Morning Song Farm News

Here's the link to make reservations for our cheese making class(es): http://www.meetup.com/Morning-Song-Farm-Cheese-Making/events/83796332/ If you have a CSA account with us, you don't need to go to meetup. Just send us an email that you'd like to have your class fee charged to your account, and let us know if you're attending one, two or all three that are currently scheduled. (Third Saturdays of each month.)

Come on out to Morning Song Farm for the first of a series of cheese making classes. A series of three classes, you can choose all three or just one. Each class will be held the third Saturday of the month starting October 20; from 9 to 12:00. Get a chance to meet the farm’s beautiful Nigerian dairy goats, pet the babies, and join in a 9:00 sharp milking demonstration. (Our goats don’t like to wait around for anyone;) Bring a crunchy granola bar or two and you’ll be everyone’s best friend, especially Carl The Herd Leader who eats anything but really gets excited if it’s crunchy.   We’ve teamed up with veteran cheese maker Virginia Masters who has been exploring and teaching all things cheesy for 10 years. Among her many other interests, Virginia loves animals and volunteers with a horse, dog and kitten rescue group.   She’s enthusiastic about imparting her cheese making knowledge to anyone, young and old alike. Cheese making is somewhat of a lost art and Virginia insis...

I’m pretty excited about the enhanced quality of our Harvest Ticket this week. Ever since starting our blog here at www.blogspot.com , we’ve had problems downloading images created in Word, which is where I’ve found it’s easiest to create our tickets. I’ve jumped through all kinds of hoops, and blogspot usually says it’s not in the right format. The only way I could figure out how to get blogspot to accept the image, was to scan and save it in a format blogspot would accept, with an unavoidable, ensuing quality reduction . I’ve just discovered Gimp2, which is a free software program that can change formats, and it works!   Passion fruit this week! Passion Flower For those of you who have been with us since last year, this is old news; but here’s what you need to know to enjoy your passion fruit. First, the uglier, and more wrinkled, the better. Where else are you going to hear that sentence? Yup, the smooth, fresh looking fruits should be left on your counter to “a...

Carl the Menace has outdone himself this week and has exceeded even his usual level of nonsense and bedlam he provides us for our enjoyment. As the herd’s official “taster”, he takes the first bite of anything suspect and then the rest of the herd follows after him. I don’t know how he got this job. But there seems to be a herd consensus.   He ate all my Temecula Valley Pipe and Supply invoices this week (really just half of each—but to the IRS, half a goat-eaten invoice is the same as no invoice), saving none for the others. So I guess the flimsy invoice paper stock the invoices are printed on, is extra tasty. As I was unloading my car yesterday, I put my purse down for a second to shift the groceries in my arms and Carl pounced on my purse and bolted. That’s it, down the driveway with change, lipstick and Notes To Self flying in the wind. I cornered him in the goat barn, as he calmly starred me down with a $20 hanging out of his mouth. Here’s the thing.   Like the...

OK, son Frankie--always interested in all thinks related to economics;  is excited to see that his allowance source (the egg "division" here at Morning Song ) has demonstrated an equilibrium between supply and demand. We've taken on 5 new orders; and until our juvenile chickens are laying consistently in a few more months; he says we can't fill any more. Thanks so much to all of you who are allowing us to raise chickens as they should be raised. A side note; I was inspected yesterday for our CCOF Organic Certification, and I asked Shannon Murphy, our inspector, about what it would take to have our chickens certified organic. I was pretty sure what her answer would be, but I wanted to hear it from her. She couldn't quote the pricetag; but since Morning Song Farm offers sactuary to an occassional homeless chicken we can never become certified organic. She said we'd have to get rid of all our chickens, start over with just hatched, day old chicks and then docum...

I've posted a second harvest ticket this week because we had to switch things around a bit between Tuesday and Wednesday. Only Tuesday large share subscribers received the giant zuchs. I'm going to allow our zuch garden to provide another batch of giants, and hand out to Wednesday large shares either this coming week or next. Eggs! We now have increased our egg productin to the point where we can accept 5 or 6 more orders a week! If you'd like to have a weekly dozen or half dozen added to your CSA box, email us! Our eggs are remarkably special. First, we feed them with a top-notch, certified orgtanic, soy-free feed (from Modesto Mills) along with garden and orchard scraps. Chickens love melons and oranges, by the way! They're free to roam inside a coyote-proof enclosure and have a large red barn to escape the elements and roost in at night. We have a pet llama, Couscou, who shares their space and protects them as well. Since Couscou moved in, we haven't had a...

We're excited to have our late Sungold tomatoes in this week's shares for all. They're among the sweetest cherry tomatoes we can grow, and we grow them every year. We're just beginning to harvest limes, at last. You'll find them only in the large shares, and in a couple weeks, we hope to have them across the board. This is the last week for Asian pears. We don't have ladders tall enough to reach the highest parts of our pear trees, so the highest fruit is now being pecked by birds. We had plenty to put in all boxes for weeks, so don't mind sharing a few hundred pounds with the birds. They have to eat, too! What's coming up: apples, persimmons, pomegranites, passion fruit, dragon fruit, guavas and navel oranges. In the gardens: brocolli, eggplant, beets, lettuces, radish, carrots, and more. As most of you know, we have 10 acres of macadamias but not a whole lot of nuts because of a squirrel population that we can't control organically. We do hope to...

Among my favorite ways of preparing zuchini is below. Lindy Herman, CSA member sent these photos and preparation tips. It's similar to mine. She stuffed it with Trader Joe's multigrain blend (couscous, quinoa, etc.), and added garlic, parsley, browned onions and parmesan cheese. She then topped it with a breadcrumb and parmesan cheese topping for the last 10 minutes. She didn't specify how long she cooked the beast; but it's somewhat unhelpful even if she'd said, because though each large share today received a large zuch,  everyone's is a different size.  That's one thing about a small farm like ours, we don't grow enough of something like this to set up a uniformity line.  Anyway, we cooked ours for about 45 minutes at 350, which you can use as a guideline. I couldn't tell if she cut up any of the zuchini before baking. That's what I do; I scoop out maybe half of the "meat" of each halved zuch, and cube, combine with mixture and then...

Ingredients: 24 pimiento-stuffed olives 2 tablespoons olive oil 1 tablespoon red wine vinegar 3 tablespoons minced fresh oregano 1 tblespoon minced fresh mint 1/4 t of salt 1/8 t of freshly ground pepper 2 ounces crumbled feta cheese Directions: In a salad bowl, toss your endive, onion and olives. In a jar with a tight-fitting lid, combine the oil, vinegar, oregano, mint, salt and pepper; shake well. Drizzle over salad and toss to coat. Tpop with cheese. from tastofhome.com

OK, I know it's uncool to publish an unharvested harvest ticket; but I'm heading out of town on the worst possible day of the week to head out of town; (yet another stab at trying to get my ongoing divorce handled; 4.5 years and counting) and wanted to have some sort of post available. So, yeah, I may have some items wrong--I'm hoping to get basil in boxes this week; but the heat has made our field iffy--I watered well last night and hope to get at least small bunches in boxes this morning in my absense.. Also, we have a couple new items: curly endive which is spicier, and tougher than regular lettuce; and escarole; which is amazing boiled in chicken or veggie broth; but can be consumed raw as well.