A beautiful summer rain left the farm dewy and vivid last night.
Slowly our work transforms the landscape and soils beneath it.
And we glean new fruits from our labor and make plans for the fall.

THEPARLORROOM: FARM SUPPER THURSDAY JULY 21st! 7PM

THEPARLORROOM: FARM SUPPER THURSDAY JULY 21st! 7PM: "Join us at Eightfold Farm and enjoy a Seasonal Summer meal. Thursday July 21st at 7pm until 10pm $15 suggested donation /MENU/ Roasted Ch..."

THEPARLORROOM: ICE CREAM SOCIAL JULY 28th!

THEPARLORROOM: ICE CREAM SOCIAL JULY 28th!: "A Mostlandian Junior Ambassador Ice Cream Social at Eightfold Farms Thursday, July 28 7 pm
 Eightfold Farms, Pfafftown, NC $10/members, $..."

The Parlor's new look

We finished major renovations on the Parlor this month and threw a party to celebrate with our Kickstarter backers. Still a lot of finishing touches and kitchen work to do, but a giant leap forward nonetheless.

Parlor photos here.

Slaughter Time

We slaughtered our first round of 2011 broilers today and boy are they big! Most of them are 5 lb beasts with lots of breast meat -- a great size for roasting, smoking, or however else you like to cook a whole bird. Here's some other suggestions and info for preparing pasture-raised chicken:

1) Brine -- anywhere from a few hours to overnight in a salt water bath can improve the texture and flavor of a broiler -- there are many variations on the theme but 1/2 cup of kosher salt in a 5-quart container is all you really need -- rinse the bird prior to brining and when you are finished, drain and pat dry and carry on with your recipe.

2) Air-dry -- if you allow your bird to rest in the fridge uncovered overnight, the skin will start to dry -- this is a key piece to getting that skin extra-crispy when you roast it.

3) Braising -- pasture-raised birds cook up best when they are cooked slowly with moist heat. Braising involves browning the meat first on the stove top and then transferring the meat to the oven -- a covered dish like a dutch oven is ideal -- where the meat continues to cook in a liquid (broth, wine, etc).

4) Cuticle -- this is the yellow "skin" between the feathers and the actual skin of the bird. when we process on farm not all of this cuticle will come off. Although it will not harm you nor taste bad, i like to take it as much as I can off before I cook a bird -- a little rubbing normally loosens it up enough to peel it.

Buckeye Chicks Arrive

Thursday we received 25 Buckeye chicks as a part of the new poultry breeding program on the farm. This dual-purpose breed is classified as critical by the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, and thanks to the help of poultry guru, Jim Adkins we've got some quality genetics to build up our own flock. Soon to be joining this crew will be 25 black australorps, an English breed known for their big brown eggs!

The Parlor Gets Funded!

With donations beyond our expectations, we've already reached our funding goal of $3,800 which will pay for the first phase of renovations. Folks can still donate and help us fund phase 2 as well. For more details and to donate click here

A Busy Day on the Farm

It started at 7am with a call from the post office -- our latest batch of meat birds have arrived. Once these young peepers settled in it was time to move the three-week old biddies out to the range life.


Said to be the most stressful day of a young broiler's life, these birds adapted quickly, learning to appreciate the grass and sun.




The rest of the day was left to make a cake -- a biodynamic compost pile built from chicken manure, scythed clover, straw, leaves, coffee grounds, food scraps, composted cow manure, and a dash of worm castings (and worms!). Then for the biodynamic preparations: valerian juice, stinging nettle, dandelion, yarrow, oak bark, and chamomile.

Eightfold Anniversary!

We've been on the farm for a year now! and we are launching a new project on Kickstarter.com... The Parlor!

Visit our Kickstarter page see the video, spread the word, and maybe lend a hand to the creation of this new exciting part of Eightfold Farm.

biodynamic compost preps

We received a shipment of Biodynamic compost preparations from the Josephine Porter Institute this week. These plant-based compounds will be doing some serious alchemy in our compost pile this spring, creating potent humus for our garden. Along with BD500 and BD 501 sprays, the introduction of these preparations to our farm will enliven our soils and energize our plants and animals. The different preps work with different aspects of soil chemistry, stimulating the interactions between calcium, phosphorous, potassium, sulfur, and silica -- all essential to healthy plant growth.

