Fall CSA Week 7 Newsletter

Greetings from Dancing Hen Farm!  We hope everyone had a very Happy Thanksgiving!

I apologize for not being on top of newsletters recently. 

CSA members:  This is week 7.  Week 7 is an egg week.  There is ONE week remaining in our 8 week Fall/Winter CSA.

Winter Buying Club Members:  There will be NO buying club delivery this weekend.  Currently our plans are to resume deliveries next week.

Farmer Don and I spent a quiet Thanksgiving on farm.  We had an invitation to travel a bit south of here and join my nephew and his family for dinner.  However farm chores kept us close to home.  We still have a batch of meat birds on pasture which are requiring quite a bit of attention to keep them in food and water.  We did take time during our meal to be thankful that most of the food we were enjoying was produced on our farm or neighboring farms.  We have so much to be thankful for, including easy access to locally produced, nutrient dense food.

Here on farm we are slowly shifting to winter mode.  This week we will shut our irrigation down until next spring.  We had already drained most of the system, but some of the buried lines to the greenhouses and lower fields have remained open.  With cooler temperatures predicted for this weekend, we will need to drain and shut down the entire system to prevent freezing of our pump and above ground outlets.  This will increase our workload as we will now have to haul water from the house to keep plants and animals watered.  Speaking of animals, the shorter days and cooler temperatures have caused our chickens to decrease their egg production.  Our barn cats, on the other hand, have increased their production. Their production of fur that is!  Two of our barn cats have long hair and it always amazes me how much fluffier they become during the winter. Come spring this same fluff will fall off in big clumps.

 

This past weekend Farmer Don and I spent a few hours planning for next season.  We are finalizing our plans for the 2018 CSA.  It is hard to believe this will be our 11th year of production on this farm.  We are still (and probably always will be) tweaking systems.  And, again this year, we will make some changes to our CSA.  This past season, we tried a slightly new approach to our CSA.  We shortened our main/summer CSA and added an extended Fall CSA.  We feel our fall harvest has been a mixed level of success.  Although storage crops are looking good, many of our greens did not survive a hard early November freeze.  For this reason, we are going back to a slightly longer Summer CSA, with, at this time, no commitment for a Fall season.  Later in the summer or early fall of next year we will make a final decision on extending the CSA.  In addition, we will be limiting the CSA to 75 members and we will be limiting the number of egg shares we sell.  Watch for an upcoming email announcing details for our 2018 season and when registration can begin.

In the kitchen, I am making a bit of an early New Year's resolution.  I am committed to making bone broths on a regular basis.  For years, I saved all of our bones and vegetable scraps to make broth and I always had a supply of homemade broth in the fridge and in the freezer.  Recently, I have gotten out of this habit.  But, when I cooked down our turkey carcass and tasted the delicious nutrient packed broth, I knew I needed to put the stock pot to use more often!

Speaking of the kitchen, the dishes are not washing themselves!  I will end this newsletter and here and move onto getting the kitchen in order.

Thanks, once again for everyone's support and please watch your email for details of our 2018 season.