Big Time!

Ta dah! Introducing our new bread label and packaging!  If you come to the Peoples' Food Co-op in search of our bread (and we sure hope you do), this is the label design to look for!

 Not every bakery has bread packagers dressed so spiffy!  Our baker-partner, Chris Aldis, baked this afternoon, the label stock arrived by UPS at 5 p.m.  and  Rog and I  got the labels printed for today's loaves  after he got off work tonight. He couldn't wait to even change out of his architecture duds to package the bread.

Chris baked his delicious Pain au Levain and his amazing Forbidden Honey breads this afternoon.  I have  Finnish Cardamom Braid dough rising to bake early in the morning - all will be at the co-op tomorrow morning. We will be sampling the breads  at the co-op's Holiday Open House  from 5-8p.m.

A huge thank you to Kari Dunn, talented graphic designer who brought our labels to fruition!

A Bit Fishy

We ("we" meaning "Rog") harvested the tilapia from the aquaponics fish gazebo pond today. Being tropical fish, they cannot survive water temps below 48 degrees, and it is getting cold now, so their days were numbered. Rog hasn't been fishing since we moved to the farm, 7 years ago. Until today!

First, he had to empty out some dried corn somebody had stashed in the feet of his hip waders.
Rog used a seine  net to corral the fish in a section of the pond.

Once caught in the seine, the tilapia were scooped up in a fish net (the one I use to catch errant chickens) and flipped them into a big bucket.

The catch today was 29 tilapia and a couple of koi that were caught-and-released.  There are still a few sneaky tilapia in there to be caught tomorrow.

They are so pretty, and not so big. I am sad about harvesting them.

Rog cleaned all the fish. A little  bit of blood and guts  to celebrate Halloween. 
I know they will taste delicious, but I wish we could keep them in the pond as pets.

A Day Off!

photo by  Mike Fallenstein

On Sunday, Squash Blossom Farm  hosted  "Escape From Alcina's Island,"  a Picnic Operetta on the farm, performed by Mixed Precipitation Theater.  I was quite proud of  all the weeding and  mulching I had done to beautify the veggie gardens in preparation for staging the operetta, but as luck would have it, the day turned out to be rainy, gray and stormy, so we held the performance into the  greenhouse instead. A great crowd turned out despite the rain and the performance was a delight. KTTC-TV  featured it in the news- view here.

After the Picnic Operetta, we made wood-fired pizza t while Driven by Rhythm, one of our favorite local  bands, played music. Because of the weather and the holiday, things were a bit discombobulated, and we are indebted to friends (Zoe, Connie, Tushar) who assisted with pizza and to Richard for documenting the event (those photos coming soon.)

Monday was a holiday,  Labor Day.  I believe it was the first time in about 5 months Rog and I took a day off.  Well, we did chores, of course, and finished cleaning the barn kitchen from the previous night's pizza-making,  but we also took a little nap and then took a leisurely walk around the farm. First we admired the unusually well-weeded veggie garden.

The water in the pond has dropped to its lowest level since we dug it last November.

The arrowroot and other natives I planted along the water's edge last spring are currently high and dry, but seem to be surviving  just fine.

Lots of deer tracks around this watering hole!

The creamy bottle gentian, blue bottle gentian, and this cross of  creamy and blue that comes out pink, are at peak bloom in the prairie.

Still plenty of gnomes and fairies to be found in the forgotten fairy garden.

Sumac are looking like fall already.

Lots of both blue and white lobelia (cardinal flower) blooming in the prairie right now.

Not to mention, a sea of goldenrod. There is a small opening in the  woods where the red barn shows through.

Rog inspected the hops growing on the farm store pergola.

Just about ready to harvest.

Rog discovered three nice puffballs growing right in the  backyard - they must have  popped up after Sunday's rain.

We sliced the puffballs and sauteed them in a bit of butter with garlic, onions, tomatoes, sweet red pepper, basil and squash blossoms from the garden, and a bit of parmesan, tossed them with linguine and devoured our concoction under the patio gazebo. A delicious dinner to end to a lovely work holiday.

Sunday Farm Breakfast

Rog sent me out to the garden and greenhouse this morning to  harvest soem greens, herbs and nasturtiums for his special breakfast concoction.

The nasturtiums and alpine strawberries are thriving in the aquaponics towers.

Breakfast consisted of  a frittata  slathered with pureed garden tomatoes and chives and a bit of homemade mozzarella, covered in greens (baby chard, nasturtium leaves, beet greens and mizuna) and served with Rog’s wood-fired sourdough toast. So pretty!

A peek under the greens. Thanks. babe! Thanks LaFonda and chickens!

We are on the steep, downhill side of summer now, which makes me feel wistful when I think about it.  But I try not to think about it and just savor the days, which have been so lovely.  Our lives are a colorful, crazy jumble, sort of like this  chaos in the bee/butterfly/hummingbird garden.

The garden is now providing beans galore, cucumbers, summer squash, greens of every ilk, garlic and the first tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants and peppers. This was yesterday’s pretty CSA box.

LaFonda’s  sweet little calf, Splotch, has grown so much and is beginning to look like a little steer. The past week he has been having occasional scours (diarrhea) of a type which I believe is caused by gluttony, drinking too much rich, creamy milk.

