October 28, 2021

Two weeks until their forever home. Aren’t they adorable!!!! It is so fun and they are starting on potty training. So cute!

This week is garlic planting week. It is rainy and a bit chilly but the afternoons can be wonderful. We are excited to get that early spring plant in the ground and ready for amazing garlic heads next year.

October 5, 2021

Even though Share Season is over, we still have various products for sale. Granola, pork, beef, eggs, turkeys, lamb, chickens, and more are available at our store. We are doing our once a month delivery on Thursday, October 7, so hurry and get your order in for this month!  You can also preorder your Thanksgiving turkey(s) at our store.

September 24, 2021

This is the last week of Share Season. A huge thank you to all of our CSA members for supporting us this summer. Each year brings its own joys and struggles, and you have stayed with us through it all.

Turkeys are available for purchase via our store, and here is the last Newsletter.

September 17, 2021

Quick! Beat the cold weather and get your tomatoes before it isn’t warm enough for them to ripen. This next week doesn’t look too cold for us, but tomatoes don’t ripen fast when it’s cooler than 70 or so degrees.

Daisy had puppies!! 🙂 Check out the Newsletter to see them.

September 10, 2021

Cooler weather, pumpkins, squashes, potatoes, and onions. The calendar may not say it, but it’s definitely feeling like fall around here. Even the apples and pears are ready to be picked. See the Newsletter for pictures.

September 3, 2021

Happy September!!  Wow, this year has been flying by for us. It seems as though one moment we’re caring for newly born lambs and planting seeds, and the next we’re picking melons and pumpkins. Speaking of which, we’re sending pumpkins out this week. 🙂 They are pie pumpkins, so they’re on the smaller side, with a sweeter flavor and less stringy texture. They will stay good for a couple weeks. Simply check them every few days, and if you notice a softer spot, use them right away.

Here is the Newsletter.

August 27, 2021

The melons are starting to come in! Cantaloupe, watermelon, and honeydew melon are coming in fast enough that it shouldn’t be long before they’re in the boxes. Maybe with all the rain we’re getting, they’ll be ready for this week’s boxes.

See the Newsletter for pictures of most of the kids at the Fair.

August 20, 2021

The Le Sueur County Fair is this weekend. 🙂   I wasn’t able to put a lot of farm news in the Newsletter, but I did have the time to create a bug comparison list.

Left: Common yellow garden spiders eat flies, mosquitoes, cabbage moths, and many more insects that harm our plants.   Right: Cabbage moth on a broccoli plant, presumably to find a good place to lay eggs. Cabbage moth caterpillars can destroy broccoli, kale, cauliflower, and cabbage plants by eating the entire plant.

Left: Honeybees pollinate nearly everything on our farm. From peppers to cantaloupe, and okra to alfalfa, without their pollination skills, we would not be able to provide food for you.    Right: Toads eat flies, mosquitoes, and whatever other insects stay still long enough for them to catch. We enjoy spotting toads of many sizes, from quarter-sized to bigger than an average human fist, they are all over out here. 🙂

August 13, 2021

The tomatoes are coming! You can order tomatoes at our store for delivery to your dropsite in the coming weeks. We also have lots of summer squash and zucchini, if you want to can spaghetti sauce, or make a delicious fresh-from-the-field spaghetti or lasagne. Sweet and hot peppers are also slowly coming in, hopefully speeding up as time goes on. 🙂

Here is the Newsletter

August 6, 2021

Diesel and Daisy, the family dogs, are now pig herders as well as sheep and cow herders. 🙂 A few days ago, the pigs had gotten out of their pen, and into a sheep pen. Once Diesel and Daisy knew where the pigs needed to go, they quickly sorted them from the sheep, and put the pigs back in their pen.

Our next direct to door delivery will be on Thursday, September 2, and the deadline to order is 6am on Wednesday, September 1.

This week’s Newsletter is ready.

July 30, 2021

We are doing a direct to door delivery on August 5! Lots of meat and produce: chickens, beef, pork, summer squash, zucchini, cucumbers, kale, eggs, granola, and so much more. The deadline for this delivery is 6am on Wednesday, August 4. Place your order now!

Here’s the Newsletter. Pictures below are cherry tomato bins on the left and a baby pumpkin on the right.

July 23, 2021

The tomatoes and peppers are slowly coming in! Each time we go out to check on them, we find more with others on the way. 🙂 Peppers and tomatoes are a pretty common crop to find in your share box, so I hope you enjoy them as much as we do.

Ellie has been adjusting to life with a broken arm fairly well. She keeps us on our toes thinking of more things she can do with one arm. Which the amount of things you can do around here with one arm is a bit surprising. 🙂

The Newsletter is ready.

July 16, 2021

Back to normal farm work again after our vacation week. Well, mostly normal. My younger daughter, Ellie, broke her right arm by falling from a swing set Wednesday evening. While I help her figure out life with a broken arm, the rest of our family are stepping in and helping wherever they can.