Idea Exchange at the Center for Design Innovation with Jay Dunbar & Eric Jackson - Principles of Permaculture Design for Microfarming and Urban Sustainability

Last March Jay and I led an Idea Exchange at CDI on urban micro-farming and permaculture. We had yet to move to the farm and spoke about permaculture design principles and how we applied them to the microfarm once behind Krankies.

Here is a link to a video of the webcast (the powerpoint presentation is also downloadable):
link

Also, check out the current calendar of Idea Exchanges happening weekly at CDI:
link

Feed, Seed, and Breeds

Winter on the farm has been a challenge for us and for the chickens, but we are making it work. We have eggs in the fridge (about 2 dozen a day from 42 hens - not bad, not great), and meat in the freezer as well as two broiler coops full of birds out on the winter pasture.

It's time to start ordering some chicks for the spring, but we are excited about a new level of animal husbandry here on the farm with our participation in the International Center for Poultry's Heritage Poultry Breeding Project 2011 -- we'll be getting coaching, guidance, and access to top-quality genetics to start our own breeding program for heritage breed chickens -- Black Australorps to be exact -- as well as flock of Naragansett turkey poults to raise for meat and future breeding!

One of the key goals of our small, experimental farm is to develop regionally-adapted varieties of both plants and animals, and to reduce our reliance on off-farm sources of livestock and seed. We are also developing a plan to grow at least a portion of our feed on farm (we do have some growing space and fertility limitations right now) and to save seed from these farm-adapted grains and legumes while we continue to build pasture and forage for our birds.

Stay tuned and stay in touch with your agrarian roots, America!

2011 Open Source Vegetable Genetics

It's time to plan our plantings for next year and we're looking at alot of unique and exciting vegetable and grain genetics for the next year. We've grown a good bit of corn seed on farm: 'Bloody Butcher' and 'Reid's Yellow Dent',  lots of Lettuce: the Austrian speckled heirloom 'Forellenschluss' and the baby leaved 'Buttercrunch'. Then there's an array of special potatoes from Tom Wagoner's potato sampler.  I've also saved a bunch of 'Emkwana' Squash from my Old Salem grow-out of the rare Menonomie Indian Pepo, a gallon milk jug full of a really diverse 'Whipporwill' Cowpeas, and a good bit of 'White Bermuda' Sweet Potato seed stock.

In addition to that we're getting a share of seeds from the FACE OF THE EARTH seed csa.  Based in Indiana, FACE OF THE EARTH has been breeding diversity into alot of new landrace varieties.  This experimental csa provides seed to a network of folks around the world breeding bioregional (and farm!) adapted food plants.

What's a Landrace?  I'm glad you asked...

A Landrace is a population of plants highly variable in appearance.  Like what would have been common before the industrialization of our seed sources.  Each landrace has a core, although variable, identifiable morphology and holds a certain genetic integrity.  It's sort of like the flip side of the coin of pure bred gene lines.  By selectively choosing which plants flower together we can create a diverse genepool where we see a higher density of statistical games being played at the genetic level than in inbred open pollinated lines or their hybrid offspring.

Just check out some of the diverse offerings from the FACE OF THE EARTH 2011 Seed Bazaar to get your taste buds anticipatin':

Dry Farm Acorn Squash landrace

here's what Alan at Bishop's Homegrown says about them:
"a mix of acorn varieties from our own collection as well as that of Long Island seed grown on the absolutely worst piece of soil on the farm over the past couple of years. Hard and heavy read clay is the norm here. This year we didn’t even add compost, instead we allowed the squash to show us what they had and forwent any irrigation as well, and the best of the best survived and produced a bumper crop of acorn squash from small to large in size in a diversity of color. From there we have chosen seed from the best looking, best tasting, and best storing of the survivors. "

and then there's:

Amanda Palmer Landrace corn

We hope to use this corn to develop a good feed for our poultry:

We might even work to establish a intentionally feral population of cherry tomatoes

30 total!: 
A Millet Mix
El Diablo Tobbacco Grex

Amanda Palmer Landrace

Waxy Corn

Saucer Full Of Secrets Sunflowers

Inanna Spring Wheat (mixture of varieties rescued from Iraq post invasion)

Blackberries (mixture of seed from 10 distinct thornless cultivars, lots of room to create a new thorn less blackberry including genes from runnering or dewberry type blackberries)

