Pleasant Valley Farm

Periodically, I try to review the sites that list our farm and keep them updated.  Yesterday, I looked at our eatwellguide.org listing.  I don't really like that one, because I can't edit it myself and it's just not user-friendly from a farmer's perspective.  Oh well.  I noticed that it still had our old RD Box address, so I clicked on it to update.  Then I noticed what it said about our products...no veggies listed, but all the meats were there, even turkey.  We didn't do turkey last year, but that's on our list of things to do this year, so I didn't see leaving it up as a problem.  Then I read the descriptions.  Pasture raised, no hormones, no antibiotics, organic methods...all were accurate.  Except one.  This listing advertised our poultry as being "100% vegetarian fed."

While chickens aren't meat-thirsty carnivores, they aren't strict vegetarians, either.  We don't feed our chicks any animal byproducts, just high protein, corn based poultry feed.  However, we do raise them on pasture.  The pens they live in have no bottom, and are dragged to new grass each morning.  This means that they not only have new grass to pick at and eat, they have lots of bugs to hunt and kill, which they do.  I've even seen the egg hens chasing each other when one of them kills a frog...a prize each wants to claim.  A chicken is designed by nature to hunt bugs as a part of its diet.   If you watch a chicken in a true free range/pasture pen, its attention is always drawn to the small movements of insects.  It just makes sense to me to let nature take its course and reap the benefits in the garden of having the chickens controlling the insect population. 

So what is the big deal?  My chickens eat bugs, who cares?  The problem I have is the misleading advertising that is present in our food system.  "100% vegetarian-fed"  is just a buzzword to get you to buy a product.  It's a lie if the chickens are truly raised in outdoor free range conditions.  It also makes you think that animal welfare is important, but if the birds can't eat bugs, they must be raised in some pretty sterile, unnatural conditions.  I've seen the phrase on plenty of egg cartons dropped off at the farm.  An under-educated customer buys it, but are they getting what they think is being advertised?  Maybe.  I'll never advertise my chicken or eggs as vegetarian-fed, but unlike big industry, I would never feed them beef by-products just to up the protein content of the food. (Yes, this actually happens- it's standard procedure for factory farms.) 

 As a consumer, find a farmer and ask about the living conditions and type of feed used if it is something you want to know about.  Small farmers make their living by being open and honest about what we do and how we do it.  We welcome and encourage educated customers. 

Pleasant Valley Farm is now on Facebook, too!  Become a fan and get the latest updates and farm pictures!

For what seems like forever, the farm has been blanketed with snow...unbroken white all the way to the tree line. With a week of spring sunshine under our belts and temperatures breaking 60 today, it's quickly being replaced by more spring-like footing- mud everywhere!  Although the pond in the pasture is still frozen over, it won't be for long.  I can see the outline of the water shading the snow and ice yellow.  I'm guessing in a day or two there will be open water.   For now, the ducks are swimming in a rather large puddle between the house and the greenhouse.

We hope to be in the greenhouse, starting vegetable seeds, before long.  Another box of seeds arrived today in the mail.  Even though I placed the order and know what's inside, I still rush to open it.  It's like holding a box of promises.  Each packet whispers another secret, another color, another taste.  I can't wait to be elbow deep in trays and potting soil.

I swear, even the animals get spring fever.  Although the doors remain open all winter, the chickens don't venture out if there is snow on the ground.  Today they were looking for buried treasure in the exposed mud.  A couple of the Phoenix hens need to have their wings clipped again, as they are spending more time loose than in their outdoor run these days.

Last night, I let the cows and horses out while I cleaned up the barn and put feed in the feed boxes.  As I was scooping our home-ground feed out of the barrel, I looked out the window to see the cows racing through the pasture.  The animals generally go to the creek and drink and then mill about the barnyard until the door reopens, but last night the cows raced through the pasture, turning around the island of trees and brush halfway up the field.  Fiannait led the way, her heels kicking up higher than her ears in what looked like bovine glee.  Louie, Happy and Baby Buzz weren't far behind.

Our five little lambs are doing well.  They seem to be in a constant state of joyful motion; jumping and frolicking as much as they can in the pens.  We can't wait to let them out so they can  play in the great outdoors.  That will come soon, we hope in the next couple of weeks if the weather cooperates!

