Chloe, we have to milk her twice a day. So this week I'm still milking in the mornings and Katie's milking in the afternoons (ideally we'd milk 12 hours apart; we're doing 6:15 am and 4:30pm). We're also getting twice as much milk (a mixed blessing, since we have half as many folks). so I brought milk for some folks to have at the CRAFT visit to Threshold Orchard, and we've been making tons of dairy products. Monday, Katie made purple cow ice cream (I picked raspberries and we added in chocolate chips). Later that night I made Queso fresco. This must be the easiest cheese to make. you bring the milk to between 185 to 190F, then you slowly add 1/4 cup of vinegar per gallon of milk until curds form. then you strain it in cheese cloth. next we need to figure out the appropriate time to salt it - we tried to brine it (when you hang it from the cheese cloth, you're dipping it in super salty water) but that only really makes the outer edge salty. So we'll see - we're doing another ricotta tomorrow. And tonight Melissa made a vanilla frozen custard with chocolate chips and coconut flakes. This might be our new winner - the eggs really gives it a much creamier texture, and previously our ice creams have been good but a little icy.

Otherwise it's been a great week for us to get the hang of prioritizing and splitting tasks each day. It has also given me a clearer view of just how much Bridget does behind the scenes - from pouring and skimming milk and making yogurt and cheese and washing milk cloths and drying cloths and making breakfast - wow! Between doing all that and milking twice a day we're not getting as much field work done as usual. But distribution is going well and we had a great group of volunteers out today to cut strawberry runners, so we've got things under control. And tomorrow I get to pick up my mom at the airport and show her the farm all weekend!

NOFA!

The Summer NOFA conference (Northeast organic farming association) was last weekend and it was great. We stayed with the apprentices at Brookfield farm just a couple miles away, trading them raw milk for the free place to crash. It was good to hang out with them, the only awkward moment was walking into the downstairs apartment of their house by mistake (luckily, the folks downstairs also work at Brookfield, so they weren’t total randos). I went to workshops on basic homesteader plumbing, where we got to solder copper water pipes together, leasing, where we went through sample land leases, making CSA’s more accessible to low-income folks, where we heard about sliding scale pricing for shares, a workshop on building up a core group to run your CSA (ahhh….volunteers!) and one on raising grass-fed beef, where I heard more about the new processing center for small farmers that will hopefully go up in Western Mass soon. Plus, I got to see a bunch of Food Project folks…like Henry bobbing for apples at the fair. And I got to take Katie contra dancing.

Before we took off for NOFA, Melissa and I sent the beef cows off to be with a bull. First, we had to separate Lina from the group, since she’s going to the butcher in the fall and won’t be bred. We coaxed her into the barn with some grain, I closed the gate behind her, and Melissa led her through and let her out into the barnyard. Whew. Step 1 done. Next we had to get Lukey, Lucy and their two calves Maya and Leche into the barn. We tried grain to no avail. Then Elizabeth came out and suggested zucchini. Perfect – we have tons of extra zucchini. We finally get Lukey in, and Lucy and the 2 calves follow. We close them into the pen where they stay in the winter with a couple more zucchinis for a reward for good behavior. Next we put Lina in with Chloe and Charlie in the house pasture. Chloe and Lina went crazy! We hadn’t thought about it, but they are both usually the “followers”, so now they had to establish who was dominant. Melissa and I watched as they crashed into the chicken fence, then into the fence between the pasture and the flower garden, and finally chased each other around the chicken fence two or three times. Turns out Chloe is dominant. Now that they have that settled, they seem relatively easygoing with each other, although Lina mooes constantly whenever we have Chloe in to be milked. You can see them all in around the chickens (and you can see Charlie by the gate to the orchard – they’ve also found their way into that as well!)

Meanwhile this week has been a big week for melons. We harvest them by tossing from the middle rows to someone standing on the outside row, where we stack them into crates and put the crate in the tractor. Super fun. And melons make a great midday snack in the field – lots of juice when you’re thirsty. We had one yesterday in the midst of the onion harvest. Like the garlic harvest, you have to wait for a dry day and then you harvest them with a big group. Onions don’t hang to dry, instead we spread them out in a single layer over the whole greenhouse. This “curing” process dries them and helps to keep them from rotting. Then we’ll keep them in the cooler, turned off in the winter. (onions are stored best in a cool, dry place. Most of our other crops will go into the root cellar which is cold and wet).

Our chickens have been laying full blast, so we collect eggs when we feed them in the morning and then again at noon. You have to pick up the eggs gently but quickly because the chickens are getting broody (they want to sit on them to hatch them...of course I know that we don't have a rooster so they won't turn into chicks, but I've tried to explain this to them many times to no avail). So they peck at you and cluck and generally make you feel bad for stealing all their eggs. But then you come in with between 6 and 7 dozen eggs every day! we wash them and set them on a towel to dry before packaging them up. there's a huge range of sizes, from tiny little ones that they lay at first to a couple big honkers that will barely fit into the crates for "jumbo" sized eggs.

vacaciones

So I'm just back from vacation, which was excellent. It all started with - what else? - a farm tour. I went to see 2 spoons farm, a new meat CSA up in Pownal, VT. They just started in April and jumped in, with tamworth pigs, chickens (they started them in the Joel Salatin style pens, but moved into doing pastured chicken with movable electric chicken fence, like we do), dairy goats, cows, sheep and a bit of a garden for themselves. I talked to an 8 year old at the beginning about the hanging things on the goat. she said they were called billies, and it was a billy goat. i pointed out the udder and said i didn't think it was a billy goat (from wikipedia: they're called wattles). Gabriella took the picture of me and Michael there.

then i headed to boston where i walked into 69 elm and got a mud mask. most excellent. the week was full of lots of biking, farmers markets, good folks, dogs and good food. My roommates are fostering a greyhound, Beck, so we took him on lots of walks and to an adoption day on Sunday where he got lots of attention and interest. Becky and I rode bikes over to see the city hall market, and I met an awesome farmer at central square - his name is farmer al, he's been selling at central sq since the 70's, and he sells a book called "farmer al's seeds of wisdom". It's got great stuff like "if the water isn't coming out, there's probably a crimp in the hose". awesome.

I also got to stop by the food project and check out the Urban Learning Farm - complete with a new shed (on the left) and a grape arbor in the middle! and the beds look awesome. this year our interns laid out the garden in the winter, with a bed for a salsa garden, a bed to attract butterflies, beds laid out in rows and beds laid out in square foot gardening.

Meanwhile on the farm we did our garlic harvest a couple of weeks ago. Don drove through with the tractor and the chisel plow to loosen them and then we had tons of volunteers who helped us pull them up, put them into the tractor, put them into bunches of about 10, tie a slip knot around them and hang them in the barn. They'll dry up there for about 4-6 weeks.

This week is my distribution week, and it's also when we'll start to get tomatillos...and melons! so exciting! we also had a couple raspberries, I think they'll start soon. Melissa and Geoff and I spent the whole weekend canning and I made cookies. This weekend we're heading to the NOFA conference.