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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Category Archives: Farm
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.
A Week of Chicken Dinners
Our whole Cornish Cross chickens are delicious and big. I am a huge advocate of leftovers especially in the last few weeks of my pregnancy and probably the first few weeks of new parenthood. It’s nice to have already
prepared meals that just need to be reheated. But it’s even nicer to have a variety. Most of these recipes can be found on the recipe page, just use the search box at the top of the page.
Chicken is so versatile, and for just two people a 6 lb bird goes a long way. Here’s what we did with one bird over 2 weeks.
Meal One: Defrosted using water bath method. Cut off breast meat, not including tenders, and made Chicken Pad Thai, enough for dinner and lunch for two people. Refrigerated the rest of the whole raw bird.
Meal Two: Roasted Chicken, served with salad and mashed potatoes. Tom split it up the back so it would cook faster, but it didn’t.
Meal Two point one: After dinner, we picked the meat off the bone and added the bone with meat we couldn’t get off, and skin and 8 cups of water in the crock pot. We set it to high and turned it down to low just before bed. This made stock overnight for future meals. In the morning, we strain the bones out and put the stock into glass Mason jars with lids and rings, and let it cool before refrigeration. Stock will keep in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks.
Meal Three: Chicken Fried Rice. Using some of the leftover meat, Tom whipped this up. Enough for dinner and lunch for two.
Meal Four: Cajun Red Beans and Rice with Chicken. Using one jar of the stock and some of the remaining chicken, Tom made enough for dinner, and a few lunches.
Meal Five: Chicken Pizza. We made spinach garlic pizzas and put chicken on about 1/4 of the 2 pizzas. This leaves enough leftovers for a few extra meals beyond dinner.
Meal Six: Chilaquiles, a thick stew of tomato sauce with Mexican spices and chicken served over tortilla chips. Tom used the rest of the chicken plus 1 cup of stock. It made enough for dinner plus lunch for two
Meal Seven: Butternut Squash Soup. Made with the rest of the chicken stock, Tom counts this as a chicken meal. We serve it with sautéed greens and grilled cheese typically.
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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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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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.