Boulder Belt and the Choice Food Pantry

Many years ago when I was still on the Oxford farmers Market Uptown governing board I made the suggestion that we should figure out a way to get the left over food that farmers have at the end of every market to people who need food, i.e. a food pantry. Everyone on the board thought that was a great idea and voted it in. And we thought from there it would be easy to set up a system to get food from market to the needy.

Not so. It seems that at the time none of the local food pantries around Oxford (there were two at the time-family Resources and the Food Pantry of St Mary's/St Vincent dePaul. These merged in 2007 to form The Choice Pantry) had much, if any, refrigeration and were not open on Saturdays and had no real way to deal with perishable fresh foods. There also was no one to pick up the food and take it where it needed to go.

The first couple of years were hit and miss. It was obvious it was up to the farmers market to get things together such as coolers and humans to get the job done and this happened (we have a really great support system and community with this market). But it was not possible to find people every week to pick up food from the vendors and take it to the food pantry location and I know on at least one occasion the food pantry forgot about the Saturday delivery and the volunteers had no way to deliver the food. And there was also the issue that the needy people who were getting this food were not familiar with much of the produce being donated like arugula, heirloom tomatoes, specialty peppers, eggplant, daikon, fennel, etc., etc.. So they were not using the food and it often went to waste.

But that was 4 or 5 years ago. Than in 2007 the two pantries merged into Choice Pantry, run by St Mary's Catholic Church. They are well run and have refrigeration (because they knew about us farmers when they set this new pantry up and made sure they could utilize us). And they have Miami students hold classes to teach the food needy about cooking, nutrition, etc., so these people can use the food from the farmers market (more utilization). And we have Mike coming by just about every Saturday at noon to gather together food that would other wise be wasted (okay not exactly wasted as we and most other farmers at the market would do something like compost the produce or feed it to livestock-it would not be land filled in most cases) and he takes that food to the pantry for distribution that very day (unlike the past where the fresh food would sit around until Monday before distribution). It has become a very workable system.

So we have been donating a lot of food most weeks. Most weeks the pantry gets about 3 bushels of food. I think there have been only 2 or 3 weeks where we did not have much of anything left to give (and what we had was probably too weird for the food pantry-we do grow and sell a lot of unusual varieties). Over the season we have probably donated more than a ton of food.

It feels good to be able to do good works but it sure ain't easy to get these good works started up. But happily, in Oxford, OH they have it figured out.

Refrigeration and the Eco-Farm

The farm store open for business on a rainy day in May

One of the cool things about this farm (and there many) is it had a store building already built when we got here. The store is a work in progress for us. We started with a 20' x 40' open space and Eugene built a wall so we have a retail space and a work space. After that was done the building was rewired as we found when we plugged in the vacuum cleaner the lights would get very bright . A bad thing, especially if you are intending to plug in the big fridge (or two) and run it 24/7/365. So, last spring we got help from our buddy Wyatt and got the electrical system working a lot better (and likely up to code, which it most certainly was not). So the big fridge that had been living in the barn the first 9 months we were here could now live and run in the store. This year was the year of the eBay fridges. As regular readers know, we bought two glass front fridges on eBay for $500 and had an adventure hauling them back home. Found out in late April one works and one does not and it would take about $2000 to fix the non working one (we can get an almost new one for under $2 grand so not worth dealing with). But one does work and we have it in the store keeping the produce cold and fresh. The fridge has made life a lot easier on many levels and when it breaks down we will buy a new one because I can see we cannot function well without such technology.

The one running glass front fridge full of good things to eat

To any budding eco-farmers, investing in refrigeration will pay off well in the not so long run. The quality and longevity of your produce will increase dramatically (our lettuce will last 3 to 4 weeks if it has been properly chilled ASAP after harvest. If it has not been properly cooled it will last a week at best). We have had storage refrigeration for the past 10 year and having such meant we did not have to harvest everything within 20 hours of a market which can kill a person. I really hated those 20 hour days followed by a 14 hour day that we had to pull to get ready for the Saturday morning market. And it was made worse because the quality of our produce degraded quickly, especially in hot weather. That meant we were composting, often half of what we harvested. It gets depressing to toss out half of your hard work just about every week. Refrigeration stopped that, cut our work hours and upped the quality of everything that needs to be cold.

