November has been a busy month. Ken and Bill finished the fall ploughing with our Suffolk Punch horses and we have of course been focused on the Fall CSA. It takes the three of us a good three days prior to the pick-up day to harvest. That pretty well eats up a week.  Today Ken is finally getting back to sawing logs. It is a job that he was hoping to have done last spring, but the early spring jump started our farm work and put a stop to that idea. The one window of opportunity to saw during the growing season was kiboshed when the saw engine broke.  It took a while to get that repaired because the small engine repairmen in our area were all focused on irrigation engines during our dry summer. When Ken got ready to start today he found that the mice had chewed a hole in the air filter…after a trip to town he is now starting to saw and I am crossing my fingers that all goes well.

We ended up with lovely weather for our annual CSA Pot Luck. As usual there was lots of amazing food to share with a relaxed , happy time for all. After our big meal we enjoyed horse drawn wagon rides and for some a walk in the woods. Later in the afternoon the children made a jungle gym out of the straw bales that we had put out for people to sit on and had lots of fun playing on them. It was a nice end of the season party for our apprentices and Michelle Jory, who helped make the day enjoyable for all. It is very special to be able to form a community around the food that we grow and eat.

The coming week will wrap up the main season of our CSA and we are happily anticipating slowing down a bit after that. We hope to plant our 2013 garlic crop this week and mix up potting soil so it will be ready for the winter startup of the greenhouse for next season.

I am happy to report that we have had a major break through with the milking of Mabel. She was not very happy about being milked and was kicking to the extent that it was impossible to milk her. Finally, after much perseverance, she has turned into a dream cow at milking time. Mac is now permanently separated form Mabel and is being bottle fed. We have a small milking machine system to keep me from waking up with numb arms in the night and are now able to start thinking about making yogurt, butter and cheese! Our apprentices, Michelle and (Ken-reluctantly) were a big support to me in this endeavour and I am very grateful. Ken thinks that I am crazy to want to take on more work and perhaps I am, but for some reason I am excited about the prospect of having our own milk and making our own dairy products.

September is a big fall harvest month on the farm, at the same time we are looking forward to next season, working in summer cover crops and planting the over winter cover crops and fall grain. With only three weeks left in our main season CSA we are deciding how to divide the harvest amongst our  members and what to set aside for the Fall CSA.

Today CSA working shares helped us bring up our squash and pumpkins from the field. In the afternoon we started to dig our sweet potatoes and have them curing in one of the hoop houses. Amanda spent part of the afternoon tedding the last of our hay for this season.  We are hoping to take it off on Monday, weather providing.

It is already September 1st! Our CSA working shares are always a big help when they come to lend us a hand with the harvesting and washing of produce for our pick ups. Today they suggested we take some photos of the pick-up room with the produce ready to go before everyone arrived to “pick-up” the days offerings.

The fall harvest time is upon us. This week we dug all the remaining potatoes. The horses actually dug the potatoes and we picked them up and bagged them. It was a full day, but very satisfying.  Anna McFaul, a past apprentices, was here to help and enjoyed seeing our potato digger at work. When she was here we were still using a walk behind potato plough.

We have been having a bit of a challenge milking Mabel this week and have decided to take Mac away from her to see if that helps. We had hoped that we could leave him with her and just milk off enough each morning for house milk, but Mabel decide this week that she’d rather keep all the milk for Mac. We’ll see how it goes from here…

Ellen and Della were home for a visit last week and it was lovely to have a  bit of time with them both. Della is a very responsive two month old and we look forward to seeing her continue to develop her own personality.

Above is a youtube video that was filmed at Orchard Hill Farm last weekend by our son, Grayden, and his friend Ivan.  Grayden and our apprentices were brain storming earlier in the season on promoting farming as a good way to get fit and dreamed up a competition day   with various events…somehow it actually managed to come to pass. T-shirts were designed for the occasion with the “Farm Fit”  logo.  It was a fun weekend, but I think more fun for the city slickers who came than for our tired farm team here!  Grayden says that next time he will try and schedule it in the off season so that more farmers will actually attend!

We have been busy planting cover crops for the 2013 garden areas. Our garlic has been drying for a month and today we took it down and bagged it for future use. We are also reorganizing the middle barn to make room for the lumber that Ken is finally having time to saw. The motor for the new saw mill is now fixed and the sawing has begun!  Yesterday, Michelle and I bent over the tops of our onions to get them ready for pulling and curing next week. The crop looks good. We were also very pleased to see that the squash and pumpkins are producing a good crop.  This year we tried a new method of preparation and planted directly into a rye cover crop that had been cut off just as the heads were coming out instead of ploughing in the rye…as a result I was watching them very closely and getting worried that they weren’t setting enough fruit…I decided that I should just leave them alone to grow and was pleasantly surprised to see that left on their own they did fine!