The sun has been shining here for almost a week now.  It's refreshing after all the gloomy and snowy days of February.  The snow is melting and soon Dan will be able to begin plowing for the year.  My goal is to take lots of pictures of the equipment and how the process works and get it up on the website sometime this spring.  It will look a lot like the page up now that covers hay making.

I just hit "send" on another seed order this morning.  I can't wait to begin starting seeds!  we plan on making use of the greenhouse this spring to get a jump on the season.  We plant around 75 different vegetable varieties every year.  Sometimes I feel like  it's hard to narrow it down to that many, as the seed catalogs do a good job of making everything sound so good!

Our little owl friend is still living in the barn.  After a bit of online research, we've decided that we have a red phase screech owl.  We have been wondering if it is looking for a nesting site, so I looked up the dimensions and we hope to have a nest box hanging for it soon. 

I think this is one of the hardest times of the year...while the sun is shining, I feel like I should be outside, doing something!  But with a foot of snow still melting off the fields and pastures, it's really just not time yet.

We have a fairly recent addition to the barn crew. While normally we don't encourage wildlife to take up residence in the building, sometimes it is beneficial to us and the critter.  In this case, I'm happy to share the hay mow with an owl. It's not a barn owl, as those are white with big, moony faces, and our visitor is a smallish owl, reddish brown in color.  Matt thinks it's called a barred owl, and i haven't had time to look up anything more specific, so I'll go with that for now.  I love seeing wildlife as long as they don't damage our crops or hurt the livestock.  I think it's part of being sustainable.  While we are stewards of the land, we share it with other creatures who call it home as well.

Our owl has been hanging out for a couple of weeks now.  The upper part of the barn is where we store hay, machinery, and where the feed grinder is located.   We've been able to grind a bit of our corn into animal feed now that Dan has the Wisconsin engine up and running, so that means there is a bit of corn dust on the floor of the barn.  It's not much, but it is enough to attract the mice that live in every barn.  An owl loves to eat mice, and I love the idea of one of these quiet birds cutting down the rodent population.  This owl has probably been living there, finding a nice quiet spot to be behind the stack of loose hay, so some evenings you see it, most you don't.  It doesn't appear to be terribly afraid of people, and we go about our chores without scaring it off.  Tonight, after chores, I was in the kitchen fixing dinner when Dan came in and told me it was hanging out and visible from outside, so I went to check it out.  Old barns like ours bear the mark of the builder.  That's why you'll notice a small, cut-out shape near the peak of most barns.  This was the signature of the builder.  Ours looks like a diamond with a small triangle at each point...the result looks something like a cross.  It's just a small, open hole that doesn't cause problems as far as rain getting in or anything.  Tonight, it was the perfect look out spot for our small owl friend, who was perched there, surveying the barnyard.  A little thing like this won't hurt our large rabbits or hen, and I am sure it will find more than enough small mice to keep its belly fed, so I hope it stays.  Who knows, it may be a she looking for a nice safe place to hatch a nest of baby owls!

Today brought lots of driving and a less than looked forward to meeting at my day job, so it was good to come home to more baby lambs.  Rosa, had been staying in the barn for the past 10 days or so, baa-ing for food whenever a person came or went.  It can be a bit frustrating, hoping for lambs daily and continuing to wait, but as Dan kept reminding me "they have to come out sometime!"  Today, we have another set of twins.  Rosa is my favorite ewe not only because she's friendly to the point of being a pest, but because her lambs are always just a bit different looking.  The first one I saw was black with a key-like white shape down her face, and last year she had black twins with bits of white markings.  So, before I changed into barn clothes, I asked Dan what the new twins looked like.  "One black, one white, both rams" he replied.  Rams mean boys, which means they won't be here past fall.  That's too bad, I thought out loud, disappointed that I wouldn't have a little ewe to keep as part of the permanent flock.  But Dan reminded me that we never speak negatively as long as there are healthy mammas and babies and the little ones are getting fed without a 2AM feeding from us.  I have to admit how very right he is.  

