Fingerling Potatoes
We hope to have a good selection of fingerlings Saturday if we can get them out of the ground.
After moving the laying hens Wednesday morning, we went to dig potatoes. I ran the cultivating tractor with the potato plow attached down a row ( our rows are 440' long) of Rose Finn Apple fingerling potatoes. The yield was disappointing compared to the Bintje potatoes we have been digging, only a few 5 gal. buckets off the entire row.
But then Jenifer boiled some for supper... They were awesome! We generally eat the cull vegetables, except for sweet corn, which we selfishly hoard and I think Rose Finn fingerlings might be added to the list.
We quit for lunch around 12:30 and it started to rain around 1:00. Not hard, just enough to make digging potatoes out of the question. So I took a nap after lunch and then went shopping...
Shopping for me involves going to Lowe's for lumber and hardware and Tractor Supply for pine shavings for the turkeys and the laying hen's nest boxes.
I also got the thrill of going to Radio Shack, Office Max, and Wal-Mart looking for a USB to Ethernet adapter and vice-versa.
Ellie wanted a laptop and we told her we would match her 1/2 on the purchase. She made her half in 3 weeks selling flowers so we had to pony up for the other half and we went to Best Buy in Concord to take advantage of the state tax- free days this past weekend.
I also bought something I have been dreading, a wireless router.
Some of you may not know what I am talking about and, believe me, I am in your camp while others will consider me a luddite for having trouble hooking up a simple router.
The installation instructions were simple, remove the Ethernet cable from the back of the computer and plug it into the router... Our 7 year old computer does not have an Ethernet cable. It is a USB plug. Which led to the fruitless search for adapters at Radio Shack, Office Max, and Wal-Mart... I was told multiple times I needed to go to Best Buy... jeez.
Simply Eating
We get asked all the time what do with this or that, whether it is potatoes, tomatoes, eggplant, or peppers. We are happy to share what we know but sometimes we want to scream "Just eat it!"
Our condiments this time of year are sea salt, freshly ground black pepper, and good olive oil. Duke's mayonnaise if a tomato sandwich is involved, which is daily for me.
It is so easy to eat fresh, you really don't even have to know how to cook.
I got home Tuesday night from theTailgate market around 8:30. Arron from Red Dirt Ranch had given me a cornish hen he had butchered that morning. Talk about fresh. I fired up our Weber charcoal grill, split the chicken, and surrounded the chicken with peppers, eggplant, shitake mushrooms, and tomatoes .
Easy and awesome with real food...
A philosophical / ethics question
Laughing Owl Farm T-Shirts
We have been thinking of having some farm t-shirts made for a couple of years.
Naturally, we would want them made as local and sustainable as possible.
A google search, just by luck, turned up a facility in Monroe that made t-shirts. Initial thought was "that is local".
More investigation turned up TS designs in Burlington, NC. Whoa! They run their facility on bio-diesel and are doing all they can to reduce pollutants that are part textile production. Dig around their site for more information.
The plant in Monroe will run as few as 12 shirts for $24 each, and for a 200 shirt run, it is less than $4 each
TS Designs requires a 200 shirt min. with shirts costing $12-$15.
TS Designs offers 4 choices in t-shirts. Shirts made with 100% organic cotton manufactured entirely in NC, shirts made in LA out of organic cotton, organic cotton t-shirts that are fair trade, and conventional cotton t-shirts that are produced entirely in NC in a program called dirt to shirt.
Here is where it gets ethically challenging. How far and what direction do we take to locally grown?
One of the farms and the gin that is involved in the dirt to shirt program just happens to be neighbors of ours, the farm and gin is located about a mile away across the creek and through the woods as the crow flies.
The kicker is that they grow Monsanto Round-Up Ready gmo cotton.
Round-Up Ready
All the farmers around here, my dad included, are growing round-up ready corn, soybeans, and cotton.
So do we by-pass local farmers that are neighbors whose cotton is genetically modified and use organic cotton for our t-shirts?
There is some organic cotton grown in the US but not much. I was wondering where all this organic cotton is grown. Apparently India and Turkey.
"India took over Turkey's long-standing position as the leader, seeing its production increase by 292 percent to reach 73,702 MT, or about half of world organic cotton production. Other leading organic cotton producers, according to rank, were Syria, Turkey, China, Tanzania, United States, Uganda, Peru, Egypt and Burkina Faso." Source
Notice that the US is between Tanzania and Uganda in organic cotton production...
Apparently, organic cotton has to be picked by hand.
Hand-picking cotton
It makes most of the older folks around here that grew up doing it shudder. They hate the sight of cotton.
The three years my dad grew cotton, the neighbors around the fields would come out to watch it be harvested by machine and share how awful it was to have to hand-pick cotton when they were growing up in the late 40's and 50's.
Organic cotton seems hip but if it is hand-harvested.. it is close to slave labor. Good intentions start to fall by the wayside...