Locavores, when you see wilted food at the farmers market what you are generally seeing is a farm that is not using refrigeration and also a farmer who has not yet learned good post harvest practises. It takes a while to learn everything there is know about growing food for market. Most new growers get better and better each year and as they get better improve their operations as they can afford to. But some farmers believe they do not need refrigeration and that is their choice. They just don't know how much refrigeration would improve their farm, life and produce quality.

Rainy Afternoon 69

It's raining today which has messed up my plans to harvest most things today and pack them tomorrow for the Saturday farmers market in Oxford (which has a brand new website Oxford farmers Market dot com) . Sigh, it looks like tomorrow will be a long day. Picking lettuce, spring mix, kale, radishes, arugula, etc., early in the morning. Washing up what we have harvested mid morning than bagging in the afternoon. And opening the store at 11am and waiting on customers who stop by throughout the day. I am trying to avoid pulling 18 hour days on Friday so I have more energy to devote to Saturday.

Washing will take a while as everything will be super dirty and likely full of slugs. I always put a 1/2 cup of table salt in the water as this does two things:
1) Salt water keeps greens very crisp and re-hydrates wilted greens
2) Salt is a slug's mortal enemy and when they hit the salt water they release from whatever they were on, sink to the bottom of the wash tub and die. This is one of our slug controls.
And it means the greens are usually free of slugs when sold (but if you buy our greens, Please wash before use because you never know...)

I have the store open right now but, as usual, rainy days tend to kill farm stand business. Ah, c'est la vie. I would like to take a nice nap but the store is open so I cannot. Instead I sit typing and listening to the rain pour down on the roof occasionally picking ticks off my body and burning them with a lighter (we are still going chem free with the dogs so we get a lot of ticks. I am beginning to question this decision, as the poor dogs are getting scabby where ticks have been removed and seem to be avoiding Eugene and me now that quality petting time means tick picking and killing time).

I have seen Stewie the cat. He is living under the store and for the past week has allowed us to see him and even talk to him before he slinks away. I guess he is realizing he cannot stay angry at us forever and we feed him tasty food (some organic cat food we picked up at the cut rate grocery store B&D Grocery, in Richmond, IN for $6 a 6 pound bag). Yesterday he visited the store but quickly left when I came in carrying a crate of produce. I am happy he did not decide to spray the store.

So I wait till 5 o'clock rolls around to close the store. it is an easy task to close up now that we have a fridge on the sales floor. In the past I would put out things that really needed to stay cold on the unrefrigerated shelves and hope things sold quickly. By the end of the day everything that did not sell would have to be gathered up and put back into the fridge in the back of the building or taken into the house to be eaten ASAP or tossed in the compost. This took up to 20 minutes depending on how much stuff we had (melon season is the worst). Now I just have to shut off some lights, count the cash drawer and remove the money, bring in the "Open" signboard and turn the other open sign around so it says closed. This takes about 3 to 5 minutes.

The one bad thing is only one of the two fridges I bought on eBay works (and I am not too sure how long it will last) and it is already pretty full and we have just started the season. Though soon we will be getting more stuff that does not need to be in a refrigerator like tomatoes, potatoes, onions, garlic, squash (though the zukes and other summer squashes prefer it cold), etc.. I gotta say the fridge has been a huge improvement on many levels. Maybe I will spend my gummint stimulus check on another used fridge as the Commercial fridge repair guy said we should be able to pick one up for around $800. A newer fridge (the eBay fridges are circa 1977) would use a lot less electric and be cheaper to repair.

Getting Things Done

It rained early yesterday and we ended up with 1.5 inches which filled the market garden with water. So we got a day off from planting things in the garden. Instead I pricked 200 pepper seedlings (out of about 450 seeds planted-fairly bad germination) into 2" soil blocks and Eugene planted French and galia melons along with replanting zucchinis because the first bunch I planted had terrible germination due to me using old seeds. I got 6 seeds out of 100 (maybe more) to germinate.

Later we investigated the new to us Coke and Pepsi fridges and decided they needed professional help so I called up Lowman's in Eaton and made an appointment to have their commercial refrigeration guy come out early Monday morning to see what's wrong with them. This visit will likely be expensive but we need to get the fridges up and running before we open the store April 23rd, that's just 11 days away.

