Deadline for orders for Delivery on November 9th is Wednesday, November 3rd!
Nancy’s Note
The warm balmy weather has been replaced by rain, rain, rain, although still quite balmy! The cows are in the fields around our house and we are feeding hay already as the drought of August prevented a lot of re-growth of the pastures. In spite of all the rain we have had, with the colder temperatures of the last few weeks, the grass is barely growing. We like to feed hay in the pastures up here on these hilly fields in the fall when we are fairly certain there will be no ice and slippery conditions for the tractor delivering the bales or for the animals’ footing. It is nice to have the cows nearby; to hear them calling each other, and to hear them calling to Colin when he arrives in the morning to let him know they are hungry. Prince Rupert the peacock is still seen here and there every day around the farm. The six little peep-peep guinea fowl we got three weeks ago are roaming all around the farm too. We got them after we hear they ate mostly bugs and so may be they will help in the garden with our cabbage moths (I hope they like slugs too!). The twelve newest weanling piglets are also roaming the farm these days. They grew enough to let them out in the pasture but they insist on walking right under the wire, stung by the shock or not, and roam in the pastures with the cows and horse and donkey. We just made the pigs a new pasture and all the rest of the 16 pigs go there to eat and root, but these little guys have a herd of their own. I just hope they stay away from the lawn and garden!!
The big project of the week is a big re-arrangement of our freezers in our North Barn near our house on Lewis Hill. We have a big 8x10 walk-in freezer filled with our beef, O’Donnell Hill Farm beef, Joint Venture chicken, and all of our farmers’ market coolers, 4 filled with beef items and 3 filled with pork items. During the preparation for delivery days, it is also filled with 12 to 20 coolers with all the frozen products in them for the particular delivery. Then, on packing day, we fill each of your orders from the coolers and when there is something left over, we made a mistake and we can find out what we might have missed. Once all the orders are packed into the boxes, they go back into the big walk-in freezer overnight so we pack all the cold boxes into the van at 5 or 6 am. This big freezer gets a lot of use and is generally pretty full.
We still have the old smaller 6x6 walk-in freezer at the Waites’ farm barn where this whole CSA business began. We use this freezer for the extra ground beef boxes so as not to take up too much room in the big freezer. We also have an 8x8 walk-in cooler where we keep all the eggs and cheeses before and after packing them all up for the delivery. Our big plan and project is to change the cooler to be a freezer so we have enough space for all the turkeys for a couple weeks and move the whole small freezer to the North Barn and turn it into a cooler. All the freezer and cooler apparatus that goes inside and outside of these big insulated boxes are maintain by the ‘freezer guys’ who will be here all day on Friday and hopefully again Monday when the small freezer is moved. We’d like to have some big progress and hopefully a smooth and easy transition. There will be a lot of lifting and moving of boxes of frozen items and hopefully when all is done, we’ll still remember where everything is!!
Here’s hoping to the coming wonderful season of holidays and festivity and fun. With this last month of deliveries every week, we are scurrying to keep up with all the ordering and packing, farm coordination and inventory details. Please be sure that you receive a confirmation order email for your turkey to make sure your order is accurate.
Thanks for all your order through the CSA season. Nancy and Alan
Turkeys
Turkeys are now available for ordering. Please use the special option for Thanksgiving Turkeys, and place the rest of your order separately. As always, just email us if you have any trouble with the system!
To EDIT your TURKEY ORDER, use the date shown in the order edit pages of 10-01-10. I know it seems a weird date, but there are reasons for it and that is where your turkey order is!! As always, there were some mistakes in the turkey program code on the website, but we are working it all out, hopefully very soon. Any problems changing your turkey order please call us.
Product Updates
- New Pork is back! Tenderloins, Boston Butt, and bacon (small packages this time) are back in! Smoked hams and ham steaks, a few smoked sirloin roasts, and just a few fresh and smoked belly slabs, are also back. We should have these on the web by the end of tomorrow.
- For beef, we’ve got the bulk sausage back! Sweet and Hot Italian and a bulk Breakfast. The sweet Italian makes some great meatballs! For those of you who haven’t taken advantage of the short ribs sale, we’ll leave it on for a little while longer, and we’ll be adding a sale on Bottom Round Roasts (see recipe below).
- Goats Milk Chevre is all done for the season, but spring isn’t too far away.
- Argyllshire Farm is expanding! Look for more cuts soon.
- Farmer Ground Flour has expanded to white flours! We will be offering (after Friday) white all-purpose, white bread, and white pastry flour.
In the News
Geo-engineering—Summit on controversial topic in Japan, where delegates are calling for a moratorium on research on large-scale projects to manipulate the climate, such as nano-particles, creating clouds from sea water, and many other ideas.