First winter CSA

Well it has been pretty quiet around here lately. Mostly we have just been cleaning things up and getting ready for our winter CSA. Our first Winter CSA went out last Wednesday and things went pretty smoothly.

Well it appears that I have gone back to my old slacking was and have to write on the blog for almost a month. I will admit that it has been a little slow around the farm with just the daily hub a bub going on. We did finish the hoop houses out back which are now guarding a lovely crop of lettuce, and greens for the winter. And with our first snowfall yesterday having those lettuces protected is a great relief.

Other than the hoop houses going up I guess the only other eventful thing that has happened it that we had 100 chickens butchered for community care (our local food bank). This is something we have been planning since the beginning of the summer and it is nice to have it accomplished. The most time consuming part of the process is actually packing the chicken when they come back from the butcher. We pick them up in big coolers (to keep everything cold of course) and then when we get home we put the chickens into food-saver bags and suck the air out so that they stay fresh longer in the freezer. We did on a positive note only do 50 chickens at a time otherwise it would have taken us all  night to get those bad boys into the freezer.

The first little bit on the top there is old and we are now on our third week of winter CSA and I think that it is going well. This week people got an assortment of lettuces and greens, squashes, garlic, leeks, mini cabbages and a pie pumpkin.

       Boxes from our first winter CSA delivery. How many CSA's can you fit in a Yaris?                                                   Well i fit 14 and there were room for more.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oats up in the cherry tree

Parsley holding strong despite the cold weather and snow

Also some people might find of interest this interesting article i just read on etsy about art CSA's. An interested idea. Take a look http://www.etsy.com/blog/en/2011/noted-growing-an-art-csa/?ref=fp_blog_title

Its been too long my good friend...

To all our faithful readers I have to sorry for the slack on the blog over the last month. Just when one thinks that things will be winding down a new stretch of work seems to await. So what has been going on around the farm in the last month?
I have to say that I have probably forgotten about 50% of what we have done (I'll blame it on stress, colds, loads of work and little rest) First off during October we put up two cold frame hoop houses. These are just like little greenhouses but they have no heat. They are pretty much used to keep frost and snow off of the crops. The crops in the cold frames are all winter greens, including; bok choy, dandelion, lettuce, spinach, rapini and other fun stuff.
To the left you can see us putting the hoops up the greens are now about 3 or 4x bigger than that.

One injury of the day was this nice cut I got. It really wasn't that bad and luckily I had just refreshed my tetanus shot ( I cut it on a freshly cut piece of rebar).

Since we put up the cold frames we have also done a lot of end of season work. We finished harvesting our pumpkins. Which seemed to be a big hit with our CSA customers. We have pulled out all our tomato post, Ryan has been mowing down all the crops that are finished and I dug out our few sweet potatoes.

This is where my memory starts to go blank and I'll skip ahead to more recent times. So due to the heavy frost we had probably 2 weeks ago most stuff would have died accept for Ryan's forethought to get some frost cloth. Frost cloth is a fairly think fabric that you can put over your plants to protect them from frost. We put it over peppers, cauliflower and peas. The cloth worked great and we were able to harvest everything in excellent condition still.

Just today I harvested some garlic chive seeds to save for next year. I have a friend of saves seeds for me so I thought I would return the favour. I had a fun picture but as usual my computer savy is not working ( I blame it more on my poor e-mail).
That's all for now