Our cut-your-own flowers have been a big hit and I wish I had pictures of all the lovely bouquets that CSA members have taken home with them. I’ve planted several succession plantings of zinnias, snap dragons and calendula to keep the flowers coming longer and an pleased with the results. Over the years I have tried to select flowers that grow well here and produce good cut flowers for our CSA members. Gradually I feel like I am succeeding in growing a better “cut flower garden.”

Ken and I went on a field trip the end of last week organized by the Ecological Farmers of Ontario. We are very grateful to our apprentices and working shares who were here to gather together a lovely array of produce for Saturday’s pick-up. We saw a number of other farms and visited the Rodale Institute for their field day. One of the farms we visited was Eric and Anne Nordell’s in Pennsylvania. They are a model farm for weed control with the use of draft horses. It is interesting for us to be able to leave the farm to see other farms during the growing season.

This time of year we have lots of produce coming in and we welcome recipes from our CSA members. Colleen Burns has supplied us with a Cold Cucumber Soup recipe that she has been enjoying.

Cold Cucumber Soup

3 T. Butter or marg.

1 cup chopped onions

4 large garlic cloves – minced

3 cups chicken or veggie broth

4 cups seeded diced, unpeeled cucumber (2 medium)

1 cup swiss chard or spinach

1 cup sliced, peeled potatoes

1/2 tsp. salt or to taste

1/4 tsp freshly ground pepper

1 T lemon

1 cup table cream

In a large saucepan heat butter and saute onions and garlic until soft. Add broth cucumber, spinach, potatoes, lemon juice, salt and pepper.

Simmer covered until potatoes are tender (10 min.) Tansfer mixture in batches to blender or food processor to puree (Blender makes soup smoother)

Transfer to large bowl. Stir in cream. Let soup cool. Then chill overnight or for several hours. Serve in chilled bowls. Can garnish with thin slices of cucumber.

Harvest time is coming early this year with the warm spring and hot weather that we have been experiencing. Usually we don’t harvest wheat and oats until later in the summer, but our wheat is all off and the straw is in the barn. The oats are half harvested, one of our fiels isn’t ready yet. Our old combine has held together so far, but Ken says there is a vibration that is starting to concern him…fingers crossed that it all holds together for another season. We are selling our old thrashing machine today so we can’t use that as our fall back position.

The garlic was also harvested earlier than usual this week. It came out of the field as a bumper crop!  We dug it all in one afternoon Ken and Bill ploughed it out with Gena and Buttons, two of our Suffolk Punch horses, and a walking plough. Then we gathered it up and tied two bunches of ten together on either end of a length of twine, loaded it onto a wagon that the horses pulled up to the barn and it is all nicely hanging to dry.

We have been irrigating the garden  because of  the dry weather and are thankful that we have a pond and equipment to do so. It does add to the work load and it isn’t the same as rain, but it helps keep the garden growing! We are hoping for rain soon to help our hay and pasture fields to grow.

The CSA pick-ups keep rolling around twice a week and we are harvesting beautiful produce to give to our CSA members. Our early carrots have been the most disappointing, because of the wire worm damage early in the spring. We are hoping that the later plantings will come along better. The taste of the carrots that we have harvested is very good despite the lower yield. Because of the wire worm we have decided to move our garden plot for the 2013 season to a different location. We had the area where we thought we were going to have the garden all ploughed in the spring and thought we were going to avoid summer ploughing in the hot dry weather. Now we are in the midst of ploughing the new area and it is hard on the horses and the teamsters. The ground is so hard that it is difficult to keep a plough in the ground. The apprentices are also working at preparing other plots for our 2013 potatoes, squash and new asparagus planting. Each of them have a field that they are responsible for and are doing all the tillage with the draft horses to prepare the ground. Some of the cover crops have been planted and the other fields are almost ready to be seeded.

We are happy that Princess,the belgian mare we had for sale will be going to Edencrest, another CSA farm in Ontario north west of Barrie. Mater is still for sale.

It’s Pesto time with fresh garlic and basil! Here is a recipe from Our Mothers’ Kitchens by Anita Stewart that I use:

PESTO

3 garlic cloves

2 cups packed leaves

1/3 cup pine nuts or walnuts

1 tsp salt

1/2 tsp pepper

3/4 cup olive oil

In blender or food processor process garlic, basil, pine nuts, salt and pepper until finely chopped. With machine still running, gradually pour in oil and puree. Scrape into freezer container. Seal and freeze for up to 6 months. Makes 1 cup.