February- Scraps

February- Scraps
The crust is the best part

Throughout the week, I am collecting crusts from May and Jack's morning toast, the inevitable vestiges of a sourdough delight.  If I haven't eaten breakfast myself, I may make a meal of these remnants and a cup of black coffee.  They are my favorite bits of bread, the happy result of the Maillard reaction that unfolds in our 500 degree oven once a week.  Other times, we offer crusts to the hens in the coop who leave no crumb behind.  Either way, all bread baked in the house makes its way to a belly.

I got to thinking about these bread scraps the other day.  During our week-long getaway to sneak in more time with family before our season starts in earnest, my brain churned in a wholly different way: a bigger picture way.  This tends to happen when I pull myself out of the farm's current and onto the bank to sit back, dry off and take stock of the rest of life. And this time around I ruminated very much on the fact that we are in our slim season.  We are making it to the bottom of our personal barrel of potatoes, onions, carrots, radishes, garlic and squash we grew and stored for ourselves for winter.  We cherish every bit of fruit we bring into the house, knowing that this time of the year it takes that much more energy to get it to our table (I finish many an apple from the kids which isn't chewed down to the seedy core).  I relish all the greenery we muster to grow in the warmth of our growhouse: shoots and microgreens that don't sell are peppered on all of our meals.

While on vacation, we were treated to meals out, complimentary bread brought to the table.  And of course, I wondered what happens to the bread left behind in the basket.  When I was in culinary school, I found myself very bothered by the food waste of the program.  We cooked for long shifts and whatever wasn't eaten at family meal had to be thrown in the compost bin, not to be donated to a pantry or even to be taken home by us students in the name of food safety :O?!  I really believe that there is yet a lot of juice left to squeeze from the lemon before we all start to worry about growing MORE food.  Okay, alright, I'll hop off the soap box.

The business's heartbeat is much fainter in February, as in the depths of sleep.  Any and all scraps we get during this season are icing on the cake of our business year which is quite obviously summer into fall.  Wholesale granola and microgreens sales AND the weekly retail orders we bring to town on Saturdays are savored just like the last heel of Rich's sourdough loaves.  We're grateful for the small but steady flow of income we get as we have maintained such a lovely customer base.

And just as a tree masts and fallows, the limbs of ours will sag under the heaviness of its fruit once again.  We will harvest the fruit and celebrate its arrival and store some for the next fallow season.  It's the way of the farmer and that's exactly what we are eating off of right now...the literal and figurative fruits of last year's bounty.  Maybe when you're a third or fourth generation farmer you inherently don't sweat this part of the cycle...I'm writing this as another reminder to myself that this is the nature of the beast: scraps season.


Updates from the farm:

-Layer Chicks Galore: We've doubled our layer flock overnight.  By July we should have double the eggs provided by our pastured band of layers.  For now, the babes are coming up in the warmth of our brooder.  The interesting part is always introducing two groups of birds to each other...stay tuned for that!

-Seed starting: We will start the first of our seeds for the season at the end of the month.  Plant sale starts and field crops both will start germinating, ringing in the true beginning of our 2023 growing season.  We have a great menu planned and predominantly want to grow more of everything with the intentions of no gaps of salad mix and more.

-2023 CSA: We still have csa memberships available for the year.  If you have any questions at all, most can be answered by reading the csa page on our website (link below).  But please please email me with questions that remain :).

-Hoop House Production: More crops are starting to be harvested from the hoop.  They were stunted in the extreme cold we had in December are are coming to fruition now!

-2023 season: We are thrilled to be at it again...another year and another chance to grow and bake for you.  Our intention for this year on the farm is to stay the course and fine tune what we have going right now: more of our favorite salad mix offered every week, more spinach, of course our tomatoes and peppers, potatoes and yams, radishes, microgreens and shoots, beets and carrots, asian greens, herbs, and beyond.  I hope to expand upon sharing our story through writing in our "Foxhole Journal", on Instagram, and possibly beyond.  


Thanks to the generous folks who paid to subscribe to our Foxhole Journal last year, we were able to fund this site for years to come.  More importantly, you all encouraged me to expand on my writing, something which I have now learned to make time for and which I love to do.  Going forward, we are making all publications available for free.  No more pay wall!  If you'd like to contribute still, you can fund my writing by 'buy(ing) me a coffee' any time you'd like.  The button you see below will be at the end of each publication going forward.  Thank you for reading :).