Calling All Egg Cartons!

Hello to one and all!

Now is the time to rally! Save your egg cartons!
Our new flock of hens are getting ready for their big debut as laying ladies!

We'll be picking up old cartons from the dropsites when deliveries start.

On that note:

The lettuces are soaking up all this great rain...and the herb starts are ready to invade your kitchens, patios, and gardens. We will be making an early delivery soon, when the lettuces head up nicely, ahead of the season's start in mid-June. Get your potting soil ready!

BROILER CHICKEN UPDATE

Our June delivery of Broiler chickens will be delayed until July.

(The Hatcheries are sold out of earlier chicks!)

Terribly sorry to delay your future culinary bliss!

"Let food be your medicine, and your medicine be your food."

-HIPPOCRATES

“Only he can understand what a farm is, what a country is, who shall have sacrificed part of himself to his farm or country, fought to save it, struggled to make it beautiful. Only then will the love of farm or country fill his heart.”

- Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1900-1944)

Little Flower Farm in the News!

http://thecatholicspirit.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3633&Itemid=27

Eveningtime at Little Flower Farm

The new laying flock is fattening out. The roosters are all strutting around displaying all their manly glory, and trying out their "Doodle doos" in the woods. The Farm is echoing with their valiant attempts. The hens are roosting at the foot of the silo these days.

Ginger and Dixie enjoy evening grazings on the lawn, with Salt and Pepper ambling about. Their wee little horns are growing in.

2010 CSA garden taking shape!

The Brassicas made the great leap from flat to field last week. They are all well, and send their regards. They lie in the sun all day, brave the wind, and dibble their toes in the drip irrigated water.

A flat of Broccoli grinning in anticipation.

wild mint! local Pac Choi makes good.

fall planted garlic is up and running.

early lettuces pretty enough for a Bride's bouquet!

We have been blissfully busy, covered heat to toe in soil.

Kneeling in the dust, with dirt in your ears, smudges on your face and woodticks all over you, the sun beaming down, the new roosters trying out their crows....you can't help feeling 6 years old again. Happy Spring. (It's sprung in earnest!)

Dalma's babies: Ram and Ewe.

Babies are sprouting everywhere!

Imelba also gave birth to twin lambs just this morning.

They are waggling their wee tails as we speak, hail and hearty.

The Cat's Meow

Beatrice and Cleopatra dissappeared for a few days, and when we found them they had both given birth to a fine mess of kittens in the window well! They share mothering and nursing duties and are raising two greys, two whites, one black with white belly and feet, and two stripy love bug kittens.

St. Croix Valley Press

Wohoo! The local paper passes it on!
http://www.presspubs.com/articles/2010/04/08/st_croix_valley_press/news/doc4bbe30cf43f17888817155.txt

April

"Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see" C.S. Lewis

April is here! The green is coming back to the grass, and the hens are happy.

Happy Easter from Little Flower Farm!

“There is a stage in a child’s life at which it cannot separate the religious from the merely festal character of Christmas or Easter. I have been told of a very small and very devout boy who was heard murmuring to himself on Easter morning a poem of his own composition which began ‘Chocolate eggs and Jesus risen.’ This seems to me, for his age, both admirablepoetry and admirable piety. But of course the time will soon come when such a child can no longer effortlessly and spontaneously enjoy that unity. He will become able to distinguish the spiritual from the ritual and festal aspect of Easter; chocolate eggs will no longer seem sacramental. And once he has distinguished he must put one or the other first. If he puts the spiritual first he can still taste something of Easter in the chocolate eggs; if he puts the eggs first they will soon be no more than any other sweetmeat. They will have taken on an independent, and therefore a soon withering, life.” ~C. S. Lewis
"A thing may be too sad to be believed or too wicked to be believed or too good to be believed; but it cannot be too absurd to be believed in this planet of frogs and elephants, of crocodiles, and cuttlefish." G.K. Chesterton

Update on the Twins

Alot of you have been asking about Salt and Pepper:

They are ambling and chortling and galumphing about! A happier family you never did see!

Farming with G.K. Chesterton

We finished plowing the 2 acre vegetable field with Indy and Dance yesterday.

Next up: laying the mulch and planting out the onions and early cabbages and broccoli. Also the potatoes! The Forsythia is in bloom on the farm. That seems to be our seasonal signal to get ready to put things in the ground!

The ploughman behind a trusty rusty old walking plow (and two shapely horses' rumps) is given to philosophizing...it took three days to finish our field, but in that time we all forged a bond by our shared work, and will never be able to look at that field that same way. Not only do we know our soil, and the lay of the land intimately, we are also now better friends with our neighbors! All from one little plot of soil!

G.K. Chesterton came to mind:

“Comforts that were rare among our forefathers are now multiplied in factories and handed out wholesale; and indeed, nobody nowadays, so long as he is content to go without air, space, quiet, decency and good manners, need be without anything whatever that he wants; or at least a reasonably cheap imitation of it." - G.K. Chesterton, Commonwealth, 1933

"Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back." - G. K. Chesterton, What's Wrong With The World, 1910

"Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision." - G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 1908