Abbe Hills Farm CSA

Greetings shareholders,

Hope you are all keeping warm and able to stay inside for a couple of days.  I'm fine here, trying to get my desk cleaned off, clean up the 2009 business, and prepare for the upcoming season.   Sometimes people ask me what I do all winter, so I thought I would share with you what I did this week.  It's a long story.

Everybody knows that the best time to prepare for bad weather is before it gets here!  And that everything takes a little longer and is a little more trouble when it's really cold.  Knowing that I was going to run out of chicken feed late this week, and knowing that I wanted to go to a fertilizer school all day on Wednesday, and knowing that bad weather was on the way, I started last Sunday to take care of it.  My dad and brother came over in the afternoon, even though it was very, very cold, to help me grind 500 pounds of corn.  Small job.  No problem.  We'll have it done in an hour, right.  To make sure we wouldn't have any delay that would keep us out in the cold any longer than necessary, I found an extension cord and plugged in the heater on the tractor engine block about an hour before they arrived.  It worked perfectly and the tractor was nice and warm when I turned the key.  However, it didn't start, and all I heard was a clicking sound (so it's the starter or the switch probably, fairly easy to fix), and it was just too cold to take everything apart and look around for the problem, so I decided to splurge and call the repair guy on Monday morning.  My family helped me put 500 pounds of corn in buckets so I could do the rest of the job by myself as soon as the tractor was repaired, likely Monday afternoon.

Well, I finished grinding the 500 pounds of corn yesterday, Wednesday, about 5 minutes before it started to snow.  Between Sunday afternoon and Wednesday at 4:00, it took a large tractor, a trailer and a pickup, two guys, about $400, four hours of my life on Tuesday, taking the snow plow off the tractor, a long chain, a heavy iron bar, two brooms, a ladder, four hours of my life and my dad's life on Wednesday, no fertilizer school, my favorite screwdriver broken, a hammer, four half-sheets of plywood, ten blankets, a space heater, 3 smaller iron bars, a half-dozen box wrenches, a very large pipe wrench, two extension cords, putting the snow plow back on the tractor, a hair dryer, one trip to Ace for a shear bolt, a ladder, and four cement blocks.  But I got it done.  There is chicken feed.

And you wonder how I spend my time.

The chickens and the cats are doing fine outside.  Everybody is eating about 50% more than usual, and drinking about twice as much as they do during more pleasant weather.  It takes a lot of food and water to stay warm AND to make eggs.  The fifty young hens will start to lay in March, so I should have plenty of eggs to sell then.  Please buy them.  It will make we feel better about all I accomplished this week.

Farmers Market in Springville this Saturday, Jan 9,11:00 until 1:00 at the Community Center.  Market the following Saturday, Jan 16, in Mt. Vernon, 11:00 until 1:00 in the basement of City Hall. 

Happy blizzard,

Laura