 February 2010 Newsletter Volume 5, Issue 2
Dunlooken Farm Extra
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I don't understand why Cupid was chosen to represent Valentine's Day. When I think about romance, the last thing on my mind is a short, chubby toddler coming at me with a weapon. ~Author Unknown
Hope you had a Happy Valentine’s Day! Last year at this time we were celebrating Megan and David’s wedding on the beach in Cancun, Mexico. This year we’re celebrating snow and ice here at home! There has been a lot of digging out, and very pretty mornings.
The Animals
February is also the start of kidding season with 12 does to freshen (to come into a fresh flow of milk) and the joy of little kids. We have a number of does that will be kidding for the first time from new bucks. This means that we’ll finally get a good idea of where our breeding program is going. Did we make the right decision when we purchased our Togg and Saanen bucks or did we set back our herd for years to come? We don’t need to go to the casinos; we have all the gambling we can handle in raising dairy goats!
We have a number of baby goats on the ground just now with 7 more due to kid this week. We lost one of our best Saanen does. She must have torn while kidding because she died from blood loss. This is the part of keeping livestock that I hate. It happens, there’s nothing you can really do about it, but I still hate it. She did leave us two nice little buck kids and one beautiful doeling. Shannon’s best old Toggenburg doe gave us two doe kids but one has a problem. She has a front leg that won’t straighten. I’ve had this happen before but they weren’t this bad. We’ll keep working with her and hope that she makes a full recovery. Here are some baby goat pictures, they are VERY cute when they are SO little!
The male turkey has really been strutting his stuff the last couple of days. I sure hope we can get some eggs to hatch this year. I’d love to be able to offer turkeys for Thanksgiving. Some of the hens are laying. I love the feel of a nice freshly laid egg in my hand. I hate the feeling of a freshly broken egg in my jacket pocket but it seems to have happened a lot the last few days.
Also, the puppies, Clifford and Cleo, are growing fast! They are already Hunter’s size! These puppies are only 4 months old!!
The CSA and Gardens
Shannon and I with our friend and sometimes garden help, Savannah, attended the Sustainable Agriculture conference on the 20th. It was interesting as usual but more political. The recommendation of our head speaker, Minnesota’s Secretary of State, Mark Richie, was to get politically involved. The squeaky wheel gets the grease and if we don’t make ourselves and our needs known we’ll find more laws that work against us being passed. The one interesting story I remember is a restaurant in Minneapolis being stopped by the city from buying chicken from a farmer’s market as this was illegal. That is it was until they found out that Minnesota had a law forbidding the Minneapolis law. What a mess! There are some food safety laws currently on the docket of congress (S. 510, HR 1334), the gov’t wants traceability for all food, good idea for big manufactures that do a lot of shipping, not a good idea when you’re buying from someone you meet in person. We’ll see… http://www.ftcldf.org/federal_bills.htm Here is a link, if you are interested in getting involved. Note Ron Paul has initiated a bill to allow for the sale and transport of raw milk. You can sign a petition from this site and email it to our congressman. Half of all state has laws that make it illegal to sell raw milk, MN isn’t one of them.
I finally got all the seed ordered. We’ll send our CSA members a complete list as soon as the seeds arrive. There’s always something I’ve forgotten or something that I’ve ordered is no longer available. Shannon wants to try celery again and there are plants available at the greenhouse that starts our seed but I’m also trying leaf celery. Leaf celery is also called: cutting celery, parcel, smallage, Zwolsche Krul, and German celery. It’s the same species as the celery you know from the grocery store, just a different variety. If it grows as well as I expect it to I’ll give you tips on how to use it later.
All the seeds that the greenhouse starts for us should go out to them the second week of March. They start all our tomatoes, peppers, and cole crops. We also buy some of our plants from them. It would be nice to have the facilities so that we could do all that ourselves but it’s also nice to have someone else do some of the work. And for what they cost us, it would take a LONG time to pay for a greenhouse with it.
I read an article this week that was very disparaging of CSA and eating local. The basic premise of the article was that it was impossible for a normal 21st century family to have the time to eat this way. That also reminded me of a comment I’d heard about early 20th century cookbooks; “they must have eaten lots of desserts!” I found an interesting article at: http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/housework.cfm
It gives some interesting insight to housework in a time when all food was local and seasonal. After reading that life suddenly seemed much easier!
I certainly agree that eating real food takes more time and effort than popping some processed something into the microwave. But I also wonder if something as basic as eating should be so easy and thoughtless. Shouldn’t it take some time and effort and shouldn’t it be eaten with love and appreciation?
Recipe of the Month: Food Thoughts
Those old cookbooks did contain a lot of recipes for desserts and for pickles because those were about the only things you needed a recipe for! Most meats were roasted or broiled or boiled. Most veggies were baked or boiled with nothing more than some butter, salt and pepper though if you were a proper American Swede you probably creamed the vegetables and you didn’t use pepper. My mother and aunts creamed mostly peas and potatoes. They didn’t make a white sauce they just put a bit of butter, a bit of flour and stirred them around in the drained peas and then added a bit of milk. I know that they measured nothing.
So relax and eat your veggies with just a dash of salt and pepper and a bit of real butter and don’t worry so much about “cooking”. One of my favorite summer suppers is one my aunts would never have made but it’s very good and very quick and very easy. I just cook up some pasta of whatever variety is sitting in the pantry. While it’s cooking I chop up a few tomatoes of whatever variety is sitting on the counter, some zucchini, a bit of onion and green pepper and perhaps a hot pepper and throw it all on the pasta after it’s drained. Add a bit of salt and slurp to your heart’s content! And there isn’t anything easier than soup, find some stock, throw edible stuff in and heat!
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