CSA Shares

We have room for maybe 10 more families, and I've had 5 or 6 contact me in the last week wanting more information. If you are planning to join and haven't confirmed with me yet, better do so!

Farm Update

More is getting planted, and the larger harvests have begun! Because of the warmer weather, we picked 9# of spinach this morning, and 2.5# of salad greens! This is just what needed to be picked before picking again for Sweetwater Market on Friday. YUM!

We have tomato plants with blossoms!

Chickens got moved to their summer coop and pens. They are happy girls (and 1 guy).

Grass-Fed Beef Quarters for sale!

We just butchered and have the beef hanging to age and tenderize it. If you order in the next week, your quarter will have your name on each vacuum-packed package and will be cut and packaged however you desire. Prices are $400-$450 depending on individual hanging weights. It would be ready to pick up in 3 weeks.

Lots growing

We have the garden back here by the house almost full, and have planted a whole lot of the rest of the garden spots with early plants and seeds. Things seem to be coming up and growing well, except for the early kale and chard that was transplanted outside. It got zapped hard by cold and rain. Planted more seeds of both in the greenhouse.

Rainy -

We transplanted a lot of plants today: Piricicaba sprouting broccoli, Bright Lights Chard, Winterbor Kale, a few kinds of head lettuce: Michelle, Buttercrunch, Waldemann's, and Raddichio. More seeds have been planted in the greenhouse as the flats of early things are transplanted.

We have been hardening off plants (getting them used to outdoor weather after they've been growing in the greenhouse), but I moved them all back into the hoophouse or greenhouse because it's getting colder tomorrow - Sunday. All the plants in the ground should do ok.

We sent 4 steers in to get butchered. If you are interested in beef, let me know as soon as possible!

Onions and Potatoes, Oh My!

1000s of onion plants were put out today. Long rows, and we are trying them in black plastic this year. Small early onions, onion sets, Copra yellow onions, Red Bull and Redwing Red onions.

One 400 ft row of Red Norland early potatoes was planted.

Pak Choi was transplanted out and covered with row cover to keep the flea beetles off it. 200 plants.

Summer weather in early April!

Wow. It's actually too hot & windy to do some transplanting today! I had visions of putting out storage onions and pak choi. They will have to wait.

We transplanted about 100 ft of scallions that were started in the greenhouse 2 months ago. I'm watering them now. There's another tray growing that will be ready to transplant in a few weeks. Little tiny onion plants put 1-2 inches apart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

All the peas are planted: Lincoln, Green Arrow and Coral shelling peas, Sugar Snap edible pod peas, and Oregon Giant snow peas. The fences are up and ready for them to climb. The tallest pea vines get about 6 ft tall.

Bill has been setting up the irrigation system at the Putney Farm next door. Plumbing ~~ his favorite thing to do - NOT!

Photos from March 30th

A beautiful head of Bibb lettuce. This is growing in the hoophouse, planted last Fall.

Kale, transplanted into the hoophouse last Fall. We've been eating this regularly. YUM!

Raddichio, parsley, arugula, chicory, mixed lettuces. I picked these for Sweetwater Market on Saturday. Plus we had a huge salad and can pick these plants again in about 3 days.

This patch of daffodills has been growing here for about 35 years. They get periodically thinned and spread around the farm and shared with others.

A frosty morning on the Farm. There's carrots, mixed lettuces, radishes, raddichio under the row covers, and a bunch more was planted yesterday.

Planting Planting Planting!

We put in about 30# of onion sets today. They look like tiny onions, the size of a fingernail, and will grow into a normal-sized bulb. We planted them in black plastic mulch this year - worth a try so it's less labor weeding and cultivating.

We planted many seeds directly into the ground: 2 kinds of spinach, Leaf Lettuces, 3 kinds of beets, turnips, carrots, 3 kinds of radishes, mustard greens, arugula. The first planting of radishes got thinned. The first planting of leaf lettuces and carrots are sprouting.

Plastic is layed for the peas, chard and kale. Hope to plant them in the next 2 days, along with the early potatoes.

More raddichio, 2 kinds of kale, romaines, and larkspur seeds were planted in the greenhouse.

This will be the first night I've left the trays of head lettuces out all night. The temperature is still 66℉ and it's 9:15 at night!

Oh, there's sooo much to do!

EGGS!

We have an abundance of eggs - $2.50 per dozen on the Farm, or $3 per dozen at Sweetwater Market. The chickens are loving all this warmer weather, fresh greens, sunshine. They have increased production!

Farm Update

Calves are being born! Fields are getting tilled! Maple Syrup set-up is cleaned up. It was a bust year for syrup - we made 5 gallons and should have made 25. It just got too warm.