Upon entering the barn, Rosa began calling to me...or more specifically, to the cookies in my pocket.  I went over to check out our newest arrivals.  One is all black with a tuft of white wool on the crown of his head.  He looks much like his older siblings.  I looked a bit closer at his brother, for a minute I though his wool was still dirty, since being born can be messy.  No, not dirty...brown.  He's mostly white with brown rings around his eyes and brown across his back.  I've never seen a lamb like this before, either here or on any other farm.  Rambo, the father, is a pure white polled Dorset, and Rosa is all black and of uncertain breeding, but all other babies have been black with a touch of white on face or legs.  Some of the other ewes have had all white lambs with some black "freckles" across the muzzle too, and most sheep come out all white.  So he's unique.  And although the boys are newborns, they already are taller than the lambs in the next pen (who are also thriving and bouncing about!).  But most importantly, Rosa is feeding both.  Last year, she also had twins but only cared for one.  The little guy she rejected was also born blind.  While he was able to see just fine a week later, we had to bottle feed him.  I'd much rather feed mama a cookie and let her take care of all the late night and early morning feedings.  Plus a pocket full of cookies is far less expensive than a sack of milk replacer at the feed store!

I read with great interest yesterday, both in an e-newsletter and a print newspaper, that the federal government is discontinuing the National Animal Identification System as previously proposed.  For once, the voices of small farms and consumers appear to have been heard.

The National Animal Identification System (NAIS) was a pretty scary thing to small farmers.  It proposed mandatory identification of all places that housed livestock by GPS location.  This would apply to factory farms down to grandparents keeping one pony for their granddaughter or a couple who has a half-dozen chickens as pets and for eggs.   Then, all large animals would need to be microchipped (also readable by GPS satellite) and the government would need to be notified if the animal was sold, died, gave birth, or was taken off premises.  This would need to occur within 24 hours of the event to avoid a fine of hundreds of dollars per animal involved.  The cost of microchipping, record keeping and government notification would, of course, be the responsibility of the farmer.  If passed, this literally would have meant that if my husband and I took advantage of a nice day and rode our horses down to the lake through the woods, with full consent of all property owners, we would still need to notify the government within 24 hours that those two horses had left the farm for a few hours.  If the government happened to notice a signal from the microchips off the farm property and did not recieve such notification, we could recieve 2 fines, one for each horse.

 So why would the government be bothered?  The reason was food safety...this way, any animal found to be contaminating the food chain could be traced back to the source, and any other affected animals could be withdrawn from the nation's food supply.  This sounds perfectly reasonable, until you read enough to know that the main offenders of contaminated meats, the factory farms, or CAFO's, wouldn't need to microchip any of their animals.  The government would only need them to register the location of the operation and give a number of animals housed & processed there.  No traceability by animal.  This is wrong.  Most farms thought so too, as the government was only able to register about 36% of estimated farm locations despite years of promoting voluntary registration.

Big beef, pork, and poultry were not opposed to this regulation.  It really didn't apply much to them, and hurt the small farmers with undue costs and government regulation, all in the name of safety.  I wouldn't feel any safer had this passed, would you?  Big meat gets its business by selling its products at virtually every grocery store at the cheapest price possible.  All the recent recalls show that safety isn't the #1 concern.  If you buy meat from a small, responsible farmer, we are staking our reputation on every package sold.  If you get sick, you won't come back, and you'll tell your friends not to visit us, either.  Besides that, small farms are committed to product quality, a personal relationship with customers, and healthy food.  Killing your customers with e. coli just doesn't fit into those values.  Besides, I don't need a microchip to tell you about your meat.  I can tell you the age, sex, color, breed, parentage, diet, birthday, name, and anything else you care to know about the live animal that produced the meat we sell.  A microchip wouldn't be of any advantage to our customers, because all they have to do is ask, and that information is already available to them.  We don't feel we have anything to hide, and that, in my opinion, is the quickest route to food safety.  Put a face on your food.  Know where it comes from.

 The new proposed regulations, according to the article I read in Farm & Dairy, would apply only to animals or products crossing state lines, would be regulated ultimately by states or tribal nations (some states had already passed laws protecting their farms against the old NAIS proposal) and would be pursued by lower-cost technology.  This seems more reasonable, but I'll be interested in seeing what the details of this plan look like.

The plan was dropped not only because of farm opposition or groups representing small family farms, but because concerned consumers voiced their opinions to local government officials, and everyone made their voices heard during 15 stops on a national "listening tour".   If you were one of those voices, I thank you, as do many farms across the country.  Today we can chalk up a victory for the small farm, something that happens far too rarely.  

O.K.... I'll get off my soapbox now.  I promise next time to write about more cute animal happenings here at Pleasant Valley! 

