I finally got the details hammered out and put shares up for sale. If you haven’t looked at it yet, check out our CSA page. We’re offering veggies and a small assortment of fruits (basically melons and mulberries, maybe some peaches and/or pears depending on what my four trees do this year), eggs, chicken, bread, and other baked goods.
So far, all the stuff I’m offering is stuff we grow or make ourselves. The baked goods, both the breads and the sweets, will feature local (or at least Ohio-grown) ingredients whenever possible. We’ll be using our own eggs, milk and cream from Snowville Creamery, and we’re following a couple leads for flour. I imagine we’ll get some whole wheat flour from Flying J, but it looks like the white flour will have to come from northeast Ohio. Since I’m also going to be growing some grains myself this year (mostly to supplement the chicken feed), maybe we’ll see something featuring millet, buckwheat, amaranth, or multicolored corn later this year. Maybe I’ll put some home-pressed sunflower oil in something, too. I’ll have to play around with recipes a bit. I expect I’ll be using some of Ochs’ Fruit Farm’s apples for pies, fritters, applesauce bread, or something along that line.
I just finished updating our produce page. I didn’t list all the varieties, as I could devote an entire page just to tomatoes and peppers, and I may add a few more things as the season progresses. I nearly forgot to mention the sprouts. Mayda came up with the idea to do sprouts so we’d have some produce to offer at the winter markets without building a big, expensive greenhouse. They’ve been so popular, though, that I plan to continue growing sprouts all year. (I probably won’t bother with buckwheat lettuce, though, since we’ll have plenty of seasonal greens.) Oh, that reminds me–I’ll be doing collards, too. I still need to get seed for that.
We have a very limited supply of eggs. Right now, I’m gathering about 18-22 a day from 24 hens. One of those hens is definitely not laying and she’s not socializing well with the other hens, either, so she’ll be going to Bradford with me and the current flock of broilers in a few weeks. I plan to add a few more layers, but even if I get them now, they won’t start laying until probably about August. Even then, they’ll just be little pullet eggs. In the dead of winter, I was getting about 8-15 eggs a day. This CSA doesn’t run that long, of course, but I don’t think I should count on more than about a dozen a day, so I’m cutting this off at six dozen eggs a week. We’ll eat the rest or use them in baked goods, I reckon. I’ve already got one person signed up for two dozen a week, so if you want any, sign up soon.
I said that everything we’re offering “so far” is our own. We’ve been kicking around a couple ideas. There’s a cattleman up in Marysville who sells beef at the Columbus Winter Farmers Market. He has a landscape company in the summer and therefore only sells his beef in the winter. He doesn’t seem too interested, but he has a great product. I proposed that we team up and rent a booth together at the Jefferson Township market. He wouldn’t have to go. We’d sell for him on commission. He turned down the idea, feeling it would be too much of a hassle to meet us halfway every week to exchange a freezer and pick up his money.
We still haven’t given up, though. We were thinking that even though the farmers markets forbid resale, some of our CSA customers might appreciate some locally raised beef. We’d just buy it from him outright and resell it here at Frijolito Farm. We’d probably have two or three options for burgers, steaks, and roasts, sort of how we’re offering whole chickens or leg quarters for the chicken CSA. I don’t know…it’s still just an idea right now. I plan to talk to him about it this Saturday at the market.
Also, Mayda has a client (she’s a web designer, for anyone who didn’t know) in Urbana who raises fish. We’d like to do that when we have more room, but until then, we’ve thought we could sell some of his smoked trout to our CSA customers. It’s great stuff, and his aqua-farm is sort of on the way back from the chicken processor.
Well, anyway, if you haven’t looked at the CSA page yet, go check it out. And if you want any of those four dozen eggs a week that are left, get ’em quick. If, by some miracle, we get approved for financing to buy the 5-acre place a couple blocks from where we are now, I’ll probably have about 200 hens next year instead of 23, but until then, supplies are very limited.
