Old 99 Farm, week of Nov 23, 2014

As of Nov 23th, we can offer 60+ items including the following crops: mint, beet tops, spinach, beet root (two varieties, Detroit Red and regular), yellow plum tomatoes, chard, celeriac, eggplant, carrots, collards, squashes (hubbard, butternut, Sibley, buttercup) summer squashes (spaghetti and delicata) and kale.

Camelia is cooking prepared foods from our produce: garlic pesto, cucumber relish, quiches (on order). Arugula Pesto is her latest and it’s a delight, but you can make your own too! We have homemade grape jelly too from the Mazzonis next door.

Meats
Beef cuts are now available, a total of about 500 lbs of pastured meats. There are several geese in the freezer. I have 6 lambs in the freezer, still have about 10 chickens as well as veal.
I have listed pork now so that you can order specific cuts and I’ll know how to instruct the butcher: pork coming in December.

Eggs
My current price is $6/XL doz. I sell mixed size dozens that weigh at least 588 gm (medium), 672 grams, the ‘large’ size dozen, and Extra Large, 770gm plus carton. Please bring in recycled cartons.

Raw Honey
The first crop is sold out, I have several boxes ready to extract from the summer crop. You bring your jar and fill it here, or buy in prefilled mason jars.

Thank you to all bringing in recycled egg cartons, hold off now, I have several months supply.

Celeriac is a celery that is grown for the root, to be eaten like other root crops: mashed, in stews, steamed, etc. I like it in bone broths and soups. We have a good crop in storage now. See this site for recipes: http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/glossary/celeriac

http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-11-20/a-two-century-fight-for-the-small-the-local-and-the-beautiful

http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-11-20/facts-values-and-dark-beer

Well, I must echo and quote JM Greer in the essay I just gave a link to. There is much to despair about and its so easy to give up, to live for the moment and let the devil take the hindmost. But that is a tough way to live out the rest of our years and a stern sentence for our children. So please consider reading these two essays, with the conclusion in mind:

“As for me—well, all things considered, I find that being alive beats the stuffing out of the alternative, and that’s true even though I live in a troubled age in which scientific and technological progress show every sign of grinding to a halt in the near future, and in which warfare, injustice, famine, pestilence, and the collapse of widely held beliefs are matters of common experience. The notion that life has to justify itself to me seems, if I may be frank, faintly silly, and so does the comparable claim that I have to justify my existence to it, or to anyone else. Here I am; I did not make the world; quite the contrary, the world made me, and put me in the irreducibly personal situation in which I find myself. Given that I’m here, where and when I happen to be, there are any number of things that I can choose to do, or not do; and it so happens that one of the things I choose to do is to prepare, and help others prepare, for the long decline of industrial civilization and the coming of the dark age that will follow it.”

Healthy Eating
Ian and Camelia