Farm Update

Hi Everyone,

After an impromptu survey of Tuesday's customers at the farm, we found out that most would have purchased corn if we had any available. I took this as a staggering defeat in my marketing strategy and took action immediately. We have corn today (Wednesday) through Sunday. If the corn sign is out the corn is in the building.

Most have let my macho male ego slide after the last update email about Vicky not allowing me to pick beans anymore because of my ineptness. Of course, there were a few that marched in and asked, "Hey Steve, how's the bean picking going!"

A couple of questions have popped up as a result of the Chicken email. The answers:

1...Yes, you have to buy the whole chicken.

2...Yes, you can order in advance.

3...Yes, we will normally have some on hand for purchase.

4...Yes, we will do a hundred about every three to four weeks with the last group in November

5...No, the chickens don't swim in the pool and do cannonballs off the diving board.

Available now:

Tomatoes-heirlooms, conventional and romas

Onions

Green Beans

Garlic

Arugula

Basil

Red and White potatoes

Zucchini

Yellow Summer Squash

Cucumbers

Corn

Chicken

Eggs

Honey

Everything produced and grown here at the farm except the corn from Maple Border Farm in White Hall and the raw honey from Cybee's in Jarrettsville.

The weather is beautiful. Come see us!

Vicky and Steve

Chicken

Let’s talk chicken.

Over the last few years we have grown and sold broilers, or as we refer to them as “meat chickens”. We have always broken even or lost a little bit on the venture. At the beginning of 2013, Vicky said I was crazy to spend the time and money raising the birds to get no return. I enjoy doing it, but as usual, she was right, so we decided to not raise the broilers anymore except for our own consumption. Upon making the announcement that we were out of the broiler business, depressed voices were heard from far and wide. Chicken customers were saddened, outraged and emotionally distraught. Some of the quotes were: “My kids can tell when I serve store bought chicken and won’t eat it.” “Rousedale chicken is so tender, juicy and tasty!” “I’ve heard Steve sleeps in the chicken house when they’re having bad raccoon dreams. That’s the kind of love we want our chickens to receive!”

Anyway, I couldn’t take the pressure, the tears and quite frankly the threats. So we are back in the chicken business!

We are a small farm. We can only do 100 broilers at a time, to raise them the way we feel they should be raised. That leaves us out of buying much of our feed, litter, etc. by bulk. We spend more time with our chickens each day making sure they have clean water, fluffing their litter, running fans properly to cool them, and getting them outside to range on grass, bugs and grit. As a result of these things, our prices have to be a bit higher than some other small farmers in the business. We think that the lives the chickens get to have here and the final product you receive is worth the price.

We will only sell whole birds. They can remain whole or cut up in parts. If you purchase multiple cut up birds, the parts can be packaged any way you would like. You can have the whole cut up bird vacuum packed in one package or, for instance, if you would like 6 birds cut up that would give you:

12 split breasts

12 drumsticks

12 thighs

12 wings

Packaged any way you want. Everything is vacuumed packed. Most whole birds will run between 4 and 4.5 pounds. Cut up gives you about 2.5 to 3 pounds.

The pricing is:

$4.50 per pound for a whole chicken

$6.50 per pound for a cut up whole chicken packaged any way you would like

$8.40 per pound if you opt for boneless breasts rather than bone in breasts on your cut up chicken

Please email or call with any questions.

That concludes the chicken email.

Vicky and Steve

Prices Slashed!

Hi Folks,

Today (Friday) through Sunday, due to excellent pollination, the price of zucchini, yellow squash, yellow zucchini and our zephyr squash is 75 cents a pound. Marked down from $1.99 per pound. Cucumber prices have been cut from $1.69 per pound to 50 cents a pound.

Come and get it!!

Vicky and Steve

Farm Update

Hi Everyone,

It's so much more comfortable this week working outside. We actually had a couple of days the farm pond was not even used for cooling off purposes.

The green beans are coming in beautifully and Vicky is picking them about every other day. She won't allow anyone else to pick her precious beans. We have a few people that help around the farm occasionally who, I have suggested, could help her with the bean picking, but she refuses the help. She even fired me from bean picking today when I pulled a little to hard on a bean and a stem of the plant broke off. That wasn't bad enough for her, but apparently I left some perfectly good beans on the plant that, "Will be too big in another two days! How could you miss these!!" I decided my place was on the other side of the farm for a while.

