During the long Memorial Day weekend, I noticed that the raspberry canes are flowering. I looked up last year’s crop records so I could figure out just how long we’d have to wait until we started to see fruit. We brought our first harvest to farmers market on July 5, so it’ll only be about a month. Hooray!

For this week’s CSA, we have baby bok choy, lacinato kale, red spring onions, Lettuce Trio mix (Tom Thumb, Red Iceberg, Four Seasons) and beet sprouts. It’s rewarding to see more things mature, but I really enjoy hearing how our members like the food. Scott and Sara made a rosemary pizza crust, Ray’s family made a fresh salad, and Amanda and Sara sauteed radish greens at Sara’s after working on the farm.

Our kittens are venturing out of the barn, and the chickens and turkeys have been granted “roaming rights” around the yard. The turkeys are much bolder (and louder!) than the chickens, so they are often down by the house. One of the turkeys had a near-death experience on Sunday when Lexi grabbed one and started running. I quickly shut down the tractor, jumped off and caught her before any damage was done. Lucky bird. Lexi got put on lockdown for a couple of days, but I think she learned her lesson. Again.

-Brian

Dinner at our house tonight was a delish salad trio with fresh radishes and thai peanut chicken.  YUM! 

Since yesterday was our first CSA pickup, I imagine lots of people we know will be enjoying salad with radishes in the next few days.  But what can you do with radishes besides put them in a salad? 

We received a couple of very interesting recipes from one of our CSA family and we’d like to share them with you.

The first recipe is for a radish salsa.  It also calls for tomato and cilantro.  Our tomato and cilantro are not quite ready here, so you can store this recipe away and use it later, or just head out to the grocery store and buy your other ingredients now.  This link also includes a link to even more radish recipes!

The next recipe is for roasted radishes.  I have always shied away from radishes because I don’t care for the heat, but I am learning to appreciate these pretty little gems and this recipe helps since it takes away a bit of the flame. 

Another option is to carve your radishes into artwork like they do for Radish Night in Mexico.  The crafty girl in me is dying to spend an afternoon with a pile of radishes to see what I could come up with.  I’ll let you know if I ever find the time to do this! 

I’m getting hungry from all this talk of good food.  Time for a snack!

~Kelly

Or maybe that should be farmer vs. weasel?  Anyway, we had a rough week here at the farm that ended victoriously.  On Tuesday night the dreaded weasel struck again, killing 13 chickens in the coop as we slept.  Not a pretty thing to wake up to.  Determined to save the last 3 roosters and all the new chicks we had gotten days before, we patched and patched and patched every last gap in the coop.  Shame on us for not taking care of this problem before.  On Thursday, we woke up to another dead chicken.  The last two were obviously rattled and spent the day quietly hudled together outside.  More patching took place, and we were convinced that the coop was inpenetrable.  The next morning, the last of the two roosters were dead, and we were beside ourselves.  What was happening?  Where was this stupid thing getting in????  We discussed it and decided we would bring the baby chicks into the house for the night and set the small trap we purchased inside the coop with one of the chickens the weasel had killed for bait.  We surrounded the trap with boards to simulate a log (something I had read online).

This morning was a market morning, so we were up very early getting ready.  Brian went to put the baby chicks in the coop (the smell was not pretty in the house!) and came back yelling that we had gotten it!  We brought the cage out to take some pictures, and while I was snapping away, the weasel looked awfully close to weaseling out of the cage so we very quickly put an end to our weasel woes.   We hope…  I should mention we still are not positive this thing is a weasel.  It looks like it could be a mink as well, so if you know for sure, let us know.  I am just going off of the several hundreds of images that I have seen on Google!  Weasel or mink, it’s our understanding that they are pretty territorial, so we are hoping that this is the end, but just in case, we are setting the trap again tonight to make certain.

Thanks to everyone for all of the kind words of support and helpful suggestions.  We are so thankful!

~Kelly

This weekend, we had the first farmers market of the season and our CSA Orientation. What a great start to May! The kids didn’t even mind getting up at 6am on Saturday to help us load the truck.

Actually, I think that’s because they have a lot of friends at the farmers market. It’s a unique situation since a lot of the farmers bring their children, which is difficult (if not impossible) at other markets. The Village Pointe Farmers Market allows for kids to roam, play and get lots of samples from the other farmers. We really like it there.

On Sunday, we had an orientation meeting for the CSA members. Kelly baked her special chocolate chip cookies, and we toured the farm. It was fun to see the kids following the chickens and playing in the barn. Hardy and her kittens stayed tucked out of sight, even though the babies are learning how to walk.

We also increased our chicken flock this weekend, to a total of 68 birds. This weekend, we will “dispatch” a few of the roosters. We’ll have a delivery of 15 turkey poults on Wednesday or Thursday.