Our small flock of sheep has just increased by two!  We began the winter with 7 ewes and our ram.  Four of the ewes were born last year, so while they will probably lamb in the late spring, we won't look for that to happen until late April or sometime in May.  Of the other three, one is two years old, and the others, twin sisters, are what I like to refer to as the "senior ladies."  Their names are Nutmeg and Rosa.  If you've ever stopped by the farm and been mobbed by a black sheep looking for treats, that would be Rosa.  Nutmeg is a bit more reserved, but still fairly friendly.  She's been in a pen in the barn since last week.  We noticed her udder was filling up, a sure sign that lambs won't be far behind, so we penned her up where it is warm and dry.  She gave birth sometime last night, to two healthy lambs, one female and one male.  Here's a picture of them.  They are less than 18 hours old!

 Rosa is also looking like her udder is getting large, so we set up a second pen for her tonight.  I lured her into the barn with a bag of sheep bait...otherwise known as day-old bread from the local bakery outlet.  I gave Nutmeg a few slices as well as a treat for a job well done.  We're looking forward to even more lambs.  They're a sure sign that spring can't be too far behind, despite the blizzards we've seen lately!

I'm finally in the process of making vinegar.  One of my Christmas presents was a vinegar cask, a large, pear shaped container with a spigot on the bottom.  It is used to ferment the vinegar, with the final product being heavier and sinking to the bottom.  The spigot lets you remove some without disturbing the "mother." The mother is a whitish, jelly-like substance that floats on the top of the liquid and converts the alcohol in wine, hard cider, beer or any other alcoholic beverage into an acid, which make vinegar.  It functions much like yeast does in home beer or wine making- it's best to buy a good starter so you can be confident your end product is going to be what it is supposed to be.  It was also a treasured possession years ago, much like a good starter for sourdough bread.

 The first step was deciding what kind of vinegar I wanted to make.  The season is past for buying good, local, unpasteurized apple cider, plus I would need to ferment it into alcohol before starting the vinegar making process, so I figured that could wait until next fall. I don't use a whole lot of red wine vinegar in my cooking, so I though a nice white wine vinegar would be a good choice.  However, Dan and I have really developed a taste for a champagne-dill mustard lately, and I just can't seem to re-create it here at home.  I'm thinking that I need champagne vinegar, and I simply can't buy it locally.  So, it just seemed logical to try and make some of my own!

The next step was to buy the champagne.  Since I live in Pennsylvania, the only place to buy it is at the state-controlled liquor store.  When I walked in, I was the only customer in the store, so the gentleman working there came over to try and help me find what I was looking for.  I was just comparing prices, because I'm not going to buy really expensive champagne to turn into vinegar, a moderate priced one seemed like a much better idea.  When I explained what I was doing, the man got a very puzzled look, and suggested which brands were drier and might be more like vinegar.  I tried to explain that it was a process of refermenting the alcohol, which seemed to totally lose him.  I'm sure I'm the only person who has walked into the Tionesta liquor store lately for vinegar making supplies!

After I made my purchase, I brought it home and poured the champagne into the cask, added some water, and dumped in the mother of vinegar culture I had purchased through the LocalHarvest online store. I covered the opening loosely with cheesecloth to keep out dust and kitty hair, and put it under the sewing machine in the living room.  It needs to be near the wood stove, as the mother works best when the temperature is near 80 degrees.  In a few months, I'll be sampling my own vinegar!

We're really proud of doing lots of things here the old-fashioned way, usually with horses.  But there are some tasks that are easier to do when you're using motorized equipment.  We have both a baler and a feed grinder here, but we're not able to run either of these without a motor.  Stored away for the past 15 years or so has been a large Wisconsin 4 cylinder engine.  It hasn't run for all that time, and wasn't the most reliable piece of equipment on the farm when it did.  Stories like "the time the motor caught fire"  "the other time the motor caught fire" and "the time it almost cut Dad's finger off and we had to rush him to the ER" make me very nervous about trying to use it again.  It's surprising it never was hauled away to the scrapyard, but Dan thought that someday it could be rebuilt and be a real asset to the farm.  He's been working on it for a good part of the winter; tearing it down completely, cleaning the gunk that forms when hay, dust and motor oil combine, and looking for parts, mostly online, and waiting on UPS/FedEx/USPS to deliver them.  I was amazed it's not that hard to locate parts for a motor that was manufactured from the 1940's through the mid-60's.  Because it was a popular, commercial engine, we were able to find pretty much everything.

