blue star equiculture

Those of you that have been to the farm in the past few weeks may have spotted the latest addition to the Blue Star Family—Moonshine, a 4 year old Jersey cow. Just in from the Northern-most tip of Vermont, she and her fellow sisters made the rich, creamy milk for Butterworks Farm (one of the first certified organic dairies in America!). 

Here at BSE, we plunged into the world of garlicy greatness with reckless abandon.  80 lbs of garlic made it’s way into our new fields this past week.  That’s 2400 cloves!  Perhaps it was my influence, the great admirer of the garlic plant that I am.  It’s wisdom as a medicine, and it’s quick, decisive moves to adapt to its environment, it's life saving nature in the kitchen--I wish my resume was as loaded.  

With the heat of the growing season behind us, chores like this in the garden take on a new air-- the pace can slow and the work is truly fun again.  With the only deadline being the end of the month, we could chip away at the job--teaching, laughing, loitering and learning. 

For next season, we’ve opened up another acre and a half to grow on—and with that, the number of shares we plan to offer has expanded as well!  Because of an overwhelming interest, we’ve decided to open the sign-ups for farm shares early. 

Curious about our share, or want to sign-up?  Check out the “Farm Share” page on our website, here you will find descriptions of the farm share model, specifics on how our share at BSE works, and a link to sign-up!  Note that next season, our share will not only be bigger, but it will also be longer! From the beginning of June to the end of October—22 weeks of the freshest, horse powered produce around.
                                       http://www.equiculture.org/farm-share.aspx

Sunday marked the end of both the Big E and our very first CSE season here as BSE.  Here we are, already a few days into October and it seems the summer passed by without us noticing.  We still get to spend a bit of time out back.  The garden has changed face, the cover crops we planted springing out of the freshly tilled fields.  We still have plants in the ground—lots of storage carrots and beets, greens, and the hardiest peppers around.  Our farm store will be open on Friday, Saturday and Sunday all through October, filled with potatoes, beets, squash and greens—please stop in and bring home some BSE produce to share with your family.  We’d love to see you! 

Finally, the hallmarks of autumnal produce arrive to ease the pain of summer’s departure.  Squash, Brussels sprouts and the return of spinach sweeten the deal as the horses coats fluff and the leaves begin to blanket the yard. 

What a spiritual act, putting a garden to bed for the winter.  The slow, steady process of pulling back the layers of fruit, foliage and mulch you ever so carefully laid what feels like years ago—now served its purpose, and destined for the compost pile.  We have a great responsibility, being stewards of this piece of land. Having harvested from it all summer—we must look for ways to return the appropriate nutrients, minerals and biology to the soil, a way to thank the land for providing such abundance. Cultivated soil, such as that you’d find on farmland or in a garden, is not a natural soil environment, and because of that, we must take special care to support the life in the soil so that it might stick around. 

Just like that the nights turn chilly and August sneaks up on September.  While in the kitchen we are still enjoying the fruits of summer, our minds drift into the colder months and beyond towards the future of our garden. 

This weekend we finally broke ground in the second installment of the BSE gardens.  In spring of this year, time was short (seems that’s the standard length around these parts…) and we decided using our riding plow was more efficient than adding learning the art of the walking plow to our to-do lists.  But this fall, eternally hopeful that someone will add a few hours on one end of the day, Justin and I have made the commitment to learn the ancient art of the walking plow.

Throughout human history, harvest time has always been a celebration--a time to rejoice in the fact that our families have the nourishment to survive another year.  Yet all harvest festivals and celebrations seem to be in the late fall—when, as any gardener could tell you, life in the garden quietly grinds to a halt.  So why don’t we celebrate the harvest earlier?  There is no time, of course!  In August, if one isn’t in the garden—they are in the kitchen, busily putting food by for the winter.

Yay for sticky chins, corn between our teeth and the juice of vine ripened tomatoes!  Kneeling between the rows in our garden, where the soil stays cool and moist under the shade of the plants, we cracked open a watermelon to enjoy in the field at the end of a long, hot day.  Could an August evening be better spent?

As we plod through these thick days, it’s hard to remember that this is how August is supposed to feel.  It’s as if Mother Nature planned it ever so carefully, so that just when the summer seems to be slipping uncontrollably out from under us—we hit a spell like this and time slows down.

There are vegetables abound in the garden at BSE, and we have decided to open the BSE farm store every Monday from 3-6:30, starting August 13th through Septemeber. If you are not a CSE shareholder, we hope to have you all join us for some delicious, nutritious vegetables!

Finally, rain!  With it comes tons of eggplant, our first tomatoes and the juiciest fresh onions around.  After a month without any rain, you can almost watch the garden grow as the clouds part and the wet weather of the past few days is complimented by some sun—it’s weeks like this that gardeners dream of!