We also did thinking about our signage. We have a couple of big signs we bought from a Dunkard who used to sell/repair Howard Miller Clocks. He sold them to us many years ago for $50 IIRC. They have been sitting around posing as tables for several years and now we are finally able to deal with them. So now we have to come up with a design and find someone who will either put a vinyl design on them of someone who will paint a design on them. I am leaning strongly towards hiring a sign painter rather than someone who uses computer aided design to create signs. Not to mention, I feel vinyl is more toxic than paint (I am probably very wrong on this, I should ask my brother who knows his paints and toxins). As a person who was raised by real artists and has more than her share of art talent (which means you would think I could design and paint the damn signs myself but I keep running into creative blocks so the task keeps not getting done) I would be more comfortable using an artist and not a technologist to do the signs. the down side is there are not many sign painters left in the world-this craft is being destroyed by the vinyl sign industry which is sad.

Feb. Winter Market Prep.

We have a farmers market this morning and that meant a 7 hour day harvesting and cleaning produce yesterday. I was surprised how much time it took the two of us to get things together considering all we harvested was leeks, mizuna, red mustard tat soi and spring mix.

The harvesting of greens was nice. It got sunny so the hoop houses warmed up to around 70F quickly. It got so warm I was working in a T-shirt and still pouring sweat. Kind of like working on a hot summer day (okay, a very warm spring day). We did the last major cutting of the spring mix. Eugene felt slow and puny because he is slow at greens harvesting and I am very fast. This is one of the farm, tasks where I am a lot better at it that he is and I think this bruises his ego a bit (but it strokes mine so we are all good and even.). So I ended up with two full plastic grocery bags of spring mix and he had 1/2 a bag. Together we got 15 bags of cleaned spring mix.

We also got 15 leeks from another hoop house. I believe I have mentioned how well leeks do in unheated hoop houses before. They are still doing fantastic and it was a joy to pull and clean them. They also have been very very tasty, perhaps the best leeks I have ever eaten (and I have been eating a lot the past month because we have them and they are sooo damn good). Pulling leeks is a muddy endeavour. You have to get over top of the leek in order to get a clean pull out of the ground. Otherwise, the greens want to beak off and if that happens the leek is ruined for market (but can be dug out of the ground for home use). For me to do this means having to put one foot in the bed (which is a big no no on our farm because walking in beds causes compaction, but sometimes you have to break a rule or two) so I pull straight up. Once the leek is out of the ground the dirt has to be shaken off the root ball and than the roots cut off. This means whomever is pulling leeks will get a lot of dirt on their body and I did. Normally I would not mind the dirt but I did not want to go back to the house, take off my mud covered boots and wash my hands and knife in order to go cut spring mix and not get the salad greens all muddy. But since we got such a haul from the leek hoop house (we also harvested kale, mizuna, tat soi and red mustard) we decided to take all that to the store before harvesting spring mix and that got me close enough to the house to go in and get somewhat cleaned up.

Once the greens and leeks were harvested we turned our attention to cleaning everything we had just picked plus several items that have been put up for winter such as potatoes. We store potatoes with their dirt on and clean as needed as they do not store nearly as well cleaned up. Washing the potatoes was interesting. They are stored in a couple of dead fridges in the barn and are kept naturally, almost at freezing in those fridges. So when we poured the dirty spuds into the wash water it was like pouring several pounds of ice into the water. It was stinging, numbing cold washing the spuds. Not at all fun. But soon enough the potatoes were washed and bagged and put into coolers (or should I say warmers) to keep them from freezing at market

Than there were the rutabagas we harvested a month ago into a couple of buckets and than put the 'bagas dirt, leaves in buckets into the fridge. The fridge has been smelling like rotting cabbage/rutabaga for a while so it was high time to take a good look at the rutabagas and see what's what. And what I found was a whole lot of beautiful 'bagas and few that had been damaged by cold in the field and were slowly rotting away (I believe the stinking culprits). I helped their cause by depositing them into the compost bucket so they can continue to rot and eventually help enrich the soil in which they were grown. For the rest I trimmed the roots and cleaned dirt and got them ready for today.