Onion plants and lettuces, mustards, kales are all getting moved in and out of the greenhouse to harden them off. They need to gradually be conditioned to the outside weather after growing in the warmed and protected greenhouse.

Paths are getting trimmed back. The gardens are getting composted and tilled and ready to plant. We plan to start setting out onions (sets and plants) on Wednesday and also hope to plant peas that day. We need to prune the raspberries and some of the perennial shrubs still. The last of the wintered-over parsnips will be dug today.

The past few days

I planted 300 sweet pepper seeds yesterday! Reds and greens and lilac and yellow. Long ones, blocky ones. I also planted a lot of hot peppers - some interesting varieties.

I also picked enough kale for dinner. Oh my, it was so tender and yummy! We can pick salad about every 2 - 3 days. Spring is here!

Beef Testimonial!

"We love it, Patrice! I have bought beef quarters/halves before, and have sometimes gotten ....shall we say, less than good quality. Not only is your beef great, but it is also good to know that it isn't coming from some commercial feed lot where the cattle are treated like meat machines! I am also glad to feed my family ground beef that isn't coming from a mix of a bazillion different steers."

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/11/switching-to-grass-fed-beef/

Almost Spring Update from the Farm

The hoophouse is producing the first spinach and lettuces. We'd have more, but some little critter burrowed into the hoophouse about 3 or so weeks ago and ate almost all the spinach and some chard! I planted some small rows of radishes and carrots for us.

The greenhouse is filling up. All the allium family is planted: all the red and yellow onion seeds, leek seeds, the first full tray of scallion seeds, and it's time to start another tray. All the celeriac is seeded in cells, even though we haven't yet harvested all of last year's crop! It's probably the longest season veggie we grow. Lettuces were already large enough to transplant into the hoophouse. More are started, including head lettuces. The earliest plantings of kale, chard, mustards, sprouting broccoli, celery, about 60 early varieties of tomatoes, some hot and sweet peppers, parsley, basil and cilantro are all growing. More trays are planted almost every day. It's time to start kohlrabis- about 250 cells will be planted. We start a lot of the seeds indoors to transplant out in April and May so that you will have CSA veggies sooner. It's more work, but you are paying for that. To give you some idea of scale, here's some numbers of veggies planted indoors: 144 celery cells, nearly 300 celeriac cells, 144 cells of broccoli, over 200 head lettuces, etc etc etc.

We are also making maple syrup now - drew off the first few gallons today. We bought new pans and are still figuring out this system.

The sunny weather has been fantastic! It's so appreciated after snow and cold and especially cloudy days.

The Spread of Superbugs

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Until three months ago, Thomas M. Dukes was a vigorous, healthy executive at a California plastics company. Then, over the course of a few days in December as he was planning his Christmas shopping, E. coli bacteria ravaged his body and tore his life apart.

Mr. Dukes is a reminder that as long as we’re examining our health care system, we need to scrutinize more than insurance companies. We also need to curb the way modern agribusiness madly overuses antibiotics, leaving them ineffective for sick humans.

Antibacterial drugs were revolutionary when they were introduced in the United States in 1936, virtually eliminating diseases like tuberculosis here and making surgery and childbirth far safer. But now we’re seeing increasing numbers of superbugs that survive antibiotics. One of the best-known — MRSA, a kind of staph infection — kills about 18,000 Americans annually. That’s more than die of AIDS.

Mr. Dukes, 52, picked up a kind of bacteria called ESBL-producing E. coli. While it’s conceivable that he touched a contaminated surface, a likely scenario is that he ate tainted meat, said Dr. Brad Spellberg, an infectious-diseases specialist and the author of “Rising Plague,” a book about antibiotic resistance.

Vegetarians are also vulnerable to antibiotic resistance nurtured in hog barns. Microbes swap genes, so antibiotic resistance developed in pigs can jump to microbes that infect humans in hospitals, locker rooms, schools or homes.

Routine use of antibiotics to raise livestock is widely seen as a major reason for the rise of superbugs. But Congress and the Obama administration have refused to curb agriculture’s addiction to antibiotics, apparently because of the power of the agribusiness lobby.

The ESBL E. coli initially remained in Mr. Dukes’s colon, causing no particular damage. But then he suffered an inflammation that perforated his colon — and the bacteria escaped.

Mr. Dukes began suffering stomach pains and saw his doctor, who gave him Cipro, a strong antibiotic that had previously worked against the infection. This time, the pain grew worse. The next evening, he was in surgery to remove eight inches of his colon.

A culture attributed the infection partly to ESBL E. coli. Doctors inserted a tube to administer an intravenous antibiotic in an effort to save his life.

If ESBL E. coli is frightening, there are even more potent superbugs emerging, like Acinetobacter.

