The Farming Engineers

Hello, friends!

Hard to believe it’s November already. Our garlic’s planted and we’re still putting the garden to bed. The cattle are putting on their shaggy winter coats and we’re cleaning out the barn.

From now until February, we have the following items available. Delivery/ Pickup in Noblesville/Carmel is every other Monday evening, and I can do special deliveries for large orders. Call or email with your order at least a few days in advance of when you need it.

Eggs $3.50 per dozen
Homemade bread $2.50 per loaf, white or wheat
Homemade fettucine $5 per 8 oz package. White or wheat, egg, spinach, or garlic
Banana bread 5$ per loaf. Add 75 cents each for nuts and/or chocolate chips
Pumpkin bread 5$ per loaf, with or without cream cheese icing Gingerbread cookies & jam thumbprint cookies starting Nov. 21

We’ll be at the Carmel Holiday Farmers Market on November 21st from 4:30 to 6:30 PM with all of these items. This market coincides with Santa, live reindeer petting zoo, tree lighting, and various other downtown Carmel festivities, so it’s a not-to-be-missed event. The vendors will be located around the fountain, on Veterans Way, instead of in the City Hall parking lot as we are during the summer, and I’m told there will be plenty of ready-to-eat goodies & hot drinks for sale.

CSA applications! This is a reminder that I would like CSA applications within the next week or two if you want to be assured of a spot. Join us for 16 weeks of produce in summer 2010. Some of you have verbally told me that you intend to participate next year, but my memory’s not perfect, so I need the piece of paper too!

If I already have your application, you’ll be notified of acceptance by December 1st, and deposits are due January 1. If you would like an application, or if you just want to know more about the CSA, send an email or call 317 362 6512. We’ll have more applications available at the market on November 21st. After December 1st, applications are accepted on a rolling basis until we’ve got as many members as we think we can handle for the season. Pickups this year will be in Carmel, Noblesville, on the farm, and we may add a fourth location closer to Indianapolis if the demand exists.

Thanks again for being part of our season in 2009!

Lisa

Check out this post on Sunflowers in my Kitchen.  She was a great help in chicken processing this past weekend.  There are before & after pictures, but don’t worry, no gross ones.

Today it was just barely dry enough to hoe the garlic by hand.  1 – 2 inches more rain predicted for tomorrow night, and the market starts May 30th.  Eek!  We’ll be there, with green garlic, maybe some peonies, a little lettuce & mint, and I don’t know what else.  I dug around for the peas today and as I feared found only rotten seed.  I will start looking around for some to buy for the CSA.  I love peas myself and would hate for my CSA members to not have any.

The conventional farmers around here are just as antsy as I am.  Today I saw a lime truck going through the field across the street, which is an extremely soggy piece of ground in weather like this.  Maybe this will be the last big rain before the ground dries out.

In other possibly bad news, I plugged in my used walk-in cooler for the first time this weekend and it didn’t get cold.  I’ve contacted the individual who sold it to me.  I very much hope that they make good on the guarantee that it was in working order when I bought it.

In good news, we are working on putting up an electric fence.  I hope to get it done this week, and to get some cows!  I think we will get five of the ones we went to look at last week.  The person selling them kindly offered to deliver them.

Last week I saw my first grain truck.  This week, the crocuses are in bloom.  And best of all, we have seedlings out in the seed starting greenhouse.

Onions and cabbage are up,  broccoli and a few greens are next.  I’m building a raised bed for the greenhouse and am going to try putting a few tomatoes in there.  This is the first year I’ve used soil blocks.  So far, so good, except that I made the mix too wet and they take a good bit of extra squeezing to get the water out of them.  “Mud blocks” is more like it.

70 new chicks will be arriving in a few weeks, and so we’re scrambling to get their housing ready.  Last year’s layers seem positively geriatric by now, but they are starting to lay a bit better again now that the days are lengthening.  We’re still talking about beef cows as another form of revenue and as an excellent addition to our fertility program.  So far it’s just talk…

I should mention here that we have eggs for sale, now & all winter long.  They are 3.50 a dozen, 3$ if you buy 4 dozen at a time.  Chickens are pastured, & they get new grass every day.  They are 80% brown, 20% green.

As promised, here I am driving the tractor.

http://www.68k.org:15751/photos/v/2008/Farm/P9010014.JPG.html

Next stop: cleaning up the field.  It’s a terrible mess. We’ll definitely take before & after photos.

I’ve been a little remiss in posting lately because all my free time is being spent picking berries!  Right now almost a gallon of blackberries per day come out of the hedgerow, with a little help from me.

The garlic sold like hotcakes last week.  I predict we have 4 – 6 weeks worth of garlic to sell this year, maybe less if sunnier market days give us higher sales.  This Saturday is supposed to be scorching hot, so I’m wondering how that affects the market turnout.

Berries are saving us right now!

With the delay in our crops due to the weather, it’s been wonderful to have tasty, saleable fruit growing in all the fencerows & back in the woods.  I tried my hardest to get poison ivy on my hands today, picking the first of the blackberries.  The last 10 days or so, we’ve been braving lots of adverse wildlife (mosquitoes) and vegetation (the aforementioned poison ivy, plus tons of other, non-fruiting brambles) to bring in some tasty black raspberries.

It looks like we have 2 different varieties of blackberries, one of which is ripening now, one of which is much more twiggy & upright & is nowhere near ripe yet.  I have to admit that when they are dead ripe and still warm from the sun, I like them a lot more than I thought.

We had a beautiful day on Saturday for the market.  Peonies and pea shoots were popular.

Everything is now planted except for the sweet potatoes.  They should be done either Monday or Tuesday.  The warm weather means that the crabgrass is really taking off, so I’ll be spending more quality time with the wheel hoe.  Only certain areas of the field are affected by the crabgrass plague.

When I harvested some green garlic on Thursday, it was clear that scapes were getting ready to pop.  I am looking forward to harvesting them this week.

We are doing research on a better way to handle our pea shoots this week.  They made it about halfway through the market day on Saturday, and I know we can do better.  So delicious, they are worth the trouble!

The chickens are outside, in their house.  They are enjoying their chicken run.

So are the cats.  It’s cat TV.

So is the dog.. she would sit next to the chicken house all day and lick it if we allowed this.

If there’s a nice day, ever, maybe we’ll take pictures!