2-Minute Warning

If you're wanting beef or pork before the end of the year, let us know soon! We only have 2 quarters of beef, 1 beef bundle, and 1-1/2 hogs left for this year. Otherwise we'll have beef again in February and early March, but those slots are filling fast as well. Pork we won't have again until probably early April.

I'm running low on inventory, so I'll only be at the Mason City Farmers Market every other week until October. See the list of dates to the left. In October I'll be there every weekend, with pork and maybe a few chickens if I have extras. Otherwise chickens are pretty well sold out for the year. The Farmers Market was a big success for us this year. Thank you to everyone who gave us a try! We'll be back next year for sure.

Three's a crowd

Two of the muscovey ducks and a white rock hen are trying to hatch the same clutch of eggs.

If cuteness could kill

we'd all be dead by now. And the killers names would be Smokey, Candy, Dexter, Sammy, and their mother, Casper. Especially that little blue-eyed calico girl, Candy. She's especially dangerous.



Dexter, showing why this flower box is not looking nearly this pretty these days.

Ready

Hurricane Ridge

Seattle is a pretty cool place in that you are a short drive from two different mountain ranges. Mt. Rainier is in the Cascades, and Hurricane Ridge is in the Olympics. We visited Hurricane Ridge on Day 4 of our trip, so named because of the hurricane force winds it sometimes experiences. The skies were overcast that day, which made for some interesting effects at 5400 feet.

The view went from this...


to this...


to this in a matter of minutes. (Again, those flowers and meadows make me want to yodel.) And then it rained on our way back down the mountain.


There's a fun website that shows the current view from Hurricane Ridge 24/7:
Hurricane Ridge Webcam

From there we went back to sea level to visit the Point Wilson lighthouse. The original light was atop the caretakers house, built in 1859. The lighthouse was built in 1913 and the light was moved there. In 1976 the light operation was automated and the lighthouse building closed to the public.


My computer and camera are in another snit, but hopefully I'll have a few more photos to share tomorrow. (Come on, new laptop, get here already!)

Mt. Rainier

Backing up to Day 2 of the trip, we spent the whole day at Mt. Rainier - 14,410 feet high. Scientists think it was originally 2000 feet higher but lost its original peak in a volcanic blast. It boasts 26 active glaciers. Luckily we had perfect, clear weather - we were told that it wasn't often one could see Mt. Rainier this clearly.

There was breathtaking view...


after breathtaking view...


LaGrande Dam on the Nisqually River


Beautiful waterfalls


The Henry M. Jackson Memorial Visitors Center at Paradise on the mountain. This is as far up the mountain as you can go by car - at about 5100 feet. This building is to be torn down soon and replaced by a new, more energy efficient visitors center.


This douglas fir cross section was interesting. Major events in history were marked by its rings...


...from its birth...


...to its death.


The meadows and wild flowers made me want to braid my hair and romp through the grass like Heidi.


A very awe-inspiring day for this flatlander!

Seattle's Pike Place Market

So yes, you all guessed correctly! I went to Seattle last week on a spur-of-the-moment visit to see my cousin, who's been out there for 3 years now. Her parents decided to make the trip before they get busy with fall field work and asked if I wanted to come along.

They only gave me a week's notice, and I hesitated because of all the things going on here at our farm (just got 150 broiler chicks, and there's the big melon project), but then I decided that there will always be a reason not to go so just go already. So we went on Monday and came home Friday, and had a wonderful time.

I'm going to go out of order here and share my favorite pictures from the farmers market which we shopped on Wednesday, day 3 of our trip.


The flowers were amazing.


No matter what fruit or vegetable you were craving, it could be found here. Not all locally grown, of course, but much of it was. We took home 2 different kinds of cherries, 2 different kinds of peaches, and some plums.


Fresh fish...


...and shell fish. I love me some shell fish. Too bad I don't actually know how to cook it.

After the market we took a harbor cruise, which was really nice. And that night we dined on fresh seafood. Crab cakes, yum!

More Seattle pictures to come. And then I'll resume the basement retrospective. And then maybe one of these days I'll get back to being a farm blogger :)

Where in the world

have I been this week?







Put your guess in the comments! (I think I made it pretty easy on you guys :)

OLS Week 7 (?)

Or, "I am a bad bad food blogger"

Um, where did week 6 go? I really don't know. I'm sorry, OLSers! Whip me with a wet, local noodle.

And no picture this week. I got my camera and computer to resolve their differences, but the download process is painfully slow. So you'll just have to rely on my tantalizing descriptions. I'll update with the picture when I can.

It's been wicked hot here lately. Too hot to want to cook much. But we finally got our first ripe tomatoes this week. Seems late for the first tomatoes, but that only heightens the anticipation. And of course the first thing I'm going to do with the first tomatoes is make salsa.

I could eat just chips and salsa for supper and go to bed a happy girl. But my husband insists on balanced meals for some reason. So to oblige him I served the salsa with a couple of ham steaks and some steamed zucchini. I know so many are tiring of zucchini by this point in the summer, but I can't get enough. And the ones that somehow grow to the size of tree trunks when I turn my back? I throw them into the pasture and the cows break them open and devour them.

