short, short days.

December 21st is one of my dates to mark every year. It seems right around this time the light is gone and winter has its full grip tightening on this little spot in Ohio. I get really sad, there's not much to do and I'm usually pretty broke.


So I look for December 21st, the shortest day of the year. That means it's all up from here. The days will keep stretching. Soon the snow will melt and the grass will shrug off the cold and turn into beautiful April pastures with happy dandelions springing up everywhere. Yes, it's all looking up from here, well, except those two and a half more months of brutal cold.



But my first order is piling up from High Mowing Organics and soon I'll have dirt all over my house and little seedlings sprouting up to some far off tune of the promise of another growing season. (CSA future members, any High Mowing requests?)

And crap if this darn hawk didn't find my little flock of laying hens that are limping through the winter. The last batch of meat birds was a total and complete failure as they one by one were taken by either the cold or the hawk. So as soon as the weather breaks in March, I've got some chicken orders to fill. I don't like starting the year already behind, but it won't take me long to catch my tail and start moving forward again. I've got plans for a better chicken tractor system for some fresh egg layers and I think I have my system down for meat birds, when the weather isn't below freezing. Live and learn, I guess. Sorry for those short on chicken dinners this winter.

I've been sick all day, eating only bread with honey on it and drinking hot tea, but now I'm buzzing with thoughts of spring, dancing around to Metric with thoughts of spring strawberries.

All this darkness and winter has given me plenty of time to obsess over my new plan, to build a cord wood building that will eventually become a store front. Here's a pic from tinyhousedesign.com with a green roof, because of course after building a sustainable small wood and cob building, why wouldn't you plant grass on the roof?

Now the logistics part is where I am getting a bit muddled. I'll have to plow through zoning permits and whatnot... mostly the battle is getting my dad to turn the zoning from commercial to agricultural. He has big ideas of re building the old mill into this giant convention center and wants me to get investors and contractors and I'm pretty sure that's not what I want to do.
Maybe I'm not looking at the big picture, but I think I'd prefer to use this opportunity to start small and work my way up. Start small. Kinda like the CSA, every year we keep adding something and try not to bite off more than we can chew, well... I guess I had no idea how much interest I'd get from the meat share and hate being behind in that, but otherwise we did pretty well.
In keeping with the organic mindset and trying to be sustainable, I'd love to not have to borrow money from a bank, if at all possible. The supplies for a small cord wood building are somewhat cheap, except for time and labor, but I'd love the learning experience of once again working my ass off for no pay. Heh. But it's all in fun.

Anyway, if anyone wants in on this fun / hard labor project, just let me know. Of if anyone has any supplies around, old doors, bricks, liquor bottles, or anything else that might be useful, let me know.

Until then, I'll keep trudging through the cold, hopeful that the days are getting longer as I feed the pigs expired sweet rolls and keep a wary eye on the sky for that beautiful feathered cannibal. Oh, and pluck Christmas turkeys in the dark. At least today is the darkest day. It's only going to get lighter after this. Sweet!

food safety and store fantasy

It's only after the second cup of coffee that my feet start to warm up. The snow is a light dusting that's falling at a decent rate and I am at my winter ritual of constantly checking craigslist while updating about all the things I did during the super busy season.

Also, I'm sifting through all the information I can find on the new food safety bill that just passed.
Ah, thank you Jon Tester for exempting farms that sell within a 275 mile radius that sell under $500,000 a year. Check and check. So we should be alright for next year. I panicked for awhile thinking - do I need to call my CSA a "rabbit food" co-op? And the meat share could be really high quality "cat food." I'm still thinking about how things are going to be different next year, but at least I won't have to worry about tons of paperwork and the FDA looking over my shoulder now. I like personal accountability better. These are my eggs, I collect them fresh (when the darn hens are laying!!!) and this is what I feed my cow, this is what I enrich my soil with, and here's a list of anything that I spray.

I love watching food safety issues come and go just to see how much focus is spent on it. The alar scare with apples in the '70s is amazing to read about: a spray that was designed to make harvesting easier by getting all the apples to ripen at the same time, causes cancer? Noooo, really? The mad cow disease footage was enough to make anyone stop eating beef, but I think it also opened people's eyes up to the fact that they don't know what their beef was being fed - which was the underlying more disgusting story to be told.
Now there's salmonella in the eggs and this outbreak keeps happening. Why? Because the massive factory farm that these egg layers are kept in don't know which hens are laying the bad eggs and they don't want to post a loss by getting rid of the bad hens.
I think everything is getting too big to fail now.

