Hooplah, last CSA day, greenhouse, garlic, and snowfall. Ramping up to slow down.

We had a wonderful time at the farm Harvest Hooplah last Saturday. Thank you everyone for joining us, for sharing good food and excellent company. Here are some highlights from the afternoon.

A delicious feast of locally grown, lovingly prepared foods, including our own young roosters, a flight of 9 different varieties of winter squash, and fresh pressed apple cider.

THANK YOU ALL for your support and enthusiasm this first year. We’ve never worked so hard before, never learned so much so quickly, and never had so much fun.  We’re looking forward to seeing you all around the farm next season.

The squash mandala on the floor of the living room has shrunk significantly since our CSA pickup last week. The final week’s CSA newsletter is posted online here. And we have a popcorn update since the newsletter was written: the toss-a-whole-cob-in-a-paper-bag-and-into-the-microwave trick actually works. Incredible.

Our new friend Jason came to help harvest and clean carrots and fingerlings. He does magical things with film and video, and introduced us to the aperture settings on our camera. SO MUCH FUN. Thank you Jason.

Jeremy, Radish, and our A-1 good friend Thomas have been busy building the stone wall for the greenhouse. It’s stunning. The wall is dry stacked rock sourced from an especially rocky hillside property in Spearfish Canyon, the gravel pit in Beulah, and from right here on the farm (from the frost-free pipe trench we dug earlier this summer).  The chickens will be cooped in the western end of the greenhouse, their pop-doors built into the stone wall. Pretty elegant set up. If we time things well with the weather, we may get straw bales and cob up this next week.

We were able to get most of the garlic in before the snow this week. We’ve saved seed from the three varieties we grew this year; Persian Star, Korean Purple and Music. And we’ve added Chesnok Red and Spanish Roja. We’ll get the rest in the ground here shortly. We have to.

The birds have started laying. Under the spruce trees. They have free range during the day and until the walls are up on the greenhouse/coop, they are over-nighting in the tractors. There are nesting boxes in the tractor, but they clearly prefer to snuggle down under the trees and send us out for a daily egg hunt.

..and a photo of the Dakota Black Popcorn. Wow.

And now with the snow and short days, wintertime reading has begun. A little bit. Tom is sailing through any and all Ivan Doig available at the Spearfish Public Library. I’m in the middle of Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy – in which he references this article from Orion about Mayapedal. Smart farmers use bicycles. And Jeremy finally has time to catch up on a stack of mail that’s been accumulating all summer. Radish is working on crossword puzzles.