Local Ingredients:
tomatoes, jalapeno peppers, chile peppers for salsa - 0 miles (our garden)
zucchini - 0 miles (our garden)
ham steaks - 0 miles (our porkers, or 6 miles if you want to count their trip to the butcher, then to the locker, then to our freezer)

Nonlocal Ingredients:
garlic (nobody selling this at our farmers market yet), sea salt, lime juice, cilantro (sometimes this is from a local source at our supermarket, but they don't really label it as such so I'm not sure), tortilla chips for salsa

Basement Retrospective, Part 3

(Go here for Part 1 and Part 2)

By Day 3 enough of the crawl space side of the old basement had been dug out so that the steel support beam could go in. First with the big tow-truck looking thing...


Then the skid loader... (I can't believe that guy is down in the hole with that giant beam!)


Then the guy in the hole gives it a shove...


Another push with the skid loader and we're in.

Happy Anniversary

My mom will probably kill me for posting this picture, but I think it's cute. (I love her hair.) I have this picture on the shelf over my kitchen sink.

My parents have been married 38 years today. I think this picture is from Christmas 1968, the Christmas before they were married. My mom was 18, my dad 19. I was born about 15 months after they were married.

I'm grateful for the loving, compromising, affectionate example they set for my brother and I. Happy anniversary, Mom & Dad! Love, K.

Basement Retrospective, Part 2

(Click for Part 1)


By the end of the first day the crawl-space half of the basement had been dug through from one end of the house to the other and a temporary vertical support put in place. You can see that the basement half and the crawl-space half were separated by a limestone foundation wall (to the right in this picture). The stones forming the foundation walls were random sized stones stacked and mortered together.


The side porch floor had been removed and its roof supported.


The garage floor had also been dug out some. Since this was an attached garage, it had to come up with the rest of the house.

I've been told that originally this was a summer kitchen. There were back stairs that went from there up to a room over the garage/summer kitchen, and there was a door leading from that room into one of the bedrooms in the main part of the house. We had to remove that stairway in order to make room for a new stairway leading from the garage down into the new basement. At one time the room over the garage had been subdivided into 3 rooms. Servants quarters, and perhaps boarding rooms as I've also been told that this farm was a stagecoach stop. I've not been able to find any documented evidence of this, but one historical text tells that this farm and its "famous spring" (which no longer exists) were a popular stop for travellers.

We wanted to use the limestone from the original foundation walls as the facing on the outside of the new basement walls. But the stones would have had to have been cut to fit, a very labor-intensive (i.e. expensive) process so we opted to purchase limestone out of Wisconsin to keep an original look to the foundation. Pictures of that coming at the end of this little retrospective!

Basement Retrospective, Part 1

My computer and camera are still not on speaking terms with each other. I have a new laptop ordered, but it's apparently taking the slow boat from India. Or somewhere.

So I started going through old photographs, and realized that 4 years ago this week work started on our new basement. It was an interesting process so I thought I'd share a few pictures here.

Various opinions peg this house at between 100 to 125 years old. The farm itself was the first land claim made in Mitchell County, in the year 1851. A log cabin stood somewhere on the farm prior to this house being built. It is a balloon frame construction.

The foundation was limestone that had been foamed over at some point. There was only basement under half the house - which included a tree limb as one of the support posts and a large old tree stump that was presumably a chopping block. The other half of the house was dirt crawl space, and a popular entry point into the house for very. large. rats. Yikes.


This is the north end of the house where they started digging.


The first task was to dig out underneath the house so that it could be jacked up and supports put in place.


By noon the first day they had a pretty significant hole going.


A steel support beam arrived.


And Rafe was only this big (almost 17 months).

Reach for the sky

Pole beans at dusk

I'm tired tonight, and lazy, so you get the Bulleted List of Randomness:

* We survived a birthday party sleepover with 8 girls last night. It actually went really well and they seemed to have a lot of fun. My aunt & uncle took us all for a ride up the river on their pontoon, and let the girls off to swim for a while. Pizza in the park afterwards then back to the farm where, of all things, they played in the corn wagon until I finally made them get out at 11 p.m. This morning they played with the pigs, jumped on the trampoline, and took turns riding the horse.

* For some reason I am not in the mood to garden or freeze or can this year. I think I'm overwhelmed by the amount of stuff on my To Do List. In my computer programmer world this is called "Analysis Paralysis". So tonight I did 6 quarts of pickles and a couple quart freezer bags of broccoli, trying to get things jumpstarted. I'm not sure it really worked.

* Tomorrow is farmers market. I'm starting to run out of things, which is good and bad at the same time. This is our first year at market, we came with what we had in the freezer, and weren't sure what to expect. So I'm glad people are liking what we do, but I hate to disappoint anyone by being sold out of something they want. It will be nice next year when we actually plan ahead for it.

* However people seem reluctant to try the "hot sausage". It's really not that hot. I'm not a lover of tear-inducing hotness. The sausage has a bite, but I wouldn't call it hot. Maybe just spicy. Anyway, those of you coming to farmers market tomorrow - give it a try!