The final step last night was going through all the onions, garlic and winter squash and tossing out the bad ones. We lost a lot of butternut squash (we will cut them open, remove the seeds for roasting and cook up all good squash parts and freeze the puree for spring summer use) but the delicata squash seemed in excellent shape. The red onions are in sprouting mode. We are saving most to use as onions sets and for seed production (we grow several heirloom onion vareties). But we still have quite a few left. the yellow onions will be in major sprouting mode in 2 to 3 weeks it looks like. the garlic is still doing fine.

After going through everything we than started in on the second to last step before we will be ready to go. putting everything in coolers so they will not freeze at market this morning. In summer we use coolers to keep things cold and in winter we use them to keep things warm. Without them we would lose a lot of produce. So yesterday evening we filled coolers with winter squashes, onions, garlic and potatoes. this morning the carrots, radishes, turnips, chicken and greens will go into coolers. Than everything will be loaded onto the van and we will be off to market by 8:30am this morning so we can be all set up by 9:30am.

Hopefully the locavores will be out enforce and we will sell out.

We Got the Fridges!

Wyatt and Eugene moving the second fridge off the second truck. The job is almost done.

Yesterday, after 5 weeks of waiting, we finally picked up our two glass front fridges from Roger Billings in Shelbyville, IN.

Originally we were going to rent a 17' U-haul box truck to get the fridges but that was going to cost something like $275 plus another $150 or so for gasoline. So we nixed that idea and decided we would rent an open trailer for $39.95 from U-haul and use Wyatt's truck to haul the trailer (since he just bought a truck with a nice hitch). We were fine with than plan for several weeks.

Than we could not get a hold of Roger. So we did what anyone who has spent $500 on an eBay auction and than cannot find the seller in order to make arrangements to pick up the items. We freaked out and put a hold on the credit card that was used for the transaction. Than I tried contacting him via eBay (since using his regular email was getting me no where nor were the phone numbers I had) and Voila! That worked. He had not disappeared, he gave me a working phone number and he was expecting us to come by and get the things ASAP. Great. We quickly cancelled the hold on the credit card.

As I mentioned we were planning using Wyatt and his truck to get these things. Wyatt thought he had a line on a free trailer we could use but that fell through so we were back to renting a U-Haul trailer and deciding on a time to do the deed.

Than came an invite to go have dinner at our friend's Jules and rosie (for Rosie's B-day). So over to their house we went and while there started talking about the fridge adventure. Immediatly Rosie wanted to go to Shelbyville. I'm talking about that night.

We did not go to Shelbyville on Sunday night but we did decide we could use Jule's truck and get both fridges in her bed. Got home, looked up the dimensions on the fridges and found they were a bit bigger on the long side than we thought so using Jule's truck was not going to get the job done. We would need to also use Wyatt's truck. So I sent Wyatt an email explaining that we had changed the plans and would be using 2 trucks and no trailer.

Monday morning dawned frigid and cloudy and shortly after 9am Wyatt was at our house ready to go. We were almost ready to go, we were in the middle of feeding the dogs and having a morning smoke. Got done with that and collected up rope, blankets and other things we thought we would need. Wyatt was doubtful that this would work, that there was no place to tie down the fridges, that it would be too hard to get them in and out, etc. basically he regaled us with a bunch of negativety which Eugene chose to ignore while he collected the things we would need for the job.

We drove down to Jules' house. We spent about 20 minutes getting her truck ready to go-it needed oil, air in a tire and gas. Than we were ready to go and started west towards Shelbyville. We had put bad gas in the tank which made the truck run very rough so we stopped in Liberty to fill the tank up and to put some dry gas in the tank. That made the truck run much, much better and we went on our way west on St Rt 44. I had an uneventful trip and some nice conversation with Jules (who is one of my favorite people on the planet). Wyatt and Eugene were behind us.

Got to Shelbyville and found the place with little trouble and after wandering around the place found Roger and soon he was on his fork lift putting fridges on the trucks. By this point Wyatt was pretty convinced that the fridges would not go on the trucks correctly and after they were on he said there was no way to tie them down on his truck so Roger quietly got some new tie downs and tied the fridges down onto Wyatt's truck. So all was ready to go for the trip home.

But Roger was not through with us. He is a concrete person who is in his mid 50's and wants to get out of the business. He makes pavers and statuary and is retiring and selling his building at the end of this month. So this meant he needed to get rid of as much stuff as possible so he gave us a digital scale, several wooden bushel baskets (which we don't really need) some plastic crates that stack and have lids (something we do need), several boxes of tacky objets d'art that Rosie will sell at the 127 yard sale and two rolls of plastic wrap that I have no idea what we will do with. But hey, it was all free. Gotta love free stuff.

