The Boulder Belt Newsletter

Before most Farmers markets I send out an email newsletter to the 300+ folks on my boulder Belt email list telling them about what's going on out here on the farm and what we will have at the farmers market. This has long been one of our main forms of marketing. In the beginning the email list was small and ineffective (because there just were not enough people on line-this newsletter has been going out most weeks during the season for over 12 years) but over the years it has grown and I find if I send out an email newsletter we generally do $100 to $200 more in sales than if I don't. So it is very much worth the time and effort to write one and send it out.

Below is this Tuesday's (today's) edition

Greetings,

This is a busy week for us at Boulder belt, marketing wise. Not only is there the Tuesday uptown Farmers market tomorrow from 4pm to 7pm in the memorial park in Uptown oxford but we also will be opening up our farm store this Thursday, May 17th from 9am 'til 7pm and will be open every Thursday, Friday and Sunday 9am til 7pm until we run out of fresh home grown produce and pastured poultry (likely some time in November). Our farm and store are located a 3257 US 127 just one mile north of Eaton at the top of he hill (if coming northbound) or 3 miles south of he I-70/US 40 interchange just before you come to the hill (if coming southbound).

We are excited about the coming season out here we have made some major improvements to the store (most of which you won't notice, like repairing the electrical system and moving our refrigeration into the store building) to keep our food fresher and to better serve you.

Locally grown foods is a growing buzz word. By buying local you can save more energy use than if you shut down all your power in your house and drove a Prius. Buying local dramatically lightens your carbon footprint and the food is fresher and tastier to boot. When you buy from us at our store you can be sure the food you buy and eat did not travel more than a few hundred feet before it was sold, not a few thousand miles. When you buy Boulder Belt produce at the farmers market it has traveled 29 miles, again far less than coming in from California or China.

Buying local has so much going for it, but you knew that already...



On That note here is what we will be bringing to market tomorrow. If you want to know what we have at the store (we have more items at home than we bring to market) check out http://www.angelfire.com/oh2/boulderbeltcsa/farmstore.html

Spring Mix-This has been so good and beautiful to boot. We eat some every day and we are not tired of it yet, after 2 months, it's that good. We care about you our customers and not anonymous shareholders like all the corporate entities supplying most of our food in the US. This means we take great pains to make sure the bagged greens you buy from us are not tainted with nasty critters like e-coli or salmonella. Not to mention, the freshness of our produce which is hours old, not weeks old.

Lettuce-We have wonderful lettuce and many different kinds of heirlooms his week. we have the jewel-like French heirloom marvel of 4 seasons, Nancy bibb, Simpson green leaf, the delightful Lollo Rossa and another French heirloom Cracoviensis. We will have bags of mixed heads available

Radishes-We have the French heirloom D'avignon.

Strawberries-We have local, organically grown berries in May. these are coming out of one of our greenhouses

Cilantro-We have some very nice cilantro this week.

Chives-great for dips or topping a fresh soup

Garlic Chives-like chives only they taste like garlic, not oniony. If you are craving garlic these are a great substitute until he garlic scapes come in in June and the garlic is harvested mid July

Garlic powder-We are out of fresh garlic until July but we have a lot of our wonderful and powerful garlic powder.

Catnip-dried catnip for your feline's pleasure. we harvest our catnip at the height of its' potency and than gently dry it. Our kitties, Navin and Trina are nutz for this stuff (which makes bagging it interesting if they are in the room)

Dried herbs-we have basil, dill, sage, parsley and oregano this week.

That's the short list. We may find we have other items to harvest that we will be bringing to market tomorrow afternoon. The only way to find out is to come by the market in the Memorial Park from 4pm 'til 7pm tomorrow evening.

Hope to see you at the market or at our Eco-Farm Store. Thanx a zillion for your support

Boulder Belt Eco-Farm
Eaton, OH
http://www.boulderbeltfarm.com

Birthday morning

It was a beautiful morning this morning so I took some pictures of chickens

You Say It's My Birthday...

That's right it is my birthday today.

My 44th, I'm middle aged fer sure fer sure.

Started the day with farm work. We have a farmers market tomorrow morning so this morning I was harvesting lettuce, strawberries and spring mix by 7am so the greens did not get damaged by the summery heat and I did not get damaged by picking berries in a hoophouse that can easily get 120˚F on a nice hot sunny day such as this by mid day.

The bed of spring mix I harvested this morning

After harvesting I wen in for some breakfast-Eugene made us eggs (locally grown pastured beauties), fried taters (the last of the 2006 crop) and toast. After breakfast I washed greens for an hour or so. After washing greens I was going to take a break but instead got involved neatening up the yard. Eugene was weed whacking around the store, signs and flowers and I got into following him around moving objects so he could get at the grass and weeds better and hand weeding in areas where a weed whacker might behead an iris bloom or peony bud. That took a half hour and left he yard looking MUCH better.

