PIGLETS FINALLY ARE HERE!

Holy crap! After months of staring at a giant 700+ pound sow, wondering if she looks more pregnant than the day before as she stuffs her face with mashed potatoes and corn, she finally had 6 little piglets.
Yes, I am witholding pictures because they are completely adorable. Jason cooked up some amazing pork chops yesterday on the grill while I made a fresh cucumber salad. I should have taken a picture of that becasue it was beautiful and delicious. But because of the delay, meat share members take note - we're behind at least a month. We're still on schedule for the Houston family christmas ham though arriving on time.

In other news, one of our CSA members is expanding their yoga studio. Check it out at www.pilatesyogaandmore.com for an integrated relaxation yoga session. We're hoping to break away from the gardens soon and check it out and I love the fact that you don't have to wear shoes. The world needs more barefoot activities.

Oh, and speaking of barefeet, the pool is filling as we speak. Water volleyball will start up every sunday evening.
And mark your calendar for a special event - our yearly Zucchini cookout will be here at the park on Sunday July 25th starting at 1pm. Bring your favorite covered dish, as local and as in season as possible, and come out for a potluck style cookout with water and land volleyball and plenty of swimming, eating, and just plain enjoying how nice Ohio can be in the heat of July. We also welcome unique ways of cooking zucchini as by the end of July, we all start really getting creative with ways to use the bounty of summer squash season. Hopefully we'll have some tomatoes too and maybe some delcious beef from my work. Local brews permitted as long as you're of age and we'll have some local herbal tea, hard cider and wine to taste as well.

Garden Tour- Rootstown

Let's take a little tour of what's growing in my plot at work...

Brussel Sprouts forming.

A row of painstakingly hand weeded carrots and Carnival winter squash

Sweet Alyssum fragrantly blooming next to Garbanzo beans.

Carrots and red dianthus nestled up together.

Jacob's Cattle Heirloom beans just starting to poke through the ground.

Bread, anyone?

Hey - just throwing this out to see if there's any interest.

Anyone out there bake their own bread? Want to start up a bread baking group? Not like I don't have enough stuff to do, but I'd love to get together with other bread bakers once a month and swap recipes, work on a wood fired oven and bake. Email me if you're interested - janeehouston@gmail.com

broccoli flower soup

I knew I'd find it! Thanks cooks.com

I have not tried this yet. If you do, let me know what you think!

BROCCOLI FLOWER SOUP (BEST EVER)
3 c. chopped broccoli tops
3 qts. water
1 med. onion, chopped
4 tbsp. chicken base (dry)
2 tsp. garlic powder
1/4 tsp. black pepper
1/4 tsp. season salt
1 tsp. Worcestershire sauce
1/8 tsp. nutmeg
1 tbsp. cooking sherry
1 c. milk
1 c. Ranch dressing
1/4 c. sour cream
6 strips of uncooked bacon
1 to 1 1/2 c. flour

What do you do with broccoli gone to flower? Make soup! Wash and trim long stalks on fresh broccoli. Chop broccoli to make approximately 3 cups. Bring 3 quarts of water to boil and add broccoli, chicken base, garlic, pepper, season salt, Worcestershire, nutmeg. Boil 20 minutes uncovered. While water is boiling chop onion and mince up bacon strips and fry on medium high until bacon is crisp (without burning the onions). Then add flour to bacon, onion and bacon grease until lit is a thick paste. Remove from heat and set aside.Lower heat on boiling broccoli to medium (nice low rolling boil). Add Ranch dressing, milk, and sour cream while constantly stirring with wire whip. Then slowly add bacon, onion, flour mixture until soup thickens, simmer on low for 10 minutes and add cooking sherry. Serve hot with bread sticks or crackers.

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CSA week 1

CSA Pickup Starts Today!!!!

Times - Tuesday 6-8pm or Wed from 8-10am.


