To sign up for a 2010 CSA share with little flower farm email us:
littleflowerfarmcsa@gmail.com
We'll send you an application. Your application and check secures your spot.
Shares fill up fast!
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Outside the box
Your share in little flower farm costs $500 dollars. That's for 18 weeks of fresh local (aren't they synonyms?) chemical-free vegetables during the growing season. How can we put that in perspective?
If you make $52,000 a year that's a whole season's worth of veggies for just a couple of days of work. I know what you are thinking! WOAH NELLY! THAT IS SO WORTH IT! SIGN ME UP!
If you make $30,000 a year it's more like four day's worth of work for a season's worth of vegetables. Still a great deal.
And here's why:
When you sign up for a CSA share you are signing up for more than just good food for your family. You are supporting a sustainable farmer in your area. You are supporting local jobs, sustainable agriculture, family life, health of wildlife, land and water conservation, and also, National security. There's alot more in your CSA share than what fits in the box!
If you make $52,000 a year that's a whole season's worth of veggies for just a couple of days of work. I know what you are thinking! WOAH NELLY! THAT IS SO WORTH IT! SIGN ME UP!
If you make $30,000 a year it's more like four day's worth of work for a season's worth of vegetables. Still a great deal.
And here's why:
When you sign up for a CSA share you are signing up for more than just good food for your family. You are supporting a sustainable farmer in your area. You are supporting local jobs, sustainable agriculture, family life, health of wildlife, land and water conservation, and also, National security. There's alot more in your CSA share than what fits in the box!
Resident Mole Catcher
Beatrice, cat of class and character has taught herself to open the front door and sing with the birds.
Baby Chicks
Next year's new laying flock has arrived. New Hampshire Reds, Rhode Island Reds, and Silver Laced Wyandottes. Soon to be pampered on pasture out with the sheep!
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Butchering Days
We've been busy at Little Flower Farm. Sausagina and Bacon have given their lives over for the greater cause, and we've been turning them into hams and bacon, pork chops and soap. It is an amazing experience, growing your own food, especially growing your own meat. We find our respect for the common sausage is exponentially increased. Our appreciation for the fine animals that pigs are will never diminish.
Monday, November 2, 2009
Letting Nature take its course
INTRODUCING SIR WILHELM, our visiting buck.
Its breeding time for the sheep and goats...time to ensure some milk production (and cute kids and lambs) come spring. Sir Wilhem arrived to meet our ladies, Ginger and Dixie a couple weeks ago. This was after our first choice, a Nubian buck, failed spectacularly. We were excited about crossing Ginger with a Nubian for big meat kids and for richer (higher butterfat) milk since she is part Nubian...but looking back we should have thought twice when his owner said (and I quote:) "well....maybe you'll need a hill to make it work." The fellow was beautiful, he was purebread Nubian, he had all the goods....and he stood about two hands tall. Next to Ginger he would have needed a crane to hoist him into position. He also cried alot for his Mammy. We took the milk baby back and exchanged him for a "raring to go" Alpine. His Sire was named "Chaotic". That's why he looks the way he does. A buck only a mother could love. BUT he didn't need a hill! Here is his picture:
He is named after my brother William. Evidently they share the same stylist.
If you know anything about goats, you know that they get right down to it. Artificial Insemination with goats is a farce: they do just fine by themselves, and very quickly too. No mood lighting, no smooth jazz, nothing. When he saw Dixie, he locked eyes with her right away.
Later on I would catch him snuggling with Ginger in the hay pile. They are a happy family now, and we are looking forward to Springtime at Little Flower Farm!
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Taters, precious!
Harvesting potatoes with small children is like a treasure hunt. Potatoes do well in our soil here on the farm. Next year we will be planting plenty of varieties. There is nothing like a potato to turn a smiling grateful face heavenward and thank the Lord for the bliss of carbohydrates coursing through the veins!
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Greenhouse in the Gales
Just finished putting up the second greenhouse. Getting ready already for spring!
Friday, October 2, 2009
CSA SHARE DETAILS
WHAT IS INCLUDED IN A LITTLE FLOWER FARM SHARE?
