Had a surprisingly poor hatch. Candling the a few days before hatch looked good, but only 4% made it through the egg. Gruesome detective work taking place tomorrow.
bad hatch
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Strange egg inside of another egg video
Sometimes an egg will get pushed back up into the egg forming part of the oviduct, and be re-wrapped in a whole new shell. This is pretty rare, so get a load of the video:
Fertile or infertile eggs
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Gallery of our Lettuce Varieties
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Sunday planting
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Yesterday we picked up almost a ton of horse manure. Today will be compost building day. We direct seeded 400′ of spinach. We should have a harvest around the end of march from this planting. We started 6 more flats of Red and Green Cabbage, Brussels Sprouts, Broccoli, Chinese Cabbage, and Kholrabi, and one plug try of mixed lettuce.
The morning market
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We won’t have chard, spinach or tatsoi at the Douglass Loop Farmers Market in the morning because today’s pick will all be over at The Root Cellar. We’ll still have lots of frozen, free-range, chemical free chicken, tasty eggs, kale and lettuce. We’ll be setting up outside just for tomorrow, then we’ll be back inside next week.
Farm Bucks: What you’re helping us buy
As with a traditional CSA, we take pre-growing season sign-up so that we can avoid going into debt to get moving on the season. We’ve got expenses that need to be covered before there are many veggies growing, which leads us into a cash-flow crunch.
I find contributing easier when I know what I’m in for. With that, in mind, here is what your Farm Bucks are going to help us pay for. If you want to know what your specific dollars are going towards, you can ask when you sign up.
- tiller attachment to our Grillo
- wheel hoe for weed control
- propane for weed control
- picking and packing supplies (washing bins, boxes, bags, bands)
- seeds
- a new pasture coop for the chickens
- new nest boxes
what’s for dinner?
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Guessing Game
Here’s a new game. The winner gets $5 in farm bucks. Respond in a comment below so your guess is recorded and time stamped. The closest without going over wins. In ties, the first answer wins. The winner will be picked by Wednesday Jan 25 2012, so you have time to come the the following market at douglass loop.
What was the weight of our heaviest cooler from the last chicken processing day? This cooler is large (4′ x 2′ x’2 estimated), and had chicken and ice when weighed. One Tom can move this cooler around thoughtfully, as it is heavy enough to ruin a person’s day, but is still able to be lifted.
setting onion and leek seeds
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Lamb Burgers
Tom recently cleaned one of our 2011 lambs (accidental death). We got around 20 pounds of bone-in meat, such as legs, shoulder, ribs etc. And another 2 lbs of ground meat which we seasoned. We cut the meat into small cubes, seasoned it, and let it sit in the fridge overnight. Then we put it through our meat grinder twice. From there you can patty and freeze it, which we did with some, or fry it in a skillet. I served it on top of plain english muffins (see my english muffin recipe and omit raisins), with tzatziki. Tom says it tasted just like Gyro meat, or Shawarma.
- 1 onion, diced
- 2 pounds ground lamb
- 1 tablespoon minced garlic
- 1 teaspoon dried oregano
- 1 teaspoon ground cumin
- 1 teaspoon dried marjoram
- 1 teaspoon ground dried rosemary
- 1 teaspoon ground dried thyme
- 1 teaspoon ground black pepper
- 1-2 teaspoons sea salt
For tzatziki, I simply peel and seed one medium cucumber, dice and mix with 2 teaspoons of salt and a tablespoon of minced onion. Let it sit for 5 minutes then squeeze all the *liquid from the cucumbers. Combine the cucumbers with about 1 cup of yogurt and add a dash of cayenne pepper and cumin, or Tabasco brand hot sauce.
*reserve the liquid and use it to flavor foods.
English Muffins
Raisin English MuffinsRaisin English Muffin with Butter
We all associate certain foods with memories. Around winter time/the holidays, my favorite foods are white grapefruit, the family frosted sugar cookies, and raisin english muffins. My mom for at least one winter of my life, I think year 11, purchased what felt like an endless supply of raisin english muffins and I decided that was my food of choice for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I remember curling up on the sofa, it’s snowing, I’m enjoying a buttery muffin, and watching the Rankin/Bass production of Rudolph, probably chasing the muffin with a grapefruit. Since going gluten free (Food For Life makes a GF raisin english muffin), I haven’t had much of a chance to eat those types of foods. Refusing to pay nearly a dollar per muffin, I decided to make these at home. I modified this recipe from The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, 1935.
1 cup of bread flour
1 cup of whole wheat flour
1 scant Tablespoon of instant-rise yeast
Mix together in large mixing bowl or kitchen aid mixer bowl.
1/2 cup scalded milk
1 cup water
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
In a Pyrex 2 cup, scald the milk in the microwave. Add the cup of water, salt and sugar, stir. Combine with flour/yeast mixture, beat well. Let rise to double in bulk, about 30-35 minutes. Add:
3 Tablespoons of Canola (or other mild flavored) oil
1 cup of bread flour
1 cup of whole wheat flour
1/2 cup of raisins (optional)
Let your kitchen aid knead the dough thoroughly, 5-10 minutes, till the raisins start falling out of the dough. Let rise till double, another 30 minutes.
