Winter Farm Life

This is a "what we small full time farmers do in the winter" post.

Okay today I got up late-around 8am due to a late night drinking raspberry moonshine and eating a spicy meat and fish soup at Julies' and Rosie's house. We had not seen our friends since before Christmas so we had lots to celebrate. Actually we went to their house to borrow a wine bottle corker so we can bottle up the pear wine the 4 of us started about 5 or 6 weeks ago. Did not succeed in finding the implement but had a good time none the less.

Any hoo, that caused me to get up about 2 hours later than I normally get out of bed. but since we had little planned for today getting up late was not a bad thing. After eating breakfast (reheated frozen pancakes I had made a few days ago). Took a short walk around the farm and marveled at the hoar frost on everything (it got cold last night, winter seems to be here, maybe). And I saw my first buzzard of the year. Normally the buzzards do not arrive until mid Feb but this has not been a normal winter.

Went back in the house and I decided to call the Safe Auto insurance people about our property damage since they had not called us back in a week. At 9:30am I called up "Austin" and actually got "Austin on the phone and told him that nothing had been done about our property damage and when was an appraiser coming out. he had no idea why no one had looked at the damage and said he would call me back. Surprise, surprise he did indeed call back about 3 minutes later and informed that the appraiser he had hired to look at the damage only did vehicles and not property damage so he had to find another company to look at out crumpled sign just sitting there in the front lawn. So he had to call me back again and did so 15 minutes later and said he had found another company and they should contact me tomorrow. So getting the sign replaced is in the works.

After dealing with safe Auto I attempted to do the Sudoku puzzle in the Dayton Daily News and failed (but I did solve it yesterday along with the crossword and the word jumble. I do not do the word find, never really liked that puzzle) and read that it is Betty White's Birthday, she's old, can't remember how old-85 or something.

I played around on-line for a bit reading email and looking at favorite website forums (I love posting on forums). Found that the Baker Creek Seed forum is still off line. I hope it is nothing too serious has happened to them, they have been down for 2 days now.

At 11am we turned on the price is Right. I love The Price Is Right and will be unhappy when Bob Barker retires this spring. I don't know who could replace him, though my money is on Adam Sandler, yes Adam Sandler who is a producer of TPIR. I have been watching this show since it was Truth or Consequences (really a different show but also hosted by Bob Barker).

After TPIR I ate lunch (left over Mac and Cheese with Italian sausage from pasture pork and some broccoli from the hoophouse) and than checked email and than talked for 2.5 hours with Rick, the guy we sometimes buy organic/sustainable produce from in the summer. We talked about produce and Monsatan buying up all the seeds and good OP varieties of peppers and onions to replace varieties now owned by Monsantan. We ended the call with me not coming to a decision of what I might or might not need from him this summer. Simply because I honestly do not know yet. It depends on how well business goes at the farm store this coming season. I assume even if I do nothing about advertising and marketing we will do better sales than last year. But doing some advertising in the local Eaton paper and the DDN I think will help out our bottom line dramatically.

After talking to Rick I got to thinking about dinner and decided to make pasta with a tomato based sauce that will use up the rest of the Italian sausages I have. And along with that we will have bread sticks so I put together a whole wheat yeast dough that I spiked with some fresh garlic that I ran through the rasp I generally use for hard cheese.

And while I was doing my stuff Eugene has spent a great deal of the day getting ready to do the taxes. Right now he is going through receipts and folders and getting things into perfect order. Unlike past years, I was really good about putting things where they ought to be so he is cruising through this and has had few tense moment. most of the tension is coming from faded receipts where we have to guess what it is for. But because I wrote most of this kind of information down elsewhere we have been able to figure everything out so far.

Now I must attend to my bread sticks and spag sauce.