Harvest Day is Here Again

CSA Week 2

Today was the 2^nd week of Gunter's Gourmet Garden CSA delivery. All went well.  Our full-share members each received a large bunch of baby turnips with tops, mustard greens, collard greens, a head of butter crunch lettuce, and 2 baby romaine lettuces. Our half-share members received the same veggies, but in smaller amounts. 

Each member receives an information packet of new and exciting recipes for preparation of the bounty that the harvest bags hold.

 We’re very proud of our lettuce crop this year and it is even more special since it was a victim of the raised-bed collapse catastrophe and they had to be transplanted straight into the garden.  Next week’s bags should also include kohlrabi, which is a new and exotic vegetable to some, and one that definitely warrants experimentation. 

Remember play with your food! We harvested some lovely butterhead lettuce this week that's perfect for lettuce wraps. Have you had lettuce wraps? They're delightful. You can find dozens of recipes for them on the Internet, so do a search and try one out. 

Hot Tip

By the by, for all you local readers... if you like pork sausage, Harvest Market grocery at 8^th and Scatterfield Road has sausage patties in a blue-and-white 36-ounce box you need to check out. It's frozen and marketed under  “Southern Farms Breakfast Pork Patties." It was on Managers special for under four bucks. Go get a box, or a couple boxes for that matter, even if it’s not on special. If you see Jim the meat man (he’s there until around 3:00 PM), tell him Matt the fireman sent you. He will probably just shake his head and try to sell you a cart full of meat. Anyway, the sausage is really, really good, not healthy, but very tasty. 

All right then, I’m done talk’n. --Matt

News from This Week at the Gunter Farm

First Harvest Bags

Well, we are off and running with the harvest bags for members of Gunter’s Gourmet Garden CSA. Our members each received a nice bunch of baby turnips with greens, collard greens, mustard greens, mizuna, and a little bag of mixed lettuce all picked at their nutritional best and just a couple of hours before delivery for the freshest food possible. Sherry, of course, took the extra step to include a little welcome card, recipes, instructions and descriptions of their produce. One of our main missions with the CSA and this blog is to get people to learn about and eat food they wouldn’t have normally tried. Our motto is “play with your food”. Tracy, our friend and top notch landscape architect, stopped by yesterday to peruse the flower gardens up in front of the house that Sherry Darl’n has lovingly built and take a tour around the fields out in the back of the farm. Tracy got to meet the chickens, turkeys and also the baby quail. Tracy happens to be our delivery person to the Indianapolis area.

Speaking of Fowl…

The quail have been moved to a new pen that I built. It is to grow them until the time they are separated into breeding pairs and grow-off pens. We all have rejoiced at this move for the convenience.. and the smell of having them inside the house was, I will admit, a bit overpowering for everyday. We should have quail eggs for sale in just a few weeks.

All is well with the chickens. Sherry is a better mom to them than their own moms would be, and I know she worries about them more. She has placed green and yellow streamers cut from plastic table cloths all around the fenced barnyard in an attempt to dissuade any old chicken hawk from dining on her charges. She takes this all very seriously and gives me pause as to whether she will be able to eat these fowl when their time comes due. Though she has refrained from naming most of them, she has names for their little social groups they stay in: the Blondies, Little Goldies (I call them Reds), Darks, Blues, Adoptees (the Easter chicks we adopted), and such. She does a head count in the morning after she plods out to the barn through the dew-laden grass that has grown a bit of length do to my neglect. After passing the count, they are let out of the barn to run around in the barnyard for the day. She will return again to close them back into their small barn for a safe nights’

 slumber, at which time she will do another head count. I thought this head counting was part of her obsessive-compulsive nature and a total waste of time. There is nothing you can do for a chicken that has been toted off by an unauthorized intruder. I, once again, have proven to be the one of intellectual weakness.

Upon one of these head counts on Friday in the A.M., Sherry came up short one little red chicken. I, upon hearing this, think to myself, “well, there is nothing you can do, it’s been eaten.” She, I think, knew the reality of it also. There was sadness in the air at this news.

Turns out we were wrong.

During our friend Tracy’s visit, we were giving a guided tour of the barn and Sherry was lamenting the loss of one of her beloved birds to Tracy, while I was admiring the craftsmanship of the wonderful little stock barn built out of fine, rough-sawn, native red oak lumber sawn by Mr. pace at his sawmill down the road to the north (you remember that story, right?). I, looking to the northwest corner of the barn for no particular reason, spy a little red chicken head barely peaking up high enough from below ground level and from behind a corner post. He was trapped to be seen by my, some might say, predator eyes. There was a deafening cheer that shot out of the barn door and down our forest-lined valley road. I am sure the neighbors could hear it. The cheer arose because upon one more head count, yes you guessed it, this was our wayward little red chicken. The chicken coop and Sherry were once again running in greased grooves.

I’m done talk’n, --Matt

Quail, Quail, Quail!

You bet we’ve got’em. We’ve got yellow ones, we’ve got yellow ones with spots on their heads, we’ve got brown ones with stripes, we’ve got brown ones that don’t have many stripes. We’ve got little tiny ones and big ones, and some what aren’t so big, we’ve got loud ones and quiet ones, fast ones and really fast ones, some that’s easy to hold, some that’s not so easy to hold, some that’s been dropped and some that ain’t been dropped. 

