Daily Blog - Farm Food, Flowers, Camp

Farm Food:

Every morning before the sun gets too hot, I go to the gardens to pick what will be needed for the day.  Everyday since the first week of June there has been lettuce.  Yesterday I harvested some baby carrots, and another handful of garlic scapes to go with our lunch to go with our dinner.

Our lunch of spaghetti topped with garlic scapes and onions, a fried egg and lettuce.

Flowers:

A fresh bouquet for our table - cosmos, bachelor buttons, black eyed susans and tansy.

Camp:

We were supposed to go see our oldest daughter's staff dedication last night after she finished her week of training at a nearby summer camp, followed by icecream and fireworks.  Abe and Emily were so excited.  But, when we went to start our van, it was obvious very quickly that the alternator was going.  I am thankful for a neighbor/friend that lent us their car so Mike could go pick Abby up and our pastor is here early already this morning to take Mike to get the part.  I am so thankful we didn't break down at 10:00 pm on the side of the road on our way back home if we had gone last night.  The children's disappoint has mostly passed and today we are thankful for all of God's provisions.  After we sell our house, we are going to take a bit of the money and buy a second used car, probably a subaru outback or forester because our one car is nearly at 200,000 miles. 

Wishing you a beautiful day!

Warmly,
Tonya

Weekend

We were mostly home this weekend.  There is always so much to be done.  The firewood gathering continued as the temperatures remained cold. 

I cleaned out the back barn to get ready for two doe kids (baby goats!).  This is the before picture.

This rough structure was here when we bought our little homestead.  It is a small barn/shack.  But I much prefer to call it a barn.

We had a wonderful offer over the weekend.  Our homesteading neighbors (whom I have mentioned here before) offered their barn to us - for us to take it down and then we will reconstruct it at our place.  This is such a blessing.  They no longer keep sheep and it is just several years old and a nice size, 14 x 14 feet.
So instead of having to work from scratch (which carpentry is just not Mike's strength - of course he has many talents, but this is simply not one of them), we will have a clearly defined system to build our barn!

While working in the barn, I looked behind to check on Isaac and his fire pit and look what I saw!  He told me that the trees were growing marshmallows. 

Yesterday afternoon Abby and Sarah made some butter from local organic cream to go with our biscuits at supper.

How was your weekend?

Warm wishes,

Tonya

Spring Lambs

Not our own, but it was a lot of fun to be able to care for our neighbor's farm over the weekend while he was away.  One of the ewes had two day old lambs. 

Sarah is gifted with animals.  She can walk right in with the mom and babies, talk to the mom and hold the lambs without the mom getting upset.

She had two girls.  Can you see the other one in the background nursing?

It was nice to enjoy this springtime ritual of birth as we had even more snow fall last night and are practicing patience as we wait for the white to slowly turn to green.

Warm wishes,

Tonya

A Market Garden and Selling Your Homebaked Goods

Another question I have been asked recently is how to begin with selling produce and home baked goods, even on a small scale.

We are not experienced farmers and still have so very much to learn.  Please know I  welcome suggestions and ideas.

I am just going to share our experiences.

We moved up to Vermont in the fall of 2005, into a rental home right in a village.  The blessing was that there was about 1/2 acre of amazing soil.  It had been old farm land.  All we had to do was till and plant.  At this time we didn't own a tiller and with no money to invest in one, we dug by hand - yes, shovels.  The older boys would be asked to turn over one row each day and dear husband, Mike, did most of it.  I helped as often as I could.  When we had a about 1/4 left, we were given a tiller and that made the finishing much faster.  We didn't have to add any compost to the soil.  And everything just grew and grew and grew.

There was an unattached garage and I set up a little farmstand to sell our produce, baked goods and handmade goods.  I put a sign at the end of our driveway to attract customers.  We had a few sales this way, but not too many.  But, what a wonderful way to meet the neighbors, many of them elderly people.   It was a joy to have them knock on our door, looking for cucumbers for pickling or to share some raspberries with us that they had just picked from their back yard.

We signed up for a farmers market as well and made the weekly drive on Fridays.  Our sales were decent, about $100 - $150 or so with all of the produce selling well.  We could have used more for sure.  It was a nice time for our family to meet farmers and artists, especially being new to the area.

After the rental house sold and we moved to our mobile home on leased land we immediately began the process of tilling and preparing the soil for planting.  This time, however, the soil was poor, real poor.  We were blessed to have a neighbor that had 5 year old composted cow manure dumped on his property when a nearby farm was sold.  He offered this to us for no cost.  This helped and our crops improved the second year, but not enough to consider selling beyond our own little farmstand we put out right in front of our property.  Even living on a rural gravel road, it was amazing how many people stopped to buy.   We just left an  honor system mason jar out for people to leave money.

The little homestead we bought just one mile further down the gravel road did not have gardens in place and we have had to, once again, begin the process of improving the clay soil by adding lots of compost.

We did not have enough excess produce to sell any last year, but will be planting twice as much this year.  Perhaps the farmstand will return this summer.  I also, in the past, would bake cookies and other goodies for both the farmstand and the market and they always sold very well along with our eggs.

It was interesting to find that the most common vegetables were the best sellers - tomatoes, cucumbers, beans and squash.

Warm wishes,
Tonya

A Farmers' Market and Food Thoughts

"All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen."

~Emerson

My father and his girlfriend, Sheila, have been visiting this weekend from Massachusetts and it has been a joy to spend time with them and watch our children enjoying their visit and my father's new puppy, Lilly.

Yesterday, Sheila, my two oldest boys, Abby and I went down to Stowe (about a 50 minute drive) because Sheila had never been. Our first stop was the Farmers' Market. Our family had been once before the previous season and knew it to be a good sized one.

Here are some pictures ~

~annual flowers and herbs~

~live music

~

~our Abby~

~sheepskins~

I was struck, however, with a feeling of sadness to find there was only one vegetable grower represented among the approximate 30 vendors... just one. Has it become that hard for a small organic vegetable grower to make a living? Is it not even worth it for diversified farmers to grow vegetables along side other products? Or maybe a lot of farms have become CSAs and don't bother attending markets?

It made me just a bit more grateful for our organic vegetable and strawberry farm located right here in our little town and for the hard work of the owners. Yes, the food costs a bit more, but it is grown just four miles from our home, is grown by a family that cares for the land and makes their living from the farm.

I leave you with a quote from one of my favorite authors, Wendell Berry ~

This old sun-based agriculture was fundamentally alien to the industrial economy; industrial corporations could make relatively little profit from it.... [But] as farmers became more and more dependent on fossil fuel energy, a radical change occurred in their minds. Once focused on biology, the life and health of living things, their thinking now began to focus on technology and economics. Credit, for example, became as pressing an issue as the weather."

Warm wishes for a beautiful week,

Tonya

Sheep and Wool Festival

We took a leisurely drive down to Tunbridge for the annual Vermont Sheep and Wool Festival yesterday. The foliage was breathtaking and we enjoyed the drive, avoiding the highways and instead, going through small Vermont towns.

The pictures tell the story.

Gorgeous hand dyed yarn~

Abraham having a drink break ~

Bobbin Lacemaking , amazing~

Abby needlefelting in a cookie cutter, sponsored by a local waldorf school~

Needlefelting in a windowpane~

Sheep Shearing~