When you sign up for a vegetable share with little flower farm and make your season’s payment in March you will receive a weekly bag of seasonal vegetables every week for 18 weeks beginning in June and ending in October. In the fall we are also hoping to provide apples to our members. Members also get first dibbs on milk shares, and other first come first serve opportunities to reserve whole chickens, pork shares, and to purchase our free range cage-less eggs at a discount. Members will also be invited to come join us for work and tour days, which will give you and your families an opportunity to meet the animals and experience a day in the life on a small family farm.
HOW DO THE WEEKLY VEGETABLE DELIVERIES WORK?
Each member will be issued 2 little flower farm vegetable totes. We will use these to pack your weekly share in. There will be a designated drop off site in Stillwater (Loomes’ Theological Booksellers) and in Marine (TBD) as well as in White Bear Lake. Each week your bag will be dropped at your preffered site and the remaining tote will be used for the following week. When you pick up your weekly share at the drop site, please bring your empty tote with you to leave for us to pick up. Your shares will not be refrigerated at the drop sites, so please be prompt in picking up your bag. Shares will be delivered in the morning on Thursdays. If you are interested in purchasing eggs in addition to your weekly share we can deliver those as well.
WHAT IF I DON’T LIKE SOME OF THE VEGGIES INCLUDED IN MY SHARE?
We recommend that members set up an area at the drop site where you can leave the produce you don’t want and trade it for something someone else has left. Otherwise, we repeat what your Mother used to say: “EAT IT ANYWAY! IT’S GOOD FOR YOU!”
WHEN CAN I COME VISIT THE FARM?
Pretty much any time! Email us.
When you sign up for a vegetable share with little flower farm and make your season’s payment in March you will receive a weekly bag of seasonal vegetables every week for 18 weeks beginning in June and ending in October. In the fall we are also hoping to provide apples to our members. Members also get first dibbs on milk shares, and other first come first serve opportunities to reserve whole chickens, pork shares, and to purchase our free range cage-less eggs at a discount. Members will also be invited to come join us for work and tour days, which will give you and your families an opportunity to meet the animals and experience a day in the life on a small family farm.
HOW DO THE WEEKLY VEGETABLE DELIVERIES WORK?
Each member will be issued 2 little flower farm vegetable totes. We will use these to pack your weekly share in. There will be a designated drop off site in Stillwater (Loomes’ Theological Booksellers) and in Marine (TBD) as well as in White Bear Lake. Each week your bag will be dropped at your preffered site and the remaining tote will be used for the following week. When you pick up your weekly share at the drop site, please bring your empty tote with you to leave for us to pick up. Your shares will not be refrigerated at the drop sites, so please be prompt in picking up your bag. Shares will be delivered in the morning on Thursdays. If you are interested in purchasing eggs in addition to your weekly share we can deliver those as well.
WHAT IF I DON’T LIKE SOME OF THE VEGGIES INCLUDED IN MY SHARE?
We recommend that members set up an area at the drop site where you can leave the produce you don’t want and trade it for something someone else has left. Otherwise, we repeat what your Mother used to say: “EAT IT ANYWAY! IT’S GOOD FOR YOU!”
WHEN CAN I COME VISIT THE FARM?
Pretty much any time! Email us.
Oat Harvest
Shane has finished scything the oat field. We are gathering it in to feed out in the sheaf to the animals this winter. This makes it so that we don’t have to thresh and winnow it, and also gives the sheep and goats a little extra roughage and hay since there was a lot of grass in amongst our handsown oat field. It is hard not to be a little self-conscious when you are forking bundles of oat straw up into the back of a pickup for the first time in your life. You feel as though you are a part of a painting…squint a little and the ’92 Dodge Dakota becomes a rickety old haywagon, the distant landscape of rolling hills, woods, and soybean fields might be anywhere- Austria, England, Pennyslvania. The setting is distinctly pastoral. The air is clean. The sky is clear. The sheep watch: at first suspiciously and then eagerly, hoping to be tossed some of the grain. There is a rythmn to the work, set to the tune of repeating thoughts playing in your head: “Is this futile? Is this crazy? Is there a better way to do this? But soon, quite distinctly you find yourself working to an internal melody that goes something like “there is nowhere else I’d rather be right now, there is nothing else I’d rather be doing….Jesus I trust in you” Stab, lift….toss. Repeat.
England
The view from the vegetable field could easily be one of the English countryside. Especially with all the morning fog rising from the grass and the sheep moving slowly about, materializing magically. I imagine myself an Austenian heroine out for a bracing stroll. “It is a universally
acknowledged fact that a single man in possession of a large field must be in want of a pig.”