Took a break out of the heat and ate lunch. Noodled around on the web for a hour or so than decided I was was high time go out to the store/packing shed to put labels on produce bags and bag up lettuce, arugula and spring mix. So I did that for a couple of hours. Now I am blogging and waiting for Eugene to come in so we can enjoy the strawberry daiquiris I made a few minutes ago waiting for blogger to load.

After that we are going out to dinner somewhere and will also pick up some cat food. Than home and to bed early because tomorrow is an early 4:30am call.

Crunch Time

We are going into our crunch time so post will likely be few and far between until mid to late June. we have two markets going now, a store to open (and an electrical system to fix before that happens-but by the end of today most of that should be done.) thousands of seedlings to get into the ground by mid June (this means prepping 50 or so beds, setting up irrigation, laying ground cover/landscape fabric on those beds before anything is planted). Harvesting for all our markets pretty much daily. Maintaining the market garden beds (folier feeding, hoeing, hand weeding, mowing) and dealing with 150 chickens each and every day (feeding, watering, moving chicken tractors/fencing, etc..). It's a lot to do for two people with a bit of help-we do have Lauren coming out several half days a week and our buddy Wyatt has been helping out with our electrical issues and today will be bringing out his BCS tiller to help us get more beds ready to go.

And to top it all off my iMac seems to be nearing it's end, slowly. Or maybe it's just my browser (Mozilla) getting rilly funky, I dunno.

The keyboard has lost it's "T" so typing is slow and laborious. Hey if anyone has a keyboard I can use until I replace his 'puter it sure would help me out.

But it looks like the garden is gonna be very productive, the chickens are growing well and we are getting a lot of new customers, suddenly (nothing like a hundred scary food issues from the industrial food stream to get folks thinking about eating locally)

It's Farmers Market Season Again

We had our first market of the season and it was the best opening market we have ever done, by far. We harvested 3 to 4 times more than we ever have in the past and we sold everything we brought except 3 bunches of chives (which have never been a good seller for us but have sold better his year than at any time in the past). It was a good feeling to go home with empty coolers (except for milk, eggs and meat that we picked up at the market) and pockets full of money.

The market was not a busy one but we were the only produce vendors at the market and we had aspargus and lettuce, among other things, making us very popular. Our fresh produce sold like hotcakes.

Met "Wine Deb" (of Key West wine and garden blog) which was fun. Heard the sad news that Don E's wife had suddenly died two weeks ago than ranb into Don, he looked so sad. At the end of the market I was invited to the 29th (30th?) installation of St Alphonso's Pancake Breakfast.

It's good to be back

More Chicken

Picked up 100 pullets today down a Mt Healthy. That makes 151 chickens on our farm-all for eating, none for laying. We took the chicks out of he box hey came in, gave each one a drink of water and put them out on grass in the sun. leaving them to their own devices while we ate lunch and caught a bit of the race at Talledega (Jeff Gordon won which will make my friend Rosie quite happy). During lunch we decided that perhaps it would be a good idea to turn the brooder lamp on and put them in the tractor and shut the door after Eugene ran up there a couple of times to check on them.

So I went up to the peeps and one by one put all 100 into the tractor. This was not too hard to do as most were falling asleep and were very easy to catch. I was dubious that with 100 chicks there would be enough room under one brooder lamp (we have always done 50 at a time in the past and that is what we are set up to do comfortably ) but they seemed quite happy and content and well spread out but not so much to tell us they are too warm and need the lamp raised. They will likely stay inside for a day or two so they get used to the idea of the brooder lamp and know to get under it when they get chilled. After that they can come and go at will.

The older group of 51 birds is halfway to table weight and will go to the killers in another 3.5 to 4.5 weeks. These are our experimental batch of chicken cuts. In The past we have offered whole birds only. But after asking people on my email list what they would prefer we decided I would be well worth getting some of our birds processed into cuts like wings, legs, thighs and boneless breasts. If these sell well for us we will do more.

More Chicken

Picked up 100 pullets today down a Mt Healthy. That makes 151 chickens on our farm-all for eating, none for laying. We took the chicks out of he box hey came in, gave each one a drink of water and put them out on grass in the sun. leaving them to their own devices while we ate lunch and caught a bit of the race at Talledega (Jeff Gordon won which will make my friend Rosie quite happy). During lunch we decided that perhaps it would be a good idea to turn the brooder lamp on and put them in the tractor and shut the door after Eugene ran up there a couple of times to check on them.