UK Tuxpeno Corn

Curcurbita Maxima Grex

Dry Farm Acorn Squash Landrace

Gold Standard Summer Squash

High Voltage Hot Pepper Landrace

Easter Everywhere Bell Pepper Mix

Astronomy Domine Sweet Corn

Red Watermelon

Absinthe Green Fleshed Muskmelon Mix

Electric Head Lettuce

Olde 101 Red Tomato

Roller Coaster Cherry Tom 

Absinthe Tomato

Mer De Noms Tomato

Phoenix Pink Tomato

OSU Blue Tom

Between the Sun and Moon Watermelon Mass Cross

Dionysus Melon Grex

Edamame Grex

6 Turnip Root Grex

Summer Radish Grex

Hip-Gnosis Long White Slicing Cucumber

Green Gumbo Okra Mix

We'll also be looking towards these sources as we build our resilient farm library of bio-ecology:

Wild Garden Seeds

Alan Kapular's Peace Seeds

Adaptive Seeds

The Long Island Seed Project

The Kusa Seed Society

A Cold Night for Chickens

A lot of people comment on chickens, calling them dinosaurs or reptilian or what have you. Although I myself have seen the similarity, there's nothing like a winter chill to remind you why chickens survived the ice ages and velociraptors did not. These birds are cold hardy! We've had whole week full of nights in the teens with waterers turning to ice and cars that won't start, but the chickens continue to run around, lay eggs, and chit-chat with nothing but their feathers on! Meanwhile, I'm in my January clothes wondering what happened to mild NC winters.

Mornings with chickens are a little easier now -- our layer flock is finally ONE as we have introduced our original mini-flock of golden comets with our younger heritage and americauna rangers. This is especially good for winter time as it fills the coop up all the way at night and makes our feeding and watering duties centralized.

Our oldest round of broilers are also now living la vida al aire libre (bad transliteration) cooping in the greenhouse with an outdoor run. And today our flock of young white rock cockerels will move into a mobile coop with insulation, greenhouse film, and a low-tunnel design.

Pics to come!

Food Safety Rant: The Senate Bill Passeth

I can't remember a time in my life when a Senate bill has caused such a stir with such a broad spectrum of people. The critical arguments and scathing documentaries about food systems in this country have taken hold of the mass mind, I think. People are wary. Distrust of government is high. Everybody's getting frisked. The tendency is: look to how hard they're gonna screw us now. As always, Big Ag is lurking in the halls of legislation.

For many of us, small farmers or otherwise, the ramifications of the bill are obscured by the process in which it is written and passed and diminished in meaning through the very words themselves, which, being neither plain nor explicit tell in no way what needs to be done to produce and provide safe food to everyone in this country. (The sentence above is tame and legible contrasted with what passes for legal language in our society today.) What will actually happen if and when this bill is executed? What will it actually say? What other laws will be hitched to its star? And how will these laws effect the life and way of agriculture in this country?

I have no idea.

Watching and reading as this legal process unfolds, I'm more curious to know why we even have this government at all. It's shocking how very little progress is made in Washington to address the broad and disturbing issues facing our country's economies and agro-ecosystems. (Not to mention health care, education, peace and security.) It seems impossible to think that the very legal machine which paved the way for this obviously demented military-industrial-food-energy-resource-outsource-corporation complex can do anything at all to limit, prevent, or heal the damage it has done and will continue to do to our soils, our health, our culture, und so weiter.

At what point do we, as the beyond organic local sustainable resilient inter-dependent creative collaborative peace culture, detach ourselves from the trainwreck and outline realistic plans to self-organize around modes of production, consumption, and recycling that align with our values?

Factory Farms

Found this really amazing interactive map of factory farms in the US from a Civil Eats post:

http://www.factoryfarmmap.org/#animal:all;location:NC;year:2007

you can zoom in on NC and specific counties and see what's going on where.

Pfafftown Hellhounds

We had a pretty tragic experience on the farm the night before Halloween when some beast tore into one of our mobile broiler coops and snuffed a couple dozen of what were going to be our Christmas broilers. Speculations flew as to the nature of the culprit or culprits. Last night I came home, and there was a canine of some sort sniffing around. It made a terrible noise, I screamed like a little girl and it ran off across the street into a neighboring field. It looked like some kind of doberman squatweiler -- black as night and evil. Obviously, a hellhound.

April 2010 - The Chickens Move To Eightfold Farm