Thanks for taking the time
This is my first venture into the world of blogging. I’ve been doing a monthly update on the farm website to highlight what happened or will happen during that interval. When my website hosting service offered a free blog, I thought I’d give it a try. It occurred to me that folks might be interested in deeper, more frequent insights into our daily life here on the farm. Well, I can’t promise daily, but I’ll do what I can in the busy season! I appreciate your interest and look forward to your comments.
December and January are “resting” months on the farm. We have our morning and evening chores–feeding and watering the horses and poultry, collecting eggs–but little “hard” work is done unless we are hit by big storms that require repairs to structures and fencing. Thankfully, we are above the valley and don’t have to deal with flooding!
My time is now focused on planning for the next season. I have a 5-year business plan with long-term and short-term goals, which I update. Most of my effort goes into the detailed objectives and budget for the coming year. And yes, this blog supports one of my objectives–Public Education. One of my favorite tasks is the growing plan and the hours spent pouring over seed catalogs!
We are deeply concerned about the state of the economy and the impact this will have on us personally, as a business, and our community. We will continue to diversify our business (wish I had done that with my personal financial investments!) and to find ways of helping others through the rough year ahead. For starters this year, we are not raising our CSA prices and are offering CSA shares in exchange for work on the farm. I have some other ideas I haven’t fleshed out yet and I’m interested in your suggestions.
The fields are currently under a couple inches of snow, holding a few root crops. The hard freeze of last week finished off the chard we enjoyed through a very mild November. I have a long-term goal of being self-sufficient and maybe we’ll never get there, but it’s a good goal. Finding the time to put crops in storage is challenging with so little time, and 2008 was such a bad year for growing that everything went to our CSA, restaurants, and farmers markets. We have a little winter squash and a lot of apples; some applesauce, apple butter, and apple jelly that I found time to put up after our season ended in October. And of course, those wonderful duck and chicken eggs! We buy our meat from another farmer, Bruce Singbeil. Our freezer is full of Certified Naturally Grown beef, chicken, and soon pork, thanks to him.
Our farm is too small to grow the feed we need for our animals. We buy organic feed for our poultry from In Season Farms in BC, Canada. I finally found a source for quality hay at Cedarwind Farms in Snoqualmie and organic feed for my horses from a company in Idaho called Dynamite. I am so impressed with the quality of the Dynamite products that I have become a distributor. To view the product catalog, enter Cynthia Krepky for the distributor name. The Dynamite nutrition program and products started with horses, but now they have product lines for many species, including humans, and soil!
These are just some of the topics I’ll be covering in more depth in future posts.
Regards,
Cindy Krepky
www.dogmtnfarm.com