So I went up to the peeps and one by one put all 100 into the tractor. This was not too hard to do as most were falling asleep and were very easy to catch. I was dubious that with 100 chicks there would be enough room under one brooder lamp (we have always done 50 at a time in the past and that is what we are set up to do comfortably ) but they seemed quite happy and content and well spread out but not so much to tell us they are too warm and need the lamp raised. They will likely stay inside for a day or two so they get used to the idea of the brooder lamp and know to get under it when they get chilled. After that they can come and go at will.

The older group of 51 birds is halfway to table weight and will go to the killers in another 3.5 to 4.5 weeks. These are our experimental batch of chicken cuts. In The past we have offered whole birds only. But after asking people on my email list what they would prefer we decided I would be well worth getting some of our birds processed into cuts like wings, legs, thighs and boneless breasts. If these sell well for us we will do more.

More Reasons to Eat Local

I pulled this off of the slow food forum
Remember Farmers Market season is just about upon us (mine start May 5th) so now is the time to hop on the local foods bandwagon. Remember the food corporations care about shareholders, not us and the USDA is run by these corporate interests.

If you didn't have enough reasons to make preservation of local agriculture a top priority, perhaps the latest developments related to the melamine contamination of pet food will convince you.

If you've been following recent national and local news headlines you should have seen stories regarding the melamine contaminated "pet" food being introduced into our food supply by hog farmers who fed their animals the aforementioned contaminated product to their animals as "salvage" pet food. Salvage pet food means pet food (dog and cat) in distribution that is no longer available for retail sale. Examples of distressed pet food include, but are not limited to, dented cans, torn bags, or pet food past its sell-by date....and apparently although is not good enough to be fed to our pets, it is apparently good enough to be fed to livestock that will eventually end up on your family's table. Interestingly enough, there is actually a Federal ban on feeding salvage pet food to ruminants due to fear of spreading BSE. here's the gist of it:

"A Federal rule that prohibits feeding protein derived from the tissues of animals to ruminant animals such as cattle, sheep, goats, deer, elk, bison, and buffalo became effective on August 4, 1997. The purpose of the regulation is to prevent the establishment and amplification of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in the United States, and thereby minimize any risk to animals and humans. "

So the USDA recognizes potential danger in using salvage pet food to feed livestock, but is willing to make some exceptions.

Preliminary investigation by independent watchdog groups, the media, and our own Congress has turned up what amounts to massive failure and negligence on the part of our government agencies to protect our food supply. According to the USDA the main sources of contaminated or inappropriate food products appear to be FOREIGN in nature. However, there is NO ban on feeding salvage pet food (or a number of other questionable or non-USDA approved items) to livestock in many countries we import food from...and so here we are back to foreign food imports that don't get much attention from our inspectors being introduced into our food supply.

Additionally, the amount of foreign food products and ingredients imported into the US has increased substantially in the last few years. In 2001, the United States imported about $4.4 billion worth of ingredients processed from plants or animals, according to analysis by the Associated Press. By last year that total leaped to $7.6 billion — a 73 percent increase. Other food and drink imports rose from $38.3 billion to $63 billion — up 65 percent. Unfortunately, there has been no effort on the part of our regulating government agencies to increase the scope of inspections on said products. The lack of oversight appears to be even greater with respect to food ingredients, like the contaminated wheat gluten that was used in the recent pet food debacle. In fact former USDA official, Carl Nielsen, whose job until he left in 2005 was to make sure field inspectors were checking the right imports said, "I don't ever remember working on ingredients.. That was the lowest priority..."

"The lowest priority". $7.6 billion dollars worth of ingredients going into your family's food is of no consequence to the government agencies whose job it is to protect our food supply. Not very reassuring, is it.

I'm going to briefly change subjects and touch on the latest edition of the US Farm Bill. The same folks who are responsible for the mess covered above are the brain trust behind what is perhaps the WORST piece of agriculture related legislation in history. I won't get into the details, there are plenty of other folks out there who have dissected this bill and they are a whole lot smarter than I am. In fact, if you're the intellectually curious type, you can find out more by following one of the links below:

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/4/13/112749/099
http://www.foodfirst.org/node/1552
http://www.cagw.org/site/DocServer/2...pdf?docID=2121
http://www.farmland.org/programs/campaign/default.asp
http://www.slcatlanta.org/Publicatio...in_context.pdf

What I can tell you is that the 2007 Farm Bill opens the door of our nation to even more foreign food imports and does not address the issue of import food safety at all. Also, it continues the taxpayer funded, corporate welfare program designed to reward large, agribusiness commodity growers and completely disenfranchises the small, local farmer. The very same local farmers who are our last hope to provide us with a safe food system. So much for national food security.