With two trucks loaded with fridges and free stuff we set off towards home. We stopped at a Pizza Hut for lunch than headed east.

The trip home was uneventful (thankfully). We drove in the drive way backed Jules' truck up to the store and got busy unloading. Again Wyatt was negative and told us how this would not work. Within 10 minutes we had the first fridge off the truck and in the store. The second fridge on Wyatt's truck was even easier (despite him being even more negative and even more convinced we would not get the fridge off of his truck in one piece) to get off the truck but did get stuck in the doorway for a minute before we finagled it so it would go in the store.

So 30 minutes after we arrived we were done with fridge moving, other than getting them out of the doorway in the store and along the walls where they can be plugged in and used.

Today it is snowing and I am glad we got this done yesterday.

Adventures on eBay

Our new (to us) coolers

A few weeks ago I was surfing eBay and decided to see if any commercial refrigeration was for sale at a price I could afford and within driving distance. And there were two, count them two, glass front commercial coolers in Shelbyville, Indiana for sale with a bid well under $300. So I put in a bid and was out bid and did this over and over again until I hit $500. That was not immediately topped but eventually it was and I did not know this until I had about 3 minutes left to bid. I tried to put in a bid but my dial up connection was too slow and I lost out. Bummer.

Than yesterday I was looking at my emails and there is one from eBay saying the winning bidder could not pay for the fridges and they could be mine for $500. Realise to buy these fridges from any other source would mean paying around $1200 for each (probably more). If they were new we would be talking $3500 or more each.

And now they are. Just have to borrow a truck in the next few weeks and get over there to get them. I am so excited!

We really need a glass front cooler for the store and we have been chronically in need for extra fridge space in August and September and now we have all we should need.

More Fridge Woes

This past June our old fridge died after 20+ years of service to us. Last night the new Frigidaire was making bad noises-popping, hissing, rattling and was getting hot so I unplugged it from the wall. Now the compressor will not start up again. The light comes on but no one is home

Damn

Eugene spent some time on the phone this morning dealing with HH Gregg about the fridge and got nowhere really. he was given a phone number for servicing and we have an appointment next Thursday. This means a whole 9 days without a working fridge in the house. And there is a good chance that what ever is wrong won't be covered by any warranty. Though, whatever is wrong was likely caused by the yahoos who loaded the fridge incorrectly onto the van when we picked up the unit.

Oh well this will not be the first time we have had to use the commercial fridge for our personal use. It is a pain in the ass to have to go out to the store to get an egg or some milk. Oh well, c'est la vie

Ding Dong The Fridge is Dead

Eugene found the 30 year old fridge in the house (NOT to be confused with the 3 door commercial fridge) DOA yesterday at lunch. It had been acting funky for about 2 months. Doing things like flooding the bottom shelf with water, cutting off in the night and souring the milk, etc.. So we have known for a while that sooner than later it was gonna die. We even tried to get the fridge sitting in Eugene's mother's house which is for sale but apparently it is written into the selling contract that the fridge stays with the house.

So at lunch the unit finally gives up the ghost. Okay it was several hours before lunch possibly 12 hours before lunch as all the items in the freezer were pretty much thawed. So I tossed all the half thawed freezer items into one of our chest freezers and grabbed a cooler and an ice pack from the store and put all the highly perishables like milk, cream, etc., in that, ate lunch than took the stuff in the cooler out to the 3 door commercial fridge. Lucky we have such a nice fridge that really should not have household items in it but I would consider this a bit of an emergency so for the next 48 hours or so it will be cooling our food and produce for market.

After I closed the farm sore up for the evening at 7pm (really 6:30 because it was raining and I figured we were not going to get anyone else coming in to buy produce or pastured poultry) we drove into Richmond to HH Gregg's and bought a new fridge. For years I have wanted a home fridge that had no freezer box with it. I have 2 chest freezers and do not need the small freezer unit. I have long thought the tiny freezers associated with most home fridge units were stupid-too small for much of anything but ice and the freezer is often the cause of a home fridge breaking down. Working in a lot of commercial kitchens over the years I have noted that commercial fridges never have freezers tacked on to them. Freezers are always separate units and I have wondered for years why they do not make a home fridge that has no freezer.