Email me with any questions at janeehouston@gmail.com and I'll see you all soon!

broken neck

CSA First Pickup is June 15th!!!!!!

With the plant sale and putting everything in the ground and all this warm weather, I'm left wondering - where did spring go?
I think I blinked and missed it. I rejoiced at the first tshirt day... and I don't think that I have worn a sweater more than a couple days since.

I had so much fun at the plant sale this year! Thanks to everyone who came out and helped. It was great meeting new csa and meat share members and watching kids play with baby ducks. Everything that is leftover fit on a couple tables and slowly we've been planting them flat by flat. We have hundreds of tomato plants in the ground and hundreds of pepper plants happily growing in the gardens. We're running out of room! Travis moved his melon patch up by my parents house and they're starting to grow. We have all different, unique kinds this year. It must be bad if I'm already planning my order for next year and anticipating seed catalogs. Gardening must be an addiction, which is odd that even though I'm saturated in it, I'm still looking for more.


On a really sad note, one of our super garden helpers, my Grandma, broke her neck. She was playing in the back garden, getting a pump in the creek to water everything that was coming up on Memorial day and she tripped and fell backwards, hitting her head on a fencepost and cracking her C2 vertebrate right in half diagonally. The emergency room on a holiday was terrible and they sent her home with a neck brace and told her to take anacin. Yeah... that didn't fly for more than a few days before she was back in the emergency room begging for Dr. Kevorkian. But now she's back at home on a bit stronger medication with a better neck brace, talking about picking beans in a few weeks. She's amazing and the gardens are a lot less lively without her bossing us around and making fun of the way I plant potatoes. I am so glad she's not paralized.


Anyway, everything is growing at an odd pace: our asparagus is slowing production, our strawberries started producing really early this year, rhubarb flowered before I could make a pie, bok choy already choked in the heat, the peppers are loving it, my onions are the size of golf balls, and I'm having a heck of a time keeping the garlic from flowering already. And my sister declared this the year of the tomato because we already have little green tomatoes forming on a few of our plants. I'm just worried that all this hot weather will burn out our broccoli and lettuce before it's even begun.


Oh Ohio! You are sooooo weird.

This morning

I woke up this morning to my normal routine - put a bottle in the microwave for the new fainting goat orphans. Then I sat on the couch and rifled through the bag of seeds that are all begging to be planted right at the right time and upon deciding to throw some keeper squash in my garden at work, I heard a cheep come from the incubator. The turkey eggs are pipping and one turkey had it's beak out and was complaining about being stuck in an egg in an incubator. That's turkeys. Always complaining. But I'm happy they are starting to hatch as they are delicious and hatching right on time for landing on a Thanksgiving table this year.

From there, I walked back to the sheep and goats with a steaming hot bottle of milk in one hand and throwing pepper the ball with the other hand as she bounded through the grass still wet with last nights rain. The back field was heavy with a weird fog that made the sleeping alpaca look like a lockness monster in the middle of the field while the sheep trudged through with their zombie-like morning hunger groans. I went to check on the Icelandic we call Black Cloud that I had spent hours brushing out yesterday for a shear date of today only to find that among the giant curtain of frizzed out wool was a perfect little white lamb.


I still am baffled by sheep genetics and so I'm not sure how almost every sheep I've had born here looked the exact same - black with a little white spot on its head. Why then is the blackest of all our sheep the mother of the whitest lamb we have?

Oh well. Either way, I'm happy. The lamb is healthy and resting and despite being rather young, Black Cloud is caring for her little one like a veteran matron.


I'd say I had a good morning. I watched the ducks in their endless games of tag, washed the three dozen eggs were are getting a day here! Wohoo! I checked on the baby bunnies, nestled in their little hay nest. The next batch of egg laying chickens looks happy as they play with the baby geese. The greenhouse is ridiculously green in full effect.


I have such a busy day ahead that the excitement of the morning is just a sliver of my entire day. Fence building, seed planting, grapevine trimming... I've got to get back to work!