Right now the whole nation is sitting on top of a teetering tower of subsidized corn and a complex network of food haulers and producers where a beef cow can start in West Virginia, travels out to the southwest and then back to the east coast again before it lands on a plate. I certainly wouldn't want the job of tracking lettuce from California or Argentina through all the trade routes, processors, packagers, and grocery store chains.

But then again, I'm sitting here drinking coffee from South America and my dogs are cheaply fed, so I'll try not to throw stones. Just sitting here thinking about the way things are, I guess.

I've switched over to tea now and have made the necessary phone calls to get both my cows into the butcher on January 9th. I was hoping for earlier, but I just couldn't swing it. Now I've got to find something else for christmas presents and apologize the the meat share members for their empty freezers.


Now I'm looking to next year. What am I going to do...
Now is when I look back and see what went right and figure out how to adapt and make things better. There's always a slight twinge of reflection about this time now as well where I say- do I really want to keep doing this?
I got attacked by a 700 pound pig this year. I popped out a rib. I didn't go on vacation. I did many rounds of poultry killing. I sold out of everything and had to turn people away. I raised my own piglets for the first time. Hell, I watched my first lambs getting born last winter! And baby goats are ridiculously cute. And I mended fences, beefed up my garden soil, planted a cherry tree that didn't die yet, more plums, paw paws, blueberries, gooseberries and a new strawberry patch. I had an amazing plant sale and loved my CSA member's recipes and feedback and excitement at picking up their baskets. I got my first cow and learned that butcher dates fill up fast and I probably need to get a trailer now. I bought my first truck and consequently started getting a myriad of craigslist gems like cheap new hens, picked up hay and was able to get feed and goats without shoving it in the back of my honda. I grew carrots successfully this year! First time ever!!! I actually got a few carrots... of course they were in October, but still they were delicious!

So I guess there's the good and the bad. The ups and the down vary day to day, almost to the point of being bipolar. Things can go so right or so wrong, but I guess it's all a learning experience. I didn't grow up on a farm, but geez I love animals and still somehow am perfectly fine with eating them.

With the slowing down of winter, I'm sure these blogs will become more frequent as I've found that most of my problems are best worked through via writing, venting, reassessing, and therefore planning. Like right now, I'm playing out in my brain the possibility of opening up a little farm store. Yes, I know I just kinda said that I work too much as it is, but seriously, how cool would a little farm store be where you could buy local honey, organic grains, vegetable seeds, maple syrup, organic gardening sprays, and pickup for CSA under a roof, and have a freezer for the meat share people to pickup instead of the cooler system or waiting around for me to be home to pickup chickens. Just something small, maybe a strawbale building with skylights and a wood burner in the corner. Jason looked at my the same way he looked at me after I pitched the meat share idea to him - both happy and wary of how it is going to pan out. He wants to go on vacation, and rightfully so. Maybe this is just a winter fantasy, where when the snow is blowing I tend to forget how short on time I am in the growing season and I tend to over-order on seeds and have grandiose ideas about what can get done in a day.


Do I really want to keep doing this? The answer is more than likely yes. And well, if I'm already doing it, why not do more?

falling leaves and killing chickens

The nip in the wind and the bright red sun glare bright this morning. The maples release their leaves with a groan as the wind lifts them off and adds them to the swirling masses.

My favorite part of my mornings now is this beautiful wild turkey that follows around my turkey flock. I see her about once a day, just mulling around like she wants to join my heritage breeds that are begging me for their breakfast. She's really shy and will only let me get so close before she takes off in flight, which is actually quite impressive and she can soar easily through the fields or straight up into the woods. I hope she integrates and doesn't get too sad when Thanksgiving comes for the rest of her friends.

The morning feeding is quite humorous as I imagine anyone that drives by looking over to see this mass of white meat birds running as fast as their little fat legs can carry them, running through the field over to the chicken house for their morning meal. This morning I came out to a pile of pigs, cuddled together in the mud with a meat bird snuggled right on top of the pile. I always worry the pigs might want a chicken dinner, but so far they've cohabited quite nicely.

I have these swirling masses of meat birds and a pretty empty freezer because time always seems to be short as the days keep getting shorter and my whizbang chicken plucker still has yet to save me from hours of hand plucking all these birds. And I might only slightly be kicking myself but I'm happy at the same time at the overwhelming demand for these happy and delicious birds. Maybe next weekend I'll carve out a day and get everything taken care of.