Dean Mullis
Laughing Owl Farm
www.laughingowlfarm.com
After moving the laying hens Wednesday morning, we went to dig potatoes. I ran the cultivating tractor with the potato plow attached down a row ( our rows are 440' long) of Rose Finn Apple fingerling potatoes. The yield was disappointing compared to the Bintje potatoes we have been digging, only a few 5 gal. buckets off the entire row.
But then Jenifer boiled some for supper... They were awesome! We generally eat the cull vegetables, except for sweet corn, which we selfishly hoard and I think Rose Finn fingerlings might be added to the list.
We quit for lunch around 12:30 and it started to rain around 1:00. Not hard, just enough to make digging potatoes out of the question. So I took a nap after lunch and then went shopping...
Shopping for me involves going to Lowe's for lumber and hardware and Tractor Supply for pine shavings for the turkeys and the laying hen's nest boxes.
I also got the thrill of going to Radio Shack, Office Max, and Wal-Mart looking for a USB to Ethernet adapter and vice-versa.
Ellie wanted a laptop and we told her we would match her 1/2 on the purchase. She made her half in 3 weeks selling flowers so we had to pony up for the other half and we went to Best Buy in Concord to take advantage of the state tax- free days this past weekend.
I also bought something I have been dreading, a wireless router.
Some of you may not know what I am talking about and, believe me, I am in your camp while others will consider me a luddite for having trouble hooking up a simple router.
The installation instructions were simple, remove the Ethernet cable from the back of the computer and plug it into the router... Our 7 year old computer does not have an Ethernet cable. It is a USB plug. Which led to the fruitless search for adapters at Radio Shack, Office Max, and Wal-Mart... I was told multiple times I needed to go to Best Buy... jeez.
Simply Eating
We get asked all the time what do with this or that, whether it is potatoes, tomatoes, eggplant, or peppers. We are happy to share what we know but sometimes we want to scream "Just eat it!"
Our condiments this time of year are sea salt, freshly ground black pepper, and good olive oil. Duke's mayonnaise if a tomato sandwich is involved, which is daily for me.
It is so easy to eat fresh, you really don't even have to know how to cook.
I got home Tuesday night from theTailgate market around 8:30. Arron from Red Dirt Ranch had given me a cornish hen he had butchered that morning. Talk about fresh. I fired up our Weber charcoal grill, split the chicken, and surrounded the chicken with peppers, eggplant, shitake mushrooms, and tomatoes .
Easy and awesome with real food...
A philosophical / ethics question
Laughing Owl Farm T-Shirts
We have been thinking of having some farm t-shirts made for a couple of years.
Naturally, we would want them made as local and sustainable as possible.
A google search, just by luck, turned up a facility in Monroe that made t-shirts. Initial thought was "that is local".
More investigation turned up TS designs in Burlington, NC. Whoa! They run their facility on bio-diesel and are doing all they can to reduce pollutants that are part textile production. Dig around their site for more information.
The plant in Monroe will run as few as 12 shirts for $24 each, and for a 200 shirt run, it is less than $4 each
TS Designs requires a 200 shirt min. with shirts costing $12-$15.
TS Designs offers 4 choices in t-shirts. Shirts made with 100% organic cotton manufactured entirely in NC, shirts made in LA out of organic cotton, organic cotton t-shirts that are fair trade, and conventional cotton t-shirts that are produced entirely in NC in a program called dirt to shirt.
Here is where it gets ethically challenging. How far and what direction do we take to locally grown?
One of the farms and the gin that is involved in the dirt to shirt program just happens to be neighbors of ours, the farm and gin is located about a mile away across the creek and through the woods as the crow flies.
The kicker is that they grow Monsanto Round-Up Ready gmo cotton.
Round-Up Ready
All the farmers around here, my dad included, are growing round-up ready corn, soybeans, and cotton.
So do we by-pass local farmers that are neighbors whose cotton is genetically modified and use organic cotton for our t-shirts?
There is some organic cotton grown in the US but not much. I was wondering where all this organic cotton is grown. Apparently India and Turkey.
"India took over Turkey's long-standing position as the leader, seeing its production increase by 292 percent to reach 73,702 MT, or about half of world organic cotton production. Other leading organic cotton producers, according to rank, were Syria, Turkey, China, Tanzania, United States, Uganda, Peru, Egypt and Burkina Faso." Source
Notice that the US is between Tanzania and Uganda in organic cotton production...
Apparently, organic cotton has to be picked by hand.
Hand-picking cotton
It makes most of the older folks around here that grew up doing it shudder. They hate the sight of cotton.
The three years my dad grew cotton, the neighbors around the fields would come out to watch it be harvested by machine and share how awful it was to have to hand-pick cotton when they were growing up in the late 40's and 50's.
Organic cotton seems hip but if it is hand-harvested.. it is close to slave labor. Good intentions start to fall by the wayside...
Dean Mullis
Laughing Owl Farm
www.laughingowlfarm.com
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