Guess what, Frigidaire does. While discussing our refrigeration options with Jeff at HH Gregg's-we wanted something fairly cheap, under $500, but nothing less than 18.2 cubic feet of space (this includes freezer space) we noticed a fridge that did not have a freezer door. It also did not have a price so we asked Jeff to find out what it cost ($549). Jeff said since everything was on sale this week it was marked down to $469 and change. Eugene asked if he could give us a beer deal on he uni and we got he price down to $439 and I now own a fridge with no freezer-Woo Hoo!

We can pick it up today if we have time. Since tomorrow is a market day we will likely be busy harvesting most of the day. Than again, there really isn't all that much to harvest as we are in our early summer lull. We are done with most of the spring crops like lettuce and the labor intensive beans, tomatoes, peppers, melons, onions, garlic, etc., have not started to come in yet. And it's raining.

At any rate, sometime before Sunday we will have a brand new freezerless fridge in the house and I am quite excited!

Harvest Day

Tomorrow we have a farmers market so today I spent harvesting, cleaning and packaging greens, radishes and chives. I got started later than I wanted to due to life interference. Let's see, I got a call from L saying she could not come out to help today (due to life interference). The dogs had to be fed and that means someone has to stand between Danny and Arlo so Danny doesn't chase Arlo off and than eat Arlo's food, while they eat (Arlo is too wimpy to stand up to Danny even though he is a lot bigger and has all his teeth). I put in laundry when I got up at 6:30 and figured it would better to hang it on the clothes line before I started work rather than hanging it up in the afternoon or completely forgetting about it and letting it get moldy and rewashing it all.

Finally at 8:45am I got up to the gardens with bins, towels to cover the greens so they do not get flaccid and a sharp pocket knife for cutting. I walked around removing row covers from beds that had havestable things for about 15 minutes and than started in on cutting spinach than moved on to cilantro, than spring mix, than mustard, than lettuce and I was done around 10:45am.

The next step was to wash everything which meant getting the wash tub (a 30 gallon Rubbermaid tub), The giant salad spinner and salt and white vinegar which I add to the wash water to kill slugs, rehydrate greens and kill any pathogens. Since we put in a new water line last fall I can now set up my wash station behind the store under the apple trees instead of behind the barn which means I do not have to go up any steps to get produce into the 3 door commercial fridge in the upper level of the barn (which should be moved into the store this Sunday-yay!).

Anyhoo I got the equipment together and the hose where I needed it and filled the tub and spent the next 2 hours cleaning up leafy greens and dumping them into the water to cool, rehydrate and get any dirt off. Than I would put them into the salad spinner to remove excess moisture than dump them into a towel lined bin and put that into the fridge so the produce could cool off for a couple of hours. I was done with that around 1pm.

Next was lunch (chicken sandwich and yogurt and bananas) and a needed break. Than I decided to transplant some germinating pepper and eggplant seeds from tiny soil blocks to larger soil blocks while I waited on the produce to get cold and than I made some labels for the bags and finally I was almost ready to bag up what I had harvested and cleaned.

So I started putting spinach labels on produce bags and than brought out the two bins full of fresh, sweet, crisp spinach and bagged up 10 1/2 pound bags. I repeated this with the spring mix, Mustard greens, lettuce and cilantro and put the d'avignon radishes and chives into bunches secured with rubber bands and put everything back into the fridge.

Tomorrow morning we will put everything into coolers and haul it to Oxford for market. If all goes as planned we will sell everything and not feel so poor (the weeks before the regular season starts-May 5th-are the nadir of the year financially for us).

I figure for every hour we spend at market selling we spend 8 hours growing the food and getting prepared

Turkey Brining

The Turkey at 4:30am before going into the brine

‘Tis the day before Thanksgiving and I am up at 4:30am in order to brine the 25.9LB organic, pastured, hormone and antibiotic free, locally raised (by Dale Filbrun) turkey. So far I have gotten the turkey out of the fridge in the barn and have bleached out a cooler. Now I am Googling a brine recipe because it has been over a year since I have brined a bird of any kind.

