Our next CSA distribution will be Monday May 21 and Thursday May 24. It’s been a truly busy and tiring week for us as we’re fully occupied transplanting, seeding, maintaining, harvesting, packing, and delivering a wide range of produce to CSA and restaurants along with animal management on the side. That, and the pest pressure seems to be on the upswing. Things won’t slow down again until sometime in late fall. We actually took a partial day off on Tuesday to explore the back roads of north-central Missouri, our first such break in over a month. It was a wonderful day, but created the inevitable backlog of work that had us outside until after dark on Wednesday, finishing our chores with headlamps and eating dinner around 10pm. Thursday was a near repeat. The weather remains glorious and we’re very happy with the shares we’ve been able to put out so far. Read for more on this week’s share and what’s happening on the farm. Continue reading →

Our next CSA distribution will be Monday May 14 and Thursday May 17. This will be the best share yet, with the diversity of items continuing to increase, including spring turnips and garlic scapes this week. Some of you may still want to invest in a bigger, or a second, cooler as we could barely fit last week’s share in some. Coming up this weekend is our cheese-making demonstration event, which will present lots of ways to use fresh milk at home. If you forgot this was coming, remember to check the member event schedule to put anything of interest on your calendar ahead of time. Read on below for more on this week’s produce, the cheese/milk event, and other on-farm news. Continue reading →

Our CSA offers limited share customization using LimeSurvey, an open-source online survey software that we’ve adapted to our needs. Members have the weekly option to request extras of any given item, a standard share amount, or none at all; the software helps us generate custom packing lists that make bagging individual shares easy. This allows our farm to use products more efficiently, by not forcing certain items on members who don’t want them, and by allowing extras/seconds to be sent to members who want more produce. The “extras” are otherwise unsellable but edible seconds (slightly damaged or overgrown), or items not desired by other members, or just overproduction of an item that did really well that week. Thus produce which might otherwise end up on the compost heap (or which we’d have to put extra work into selling through another outlet like a farmers market), finds a useful and efficient home while making everyone happier. We could (and will) write a lot more on how and why we do this, but in this post we’ll just illustrate the way this system works and why we like it, using this spring’s abundant radish harvests. Continue reading →

Our next CSA distribution will be Monday May 7 and Thursday May 10. New items will start to appear more regularly now. Growing conditions are continuing April’s trend of being quite nice overall, and our employees/workers are doing a great job helping to keep us sane (we’ll be writing more about them soon). Read on for produce details, photos & ideas for product use, farm updates, and more. Continue reading →

Our next CSA distribution will be Monday April 30 and Thursday May 3. Below we’ll give more information on upcoming shares, events on and around the farm, and more ideas for using share contents. This week’s theme is “coming soon”, as it will likely be the last thin share for a while, with many more produce items getting very close to ready. However, milk & egg production are both quite high and we’d love to have people give these a try. We’ll also be hosting a last-minute birding/nature walk for CSA members Saturday morning, as conditions are perfect with lots of species arriving and active (see below for details). Continue reading →

Our next CSA distribution will be Monday April 23 and Thursday April 26. We had several households join us for the mid-April event and enjoyed sharing the farm with their families. All slots are still open for the late April dinner, though the May dinner is now booked. Several members have expressed interest in the mid-May cheesemaking event, which will definitely happen given that we’re now milking the full herd. Below we’ll give more information on upcoming shares, events on and around the farm, and more ideas for using share contents. Continue reading →

Our next CSA distribution will be Monday April 16th and Thursday April 19th. This gets us back on our usual M-Th delivery routine (last week was flipped to provide a buffer after spring break). Our goal is for shares to be weekly from this point on, though there’s always the possibility of skipping a given week for some reason. Also please consider joining us for either of the April member events; we have two RSVPs for this Saturday afternoon, which will happen rain or shine, and none for the late April dinner. We’d love to have you, and there’s lots to see including goat kids (there are now 7), baby chicks, lots of cute young vegetable plants, and more.

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As we were packing & delivering CSA shares today, we thought of a few more details that we wanted to communicate to members. Here’s the list: Continue reading →

The next CSA distribution will be coming up on Thursday April 5th & Monday the 9th, the second share of the year following our January distribution. (Members: We’ll get the survey out sometime in the next couple of days.) There are enough early spring items ready now to do a small but tasty share. Everything we’re harvesting for this share has been in the ground since last fall, and we’d have a bit more diversity on the leafy greens front if the warmth hadn’t caused some plants to bolt so quickly. On the bright side, spring green alliums and herbs are beautiful and growing rapidly, so the share will be heavy on these. Members should also take note of the scheduled April on-farm events; we’d love to have you out to share all the spring developments, including newborn goat kids (see below). Continue reading →