Come celebrate the bounty with locally grown vegetables and chicken
for Thanksgiving dinner! We have larger
chickens that make a great substitute for turkey. And if you’re having lots of people – we have
lots of chickens!
September was a blur of markets and getting our grains and staple
crops out of the field. Cut and hauled
and threshed by hand, we now have bags upon bags of wheat and barley stacked in
the living room and windrows of beans drying in the barn.
Growing staples was a great learning experience. We had an unexpected challenge growing staples on peat soil-- too fertile! What a problem to have! Staple crops, like dry
beans, wheat, flint corn, and sunflower seeds, need a bit of stress in the
later season to make their seeds mature.
But our plants just kept growing and growing because the soil is very fertile and stays nice and moist, so lots of the seeds didn't mature before this season’s
early rain came. The same nutrients and moisture also made the weeds
grow great – it’s called smartweed for a reason – which kept lots of
the beans from drying properly. Another
challenge was getting things out of the field before the rains came, and we
were stalled a few times when we had to wait for things to dry after unexpected
showers. However, our popcorn did unexpectedly
well. We’re just waiting for the moisture content to be right for it to pop. So this year we learned that peat soil grows
vegetables beautifully, and we've got loads of ideas of how to grow staples
even better next year!
It feels as though the season should be winding down, with
our staples out of the field, the winter squash curing in the basement, and our
last batch of chickens being sent to the abattoir this week, but we are far
from slowing down. We've got winter
crops to sell until January, garlic to plant, freezers full of chickens to sell,
not to mention book keeping and planning for next season... will there ever be an off-season? Probably not, but like my mother always says,
“a change is as good as a break," so bring on the rubber rain suits and office
work!