See the Newsletter to view some of our vacation pictures and a fun summer style meat pack!

July 9, 2021

No shares for Tuesday pickups this week, as it is the scheduled farmer vacation week. If you pickup on Saturday, we are packing your shares like normal.

July 2, 2021

Woohooo!!  We got rain this week. Our field plants are super thrilled to have water again. The ones in the hightunnels weren’t as affected, because they are on the drip irrigation system.

One of our projects lately is to put down landscape fabric between rows of viney crops, such as zuchinni, summer squash, pumpkins, winter squashes, etc. This helps with weed control around the viney crops so they can grow better and we have a better chance of finding all the produce.

The Newsletter is ready.

June 24, 2021

The cucumbers are coming! Slowly but surely the summer crops begin to come in. So far we’ve picked some cucumbers, summer squash, and zucchini, and watched tomatoes and peppers grow bigger.

We’ve been weeding the field like crazy, and it looks amazing. 🙂 Right now, the weeds are barely rooted, and thus easy to pull out, while the plants we want have enough roots to hold themselves in place. It almost takes longer to scoot ourselves along the row than it does to weed the row. 🙂

Most of our animals are on pasture now. This is a fairly big project each spring, because we rent cow pastures in various places, usually within an hour’s drive from our farm. Each pasture has to have its fences checked for breaks, fix any breaks or replace missing parts, fence-line sprayed for weeds so the electric fence isn’t shorted out, etc. After that we can bring animals to their summer homes. That isn’t the end though. Throughout the summer, the animals can get spooked, and break out of their pastures. When this happens, we go put them back in so they’re safe. Then at the end of summer into early fall, we bring all the animals home and into their winter pens.

Here is the Newsletter.

June 18, 2021

Yay for no mosquitoes so far this year! Mosquitoes make farming more difficult, because anytime we’re outside we’re wearing hooded sweatshirts, pants, gloves, hats, bandanas to cover faces, etc. That also means lots more water and cool-off breaks, but we make it through each year. 🙂  This year, we’ve made it this long with only the occasional mosquito at night!

Today’s goal is to prep for Mankato Farmer’s Market tomorrow, and trellis at least 2 tunnels of tomatoes. One tunnel of tomatoes is already trellised, and that will leave us with one more to do. We usually try to have four hightunnels of tomatoes, two of peppers, one that starts as garlic then flips to cucumbers, one as cucumbers all season, and the rest of the tunnels are random things. Some years these tunnels are beans, peas, and radishes, other times they’re zucchini, eggplant, winter squash, etc.

The Newsletter is ready.

June 11, 2021

This heat is definitely adding more excitement to our week. We have to get as much harvesting done as early in the morning as we can so the produce doesn’t wilt as fast. Even so, the lettuce, bok choy, and kohlrabi start to wilt by the time we can get it to the cooler. The peas are starting to come in, but they don’t like the heat, so I’m not sure that we’ll get many peas this year. The lack of rain with the heat is also hard. We’re rotating water through the hightunnels so that they all get water, but the field is way harder to water. The picture to the left is of one of the cracks in the ground from no water. That crack is over eight inches deep, but fortunately not wide enough to get a foot stuck in it.

Yesterday, we donated eggs and lettuce to a nearby food distribution. We have more eggs than we know what to do with; 90 dozen a day really adds up. The lettuces won’t stay sweet in the heat, because the heat causes them to go to seed, and get bitter in the process.

See the Newsletter for the list of produce we’re hoping to put in your share this week

June 4, 2021

Welcome to the first week of our Summer Share Season! Each week, usually the Friday before you pick up your share, I will post the Newsletter. The Newsletter contains our best guess as to the produce in your box that week, some farm news, a recipe or two, etc. Need help coming up with ways to enjoy your produce? Our recipe page contains many recipes that all contain produce we grow, and we keep adding recipes as time goes on.

Farm party went amazingly well! We were expecting a crowd, but the turnout was better than we were hoping. 🙂  A big thank you to everyone who came, you all help to support our farm and family. Hopefully you had fun seeing our farm, petting the animals, feeding grass to the cows, and the various goodies that we and our friends had to sell.

May 12, 2021

Four more days til Farm Party! Also known as Baby Animal Day, we are hosting an open house event at our farm, (Address: 35100 191st Ave. Montgomery, MN 56069), on May 16, from 2pm – 7pm.

We are also hosting a few other special friends who are bringing their goodies to sell during Farm Party:

• Pizzeria 201, Troy and Diane –  Fresh-baked pizzas with extra pizazz from our produce
• The Soap Lady LLC, Glenda – Soap made with lard from our farm
• New Hope Farmacy, Aaron – Local mushrooms and at home grow boxes

We will have plants and produce available for sale, along with free tours of our farm. You can see how we grow our produce, along with tour highlights such as baby chicks to pet, cows to handfeed, bunnies, piglets, and possibly seeing the farm cats. All ages are welcome.