So there you have it. Compelling reasons to not only support and preserve local agriculture, but to have serious concerns about the safety of our food supply. Please folks, I know that when buying locally sometimes it might cost a little more or may not be as convenient, but for the sake of our nation, our communities, and your family, put your best foot forward and do even a small part to save our local farms. Here in Clark County, WA you can start helping out by writing to our county commissioners and letting them know that you do not support the proposed County Land Use policy and that you want to see more effort going into policy that will support, preserve, and encourage local agriculture. Our children will thank us.

Steve.Stuart@clark.wa.gov
Marc.Boldt@clark.wa.gov
Bettysue.Morris@clark.wa.gov


Thanks for your support,

Glenn Grossman
Slow Food SW Washington
http://www.slowfoodswwa.com
Clark County Food & Farm
http://clarkfoodfarm.blogspot.com/

Rainy Spring Days on The Farm

It's been raining for the past two days so we have not been doing much farming-the soils just too wet. That is not to say we didn't need the rain, we did. And the lettuces, peas, spring mix, spinach, asparagus, strawberries, radishes, onions, leeks, raspberries, kale, broccoli, chard, scallions, herbs rutabagas, etc., look quite happy about the rain

Before it rained we got almost all the onions in the ground. All that is left are some late planted seedlings that are not big enough for transplanting yet. Now we have 3 or 4 beds of leeks to get in and we are pretty much done with allium planting until October when we plant garlic.

The next big transplanting project will be tomatoes, peppers and eggplant that will go in the end of May or early June. Looks like we will have around 1500 plants to put out over a couple of days.

Meanwhile we will be transplanting broccoli, cabbages, cukes, zucchinis, melons, winter squashes, lettuces, pac choi, etc., and doing a lot of direct seeding of various crops like carrots, turnips, spring mix, radishes, basil, parsley, sweet corn, potatoes, etc., throughout May, June and July. Unlike home gardeners we have to keep planting over and over so we have a constant seasonal supply of produce so there is no putting in the garden over a day or weekend. We will be done planting sometime in November or December.

While it's been raining we have started clearing out the storefront of a lot of detritus (aka yard sale items) and putting that in the barn where the huge, commercial, 3-door fridge used to be and moving all the equipment we use to package produce (scale, plastic wrap, pulp boxes, plastic bags, wax boxes, salad spinner, wash tubs, chest freezers etc., from the barn to the back of the store which is being turned into a packing shed. This will greatly streamline selling produce out of the store having the refrigeration where things are being sold so no one has to run to the barn to get more bags of spring mix or strawberries or a chicken and than at the end of the day take everything back to the barn

We also bottled homemade pear wine and beer over the past two days. The beer ought to be ready to drink for my birthday May 11h

Earthday History

One prominent politician, Gaylord Nelson, then Senator from Wisconsin, had been frustrated throughout the 1960s by the fact that only a "handful" of his Congressional colleagues had any interest in environmental issues. On the other hand, during his travels across the United States, he had been greatly impressed by the dedication and the expertise of the many student and citizen volunteers who were trying to solve pollution problems in their communities.

It was on one such trip, in August 1969, that Nelson came up with a strategy for bridging the gap separating grassroots activists from Congress and the general public. While en route to an environmental speech in Berkeley, California, the Senator was leafing through a copy of Ramparts magazine, when an article about anti-war teach-ins caught his eye. It occurred to him that the teach-in concept might work equally well in raising public awareness of environmental issues.

In September, in a ground-breaking speech in Seattle, Senator Nelson announced the concept of the teach-in and received coverage in Time and Newsweek and on the front page of the New York Times.

Several weeks later, at his office on Capitol Hill, he incorporated a non-profit, non-partisan organization called Environmental Teach-In, Inc. He announced that it was to be headed by a steering committee consisting of himself, Pete McCloskey, a Congressman from California, and Sidney Howe, then the President of The Conservation Foundation.

Early in December, Senator Nelson selected a 25-year old named Denis Hayes, the dynamic former President of the Stanford student body, as national coordinator. Hayes, postponing plans to enter Harvard Law School, immediately set to work making plans for the inaugural Earth Day.

Without the support and help from these two San Franciscan's the first Earth Day might have been delayed.

Cheese Update

The cheese urned out good. I wanted to make a hard cheese, like cheddar, but I forgot a step-the final heating-so I got mozzarella instead.

It is creamy and mild, I have not tried melting yet but a pizza is in it's future

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