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.