Expect an email devoted to our chicken and chicken prices soon. After much thought and figuring, it seems that we have finally come up with a plan that we feel will work.

We had a visitor who eats a vegan diet, but has found that she needs to add a little meat for health purposes. She is very concerned with the way the animals are raised and treated. I took her outback for a tour of our broiler chicken complex. Chickens were running around chasing bugs. Three were giving themselves dust baths in the sand of the horseshoe pits. One was on his way to the diving board of the swimming pool to take a dip, when I halted his progress. I thought that might be showing off a bit. I think her comment was, "They certainly look happy." I'm willing to put our system up against any other when it comes to treating the birds humanely.

We will have corn beginning tomorrow (Thursday) through the weekend.

Please come and visit us this week and weekend. We have:

Green Beans

Red and White Potatoes

Corn

Just the beginning of the tomatoes

Beets

Green Peppers

Onions

Garlic

Yellow squash

Zucchini

Cucumbers

Carrots

Arugula

Thank you for choosing us to be your farmer.

Vicky and Steve

Farm Update

Hi Everyone,

Hot enough for ya!! We decided to come in for a spell this afternoon after 8 changes of shirts three dips in the farm pond and practically drinking the well dry.

WE WILL HAVE CORN TODAY (FRIDAY) BEGINNING AT 10AM AND THROUGH THE WEEKEND! Or while it lasts.

The tomatoes are slowly coming. It will be at least another week the Queen of all Tomatoes has told me. Tomatoes do not ripen in temps above 85. That's the educational portion of our program today.

We have stopped trapping raccoons for a while. With the chickens in lock-down mode at night, we have stopped losing them. More work for us every night, but the chickens live and are way less stressed.

I'm not sure how to tactfully say this...but I have been having intimate relations with the summer squash. There I said it. About two weeks ago it seemed we weren't getting much fruit (squash) from all the blossoms we were seeing on the squash plants. I investigated and where last year I noticed our bees in practically every blossom, this year I noticed a couple of bumble bees and that was it. We googled our problem and lack of pollination was a probable culprit. I looked at Vicky and she looked at me and she said, "Honey you are the man for the job!" I was happy she thought of me that way and swaggered out to the squash plants to do my thing. Each plant has male blossoms and female blossoms. Only the female blossom grow fruit. If you cut off a male blossom (they look different than the female) cut off the petals to expose the stamen, which has pollen on it, and uh,,um..ok I'm getting into dangerous territory.....pull back the petals of the female flower and rub the top of the stamen on the inside portion of the female, you have just pollinated the plant. I now consider myself an expert pollinator. If you visit this weekend you will see an endless supply of my work!!

Ok, I really need to rest now....and maybe have a cigarette..

.

Available now:

Corn (tomorrow)

Zucchini

Yellow Squash

Cucumbers

Red Potatoes

White Potatoes

Carrots (small little poppers)

Beets (limited this weekend)

Arugula (very spicy)

Green Beans

Onions

Garlic

Green Peppers

Honey

Eggs

Still waiting for the last of the blueberries to ripen.

Vicky and Steve

This Weekend

Hi Everyone,

As we sit here at lunch time watching the rain, we thought we would give you an update. Vicky's supposed to be picking beans and I digging potatoes, but it's a bit wet at the moment. Rocky 5 was captured Sunday and I've determined I could catch a raccoon every night for eternity if I wanted to. We have stopped trapping as I have a new system in place where we can lock up all the chickens safely at night. I guess we will have to surround the corn field with traps when it's ready to pick. The raccoons LOVE corn.

Speaking of corn. We will start having sweet corn next weekend 7/19-7/21. The corn is Silver King a non-GMO hybrid that has been around for years and is really tasty. The corn is grown on the Maple Border Farm in White Hall. We will have some of our own corn in a few weeks, but we just don't have the space to plant a large amount.

With the demise of our apiary, we have hooked up with Forest Hill bee keeper extraordinaire Cybil Preston. We have available now local raw honey! It's packaged conveniently in 12 ounce honey bear jars for easy pouring.

