Is there much interest out there for lamb or mutton for Easter, and before then? We’re looking for some interest before we head to the USDA processor.
Thinking about mutton and lamb
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Author Archives: Farmer Tom
Chicken Fried Rice
- 1/2 pound of pre-cooked chicken off the bone (we use meat we picked off after roasting or crock potted) (you can cook it now, just add it before the garlic in the steps below)
- 2 carrots, chopped on a bias into 1/8″ oval disks
- 2 celery chopped on a bias into 1/4″ moons, leave the leaves on it!
- 2-3 eggs
- 2 cups cooked rice
- 2 tablespoons soy sauce
- garlic
- vegetable oil
- sesame oil
- Turn skillet up to high heat. Add a dollop of veg oil to a large skillet. Toss in diced or smashed garlic. Saute for about 30 seconds, toss in the pre-cooked chicken. Or add uncooked chicken first, and add garlic at the end.
- Once chicken is cooked, and before garlic browns, remove chicken and garlic to a waiting plate.
- add more veg oil, and a dollop of sesame oil to the skillet.
- Add rice to the oil, turning it constantly, scrape it from the bottom if it sticks.
- Once rice looks golden brown, add veggies and keep turning until they soften slightly.
- Push the rice, veg mix to the rim of the skillet, add a small amount of sesame oil to the middle well.
- crack eggs into the center and stir/flip until cooked.
- chop them with the spatula, and mix the rice and veg back in.
- pour a couple dollops of soy sauce around the pan, and add any spicy garlic sauce at this point.
- Re-add the chicken and garlic, and mix in with the veg and rice.
- Remove from heat and serve it up!
Water Bath Defrosting
If you have the time and space, you can defrost things in your refrigerator. It can take a day or more for a large turkey, and usually a day for a chicken. This is better than defrosting on the counter top, because as the meat defrosts, the outside gets up into the danger zone of the temperature scale before the inside is defrosted. This temperature range is where bacteria can thrive on the meat. In the fridge, the outside of the meat stays in the safe temperature range.
Defrosting in cold water is faster than either fridge defrosting, and relatively safe. We can defrost whole chickens in a couple of hours, so even if it isn’t in the safe temperature range, it is not out long enough to develop an unsafe bacteria load.
Here’s how: Put your frozen item in a bowl, sink, or bathtub depending on size. Fill up the container with cold water. If your item floats, put something heavy on top to weight it down, or be prepared to turn the item every 20 minutes or so. Leave the water running at a very low trickle, and make sure that it can drain, without overflowing your sink or tub.
The water is much better than air at taking heat away from the item, and since it is constantly being refreshed at a higher than freezing temperature, it is more effective than just soaking the item in one load of water.
Saturday Market Fever
It’s freezing outside, and we’ve still got 10 kinds of lettuce, Kale, Swiss Chard, Mache, Tatsoi, and Spinach. Also, we’re just slightly out-producing our egg customers’ appetites, so I’m running another egg special. If you can use a dozen eggs in the next 5 days, let me know at the market and you’ll get a special discount. Finally, we’ve got 
frozen, free-range and humanely raised chickens. See Sarah’s post on how we use a whole chicken for several meals over the whole week (Pad Thai with the breast, split and roast the rest, separate the bones for stock,Stir Fry the meat, Red Beans and Rice with stock and meat, chicken Pizza, and chilaquiles).
You can get all our goodies at the 
Douglass Loop Market tomorrow morning. I’ll also be delivering to the Root Celler, and to our Louisville Pickup. See our locations page for address and time info. Get in on our Farm Bucks plan and you can grab the good stuff before we sell out at the markets.
Tom and Sarah, plus one
Finally, if we miss the market or deliveries… we’re probably at the hospital having a baby, so check back in 24 hours if I haven’t called you.
February Newsletter
Welcome to February. It’s boring to talk about the weather, but zowie it’s been hot lately. The weather has been easy on our winter greens, chickens, and fingers and toes.
The Douglass Loop Winter Farmers’ Market is in full swing. It resumed in mid January and will be inside the gym until March 10. There will be a break until April 14, and the market will continue through September. We will be at Douglass Loop the whole year.
Keep in mind that you can pick up your CSA items from us at Douglass Loop every week. If you’d like to join the CSA, read more over at http://riversongfarm.com/csa-2012-farm-bucks/.
We have started making deliveries of greens to The Root Celler. Hopefully we can keep up with demand. We’ve already planted more spinach outdoors, and are still harvesting from our high tunnel. This year, we hope grow enough to be able to sell to a couple smaller groceries and restaurants. Our garden planning is geared toward feeding 50 people year round, plus extras of some things for grocery and restaurant sales.
Our baby is expected any day now. If you have a hard time getting in touch with us, keep this in mind. We will try to keep any promises we’ve got going, but please be forgiving if we’re a little out of it this month.
The baby is changing things at the farm already. We’ve got a couple of helpers at the farm to lend a hand to Tom this season. We could use a few more on a day a week basis, or to be on call for bigger jobs. If you think you’d like to join the team, mail tom@riversongfarm.com and discuss it in detail.
We’ve got seedlings starting, and will be planting lots more every week. You can see our planting schedule at http://riversongfarm.com/calendar/. If you’re in the CSA, let us know some of your favorite items, and we’ll grow extra, or grow it special for you.
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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Today, in the high tunnel
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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.
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.
Fresh Cornish Cross Chicken, January 10 – 15
We’ve got more Cornish Cross chickens! They’ll be ready for processing on January 10, which will allow us to offer it fresh at the following locations:
- On Farm, by appointment from January 11 to 15th. Call 502-422-2069.
- St. Andrew’s UUC Market on January 12 from 4-5:30
- Douglass Loop market, January 14 10-1pm.
- By appointment at our Louisville pick-up point in Indian Hills. Call 502-422-2069.
This is our first round of chickens to be raised without GMO corn. We haven’t been able to get a guarantee of non-GMO soy, but we’re still working on that. As always, we don’t use chemicals or antibiotics.
Roast Chicken
We invest several thousand dollars when raising chickens. If no disasters happen we earn that back over several months. That’s difficult for us when cash flow is low in the winter. You can help us cover the cost of processing by pre-paying for your chickens. We take $10 per bird as a pre-payment and we settle the difference when you get your fresh chicken. The chickens are expected to be around $15, and in the 4 to 5 lb range. Our chicken is also available through our CSA.
I’ll need 2 extra folks to help load the trailer on the evening of January 9th. If you’d like to earn a free chicken for about an hour of work, contact Tom (see below for details). Loading will take place right around dusk, and into the dark. It will be a little dirty if the weather is dry. It will be mucky if the weather has been wet.
Feel free to call me at 502-422-2069, or or get in touch if you want to help with labor or pre-payments. Please spread the word for us, and we’ll see you out there.
Farm Bucks as a Holiday Gift
If you’re the kind of person that enjoys giving food related gift cards, consider giving RiverSong Farm Bucks this year. Farm Bucks can be used just like a grocery gift card 
any place we sell. The difference is that you’re supporting a local farm, and supplying healthy, humane, home grown food to your loved ones.
See our CSA 2012: Farm Bucks page for more information.
High Tunnel Lettuce