Morning Song Farm News

We're just beginning to harvest our heirloom red beets this week, Large Shares are getting our thinnings, so that we can clean out the rows...allowing the rest to grow larger. There is Swiss Chard in all Large shares, that is missing from this photo.

Change Order? Click Here As our little CSA has grown, the complexities of keep it all straight have grown as well. We have 50 drop points, mostly weekly, although there are three that are only biweekly. There are those that receive boxes weekly, but add-ons biweekly. (We don't offer vice versa) There's Large Boxes, Small Boxes, and Salad Boxes, both with and without eggs.  There's vacation skips for weekly subscribers, much appreciated, Please-Shift-Our-Box to the homeless shelter for biweekly vacationers (and some generous weekly subscribers' donations), credit card number changes, cancellations at the end of commitments, new starts, delayed starts, restarts, and lots of on-going, uncommitted trials starting and stopping. As the roster-builder-change-order taker here, besides the lead farmer, I spend a full day each week combing through my email accounts in search of Change Order Requests...and there's no way I can ever go on a real vacation, because this task ...

We've worked for quite a while now on our livestock "fodder" system, which is a simple, automated hydroponic system that grows grain for feeding chickens, goats, etc. It's been a little more complicated than we had hoped, as suppliers of some barley provide grain that sprouts poorly (why?) and we weren't able to ascertain in the beginning if the problem was our system or their seed. Now we have a baseline of reasonable expectations, so we know if seed is good or not right away. The system itself is so tinker-toy simple, that at first I thought we'd be up and running in days. Ha! Like all things Morning Song, that which seems so simple is never thus.  The system is humidity and heat sensitive, and because we set it up in our greenhouse, near the chicken barn, we had chicken-related seed theft that baffled us for weeks, on top of automated watering malfunctions that plagued us from the start. From time to time an occasional chicken flies the coop and pecks aro...

Here's yesterday's harvest shot:

Well, I'm disappointed that we lost our entire sprout production this week when the power went out during the storm. The chickens got the makings of around 200 servings of sprouts, and there was pretty much flock-wide excitement over that. The chickens are fed Modesto Mills Certified Organic Soy-Free feed and our own freshly grown, high protein barley that we are weekly increasing the production of. They just love the barley! They also get quite a bit of leafy greens from our fields. Our livestock is NOT certified organic, while the food we grow, is...by CCOF. Even at $8 a dozen, our eggs are a loss leader for us; which is why we don't accept egg orders from non subscribers...we consider it a value-added service to our much appreciated, committed, subscriber base and not a commodity for sale to the public at large. There really is nothing quite like a fresh egg from our farm...they are truly tasty! And I think...knowing that our chickens are cared for and provided a great life,...