The winter gardens are limping along with the shortening of days. The frost isn't really knocking the kale back much, but not enough sunlight is pretty apparent in our late planting of chard, kale and radishes as they're a month in the ground and only knee high to a grasshopper. I am super happy to see the pea flowers and the cosmos are in full wispy glory. I shelled the last of the shelling beans and I'm putting up a fence at my work garden to let the sheep graze on all the weed seed pods and remaining thistles still standing. Then in the spring, I'm going to put up a fence section where I want to plant up and put pigs in there to till up and eat the roots of the plants. This is my new master plan. We'll see how it actually pans out. I just know that I've got a couple of acres of dirt and I really want to use it the best that I can.

Well I'm off to get a book on tape and scrape out some of the ram poop from my backseat (I really, really need a truck) and load up for a long drive down to North Carolina for a weekend of wine, pirates, partying, and stuffing my head full of as much information as I can soak up. I love studying under an amazingly knowledgeable winemaker... and consequently drinking some amazing wine.

Potluck Sun July 25th at 2!

There are different fragrances tempting the busy bees as I walk from one end of my garden to the other. The sunflowers have a heavenly perfume, the lemon balm that brushes my leg releases something reminicent of floor cleaner, and the freshly pulled garlic smell mixes with the delicious scent of tomato leaves just to accent the eutopia of the veggie garden. Jason has stippled patches of flowers throughout the garden and the kohlrabi patch is bordered by borage and zinnia, which are just now starting to open up into their full State Fair glory. The drip irrigation is getting a full workout now that it hasn't rained more than a quarter of an inch in 12 days and the new replants of fruit trees and small fruits are choking and lifting their weak arms up to beg for water. It's july. Even the grass looks dead.
So what more of a perfect way to celebrate the heat of another Ohio summer than with a picnic. Potluck style.

Local Foods Cookout. Sunday July 25th at 2pm

Bring your swimsuit if you so desire to jump in for a round or two of water volleyball (swimming at your own risk, of course) or just come to enjoy some fresh local foods from the bounty of zucchini season. Summer squash is in high production so we welcome dishes that are in season right now, the more local the better. I'm getting some delicious burgers from the beef side of my work and we're firing up the grill with some summer sweet corn as well. There will probably be a lot of cucumber salads as they seem to be rather prolific this year. My sister might be able to scrape together enough cherry tomatoes for another tomato mozerella salad with fresh basil, which is amaaaaazing. All are welcome and bring a friend and a covered dish. I wish I could think of a better name than "potluck" as it reminds me of piles of corn or meat mush in oven bakeware served in a damp church basement, but alas, any other word isn't coming to mind right now.

I can't believe it but I'm already thinking about next year. I'm already dragging out the dog eared, -crinkled from being watered- pages of the 2009 seed catalogs planning excitedly for next year. We're on week 7 of the csa and only a little tiny sliver of the gardens have produced and gone into baskets. We have so much deliciousness left, just basking in the sun and waiting for their time to shine.

I am going to put a deadline on my meat share signups - August 16th is the last day to signup. Reservations are made by check to High Mill Park, first come first serve so I know how much I'll need. If you've shared interest, now is the time to hold your spot for the delicious supply of the best raised meat around. We are going to start our first installment soon as the geese are almost ready already and some early chickens for those who want to get started will be ready in a month or so.
Any questions can be forwarded to janeehouston@gmail.com or check out highmillpark.com/meatshare

Both me and Pepper my cattle dog are tired from wrangling piglets and fixing their fence yesterday, which is only amplified by the gorgeously sunny-humid day. We're both looking forward to a relaxing night of planting fruit trees I just found on sale and weedwhacking the garden. I'll probably do most of the work and Pepper will just stare at me like she wishes she could help if she only could figure out how.

Projects of the next few weeks - corn crib, more chicken tractors, figure out where the turkeys are going to live, work on new sheep fence, plant fruit trees, water everything if it doesn't rain, clean bathrooms for the cookout, plant late season broccoli and turnips, and get more ducklings.

Exciting things happening this week - my hops flowered, peaches are starting to ripen, apples are coming on strong, grapes at work started turning colors, more potatoes are coming in, tomatoes are starting to turn, sunflowers are in full effect, piglets are still cute, and 3 more weeks until grandma gets her neck brace off and she'll be back to picking beans. I'm sure her doctor would love to hear that. hehe.

This has been deemed the year of the piglet and will be our 5th annual harvest fest. Tshirts will be made if you want one, they'll be around $12. Email if you'd like one ordered. Any color you want. Also - CSA members will get a special surprise at the end of this season at our Harvest Fest the last Tuesday in November.

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