Sausagina and Bacon
Our two lovely feeder pigs frolic about like dogs. One can easily see how E.B. White wrote so charmingly of one of their species: for they are such enchanting animals. They are doing their darndest to endear themselves to us. Performing tricks for us when we visit, flopping over on their bellies to be scratched, and leaning into their stock panel fencing in a most confiding way eyeing us with a very disarmingly intelligent gaze as if to say “we both know how this affair will end but let us love with passion anyway!” Such noble animals.
Ginger and Dixie
The whole of the woods near the farmhouse has been fenced for the pleasure and romping of our two dairy goats. This certainly does not mean you will have trouble spotting them when you visit. They are two of the most social young ladies you will ever meet, and will come running (usually pell mell) from anywhere in their enclosure to snuffle at you and perhaps nibble the hem of your skirt or sleave. When their kids arrive in the spring this will give them more room and save us the trouble of moving their paddock when they eat all the buckthorn, so we can concentrate on more important work( like growing your vegetables!)
Across the Pond
Our laying hens display the most intriguing differences between them. Our Buff Orpingtons (an English breed) are decidedly more shy of strangers, but they will be the first to figure brainy things out like eating bugs off of garage walls and stealing cat food from the cats. Our Barred Rocks (an American breed) will be the first to put themselves into bodily danger for the sake of venturing out of the coop in winter or making new forays into distant unexplored lands (like across the lane and beyond the white fence). These traits seems so comically analogous to typical
American and English peoples….what do you think?
Babies
Hera has given birth to two of the cutest bunnies imaginable. They get their coloring from their Father, Zeus, and are little carmel balls of happiness and delight. Too cute to eat I’m thinking.
Apple Harvest
Happiness is having four crates of gleaming apples in your kitchen ready to be processed.
Misery is processing them.
More happiness is eating the results of your labor.
More misery is finding your one-year-old and the entire floor covered in apple mush you left in a bucket by the door to take out to the pigs.
And so it goes.
To give you an indication of how the harvest has completely flooded our domestic life: Shane came down from tucking our daughter in and he said: “She had an apple in bed with her!”
Eggplant
We need some feedback from you. We are undecided on the question of eggplant. There are many varieties: the commonly seen large purple ones, the delicate looking slender European ones, and recently I have seen asian eggplants the size of bocce balls. Which to chose? And then I suppose, there is also the question of whether we should grow eggplant at all. Weigh in.
Pumpkins
Perhaps it is a Midwest thing, but there is something thrilling about a field full of pumpkins.
This year we are gowing 4 varieties: Kentucky Field pumpkins (the traditional Halloween pumpkin), “Jack be Littles” for decorating, the splendid looking french pumpkins- think Cinderella’s coach, and a pie pumpkin.
Shane has finished scything the oat field. We are gathering it in to feed out in the sheaf to the animals this winter. This makes it so that we don’t have to thresh and winnow it, and also gives the sheep and goats a little extra roughage and hay since there was a lot of grass in amongst our handsown oat field. It is hard not to be a little self-conscious when you are forking bundles of oat straw up into the back of a pickup for the first time in your life. You feel as though you are a part of a painting…squint a little and the ’92 Dodge Dakota becomes a rickety old haywagon, the distant landscape of rolling hills, woods, and soybean fields might be anywhere- Austria, England, Pennyslvania. The setting is distinctly pastoral. The air is clean. The sky is clear. The sheep watch: at first suspiciously and then eagerly, hoping to be tossed some of the grain. There is a rythmn to the work, set to the tune of repeating thoughts playing in your head: “Is this futile? Is this crazy? Is there a better way to do this? But soon, quite distinctly you find yourself working to an internal melody that goes something like “there is nowhere else I’d rather be right now, there is nothing else I’d rather be doing….Jesus I trust in you” Stab, lift….toss. Repeat.
England
The view from the vegetable field could easily be one of the English countryside. Especially with all the morning fog rising from the grass and the sheep moving slowly about, materializing magically. I imagine myself an Austenian heroine out for a bracing stroll. “It is a universally
acknowledged fact that a single man in possession of a large field must be in want of a pig.”Sausagina and Bacon
Our two lovely feeder pigs frolic about like dogs. One can easily see how E.B. White wrote so charmingly of one of their species: for they are such enchanting animals. They are doing their darndest to endear themselves to us. Performing tricks for us when we visit, flopping over on their bellies to be scratched, and leaning into their stock panel fencing in a most confiding way eyeing us with a very disarmingly intelligent gaze as if to say “we both know how this affair will end but let us love with passion anyway!” Such noble animals.