 Yesterday, it fired and ran for the first time in well over a decade.  Sure, there are still adjustments to be made, but it's possible that we will be grinding our own feed here at the farm before Valentine's Day.  We have the luxury of a feed grinder & mixer system in the top of the barn, and it will be a huge time and money saver compared to hauling our corn to the closest feed mill that will grind, which is well over an hour's drive each way.  This motor will spin a large belt to run the grinder, baler or other equipment.  It's a heavy motor, nearly 500 lbs, but with only about 25 horsepower.  It's exactly what we need, and still a rather old-time piece of equipment itself.  To start it, you need to crank a handle around until it fires.  It also needs a special additive to the gasoline, as it was built to run on leaded fuel.

I know Dan is beyond pleased to hear it roar to life.  I'm really proud of him, it was a pretty big project, but he had patience and figured it out.  And I've been told some plug wires or an electric start are right at the top of his list of nice Valentine's Day surprises...

Winter is really here, and with a low temperature of -13 last night the main job around the farm these days is keeping warm!  We'll bed the pigs down with a bit more hay, and increase the hay fed to the other animals (horses, cows, sheep & goats) since they'll use the extra calories to keep warm.  The bunnies have lots of hay too, but I've never seen creatures less concerned about the weather.  My does love to be outside, and I can frequently see the outline of the individual snowflakes on the backs of my black girls.  The chickens have plastic over the windows to keep the wind out, and have plenty of feed as well, but they can actually suffer frostbite on their combs, especially the roosters who have large, single-type combs.  Rocky, our not-so-creatively named Barred Rock rooster, lost a good bit of his comb last winter when it got down to -25 one night last winter.  I've heard that if you cover the combs with Vaseline they won't get frostbite, but that doesn't seem like a very practical solution when you have more than just a few pet or show chickens.  It looks like our Delaware might have a bit of frostbite the tips of his comb this time, but nothing major.  The frostbit part will eventually turn black and fall off, which sounds horrible, but doesn't seem to bother the birds.  Some people actually dub, or cut off, the combs as a standard practice anyway, so the overall effect is more cosmetic than life-threatening.  But as much as I'd like to keep this from happening, there isn't much else I can do besides move south or put heaters in the pens when it's really cold.  And since both my chickens and I prefer that the hen house doesn't burn down in the middle of the night with them inside, space heaters are out too!

Not surprisingly, there hasn't been much outside activity around the farm these days besides plowing out the parking area and knocking ice out of the animals' water buckets.  Dan has been busy trying to repair and old farm engine so we can use it to grind our whole corn into animal and chicken feed later this month.  It can also be used to run our hay baler in the summer so we don't have to put everything up as loose hay again.  The old Wisconsin engine has been sitting for many years, so it's not going to be a quick project, but he's making progress.  We recently got a new computer, so I've been busy transferring records and setting up new tracking sheets for the new year.  While bookwork isn't my idea of fun, it does give me something constructive to do and, more importantly, it's inside!  

The other main project we're working on is planning our seed orders for the coming growing season.  Looking through the list of what we planted last year reminds me of all the successes we had despite the difficult weather we had here last summer.  The color pictures of all the beautiful plants, vegetables, and herbs get me excited about planting a new garden.  Our final order will be a good mix of heirlooms and commercial varieties, some which have grown here successfully in past years, and some new ones which seem too good to pass up.  While keeping in mind what we need to plant for the stand and for us, I'm adding some "wish list" seeds to my initial lists.  I'm sure I'll have to trim back the final list, but I figure that because I was able to save seed from a few varieties of plants, I don't need to purchase those seeds again so I have some room in the budget for some new varieties or anything that just sounds fun to plant!

2010 is here, and it's brought quite a winter storm with it!  We're forcasted to get up to another foot of snow by Sunday night, with wind chills of zero.  There have been a number of snowmobiles riding up and down the road, and other than the state plow trucks there haven't been too many travelers our way.  I'm just glad to be home before it hit, as I was visiting family in North Carolina for a few days earlier in the week.  In my opinion, the only thing worse that a 9 hour drive home is a 9 hour drive through a blizzard!

