25. February 2011 by admin.

 Feeding the cows, goats, and chickens in the morning. Here are some of them, saying good morning–

Goofy Hazelnut:

The chickens get underfoot and crowd around, waiting for some breakfast.

The hoophouse is quiet, dormant. Spring plantings begin this weekend.

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12. February 2011 by admin.

Posted in Family Art and Crafts | 1 Comment »

12. February 2011 by admin.

Free-range chicken by our friends Shannon and BJ. Chicken soup by Ilene. Pottery by Suzi Hanson at Catoctin Pottery. All raised and shaped and made with love, it must surely cure what ails.

A flu has been visiting my house this week.  Thank goodness I remain well and can play host. The others are in varying stages of better and well.

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6. February 2011 by admin.

Some highlights from the PASA conference. There were lots of notables at the conference, here are a few.

Here’s director Andrew Kimbrell of The Center for Food Safety

If you want to help fuel an organization that is taking on the battle with Monsanto with success, in the courts and in DC… send your monetary contribution to The Center for Food Safety . They are working hard right now, in a time when the President just approved GMO alfalfa permits without an Environmental Impact Statement. But Food Safety was responsible for leading a win against GMO sugar beets and a list of other successful GMO slow-downs and shut-downs.

For the record, PASA hosts an excellent regional conference (with attendees representing 30 states and a few countries!) in State College, PA. PASA is the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture and they have a website. Under the guidance of Brian Snyder for the past 10 years or so, and with such hot items on the legislative table from raw milk policy in PA to the Food Safety Act in DC, PASA has become a leading organization in advocacy for family farms.

Jonah took most of these photos. I am proud of my six year old photographer.
Here I am with the big wig, Brian Snyder:

It was good to see again CSA farmer and author, Elizabeth Henderson. She co-authored the book, Sharing the Harvest, which was my primary resource 12 years ago when we were starting up the CSA. And what’s cooler, is that she is one of the very first farmers to start a CSA in the USA, in the mid-80s. I’ve always enjoyed her workshops at PASA. This one was about her new organizing efforts to establish a code of ethic for social justice on farms in the USA, a living wage for the farmer including farm employees.

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2. February 2011 by admin.

A quick glimpse at some snow highlights on the farm–

Its never fun to lose electric power and phone service, but we had some fun with it and appreciated roughing it for a while. I think my boys enjoyed candlelight so much that they would like a lights-out night every once in a while, when we set up a lantern and skip the lights for the night. Since we heat the house with wood anyway, we weren’t freezing without electricity, I’d be complaining if I had been freezin! We melted snow over the woodstove for drinking water…I’m grateful that power returned after a couple days, I would not have been happy melting snow for the cow water trough. There’s no skipping pancakes around here:

Skiing on the farm was fun in this big snow.

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