Birdsfoot Farm

Dear All,
the week is almost done and I am ready for the weekend.  We had a wonderful and very busy long garlic fest weekend last week.  Thank you all for coming and helping.  We got all the garlic pulled on Saturday.  We had great food!! and when the rainstorm hit we showed slides from our Europe trip.   Peeling and hanging ended Sunday 6.30pm and then we went swimming ! ah, that felt good.  It is always amazing to see you come on your weekend and roll up your sleeves and get the job done.  The barn is filled with garlic smell and it is selling fast.
(I was going t put some garlic photos in here, but Steve took the stick to Florida where he and Kira are visiting family) Photos are coming soon.
Due to the continuing dry weather we are watering everything.  Today I put the soaker hoses on the potato hills and let them run 1 hour each row.  We usually do not water potatoes.  I am glad we invested into irrigation for the past 15 years and have almost everything hooked up to some water.  Now I just have to make time to use it. 
We had a few woodchucks who just loved our salad bar.  They were so bolt to eat in day time right next to us harvesting 15' away.  We got the live trap out and the wood chuck taxi took them away.  They chattered their teeth at me and held on for dear live when I shook them out of the trap and wished them a happy live.  But of course life will not be as good as in the Birdsfoot gardens.  We are hoping the next crop of lettuce will grow fast enough so we don't have to skip a week of lettuce.
Zucchini:  We have a lot of zucchini right now and they are almost all perfect.  Today the cooler was so full of zucchini that we could barely get anything else in.  We donated 80lbs to the church dinner, Renewal House and the Community Church food bank.  We sold a few to the local accounts and 100lbs will go downstate.  What was I thinking to plant so many?  We have 38lbs a day if we don't water and 86lbs if we water.  Guess who we are not watering?  So here are some zucchini recipes for you and I hope you do your best to help and take some of the extras.

Jill Savage recommends to grill them:  Cut zucchini into 1/4" slices and marinade them in lemon juice and olive oil.  You can grill them in a grilling pan
   
and add herbs like rosemary or thyme or oregano after the grilling so the herbs do not fall on the grill.  I don't have a grill to try it, but it sounds yummy.
Potatoes:  We tried harvesting potatoes today and only got one small potato per plant.  (So we started watering potatoes) You will have to wait a while longer before yo see potatoes in your box.  Tomatoes are starting to come in and don't quite make it past the Birdsfooters yet.  There will be lots of apples this year.
We spent the past two days all day weeding little 0-1" carrot plants in the mid of 4-6" weeds.  A tidies chore.  I saw rows of carrots (weeded) when I went to bed last night. All done, onto winter beets.  At least their little stems are purple and easier to see.  Overall the gardens are weeded as never before.  Please come and take a walk if you are in the neighborhood.
Enjoy those great summer days,
peace, Dulli

Dear All,
We are back for two weeks now and I am getting used to gardening again.  It was so great to get out into the world and leave all responsibilities behind.  The cows, the farm the community, all taken care of by  others.  I highly recommend a month break and travel for the soul.  Thank you all workers for helping to make this happen!
our travels:
We started with  a week in Hamburg to see family and friends and it was a week long party, non stop and we saw all brother and sister aunt, cousins and nephews and nieces.  We drove to the Baltic Sea to see my childhood farm and the farmer that got me into cows and farming and we swam in the sea and smelled the seaweed and collected sea glass

Then we took a train to see friends in Kassel and on to Berlin for more friends.  Seba wanted to see cities and got to do some beer crawls.
 We took buses for transportation and I got to enjoy the seeing the countryside with lots of grain fields.  Barley for beer and wheat for bread.  On to Prague with its beautiful buildings full of ornaments.  The underground was two stories down with a line going underneath another line.  The elevators were so steep that it turned my stomach to go up and down and I was happy to find out there were trams going above ground.  We went to  a jazz concert two stories down in a cave like room.  I think they don't want to built higher than the original buildings and so they built down, down. 
We had enough of cities, sleeping in hostels were we had to get up by 8am and that for teenager and us on vacation.  So we rented an apartment in Rovjen, Croatia a small tourist town on the Adriatic Sea.  It was the soccer Euro cup and we watched games on large TVs outside the restaurants or ice cream parlors.  We learned a new concept of "beach" as the coast line is full or rocks and cliffs. It is called a beach if you can sit down on a large rock or if they filled in the rock line with cement and tile on top to make it somewhat level.  We got to the beach on a windy day and Croatia was playing the soccer game so all Croatians were watching the game.  There were tall waves crashing onto the "beach"  and it seemed a bit crazy to climb the ladders into the water.  But we thought that is what they do here and dared to get in, worried we would be smashed into the rocks.  Once we were in it was o.k. and we managed to get out again.  The next day it was calm and no waves, so we were a bit crazy before.
Rovinj had beautiful marble like cobble stone pedestrian alleys full of tourists and mopeds steering through them.  Lots of little gift shops and restaurants and gelato/ice cream stands every 50' with mountains of delicious gelato.  At the farmers market they had lots of olive oil with truffles, a specialty and we bought dried fruit and cheese for our upcoming hike in the Austrian Mountains.  Seba split for a few days to see a friend in Marseilles and Steve, Kira and I took a bus and trains to the mountains.  We hiked straight up to 7000' for two days and Kira did not like hiking away from the internet.  Since we had a month of luggage with us , our packs were much heavier than needed for the hike from hut to hut where we got a bed and food. The third day we hiked along the peaks with amazing view of Italy on one side and Austria on the other.  The path got narrower and the climbs fewer, but steeper and we had to cross snow fields and it was down down if we had slipped.  We were out of our comfort zone and had 1.5hrs to go to the next hut when hikers came the other way warning us of the snow fields and that they were going down to the village ending their hike.  We had gone 3.5 hrs and did not want to go back.  We did not have 4hrs in us to go down and decided to go on.  What a trip.   When we reached the peak I was done (Kira was done the day before) and we still had to go back down 1000' to the hut.  That hut was so remote that they had to fly in supplies.  We enjoyed a two minute shower for 3 Euros and the fresh home made bread and dinner.  We were exhausted and climbed down the next day to a cute village and rested for three days and met up with Seba.  The whole village was haying on steep hills for the cows that were sent up the mountains for the summer except for 7 the were kept in the village to feed the village.  We go fresh milk, yogurt and cake from the farmers where we stayed.  I was way to tired to help haying.


We spent three more days on the Croatian coast before we had to go home.  I was happy to be back in my own bed that was hugging me and in the gardens.  All was in good order and I am still some what relaxed not on edge.

garlic fest:
So this next weekend is GARLIC FEST where you can hear more stories or see some pictures if you like.  I hope you will come out for a short while and help to get the garlic harvest of 13,000 garlic in and peeled.  It's a party not to be missed.


The gardens are looking good.  We do lots of watering and weeding.  Zucchinis are coming in strong, cucumbers soon to come.  Here are some garlic scape recipes attached.


Peace,
Dulli