The key to a good rise is to boil a pot of water on the stove while the dough is kneading, transfer the covered dough, and the pot of water to your oven.
Sprinkle a work surface with cornmeal and roll out dough till 3/4 inch thick. Cut out rounds with a cutter, or a clean can from your recycling bin.
Heat a large heavy bottom skillet over medium heat. Butter well, and fry muffins in pan for 15 minutes, turning several times during cooking. You want to bake them, but not severely brown the muffins. If your muffins are getting too brown, turn them more frequently, turn down the heat, or transfer them to the oven at 375 degrees F. for the remaining cook time. The slower you cook them the fewer the nooks and crannies, but they still taste just as good. Makes 16. I like to then toast mine on the top and smother in salted butter. My mom likes hers with butter cinnamon and sugar.
Easy as Pie-Crust
I have never been good at making pie crust. I just don’t have the patience to cut in butter to flour for a really flaky crust. And I just can’t use hydrogenated oil, no Crisco for me. Nor do I wish to use lard, unless it were from my own pigs.
But in one of the last issues of Cook’s Country I came across a pie crust recipe that makes a delicious crust good for savory and sweet pies.
1/2 cup sour cream, chilled
1 large egg, lightly beaten
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
12 T. unsalted butter, cut into 1/2 inch pieces and chilled
Combine sour cream and egg in bowl. Process flour and salt in food processor until combined. Add butter and pulse until only pea size pieces remain, 6-10 pulses. Add half of sour cream mixture and pulse until combined, 6 pulses. Add remaining sour cream mixture and pulse until dough begins to form, 6-10 pulses.
Transfer mixture to a lightly floured counter and knead briefly until dough comes together. Divide dough in half and form each half into 4-inch disk. Wrap each disk in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 1 hour or up to 2 days.
Remove 1 dough disk from refrigerator and let sit for 10 minutes. Working on lightly floured surface, roll into 12 inch round and transfer to 9 inch pie plate leaving 1/2 inch overhang all around. Repeat with second dough disk and transfer to parchment lined rimmed baking sheet, refrigerate for 30 minutes.
At this point it’s ready to fill any way you like. I end up baking most pies at 375 degrees F. for about 45 minutes.
Seasonal Quiche
Quiche; Leek and Goat Cheese
I love eggs! You may have heard my joke about the reason I started dating Tom was that he had chickens. There is nothing better to an egg lover than never having to pay for good eggs again. Quiche is a great way to make eggs. It’s a good meal for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. My only regret is that for what you get, it uses relatively few eggs. But like pizza in the summer, Quiche is a great way to use what you have on hand seasonally.
Start by making the crust, see “Easy as Pie-Crust” recipe. For Quiche you will be using one crust, the recipe makes two. Either save the other crust, make two Quiche or use the second crust to make something else (see future post Mixed Berry Pie).
Filling:
4 eggs beaten
2 cups milk
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3 eggs
1 1/2 cups milk, if you have a small pie plate
1/2 to 1 teaspoon salt
Add to this any combination of sauteed vegetables and 1 1/2 cups shredded cheese, see below for a few ideas.
Cheddar and caramelized onions
Leek and Goat Cheese
Spinach, garlic and Feta
Kale, Red onion and Swiss
Make sure the vegetables have cooled from cooking, and you have pulsed till nearly pureed in your food processor before adding the eggs and milk, and stirring in cheese. Pour into pie shell and bake at 375 for about 45 minutes, till top is gold and bubbly. Serves 6, if you have a side dish (like salad and fruit), otherwise, it serves 3.
January Newsletter
Happy New Year 2012!
Here we are going into year 4 of the farm and year 3 of market production. Our Winter Market, The Douglass Loop Farmers’ Market, starts up again on January 14th, hours are 10-1. Tom’s headed to the chicken processor again this Tuesday and we’ll have fresh chicken for that week, including at the market.
Tom and Sarah, plus one
Our high tunnel is still producing lettuce, kale, spinach, and a few other goodies. Look here for some photos of what we’re growing. Our chickens are still producing plenty of eggs. But we will be taking a break from our baking until the spring markets start up in April/May. We will be offering our standard vanilla and lemon pound cakes, and Challah bread by special order. If you want to place an order for baked goods, call ahead by Wednesday for the Saturday market. We will also have our crafts, it’s finally getting cold enough for 
hats.
Tom and I are still encouraging our customers to support our farm by purchasing “Farm Bucks.” See our page for more information. Tom has had trouble finding outside employment compatible with his farming hours, and being in the down season we are having a hard time raising the money needed to sustain the farm and get things geared up for the spring. Farm Bucks are a way we can get that income we need now, and offer discounts and priority status to our valued customers. We also still have openings for the “work for your share” program. With a baby coming soon we’ll need all the help we can get on the farm.
