Squash Blossom Farm: CSA

Monday, August 31, 2015

August: Audacious and Auspicious!

After last week's CSA box (contents shown here), one of the members emailed me and asked if it was the last box of the Summer CSA subscription. So, I looked on the calendar and was stunned to discover August was pretty much over! I cannot believe summer is over-- it whizzed by too fast!

August has been a crazy busy month with many eventful moments, a few of which I will note here.

First, we said good-bye to a wonderful man, our friend Chris Shomenta, who had been battling cancer the past 5 years. You may have seen this joyous photo of him as my spokesmodel for our CSA a few years ago.

We were honored to be asked to host a Celebration of Chis's Life at the farm after the funeral service. A huge crowd came to show their love for his wife Julia and the rest of his family and to share stories of amazing Chris. What a poignant and special event. We will miss you, Chris.

The celebration we have been anticipating all year was the wedding of a darling couple, Diana and Ryan. Despite threatening forecasts, the weather cooperated and the wedding two weekends ago was stunning.

I can't wait to see the official wedding photos, but I sneaked a few shots before the ceremony.

During one sweet moment in the ceremony, Diana and Ryan combined their own small fishbowls, each with a single fish, into this large fishbowl with a replica of the living room of their house. The two wedding fish are now happily residing with our goldfish, koi and tilapia in the Aquaponics pond.

We were grateful to have had our most recent wonderful WWOOFer, Kait, for a couple weeks to help us spruce up the farm before the wedding. Besides tackling plenty of weeding, chicken coop cleaning, potato-digging and power-washing, Kait outfitted Gourdita the scarecrow in fresh clothes for the wedding.Thanks for your hard work and delightful nature, Kait.

And now, for the most long-awaited news of all: Our commercial kitchen is complete and has passed all inspections and is officially approved! We served our first offical Pizza Night on Sunday.

Here's to the next thousand or so wood-fired pizzas and sourdough breads to be made in our beautiful new kitchen! It has been such a long, arduous, costly, exhausting, exciting project...now the real fun and the real work can begin!

Thursday, August 7, 2014

We are on the steep, downhill side of summer now, which makes me feel wistful when I think about it. But I try not to think about it and just savor the days, which have been so lovely. Our lives are a colorful, crazy jumble, sort of like this chaos in the bee/butterfly/hummingbird garden.

The garden is now providing beans galore, cucumbers, summer squash, greens of every ilk, garlic and the first tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants and peppers. This was yesterday’s pretty CSA box.

LaFonda’s sweet little calf, Splotch, has grown so much and is beginning to look like a little steer. The past week he has been having occasional scours (diarrhea) of a type which I believe is caused by gluttony, drinking too much rich, creamy milk.

So, I got these giant pills, called boluses, for simple scours

and I am getting pretty good at making him swallow them.

The boluses must have suppressed his appetite for a couple of days. LaFonda gave me a whopping 6 gallons of milk for those days, twice as much as usual. Her udder was so huge! But everyone is back to normal now, thank goodness.

Our wonderful WWOOFers, Lynette and Jessica, have gotten the garden into great shape, and so with the abundance of milk have been experimenting with making skyr (an Icelandic yogurt made with rennet) and hard cheeses.

Today we tasted Lynette’s first wheel of manchego ( a cheese which can be eaten fresh or aged.) Absolutely delicious!

Jessica relaxes for moment with Orange.

The meat chickens are approaching harvest weight. Today we nabbed a a big one and weighed him - he was 7 pounds, which will be about 5.5 processed. I made a processing appointment for two weeks from now. These are f really sweet birds, and I love how they are at the stage when they make kazoo sounds. It will be sad to harvest them.

According to our cupola which has the year 1914 embossed into it, this is the 100th birthday of our barn.

We think the barn is actually considerably older than that, but we took advantage of the opportunity to celebrate a centennial birthday and invited neighbors and previous farm owners.

Bg barn birtday cake - red velvet. I am a bit embarrassed it wasn’t homemade, but it was tasty.

It is tomaoto tart season!!

And if that is not enough to make your mouth water, here is the delectable supper Lynette made for us tonight:

Garlic fried eggs, fresh manchego cheese on sourdough rye toasts with gooseberry jam, roasted pepper-olive-walnut tapenade, sliced cucumbers, roasted eggplant. All the ingredients except the walnuts and kalamata olives came from the farm!