JANUARY 2012 ~ Happy New Year!!
As we head into the coldest month of the year the shares are resembling what my grandmother would prepare for us when I was a kid. Lots of soups and stews from vegetables out of the root cellar. We also ate a lot of red meat from our freezers and dessert was from the preserve pantry (usually a fruit preserved the previous summer). That’s the way my grandparents ate, most of their ingredients came from the farm, and meals were prepared from scratch. For them it was about economics. When they were young it was the cheapest way to eat and feed the family, and of course it was a healthier way to eat.
Grandma didn’t grow alfalfa sprouts. This is a newer crop that we did a few times last winter for the share. It has become a huge favourite in our house. Our new farm kitchen gives us a great facility to grow them in and we’ll be putting them in the shares for a while to come. For each share we will do a different type. Lisa will put them on everything here, salads, sandwiches, burgers, ice cream..you name it…she loves them.
But Lisa loves popcorn just a little bit more. It’s her favourite snack and the type she likes the best comes from our friends in St. Catherines. It works awesome in a hot air popper, many customers have told us it works well in oil on the stove. It works real well in Lisa’s new mini theatre style popper she got for Christmas. We go through a pile of it here, with the shorter, colder days we spend a lot of time catching up on all the movies we missed during the growing season.
Berkshire pigs will be here soon! I don’t know if they will be here in time for Saturday but we are excited just the same about their arrival. The Berkshire breed is a very hardy, out doorsy type of pig with very unique eating (meat) qualities. They are considered to be heirloom (old breed) and are difficult to find. I’ve been looking for over a year and now we’ve got some! The first ones will be ready for the meat shares in the summer.
Over Christmas we always slow it down on the farm and enjoy the holidays. We had some baby goats born over the holidays. The laying hens are coming out of a molt (low egg production period) and with the passing of the winter solstice and longer days we are seeing a few more eggs each day. We’ve got some work to do with the cattle, upgrading water systems and the never ending job of fixing fence. I’m starting to pull my notes together and get my seed order for spring in place.
If I’m starting to order seed, its time to start thinking about summer shares. In the next couple of weeks we will let you know about registration for the summer shares. Steve