Due to current MN covid regulations, we are not requiring masks during Farm Party, as it will be outdoors and less than 500 people at a time. Mask or no mask, everyone is welcome to join us. Please do whatever makes you comfortable, and respect other’s decisions, especially those involving social distancing and mask wearing. 🙂

If you can’t make it, we are hoping to do a Facebook live video of a farm tour so you can still join the fun!

May 10, 2021 

With the weather being too cold for planting outside, our tomatoes and peppers decided to start producing in the greenhouse. The picture to the left is of an Indigo Cherry tomato. It is like a regular cherry tomato, but much darker. This is our first year growing this type of cherry tomatoes, and I’m excited to see how they taste! 🙂

Farm Party is next Sunday!!! It’s an open house event from 2pm-7pm where you can come tour our farm, see how we grow things, pet and even handfeed some of our animals, and more. I’m going to try and make the next post give all the details about Farm Party.

April 26, 2021

Hurry, CSA signups close tonight at midnight!

Our CSA signups have been coming along very well. People have been signing up faster this year than last year, and we are grateful for that. After midnight tonight, any signups will be added to a waiting list until we are sure we have enough produce for everyone.

We’ve been trying to come up with a name for our new meat pack, so we decided to ask anyone who sees this for help. Submit your name idea through email (to [email protected]) and we will pick a winner who will receive a free pack of weiners with any order! This meat pack includes beef sticks, hot dogs, ring sausage, hamburger patties, brats, summer sausage, bologna, and hot beef.

Our family of 9 will vote on which name they each like best, and the most popular will be the winner. Good luck! 🙂

April 6, 2021

We’ve been getting plants ready for Farmers Market, which opens in May. This process includes planting seeds, transplanting seedlings to larger containers, and verifying they get the best treatment possible to ensure strong, healthy plants for your garden. If you have any questions, or want to order some plants, text me(Farmer Jean) at 612-245-6271, or email at [email protected].

Mankato Farmers Market opens the first Saturday in May, see here for more details. We do our best to be at the market each time it is open, but if the weather is bad, or we have something important going on, we may not be there.

The nice weather this past week has allowed us to put plants in the ground! We have radishes and peas in a hightunnel, lettuces, kohlrabi, kale, chard, and more planted in a couple other hightunnels, and I was even able to seed plant a few rows in the field today. 🙂  Yay for Spring!

March 21, 2021

Two more important dates to add to your calendars.

Saturday, March 27, we are having a photoshoot opportunity here at our farm. Our baby animals and a professional photographer make for some super cute pictures of your kiddos. Appointments are required for this event. Set up Your Appointment

Tuesday, April 6, is the next delivery day. We have hamburger, various packages of beef (e.g. steaks, roasts, shanks, etc), various packages of pork (e.g. bacon, pork chops, ham, pork lard, etc), stewing hens, eggs, granola, and more. See our store to place your order.

March 9, 2021

We have an official date for Farm Party! Sunday, May 16th, from 2pm to 7pm. Hopefully we won’t have to worry about the coronavirus by then, but we’ll wait and see. ?  I’m looking forward to it though. We should have lambs, calves, chicks, and possibly piglets and baby bunnies. Along with cows you can hand feed, and farm tours typically given by me, (Farmer Jean) my husband (Farmer Dean), and the older of my two daughters (Farmer Abby). Most farm tours involve seeing some of the hightunnels, our greenhouse, bunny tunnel, chickens, sheep, cows, our field for plants, and sometimes we’ll see the barn cats running around the farm.  For anyone who wants to see our farm, but can’t make it, I’m going to try to do a virtual tour on Facebook on May 16th.

We’re staying busy around here. School, planting, caring for animals, prepping for the chaos of Spring and Summer, and remodeling a rental house is plenty to keep us on our toes. Our lamb count is close to a hundred, we’ve had a few calves, and Daisy’s puppies are getting cuter by the day. ?  Three of the lambs are currently being bottle fed, along with one calf. Facebook has some more pictures if you’re interested.

February 23, 2021

Lots of baby animals around here! Last I checked, we have around fifty lambs, seven puppies, and a few calves. We’re about halfway done with lambing season.

 

February 19, 2021

We’ve made some updates to the website. As you can probably tell, the links in the header are different, and some pages are in different drop down menus. I hope it isn’t too confusing to get the hang of. 🙂

January 31, 2021

Lambing season has started. I even got a video of one of our ewes giving birth. Check it out on Facebook. It’s starting to feel like spring again.

January 1, 2021

Happy New Year! Our farm looks a lot different in the winter than it does in the summer, so I thought I’d share some pictures.

Blessings on your year! 🙂