I was gifted with some new cast iron cookware for Christmas, and it's something I've wanted to become better at using.  It's been really cold here, and we heat the house with a cast iron woodstove in the living room.  The stove is very hot and has a flat top, so I've been wanting to try cooking on it...it's kind of like a primitive crock pot, and I love cooking with my crock pot! So I decided to try something fairly foolproof.  I defrosted a smoked ham hock and added some beans and the other necessary ingredients to make barbecue beans (crushed tomatoes, cider vinegar, molasses, Worcestershire sauce, etc).  I mixed it up and set it i the middle of the stove.  After a few hours, the meat was falling off of the bone, and other than a slight amount of scorched beans,  Dan and I declared it a success, and a perfectly warm and filling meal for a cold January night.

 So, why bother when I have a perfectly good crock pot?  Even though a crock pot uses only a little electricity, it does use some.  And my home is no colder for using the woodstove as a cooking surface.  Plus, I do have a wood burning cook stove in the kitchen, perhaps someday I'll be bold enough to cook meals on it, just to see if I can.  I like to challenge myself to learn new things.  In the past, for instance, I have taught myself to can and to make balloon animals.  While at the time they didn't seem like necessary, everyday skills, you'd be surprised how often I find myself making pink parrots or blue elephants, and of course the canning became a big part of our farm stand this year.  I'm never sorry when I learn something new, except that I may not have enough time for everything I'd like to be doing!

So, I guess you could say learning is always my New Year's resolution.  I'm also planning on learning to make my own vinegar from wine or cider this year, and when it is warm enough that the sheep won't need their fleeces, I'd like to try doing something with the wool, perhaps making a braided rug or something easy.  (I don't know how to knit...yet, at least!) So best of luck to all of you on your resolutions as well, if they haven't been broken already, and Happy 2010! 

The snow is falling gently outside, and we're not expecting weather above freezing, so it looks like we'll be having a white Christmas here at Pleasant Valley.  The big storm that blew up the East Coast spared us, so we only have about 4 inches here.  In my opinion, just enough to make it pretty, but not so much we're digging out or unable to travel. Most of the animals are spending their days inside where it is warm and dry.  Although the horses love to kick up their heels when we let them out at chore time, Dixie will be pawing at the barn door wanting to come back in if she thinks we're taking too long!  The only critters outside now are the sheep.  Although they have access to dry shelter under the barn roof,  you will see them outside with an inch of snow on their backs.  Wearing a wool coat all the time keeps them plenty warm!  The pigs are snuggled up in their nests of hay most of the time.  Although they still have access to the great outdoors, the frozen ground is tough for them to walk on, so they stay inside most of the time in the new, improved and very dry hog house.  The chickens also don't want to be out in the snow, but because we have a timed light in the hen house, we're still getting plenty of eggs.  The only animals besides the sheep who still love to be outside are the rabbits.  They spend as much time out playing in the snow as they do in their hutch. I can see them from my kitchen window and they seem to enjoy sprinting through the snow and playing.

For those of you who stopped in to see us at our farm stand, you probably noticed the black and red sleigh.  It is more than just a decoration, and we have enough snow to take it out now.  My little Morgan mare, Sara, is able to pull it easily.  I wanted to start a Christmas Eve tradition of taking a sleigh ride last year, but it rained ant there was nothing but mud last year.  This year is looking a lot more like Christmas!

One of the great things about our farm is the sense of history you get just by being here.  Not just because we choose to farm with horses and use antique equipment, but the very buildings are antiques too!  One of my long-term goals is to research the history of the farm and write it down, but for now I know for sure that the barn was built in 1894.  It's carved into the foundation stones, so that I'm quite sure of.  The building used as the workshop is older than that, and the house was put here later than the barn, but not by too many years.  It was built on an adjacent farm, pulled by horses and rolled on logs to its current location, so it is a bit harder to date.  Looking at the hand-hewn beams of the barn, it's fascinating to me to picture how it was actually built.  It's been in continuous use without any major structural repairs (other than a board here and there or a new roof) so it was built right the first time, as the saying goes.  The pictures of horses and buggies and a blacksmith shop here are easy to picture.  It's a bit more mind-boggling to picture that in the larger context of history, of the area and the nation as well.  

