Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Hail! Cheese! And Northside Sheds!

The driveway that looks like a river.
Hello friends of Village Farm!

Rain, hail, thunder, lightning, wind, hail, rain, downpour.
We have had more than enough, to a point of being 'fed up,' with the above weather displays.
Our vegetables seem to be faring well enough though we have had some serious Remay (that white, floaty row cover) casualties.
I did see Willie head for the fields with a seeder and some seeds yesterday. There is some good news for you! We have been so wetted by downpours and days of rain that we have not sown a seed or tucked in a transplant in over a week.The continuous flow of critical CSA and wholesale crops like cilantro, dill, salad mix and lettuce depends on successional plantings all summer long. So in two weeks, you can bet we will be out of a few of these crops.

But with more seeds now in the ground, we will again, be rolling in them in three weeks.

We have just delivered our third week of CSA vegetables to our members. Our offerings were:
Choice of sugar snap or shelling peas
Choice of broccoli or cauliflower (have you tried roasting these?)
Radish bunch
Kohlrabi (for farm members)
Garlic scapes, those ephemeral treats of early summer
Dill bunch
Lettuce heads
Appleton Creamery's Cheese Share Week 3


Also on our plates and picnic blankets this week. . .Appleton Creamery Cheeses!
Wow. Last week we enjoyed every morsel of goat feta, chipotle chevre and aged manchego that arrived in our Cheese Share.  This week I can't even bring myself to eat the cheeses (yet!) Above you see Dill Chevre, Chevre wrapped in brandy infused grape leaves (!!) and aged Jack which was "invented in California during the Gold Rush. Caitlin, Appleton Creamery's cheese maven, writes, "Traditionally, the rind is rubbed with a mixture of chili powder, cocoa and olive oil. The curds are twisted in cheesecloth and pressed with simple weights, resulting in a rustic looking artisan cheese. We make it with cow's milk from Hope's Edge Farm."

Thank you, Appleton Creamery!
(It is not too late to add a cheese share to your weekly Village Farm haul. . .we will prorate the price for the fourteen weeks remaining. Give us a call.)


With all the rain, we have had to stay out of many of the gardens and so Ryan, Willie, Emma, John and Prentice have been keeping busy with plenty of other projects.


The ever-present To Do list. (Note: The broilers' feed was withheld because they were going to slaughter the next day--important step in a clean digestive tract/ crop at the butcher's.)
This is the 'oven structure' coming into being. We are readying the space for our very own earthen oven to be built in a few weeks with many, many helping hands. Stay tuned. YOU are invited.

And this lovely is yet another northside shed. . .this one for packing vegetables rather than baking pizza pies. With five or six of us buzzing about on harvest mornings, we have been tripping over each other. Not anymore!
A bit of news and newness about the place.
Best wishes from all of us at Village Farm,
Polly