Brining is simple, it is a salt and sugar and water solution that you put a chicken, duck, turkey or any meat into to soak for 4 to 24 hours. I will be doing a 6 hour brine so I can get the turkey into the oven by around 2pm today so I am not up all night with the bird. Brining tenderizes the meat by removing all the blood and replacing that with a salty sweet solution via osmosis. This also means the bird will roast more evenly and all the meat will be moist. In other words brining prepares the bird to roast up in the most foolproof perfect way there is.

The Bird is it's briny bath, You can already see the blood being released from the carcass

It is now 5:50am and the turkey is in a cooler full of a salt and sugar solution (2 cups kosher salt and 1/4 cup sugar per 2 gallons of water repeated 4 times to almost cover the turkey in the cooler (he's a big boy but not quite a birdzilla). Upon reading full brining instructions I find I am supposed to brine a turkey 12 to 24 hours. This one will get 7 to 8 hours and that will have to be enough time to remove the blood and replace it with a sweet salty solution (this tastes a lot better than it sounds, really). otherwise I will be getting up at around 5am tomorrow to get the bird in the oven and have it done by 11am so we can eat around noon or 1pm on Thursday. I don't want to do this because I will need the oven for things like the garlic cheddar biscuits and dressing I am making and a couple of pies Eugene will be making.

Stress

Sometimes farming sucks. It is hot and very very humid, you have to do hard physical work, things are not selling and than your main fridge breaks with over $1000 worth of produce in it.

That's been the past couple of days.

We have this rather large commercial fridge which has been making loud noises for several months. Eugene diagnosed the noise as the fan by the compressor unit being badly out of center and though he had fixed the problem. it is true that the noise had gotten quieter. But this morning he noticed that the fridge was making weird noises so he went and shut it down and checked the compressor and found that the fan had lost a blade (i.e. it was shot). So we call Lowman's Heating and they will be out later today (at least we have found a local company that will deal with commercial equipment which is a good thing and we will likely be using these guys to install a furnace for the house sometime this summer).

Normally having a broken fridge would be worrisome but not horribly stressful but yesterday we bought a whole lot of produce to sell at the store (sweet corn mainly) from a not certified organic farm near St Paris, OH so we have a fridge full of sweet corn and lots of other produce that needs to stay cold (and by full I mean we cannot put anything else in there until things get sold-it's packed tight). The upside to this is the fridge is packed with produce that did manage to get cold yesterday and as long as we don't open the doors things should stay around 55˚F until the unit gets fixed later this morning (assuming, over night, the broken fan did not cause the whole compressor unit to fail and a part needs to be ordered meaning we have no fridge for the weekend).

On the corn we ordered a lot of corn-50 dozen- and some way huge cabbages (they are the size of basketballs-I was expecting something smaller) and a few other items that all came in yesterday. Because we had a lot of corn we opened the store up (normally we are open Thursday and Sundays) and managed to sell 4 dozen ears and 1 cabbage. This caused us a great deal of stress figuring out where to put all the produce so it would stay cold and not rot on us (otherwise we get to spend several hundred dollars on compost ingredients). So around 8pm we were trying to get everything in the fridge, it was hot and humid, we were stressed and we had not eaten much all day so were literally starving (farming takes a lot of calories and when you also are dealing with your body having to cool itself as well you can get into a physical bind). By 10pm we were eating hamburgers from locally raised pastured beef and sweet corn (which is excellent corn). Than went to bed around 11:30pm so we could be up by 6am (really need to get up earlier but we need at least 6 hours of sleep to function).

I guess it is not all bad we have a beautiful farm, the garden is doing quite well, our sales at the farmers' markets are great and we are getting some help out here. But anyone who thinks that sustainable farming is all fun has not farmed for a living. Farming is hard work with long hours often under adverse conditions and the pay is crap. Even us organic farmers who seem to be charging an arm and a leg for our food are not making big bucks. What you are paying is what it costs for us to make a living wage (or something kind of close to it-we ain't getting rich).

To all you farming wannabes, you folks that have this insane romantic image of farming as being stress free and fun I suggest working full time on a farm for a full season before jumping in. You may find you do not like the grueling schedule, the stress, the sore muscles or the fact if you have livestock you cannot do things like leave for more than 18 hours or take a vacation ever (unless you can find a competent farm sitter and those are about as common as hens teeth). When you choose to farm you will end up married to the farm and all its inhabitants and they will demand all of your time.

Farmers reading this know what I am talking about.