At my day job, we are in the process of relocating the office.  We will be moving to the historic Transit building in downtown Oil City.  While touring the building looking for office space, we found out a lot about the history of the structure.  It was built by John D. Rockefeller in the days of Standard Oil.  It processed something like 90% of the world's orders for petroleum products at that time.   Our little corner of the world was the birthplace of the oil industry, and at that time huge Victorian homes were being built, many of which still stand today in places like Oil City, Franklin,  or Titusville.  Boom towns like Pithole appeared overnight, full of the lawless and the newly rich.  I knew all this, it is celebrated in annual town festivals, it is talked about frequently in the local newspaper, and there are many historic monuments within a short drive of home.  But somehow, it can be hard to reconcile with our little farm.  Still farming with horses and heating with wood, we seem pretty far removed form the oil boom.  So what brought it all home to me the day I was in the Transit building?  J. D. Rockefeller, a prominent national historical figure of his era, was building his 4-story brick superstructure to handle petroleum orders the very same year my barn was built, 1894.  The two structures are separated by less than 30 miles.  I had never really put those events side by side, as one seemed to be something from a history textbook and the other an extension of personal history, the history of my home.  Wow.  History in context.

This was the first weekend our farm stand has not been open for business.  It's just too hard to grow much produce in December in northwestern Pennsylvania, and there comes a point when the butchering is also over for the year.  That point would be now.  All the creatures still here will be with us over the winter, either for breeding or providing meat for the stand's opening next year.  We are tentatively planning on being open for Memorial Day weekend, 2010, but that sure seems far away! 

Although I'm a big fan of sleeping in on the rare occasion I can, it sure seemed strange not to wake early to an alarm yesterday.  I felt like I should be gathering things to take down to the stand, and straightening up what was there already.  I can't say I was truly sorry to be in my nice warm house for those 4 hours though, since the temperatures ranged from mid 20's up to a high of about 32 yesterday. We've removed all the products and stored them ourselves.  Things like potatoes or winter squash will keep in the basement nearly all winter, but aren't much good to eat if they freeze sitting down on the concrete in the stand.  All the jars are safely put away in the pantry as well.  But there is no such thing as empty space on the farm, as within the week the stand was full again...but this time with animal food! We had a large amount of feed delivered which, along with our homegrown hay and corn, should keep the critters happy and full for quite a while to come!

 I'm often asked these days if the work is pretty well done for the year.  It sure hasn't seemed like it lately, but that probably has more to do with being called back to a full time job than with what's really going on here.  While we are busy every day, it isn't with major farm activities like plowing, planting or hay making.  Now it's cleaning up around the hog house and doing some home improvement projects we've talked about for months. I've even pulled out some Christmas decorations, and if it ever warms up above 25, maybe I'll get outside and finally take down the sagging cornstalks on the porch and replace them with some festive lighting!

 Thanks again to everyone who stopped by our farm stand these past few months.  If it weren't for people like you, who appreciate food that is local, organic, home-grown, hormone-free, and fresh,  we wouldn't be able to do what we love. We hope to see each and every one of you again next year, and in the meantime I'll be blogging so you can stay connected to what's going on here!

Although most of the major farm projects for the year are over, we're thankful that the weather is holding so we can get one last major project accomplished this year.  The hog house is finally getting a new roof!  While the ground level of the building is made of blocks, the upper story was wooden.  The roof has been leaking for some time now, and the big blue tarp over the roof has long been shredded by the weather.  The whole building was turning into an eyesore as well as a danger, as the leaning wood promised to collapse sometime if we didn't get to it ourselves.  Since the bottom is in good shape, Dan and I had decided this spring the best plan would be to tear down the upper story and replace it with a steel roof, sloping only one way so the water would no longer end up in front of the pigs' door to the outside run.  We're hoping this new layout will help to eliminate the giant mud puddle currently in front of their door. Eliminating the second story is really no loss of space, since pigs don't use staircases and we weren't using the space for storage or anything else.  It should cut down on the mice as well, as they had taken over the top story and were abundant below as well.

The project began yesterday, with Dan and his brother knocking down all of the boards not responsible for holding the roof up.  Then ropes were tied to the support beams.  The other end was fastened to the van.  The second story came down with a big crash, but safely for all involved. They've recycled lots of the usable  lumber to build supports and give the roof a proper angle so that snow and rain will slide off.  As I type, the green sheets of metal roofing are being nailed into place.  Daylight will be running short, but we'll try to get it all on tonight.  The the most time consuming part will start- the cleanup!  We'll save any still-usable boards for future projects, but there will still be lots of rotten wood and shingles and random junk that will need to be picked up and disposed of.  We'll give the inside a thorough cleaning and spread the manure on the fields and then line the pens with fresh bedding.  This was really important to get done before winter, this way the sows won't have to go to a new building before the next litter of piglets are born in early March.