We are open until 7 this evening and will be open 8-8 Saturday and Sunday. Regular week day hours are 9-7.

Available now:

Green Beans (when it stops raining)

Potatoes

Green Bell Peppers

Sweet Onions

Garlic

Yellow Squash

Zucchini

Cucumbers (half price at .80 cents a pound) WOW what a deal!!

Beets

Carrots

Honey

Hope to see you this weekend!

Vicky and Steve

This week

Hi All,

I know it's probably hard to believe but we have been doing a few things other then chasing chicken predators around and trying to rid ourselves of these darn Japanese beetles! When you come down the drive to the farm, you'll notice a lot of covers on a lot of things. That's mostly because of the Japanese Beetles. Rocky 5 was captured Saturday night and released Sunday. We wish we had taken some pictures of the release. We let him out of the trap and he took off across a field of knee high grass and a couple of trees. He started to climb the first tree he came to, but came right down after a couple of feet and looked at us from behind the tree. Then he ran another twenty feet and we saw this masked face pop up above the grass level and looked at us again. It's just like us humans to put our minds into the head of a raccoon with a brain the size of an almond and who knows what he was thinking. It looked to us like he was saying, " Are you sure you want me to go? Are you positive? Oh, OK." No more sign of the hawk out back. We actually put the scarecrow, now dubbed scarehawk, behind the back barn by the broilers. We're also trying to show a little more human activity by walking back there more often and talking to ourselves loudly during the day to thwart any more attacks. If anyone happened to be in the woods behind the barn listening, I'm sure they would think we were nuts! I believe I had a conversation with a shovel out there today.

The blueberries are picked out until the late bushes ripen. That should be in a couple of weeks. We dug all the garlic this past weekend. There's about 1500 bulbs. About 300 German Red and the rest is Music, our favorite. The next couple of days will be spent sorting, tying and hanging the garlic in the barn to dry and cure. The garlic is usable fresh, it's amazing really, you just have to peel the cloves rather than pull the paper off them

This week along with our eggs we have:

Zucchini

Yellow Squash

Cucumbers

Beets

Carrots

Onions

Fresh Garlic

Green Beans will be picked and ready on Wednesday after noon

All organically grown!

Open 9-7 each day.

Hope everyone had a nice fourth!

Vicky and Steve

Onions

WOW!! Onions looking good!

Tomorrow

Hi All,

Here's the deal on the blueberries for tomorrow.....The early and mids have been picked and slowing down. The later variety is not all ripe yet. If you are expecting to come and pick a ton of blueberries, tomorrow is not going to be your day. If, on the other hand, you are looking to pick just a pint or two and want to get outside for a bit, tomorrow will work. We will be open from 9a-noon tomorrow 7/6 for light picking.

We have salad greens and garlic scapes. The squashes and cucumbers are coming in and we should have some by next Wednesday. We are pulling onions today and there should be some available next week as well. We are digging garlic today. Beets are about ready.

Our egg production has increased a bit especially in Coop 1. Those girls were hardly paying their way. We decided to try something that we had read about years ago, playing classical music in the coop. Now, I didn't grab my cello and Vicky her Stradivarius, we hung a radio in the coop with the classical station on softly. It's only been a week, but we have gone from a daily take of 17 eggs in there to 28 yesterday! We'll see if it continues. If it does, all the layers will be relaxing to Brahms, Bach and Beethoven soon.

On the raccoon front...Rocky 3 and 4 were captured and released this past week. There was nothing in the trap this morning. When we returned after releasing Rocky 4, I heard squealing out back and sprinted out to find a huge Red Tailed Hawk grabbing one of the broiler chickens. I got there in time to save the chicken and scare off the hawk, but it made me stop and think, My gosh what's next a a saber toothed tiger!!! This is one of the reasons why you don't see a lot of truly free range product and why it costs a bit more.

OK to summarize....

Light blueberry picking tomorrow 7/6 from 9-noon

Salad greens and scapes available now

Laying hens in tuxedos

Broiler chickens running for their lives

Open 9-7 each day.

Vicky and Steve

Blueberry Picking

The blueberry area will be open tomorrow evening 7/3 from 6pm-8pm for picking.

Vicky and Steve