Abbe Hills Farm CSA

Greetings shareholders,

This Wednesday, we'll have potatoes, onions, squash, a little broccoli, a little spinach, kale, baby salad greens including arugula, lettuce, Chinese cabbage, bok choi, mustard greens, lots of radishes, turnips, beets, and cilantro.  This will certainly be the last week for broccoli, spinach from the garden, baby greens, cilantro, and mustard greens.  They are all pretty cold-hardy, but not tough enough to resist the kind of cold that we're going to have here by the end of the week. 

I sure have used these last couple of weeks of warm days to get much closer to being ready for winter.  More things have been put away, cleaned, scrapped, or sold.  The two old corn shellers that we used to use every December to shell the seed corn finally got pulled out of the mud yesterday (with a winch, regular farm machinery failed) and are going to be sold to a central Iowa antique guy.  I describe them as "old" and "older".  He's very excited about them.  I sure don't know why.  But, soon they will be gone and we'll start pulling out all the old machinery that I should have scrapped last year.  Scrap iron prices follow the price of oil, so when gas was $4, that would have been a great time to get rid of the many old machines that have died on this farm.  The iron in them isn't so valuable now, but it's the first time in several years that I've had the time and the weather to deal with them, so hopefully, much of it will be moved out by the time you all return in the spring.  Some old stuff is good to keep around in case you need a part, or need to make an invention, but I have too much of that kind of interesting stuff.  It will be glad to see some of it go.

The replacement layers that grew up in the chicken yurt have been moved to the layer house for the winter.  It was World War III for a while, but everybody is a little less stressed every day so I think it's going to work out OK.  At least nobody has died so far. The goal is to have 70 or 80 chickens laying eggs by next spring, and having lots of those yummy, grass-fed eggs for my egg people (you will be able to be one of them).

Got to get outside now.  This is the last very nice day of the season, and maybe my last chance for a while to drag lots of mud around on my boots and tires.  Can't let that get away from me.

See you Wednesday,

Laura