Tom was able to butcher one of our 2011 spring lambs and hopefully soon we’ll be able to offer USDA butchered mutton and lamb. We still have sheep roving for sale for all you spinners and felters. And we have rams for sale if you are interested in having your own personal lawn mowers and fleece producers.
Due to mild weather, we have already missed some great Maple sap collection. If you’d like to help out with collection and cooking of sap, just let us know.
Our Garlic Guru, Debra, has her own Facebook page on her endeavor, The Salt River Garlic Company. Debra and the Toms have put in a lot of time on the fall planting and hope to have a huge early summer production.
Other miscellaneous things for sale include fire wood, laying hens/stew hens, and we are firing up our incubator again if you are interesting in hatching a flock.
We look forward to farming another year, and hope to exceed your expectations on the delicious bounty of our local, fresh, and chemical free food.
Today, in the high tunnel
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Breakfast Casserole (naturally gluten free)
I made this to take to a holiday brunch recently and it was a huge hit. I thought with all the other food we’d be bringing back a lot of leftovers, but with only 10 people we managed to nearly eat it all. It was that good. I wanted to add peppers to this but was unsure of the crowd.
You could shred the potatoes yourself to avoid all the additives, but you will have to go through the trouble of washing, peeling, shredding (I use a food processor), and then squeezing all the excess liquid out of the potatoes (see my recipe for potato pancakes), and the shreds will turn brown, but this will not be apparent in the finished product. I do buy block cheese and shred it in my processor to avoid additives, plus it melts better.
2 lb bag of frozen, shredded Hash Browns *GF get generic, Ore Ida has gluten
1 lb of MSG free pork sausage, we buy locally raised
1 large onion, diced
5 large eggs, we use our chicken eggs
1/2 cup of milk
12 oz. sharp cheddar cheese, shredded
1 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. ground black pepper
1 tsp. garlic powder
Spread hash browns out on a large cookie sheet and place in the oven on warm while you prep the rest. In a large skillet over medium high heat brown the sausage and onion. If there is fat, drain it. If you use lean sausage you will need to add 2 Tbs. canola oil to brown, and use high heat.
Remove potatoes from oven and set temperature to 350 degrees F. Transfer the thawed potatoes to a greased lasagne baking dish, combine sausage and onion with potatoes. Add in 1/2 the shredded cheese. In a large mixing bowl, beat the eggs, beat in the milk and spices and pour over potato mixture. Layer the remaining cheese on top and bake, covered with foil, for 35 minutes. Remove foil and crank up the heat to 375, bake for another 15 minutes (till cheese begins to bubble and brown slightly). Remove from oven, let stand for 10 minutes, cut and serve.
Pre-pay: why we encourage it
We love what we do. What we provide is essential to life, and we can measure our accomplishment by how many people we can feed. There are very few types of business that can say the same. We are a business, and we need to produce cash to keep doing what we love.
In farming, we often invest lots of cash into projects that pay off slowly. For example, it takes us 1 week to collect eggs to hatch, 21 days to hatch chicks, 6 months to raise them to laying age. All of that requires daily labor, supplemental feed costs and more. All said, it takes about 9 months of work before we break even on expenses and can start to pay our salary. Those calculations are based on ideal conditions, and not factoring in losses due to predators or bad weather.
If we can take payment upfront, that helps us to keep paying bills while we’re waiting for the hens to pay us for themselves. They allow us to know that we’ll have the funds to finish a project. Pre-payments allow us to be more efficient. They allow us to work on more projects in the same time frame than we could otherwise, and up to a limit, the more projects we’re doing in a season, the more we’re earning.
We encourage pre-payment on everything we produce by providing Farm Bucks. You probably wouldn’t want to pay $4 today for eggs that will be ready 6 months from now, but if you pay the $4 into Farm Bucks, we can get started on making eggs and you can get eggs from our existing hens, or maybe some tasty greens instead.
To pre-pay, send a payment via paypal to tom@riversongfarm.com or mail a check to our mailing address to “RiverSong Farm.” Finally, consider using Farm Bucks if you shop with us often.
Rams for Sale 2012
We currently have 4 Shetland Rams and need to find homes for them, photos taken in September 2011, none of them are registered.
Calvin, a purebred white horned Shetland Ram born 2008. He is a proven Sire and father of Padraig. Asking $200
Gwyn (foreground), born 4/25/11, from a purebred mioget horned Shetland Ewe and a purebred musket horned Shetland ram. Asking $125
Padraig, a purebred white horned Shetland ram born 2010 from a purebred Ag/Emsket polled Shetland Ewe and a purebred white horned Shetland ram. Asking $125
Time is running out on holiday gift cards
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You can buy into our Farm Bucks any time, but you’re running out of time if you want to give them as a gift for the Holidays. We’ve added a “Seed” and “Twinkle” levels of investment at $50 and $25 to give as inexpensive gifts. You can pay using a credit card and give the gift of healthy food! Feel free to call me at 502-422-2069 if you need more information.