Quail, Quail, Quail! 

You betcha we got’em. 66 Cortenix quail and 8 button quail.

This Week’s News

The fields are almost planted. I was chased out of the pumpkin area last evening by the lightning. I did however get three raised-beds done. I can plant those when it dries up just a bit. Here’s what I have left to plant: kale, chard, miniput watermelon, carrots, edamame, and a few more plants I have picked up.

I have been late in getting another thrilling installment of this blog out and I apologize to our many, many loyal followers (pay no attention to the area on the screen that says we have only three followers… I bet there are at least twice that many). Anyhoo, we have been crazy busy, as you can imagine. I have been splitting my allotted time between prepping raised beds in the fields, planting and cultivating between rainstorms, mowing, and clearing land behind and around the little livestock barn. I’ve been cleaning out all the lumber and old windows that have been stored ever so meticulously in said barn all in preparation for the chickens, which by the way there are now 48. I have to get the fencing up now while I have a wife that’s still practicing tolerance instead of violence.

Bless Sherry’s little pea-pick’n heart—she has taken such good care of these chicks. She takes them out of their Rubbermaid totes that they sleep in and releases them every morning . She does this knowing full well that they will have to be caught again in the evening. This bring us to the evening chicken round up. This is no easy matter my friends. Chickens of this age do not like to be captured. They are like some teenagers that are sure they know what’s best and can fend for themselves. Wrong—they do not and cannot. Left unattended, they will surely fall prey to creatures that go bump in the night. These youthful chickens are assuredly on the menu here just as they are at your local KFC.

Sherry Darl’n is painfully aware of this as she has witnessed the taking of one young chick by a thieving chicken hawk. In an effort to thwart the hawk, she has rigged an area of the backyard with a variety of household/farm items to offer cover and protection for the chicks as well as deter the sky attacks. Every evening, Sherry dutifully goes out and chases these ever-growing two-legged speed demons (aka: chicks) around the yard. They have more moves than the highest paid athletes in the world. They are chased in and out of the labyrinth of obstacles that are there to protect them from the death that comes out of the sky.

Quite frankly, it all looks like a kids birthday party scene gone wrong. Let me paint you a picture of this elaborate hawk deterrent scheme. There are long, green streamers tied on every available tree branch and on twine that’s stretched from the old, falling down garage building over to the sycamore tree and back again. There is an giant patio umbrella in its most outstretched position propped up as to give the most cover it can afford. There is wire picket garden fencing scattered about—you know the kind, it is about knee high, scalloped along the top. Your mom or grandmother always had it around a flower bed. When you where in charge of the mowing you would always hang a lawn mower wheel in it because you were in an all-fire hurry to finish since the Key boys down the street were getting a game of baseball up, and you didn’t bother to take the little fence down like

 you were told to do! Yeah, that kind of fence. Well it’s laid around the yard at odd angles to offer more chicken protection.

There is also a an old metal trash can which has had the bottom missing out of it for fifty-three and a half years. The can’s been a part of the farm since I got here. Someone had the good sense to tie a piece of plywood cut to a reasonably round shape and size, some might consider, and tied onto the bottom of the can with a yellow rope. I foolishly tried to throw the whole thing away once. 

Surprisingly, it is hard to throw away a crappy trash can with a plywood bottom tied on with a yellow rope. The boys on the trash truck must have thought it’s just a crappy trash can holding, as best it can, trash, and in and of itself was not intended to be part of the days pick up. In all fairness, I am sure that this is the sort of scenario the trash guys encounter all the time. I’ll bet the trash pickup route is full of good folks with similar trash receptacles that would not wish to have their crappy trash cans mistaken for the very refuse they hold, and would have complained severely over the matter of a mistaken pickup. So with this in mind, and attempting to avoid customer wrath, the trash guys ignored my poor metal can even though I dearly wanted to get rid of it. This is my good fortune now as this very can has become an intricate piece of the chicken hawk depredation zone avoidance system… along with assorted old house window screens, Rubbermaid lids, flower planters, cardboard boxes, and a flower trellis. (The lesson here is keeping things around, even if they’re rusty and falling apart, is a good thing. You never know when they might come in handy.)

I am sure all of this does a very good job of holding down the mortality rate of death among our chicken population. We have not suffered one more loss due to the hawk since the depredation zone avoidance system has been put into place. But it cuts both ways. What’s good for keeping the hawk at bay is also good for keeping the slow, sore humans that are designated chicken wranglers each evening from a quick catch. Sherry starts out every morning knowing that this dance is going to take place the same way every evening—the running, the dodging, the weaving, the almost cussin’, the for sure crying, yet she does it everyday without despair and with a since of duty. She cannot stand the thought of losing one more of the dirty, uncaring, ungrateful, feather-covered little beasts. She loves and cares for each one of them, and I don’t understand it. Same as I don’t understand why God does this very thing for me and you. I just know he does. She will carry on and so will He.

Well that’s going to wrap it up here at the swamp farm, I’m done talking. -- Matt