“We are seeing infections caused by Acinetobacter and special bacteria called KPC Klebsiella that are literally resistant to every antibiotic that is F.D.A. approved,” Dr. Spellberg said. “These are untreatable infections. This is the first time since 1936, the year that sulfa hit the market in the U.S., that we have had this problem.”

The Infectious Diseases Society of America, an organization of doctors and scientists, has been bellowing alarms. It fears that we could slip back to a world in which we’re defenseless against bacterial diseases.

There’s broad agreement that doctors themselves overprescribe antibiotics — but also that a big part of the problem is factory farms. They feed low doses of antibiotics to hogs, cattle and poultry to make them grow faster.

A study by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that in the United States,

70 percent of antibiotics are used to feed healthy livestock, with 14 percent more used to treat sick livestock. Only about 16 percent are used to treat humans and their pets, the study found.

More antibiotics are fed to livestock in North Carolina alone than are given to humans in the entire United States, according to the peer-reviewed Medical Clinics of North America. It concluded that antibiotics in livestock feed were “a major component” in the rise of antibiotic resistance.

Legislation introduced by Louise Slaughter, a New Yorker who is the only microbiologist in the House of Representatives, would curb the routine use of antibiotics in farming. The bill has 104 co-sponsors, but agribusiness interests have blocked it in committee — and the Obama administration and the Senate have dodged the issue.

After weeks of receiving intravenous antibiotics, Mr. Dukes is now recovering at home in Lomita, Calif. He must use a colostomy bag, but he hopes to be patched up and ready to return to work next month. Still, he knows that the ESBL E. coli remains in his gut.

“As long as it’s contained in my colon, I’m a happy camper,” he said. “But if it gets out again, I’m in trouble.”

Dr. Martin J. Blaser, chairman of the department of medicine at New York University Langone Medical Center, and a former president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, agrees that agricultural use of antibiotics produces cheaper meat. But he says the price may be an enormous toll in human health.

“You could have very lethal pandemics,” he said. “We’re brewing some perfect storms.”

Mom's Diet During Pregnancy May Alter Infant's Allergies

By Joene Hendry

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) Feb 19 - Eating lots of vegetables and fruits during pregnancy may lower the chance of having a baby with certain allergies, hint study findings from Japan.

Greater intake of green and yellow vegetables, citrus fruit, and veggies and fruits high in beta carotene may lessen the risk of having a baby with eczema, Dr. Yoshihiro Miyake at Fukuoka University and colleagues found.

Foods high in vitamin E similarly may lessen the risk of having a wheezy infant, they reported online January 22nd in Allergy.

Beta carotene and vitamin E are two of many antioxidants thought to benefit health. But prior investigations of maternal antioxidant intake and childhood allergies offered conflicting findings. This area of research "is still developing," Dr. Miyake noted in an email to Reuters Health.

In the current study, Dr. Miyake's team evaluated vegetable and fruit intake during pregnancy in 763 women, as well as eczema or allergic wheeze in their infants.

The women were 30 years old on average and about 17 weeks pregnant at enrollment.. When their babies were between 16 and 24 months old, the women provided birth and breastfeeding history, number of older siblings, and exposure to smoke.

The team found that 21% of the youngsters wheezed or had a "whistling in the chest in the last 12 months," and fewer than 19% had eczema.

According to the investigators, mothers who ate greater amounts of green and yellow vegetables, citrus fruits, or beta carotene while pregnant were less apt to have an infant with eczema.

For example, after allowing for other eczema risk factors, eczema was more common among infants whose mothers ate the least versus the most green and yellow vegetables - 54 and 32 infants, respectively.

Likewise, higher intake of vitamin E during pregnancy was associated a reduced likelihood of having a wheezy infant -- a finding that supports previous investigations from the U.S. and U.K.

Boosting intake of green and yellow vegetables, citrus fruits, and antioxidants such as beta-carotene and vitamin E among pregnant women "deserves further investigation as measures that would possibly be effective in the prevention of allergic disorders in the offspring," the researchers conclude.

Reuters Health Information © 2010

CROP MOBS ~ TODAY'S GENERATION OF BARN RAISERS

By CHRISTINE MUHLKE

“Who brought their own wheelbarrow?” Rob Jones asked the group of 20-somethings gathered on a muddy North Carolina farm on a chilly January Sunday. Hands shot up and wheelbarrows were pulled from pickups sporting Led Zeppelin and biodiesel bumper stickers, then parked next to a mountain of soil. “We need to get that dirt into those beds over there in the greenhouse,” he said, nodding toward a plastic-roofed structure a few hundred feet away. “The rest of you can come with me to move trees and clear brush to make room for more pasture. Watch out for poison ivy.”

