Good Morning Everyone,

Follow this link to a very interesting article, it will make you think a bit before you eat another hamburger.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/31/us/31meat.html?hp

As for end of year reflections and resolutions I have just been too busy to have them or make them. Perhaps as I harvest salad today for market this Saturday I will find some time to think. Overall it has been a very challenging year on a great many levels that is finishing up with the farm and my mental state in a much improved place compared to last year at this time. 2010 is shaping up to possess a lot of promise and opportunity as long as the appropriate quantities of work and effort are applied. Hoping the month of January will allow me to actually sit and think. So much planning to get done and decisions to be made for a growing season that I sincerely hope will be warmer and sunnier than the last two. Well have to go deliver soup to Red Hen and get going.

A Happy and Safe New Year to all. Thanks to all of you for reading this intermittent rambling and buying the farms products this past year. Joe

Well here I sit. End of the year is approaching and things have not slowed down much....a good thing? Soups are doing well and so are the greenhouses. I have lost a few things in certain places so will move them next year or try other cultivars. Overall plenty of salad right now and things are looking good. Still no time to do planning yet..........

Good Morning! Finally some real snow! Forces me to slow down a bit and actually tend to the mounds of paper sitting on my desk....some of it from August. So soup and paperwork today. Just came up from loading the furnace and I must admit admiring the wood pile. We just had a huge insulation job done where they sealed every nook and cranny with dense pack cellulose. Wow what a difference so far. Should work out where the savings on fuel oil actually makes the loan payment every month. I will get out to check on the greenhouses and finally seal up the doors. I have been waiting to do that with the lack of cold temperatures until now. This weekend they are calling for single digit temps....ouch.

Well arrives this week. Scrambling like crazy to get the last few things put away or sealed up. Harvested alot of really nice baby cauliflower yesterday. I will have it at the Dec. 19th market in Montpelier. The soups sold real well and I had some very positive feedback. Any of you have a request for soup at market? Be happy to give it a try if I can source the ingredients. Delivered 200lbs of salad this morning and 10 gallons of soup. Then ran out of gas near the Intervale. Ah well, had a nice sandwich, got some gas and went on my way. Luckily not alot of walking involved. Debating whether to harvest my kale or leave it alone for another week and hope the snow we have on tap insulates it along with the remay that is covering it. I am thinking leave it until next week, fresher is better. I will go get the last of my cabbages out of the field though. They will hold just fine.

I will have CSA flyers at market on the 19th. I am only taking 15 families for the 2010 summer. Eggs will be included as well as soups and sauces like marinara and pesto. Plenty of free cooking advice if you need it also.

Well I am going to go eat dinner. I am having some of the duck I raised this summer. Man is it good!! That's another thing that I will be offering as and extra for the CSA is chicken and duck. I tried it this year and it went very well.

Joe

Good Morning all my secret readers.......hope to see all of you at the first winter market in Montpelier tomorrow. Lot's of great product coming to market with me. Winter salad mix, eggs, quarts of marinara sauce, pesto, green curry coconut squash soup served hot in a cup and quarts for take home as well as potato kale soup. I will also have some winter squash, really sweet kale, small cabbages at 3-5 lbs. The soups are made by me at the LACE kitchen in Barre and Red Hen Baking will also start selling them at their store in Middlesex.

The market is the 1st and 3rd Saturdays of each month this winter all the way through April.

Hope everyone had a great and tasty thanksgiving. This mild weather continues and it has been great for fall/winter crops. I am still harvesting from my outside fields this late in the season and the greenhouses look the best ever of my 7 years of winter growing. All my soups and sauces are being made with at least 80% local ingredients. This is a new adventure for me and I will be using all my own product or product from Dog River Farm and Littlewood Farm. So trying to keep things hyper-local.

Egg production continues to confound me. 150 birds and I am getting only 2-3 dozen eggs a day. Talk about freeloading hired help.....

Now onto my political soapbox. I have pasted a link to an article in the New York times below which quite frankly really pisses me off. Please give it a read it's fairly short. In my opinion this is exactly what is wrong with our industrial food system. Instead putting animals back on pasture where they belong and have spent thousands of years evolving to eat grass. Which means little to no E. Coli production in the animals gut we spend millions of dollars developing a vaccine that will be partially effective and continue feedlot confinement beef production. Damn!

Well gotta go.......Joe

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/04/business/04vaccine.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1259928132-SCsBbATgX5JI8Az51JC4Pg