So, I got these giant pills, called boluses, for simple scours

and I am getting pretty good at making him swallow them.

The boluses must have suppressed his appetite for a couple of days. LaFonda gave me a whopping 6 gallons of milk for those days, twice as much as usual. Her udder was so huge! But everyone is back to normal now, thank goodness.

Our wonderful WWOOFers, Lynette and Jessica, have gotten the garden into great shape, and so with the abundance of milk have been experimenting with making skyr (an Icelandic yogurt made with rennet) and hard cheeses.

Today we tasted Lynette’s first wheel of  manchego ( a cheese which can be eaten fresh or aged.)  Absolutely delicious!

Jessica relaxes for  moment with Orange.

The meat chickens are approaching harvest weight.  Today we nabbed a a big one and weighed him - he was 7 pounds, which will be about 5.5  processed. I made a processing appointment for two weeks from now. These are f really  sweet birds, and I love how they are at the stage when they make kazoo sounds. It will be sad to harvest them.

According to our  cupola which has the year 1914 embossed into it, this is the 100th birthday of our barn.

We think the barn is actually considerably older than that, but we took advantage of the opportunity to  celebrate a centennial birthday and invited neighbors and previous farm owners.

Bg barn birtday cake - red velvet. I am a bit embarrassed it wasn’t homemade, but it was tasty.

It is tomaoto tart season!!

And if that is not enough to make your mouth water, here is the delectable supper Lynette made for us tonight:

Garlic fried eggs, fresh manchego cheese on sourdough rye toasts with gooseberry jam, roasted pepper-olive-walnut tapenade, sliced cucumbers, roasted eggplant. All the ingredients except  the walnuts and kalamata olives came from the farm!

Life is pretty darn good at Squash Blossom Farm.

End of an Era

My Grandma Waughtal’s bread mixing bowl met its demise today in the line of duty while baking for market.

I have been  using this bowl for almost 35 years, since around 1980, when my grandma moved to live with with my aunt and uncle in Oregon and my sister Rita moved into Grandma’s house for a year. She said I should have it because I was the one in the family who baked bread. I always thought it was one of Grandma’s wedding presents, but I don’t know if it was quite that old.

This was the bowl that Grandma always made her famous cinnamon roll dough in. We kids spent many an afternoon spent drinking milky tea and devouring hot cinnamon rolls while playing Scrabble with Grandma. She mixed her chocolate chip cookie dough in it (the last pan of cookies ALWAYS  burned on the bottom, but we assured her we liked them that way). This bowl has memories of  Dilly Bread, baked in coffee cans, associated with it, too. Both of my daughters requested to inherit the bowl.  I found the same bowl only in better shape on EBay and told them one would get the original and one would get another, more perfect, version. Now they will both get lovely copies.

Never fear, this noble bowl will continue in my life--it will go on to becoming art, in some as-yet-to-be-determined mosaic project. 

Summer Projects & Progress

A Few Recent Farm Projects:

Gordita, the gourd-headed scarecrow, finally got a new outfit, She now has red rubber garden boots!

I don’t think I ever posted  a photo of my very first welding project, this heavy-duty trellis made from elaborate ornamental ironwork scraps. (I hung the ceramic mask from Mexico on it.)

A sweet little  thrift store plant stand find.

Two matching iron headboards  are now a fence in front of the chicken coop.

Fairy garden in a metal bowl.

One of those Pinterest ideas I had to try. Rog is not very fond of it--he thinks we have too many cockeyed, askew structures on the farm already.

We inherited these three amusing (but comfortable), patriotic tractor seat stools from a friend.

Garden Update:
The gardens are looking glorious, thanks mostly to our awesome WWOOFers. They are weeding machines!

The lilies and wildflowers along the  driveway are stunning.

Healthy tomato plants, laden with fruit.

WWOOFer Jessica whipped the granary flower garden into shape before the wedding a week ago.

The large pepper and tomato sculptures (that often cause people to do a double-take) are back in the garden.

Currants will be ripe soon.

We have begun to harvest the first zucchinis and squash blossoms from the straw bale plantings.

Calla lilies.

Red Russian kale.

A salad from te garden for last night’s supper -- featuring  mesclun salad mix, large purple radishes,  Egyptian walking onions, baby zucchini and squash blossoms.

Splotch, the calf, is growing fast and is  much larger than Zinnie (our collie/border collie pooch) now.  He was banded today -- a life-changing event that makes him a steer, not a bull.  He gets to nurse from LaFonda, and even though we are milk-sharing with him, we are still getting  3.5 to 4 gallons of milk per day.

Our newest WWOOFer, Lynette, learned how to make  mozzarella and  ricotta cheese from the fresh cow’s milk.

Lynette has also  transformed the barn stage into a yoga studio. (A great way to work out the kinks after a hard day of weeding.)  Zinnie is waiting for “downward dog.”

Rog finished digging (through rock!) and pouring the footings in the north end of the barn,  they passed  inspection, and the Lull came to move the 2 1/2 ton  oven into place.

The oven is successfully sited in the barn-- the first major, visible step in constructing our commercial kitchen!

Once this oven is operating, it will be able to bake 60 loaves of bread at a time.  I will need to step up my game and expand my bread-baking repertoire!   I made some fancy roasted garlic sourdough boules last week for the Farmers Market --it’s a start.