June Heat and Farm News

Greetings from Dancing Hen Farm.  We hope everyone had a very happy Memorial Day.

Yep, summer is here in full swing.  Hard to believe that just about 2 weeks ago we had temperatures low enough to cause freeze damage to our field and greenhouse grown plants.  Now we are struggling to keep our spinach from going to seed and the dogs and Farmer Don are swimming in the pond most every night.

 

We are two weeks away from the start of our 2016 CSA.  Our first delivery will be Tuesday, June 14.  If you have signed up for a share, please watch your email for another communication in the next few days confirming the status of your account.  If you have not yet signed up, but are interested in becoming a CSA member, we do have a few spots remaining.  Please go to our website and sign up as soon as possible, as we do require payment prior to the first delivery.

This crazy cold then hot weather has our crops not performing as we would expect.  We had anticipated having peas to harvest for our first csa pack, but they have just started to flower, so it will be a few weeks before we have peas.  Our summer squash, on the other hand, is ahead of our harvest prediction and it looks like we will have a small harvest of squash to offer to members on Week 1.  Thanks to some hard weeding work from our farmers and helpers, we have a beautiful stand of Swiss Chard.  If we can keep the deer away from this bed, chard should also be available for Week 1.  Other cooking greens, salad greens and radishes are also looking great.  Scallions are sizing up nicely and our garlic is starting to produce scapes.

 

The farm is still buzzing with activity as we push to get fields prepped and planted.  With the danger of frost gone (hopefully!), we are starting to plant warm season crops, including tomatoes.  We are continuing to seed rotational plantings of cooking and salad greens.  This seeding will continue through August and then our seeding will be closed down for the season.  This week we will be seeding winter squash and pumpkins in the seed house and beans in the fields.

New on farm are babies everywhere!  This time of year is very difficult for me, as many of these babies are not friends of the farm.  It is so hard to see that beautiful fawn born in our orchard as a ravenous chard and lettuce eating machine, but it is.  It is barely a week old and Farmer Don caught Mommy deer leading baby down the farm road right towards the chard bed!  So the push to get Mom to relocate baby is on.  Generally enough activity from us and the dogs will cause most Mothers to move their young to a quieter location.  Earlier in the spring we had a groundhog family under one of our sheds.  The babies were so curious and so much fun to watch.  Like the fawn, it is hard to imagine these cute little babies eating hundreds of broccoli or kale plants in one day.  Rosie, our border collie, has already helped us with the ground hogs.  Mommy got tired of her family constantly being harassed and moved everyone to another location, hopefully not to a fence row near our kale or broccoli beds!  On a positive note our baby peeps are growing nicely in the brooder and will be moved out to pasture soon.  Like most babies, baby chickens are so cute, little puffs of yellow feathers!.  Cute, until they become annoying chickens hanging out on my porch or digging up my flower and herb beds!

The other week, Farmer Don and I spent a rare couple of days away from the farm.  We spent the weekend outside of Boston on a farm of a college friend of ours.  Annie now owns and operates a goat dairy.  She milks around 45 goats twice a day and turns all of this milk into some of the most delicious chevre I have ever tasted.  Farmer Don is threatening to sign up for a "cheese of the month club".  He is also threatening to get a few dairy goats!  It was a real treat to get away, spend some time with an old friend and see Ann's efficient operation.  And I have to thank Farmer Matt for watching over our farm and making our getaway possible.

In the kitchen, with the warmer than warm weather, we are trying hard to avoid using the oven and are cooking more and more on the grill and stove top.  Dancing Hen Farm chicken is still a favorite meal on farm.  Generally once a week, I cook a whole chicken on the grill.  I cook the chicken low and slow over indirect heat.  This chicken easily gives us 2 to 3 meals for the week.  We have chicken dinner the day I cook the  chicken and then the leftover meat is used in a variety of meals.  Tonight we had chicken and asparagus on toast with white sauce.  Probably one of our last meals of asparagus for the season.  Tomorrow we will have chicken sandwiches for lunch.  Over the weekend we cooked several pork shoulders on the grill for pulled pork served at a family picnic on Sunday.  Again, indirect heat and low temperatures produced some tender, great tasting Dancing Hen Farm pork. 

Let's see.  I covered the weather, the csa and the farm, time to move on.  The sun is shining brightly - looks like another beautiful day for field work.