Bobby Tucker, the 28-year-old co-owner of Okfuskee Farm in rural Silk Hope, looked eagerly at the 50-plus volunteers bundled in all manner of flannel and hand-knits. In five hours, these pop-up farmers would do more on his fledgling farm than he and his three interns could accomplish in months. “It’s immeasurable,” he said of the gift of same-day infrastructure.

It’s the beauty of being Crop Mobbed.

The Crop Mob, a monthly word-of-mouth (and -Web) event in which landless farmers and the agricurious descend on a farm for an afternoon, has taken its traveling work party to 15 small, sustainable farms. Together, volunteers have contributed more than 2,000 person-hours, doing tasks like mulching, building greenhouses and pulling rocks out of fields.

“The more tedious the work we have, the better,” Jones said, smiling. “Because part of Crop Mob is about community and camaraderie, you find there’s nothing like picking rocks out of fields to bring people together.”

The affable, articulate Jones, 27, is part of the group’s grass-roots core, organizing events and keeping them moving. The Mob was formed during a meeting about issues facing young farmers, during which an intern declared that better relationships are built working side by side than by sitting around a table. So one day, 19 people went to Piedmont Biofarm and harvested, sorted and boxed 1,600 pounds of sweet potatoes in two and a half hours. A year later, the Crop Mob e-mail list has nearly 400 subscribers, and the farm fests now draw 40 to 50 volunteers.

The Crop Mob works well partly because the area around Chapel Hill, Raleigh and Durham is so rich in small-scale, sustainable farms, and the sustainable-agriculture program at Central Carolina Community College draws students from across the nation who stay put after graduation.

One of the biggest issues facing sustainable agriculture is that it’s “way, way, way more labor-intensive than industrial agriculture,” Jones said. “It’s not sustainable physically, and it’s not sustainable for people personally: they’re working all the time and don’t have an opportunity to have a social life. So I think Crop Mob brings that celebration to the work, so that you get that sense of community that people are looking for, and you get a lot of work done. And we have a lot of fun.”

“It’s good to get off the farm you’re farming,” said Jennie Rasmussen, a 25-year-old Indiana native who traded an office job for community gardening before moving to the area to farm. “It’s great to meet other people who have the same challenges and just network and build community.”

“Networking” and “building community” popped up in almost every conversation I had that day, and it never came across as slick or earnest. Both have real context here, as these mostly farmless farmers hear about internships, learn about affordable land and find potential dates. For those who don’t farm, it’s a way to explore getting their fingernails dirty. One woman, who recently moved to the area from New Jersey after losing her job in the financial-services industry, was eager to plug in to the vibrant local food scene. “I’m trying not to hinder the effort,” she said with a laugh as she distributed twigs on a hügelkultur bed made from dead trees.

The farmer Trace Ramsey, who is part of the Mob core as well as its documentarian, has watched the young-farmer phenomenon explode. “People are interested in authentic work,” he said. “I think they’re tired of what they’ve been told they should accomplish in their life, and they’re starting to realize that it’s not all that exciting or beneficial from a community perspective or an individual perspective.” At 36, Ramsey joked that he’s the old man of the project — remarkable considering the average American farmer is 57. But as people of all ages become involved, he said, “what started as a young-farmer movement is just becoming a farmer movement.”

By the end of the afternoon, the transformation was remarkable. The towering piles of soil and mulch had dwindled to child’s height. The greenhouse beds were filled and the walls framed out by older volunteers who knew what to do with the table saw. The Tamworth pigs had a new fenced-in grazing area to uproot. Thickets and trees were removed from the edge of a field, a bonfire built from the haul. Garden rows were tidied while someone sang. And the hügelkultur beds were handsomely finished. The dreary mess of winter had been cleared to make way for a well-ordered spring.

There was even time for a pecan-tree-planting demo before the buffet lunch. (Farmers are required only to feed the workers; no money is exchanged.) Tucker, bleary from exhaustion, thanked the smiling gang. The group then threw around ideas for which farm should be Mobbed next. When it was agreed that a volunteer’s employer would win the reciprocal-labor lottery, she hopped around in excitement.

The idea is catching on, Jones said. Requests for advice on starting mini-Mobs have come in from around the state. Two Crop Mobbers are traveling to Spain to talk to farmers. In cities, Jones added, there’s no reason that backyard and community gardeners can’t mob, too. Because anywhere there’s dirt, a community can grow.

Mia and Grace ~~ Great Restaurant in Muskegon

Just wanted to let everyone know that Mia & Grace will start serving dinners on March 3rd, on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights. If you haven't heard of Mia & Grace you need to check them out. They are located in downtown Muskegon on Third Street. They purchase from local food sources as much as they can.

Let them know you saw this on our blog!

CSA Update soon!

We will get our CSA info up on the blog soon. Seeds are purchased and I'm getting the early things planted. We have a lot of plans, just haven't finalized anything yet.