Although it’s mid-February, we feel the onrush of spring breathing down our necks, all the more so in this mild winter. Indoor planting is already underway, outdoor planting will start in a few weeks, and we can tell we’re running out of time for the various projects that might or might not get done before the vegetable portion of the year takes over our lives. Here’s a quick look at some of the things we’re keeping busy on right now.
We’ve made good progress over the last month on finishing our orchard-clearing project. This hillside above our house has a good southern exposure, and we’ve been working for several winters to clear the thick cedars off it and get various fruits established (see our newly added Human History & Management page for aerial photos of this work). We have a hard deadline to finish this spring, as we have more fruit trees coming, and need to put in a good permanent deer-proof fence around the whole area, which means taking down all the trees both within the area and along a wide enough perimeter that future logging won’t drop anything on the fence. On Friday we made especially good progress, as we were joined by a work crew from the Columbia Center For Urban Agriculture. I tried to take some before-and-after photos, but at the small online scale they aren’t as clear as I’d like. So here are some basic views of the area instead.
Continue reading
This post is part of an ongoing, fascinating discussion/debate between ourselves and a mid-scale organic egg producer from Wisconsin (commenting as “Mac”), sparked by a comment thread on our earlier post about small-farm egg economics. Read that post and thread first, to gain the context of the discussion and the two farm models under discussion. My latest response simply became too long to be a useful comment and stands well on its own as a comparative analysis of the two models, so we’re published it here for further discussion. Also coming in a future post is a long discussion of our justifications for raising heritage breeds and doing our own breeding, something Mac also initially challenged.
We take our food preservation seriously, finding deep value in detaching ourselves from the industrial food chain and the stress and bother of grocery shopping. We like to keep records of our annual food preservation for our own information, and figure some readers may also be interested in the sheer diversity of foods just this one farm can produce and preserve; it can also be an inspiration to CSA members.
Here’s a mostly complete list of the foods we prepared and preserved over the past year, to feed us through winter and spring of 2011-2012, and in some cases through the following summer or fall until the products become available again (like fresh meat). All we really purchase anymore are staples like sugar, salt, flour, spices, vinegar, oil, and such, and those mostly in bulk so we always have them on hand. All items listed below were sourced from our farm unless otherwise noted.
We’ll be selling eggs to off-farm customers for the first time in 2012, having expanded our laying flock to 35 hens. In past years we kept up to a dozen, which laid enough for our own household and some for workers, but this year eggs will be available to CSA members for $6/dozen. That’s higher than anyone around here is used to paying, so I thought I’d share the economic modelling that led us to this price. For reference, our friends at Happy Hollow Farm in Moniteau county came to the same conclusions, and are selling their certified organic eggs at $6/dozen as well. Our eggs are not certified organic and should not be referred to as such, though we absolutely refuse to feed out anything containing GMOs, whether chicken feed or food scraps.