Ginger and Dixie
The whole of the woods near the farmhouse has been fenced for the pleasure and romping of our two dairy goats. This certainly does not mean you will have trouble spotting them when you visit. They are two of the most social young ladies you will ever meet, and will come running (usually pell mell) from anywhere in their enclosure to snuffle at you and perhaps nibble the hem of your skirt or sleave. When their kids arrive in the spring this will give them more room and save us the trouble of moving their paddock when they eat all the buckthorn, so we can concentrate on more important work( like growing your vegetables!)
Across the Pond
Our laying hens display the most intriguing differences between them. Our Buff Orpingtons (an English breed) are decidedly more shy of strangers, but they will be the first to figure brainy things out like eating bugs off of garage walls and stealing cat food from the cats. Our Barred Rocks (an American breed) will be the first to put themselves into bodily danger for the sake of venturing out of the coop in winter or making new forays into distant unexplored lands (like across the lane and beyond the white fence). These traits seems so comically analogous to typical
American and English peoples….what do you think?Babies
Hera has given birth to two of the cutest bunnies imaginable. They get their coloring from their Father, Zeus, and are little carmel balls of happiness and delight. Too cute to eat I’m thinking.
Apple Harvest
Happiness is having four crates of gleaming apples in your kitchen ready to be processed.
Misery is processing them.
More happiness is eating the results of your labor.
More misery is finding your one-year-old and the entire floor covered in apple mush you left in a bucket by the door to take out to the pigs.
And so it goes.
To give you an indication of how the harvest has completely flooded our domestic life: Shane came down from tucking our daughter in and he said: “She had an apple in bed with her!”
Eggplant
We need some feedback from you. We are undecided on the question of eggplant. There are many varieties: the commonly seen large purple ones, the delicate looking slender European ones, and recently I have seen asian eggplants the size of bocce balls. Which to chose? And then I suppose, there is also the question of whether we should grow eggplant at all. Weigh in.
Pumpkins
Perhaps it is a Midwest thing, but there is something thrilling about a field full of pumpkins.
This year we are gowing 4 varieties: Kentucky Field pumpkins (the traditional Halloween pumpkin), “Jack be Littles” for decorating, the splendid looking french pumpkins- think Cinderella’s coach, and a pie pumpkin.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
STRAWSTACKS
Shane finished scything the oat field. It's in nice big stacks for feeding livestock "in the sheath" during winter. Its the old-fashioned way...also known as "don't own a big threshing machine and don't want to make more work for myself" method of harvesting grain.
It's lovely living in a painting. Cue the mushroomed straw-stacks, the smiling children, the stormclouds gathering, and the chickens scratching up loose oats.
It's lovely living in a painting. Cue the mushroomed straw-stacks, the smiling children, the stormclouds gathering, and the chickens scratching up loose oats.
FIRST BATCH OF BROILERS BUTCHERED
AN HISTORIC MOMENT:
24 cornish rock chickens gave up their lives for a greater good recently on little flower farm.
Our toddlers were on call- the youngest crawling thru the feathers and gore to play underneath the processing table, and the eldest chanting "These chickens will taste so good, yum yum" to help herself get through the slaughtering part. Next year we hope to expand with more broilers to offer our CSA members at a discount. They are slated to follow our sheep on their paddocks out in the field. Chickens are amazing at cutting down on worm infestations since they eat all the larva out of ruminants' droppings.
a footnote:
we tasted one. That chicken was so good, yum yum indeed.
24 cornish rock chickens gave up their lives for a greater good recently on little flower farm.
Our toddlers were on call- the youngest crawling thru the feathers and gore to play underneath the processing table, and the eldest chanting "These chickens will taste so good, yum yum" to help herself get through the slaughtering part. Next year we hope to expand with more broilers to offer our CSA members at a discount. They are slated to follow our sheep on their paddocks out in the field. Chickens are amazing at cutting down on worm infestations since they eat all the larva out of ruminants' droppings.
a footnote:
we tasted one. That chicken was so good, yum yum indeed.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
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