Summer Season continues until the end of October. As we like to say, the season starts out green, gets colorful, and ends heavy. We just entered the "heavy" stage. The fall harvest is one of my favorite times of the year. The flavors are great and less perishable.

Over the next 5 weeks, we'll look forward to fall vegetables like cauliflower, brussel sprouts, butternut squash, parsnips, celery, and sweet potatoes, to name a few. Apples will continue to keep the doctor away, and our fall proteins include fun items like smoked chicken wings, stew beef, pork chops, and breakfast patties.

Joining now gives you access to the fall harvest. Memberships are pro-rated automatically online.

**Note, it is not an open to the public week this week. The items featured below are only available to current summer season members. We're sending this email to everyone since it's not too late to join in for the remainder of the season! And, Thanksgiving details are included below.

It's been a wild year for eggs. Back in the late winter/early spring, we were unusually short. Laying hens lay well for a period of about 18 months before their production drops or they go into a molt. We run 2 flocks to try to avoid any downtime in production, but we do try to time rotating out birds around March when our demand is usually the lightest.

Then 2023 came with the egg shortage related to bird flu (and news media). Prices were sky high, and we saw the "fair weather" shoppers who came in for just eggs. Restaurants were even trying to buy eggs off the shelf of the butcher shop, and we had to put a limit on eggs just to make sure there were plenty for our regular customers.

Now, the hens are laying well, and we have an excess of eggs until holiday baking season starts.

So, this week our eggs are on sale. And for the dairy farmers, milk production is good and we have excess availability of milk as well, so let's move it!

Eggs - 2 dozen for $7

Milk and Eggs - $7.50

1 half gallon A2 Guernsey Whole Milk and 1 dozen Eggs

Apple Cider - $4.75

Pressed from a mixture of apples - honeycrisp, cortland, gala, and paula red this week - and UV pasteurized, this cider is great and, if neglected in the fridge, will give that refreshing tang and fizz as it ferments some. That's how I prefer mine!

Celery - $4

I've been waiting for this for weeks. The celery stalk rarely gets to be the center of attention. But our growers do it so well and it is shockingly different.

Commercial celery is usually "blanched" in the field with a tube that keeps it out of the sun to give it that pale color. This celery is grown in the sun for dark color and rich flavor. Sold with the leaves - which I enjoy as garnish on a meal or use them in the stockpot.

Seedless Grapes - 1 # bags - $4.50

These are new to us this year. These are two "table grapes," intended for fresh eating. They are sweet/tart and seedless, and just really enjoyable.

Two varieties available :

Reliance - small, sweet, and floral. Green.

Jupiter - a more "muscat" type grape, slightly more tart but still sweet and tender. Dark purple.

Sweet Potatoes - 3# bags - $6

The possibilities are endless. Baked sweet potato. Sweet potato fries. A mash. A soup. In a stir fry. In pancakes, muffins, or even sweet potato pie or cookies.

Huckleberries - per pint - $5

This is a new one for us this year. One of our growers experimented and put in a huckleberry patch. This cultivar is larger and sweeter than the wild ones. Think of it as a more tart blueberry, great on cheese plates, used to make a pie or jam, or even an ingredient in a sweet and sour sauce to serve over pork chops, chicken, or smoked meat.

Apple Pie with Crumb Topping: Also known as Dutch Apple Pie. The trick to this pie is to make the filling a few days ahead. Soak the apples with cinnamon and sugar to pull out a bit of the water. The resulting juices are cooked down and added back to the apples, dusted in flour, to provide for apples with texture in a juicy, flavor rich filling. Topped with a crumb topping of flour, oats, brown sugar and butter.

Serve warm and with ice cream for maximum smiles!

Apple Cinnamon Loaf. We are replacing the zucchini bread this week with a new quick bread. Apples are folded into a sweet batter for a moist breakfast or dessert bread. Only $5 per loaf.

OK, all you super-prepared people who have been calling since June to try to reserve a heritage turkey....

The order form is now live! Please place your order online so I don't lose it!

Turkeys are a big focus right now on the farm, and in the kitchen we'll soon start roasting pumpkins to freeze puree for pies and more. The work has already begun!

Our offerings are similar to last year, and prices are the same. We expect to quickly sell out of heritage turkeys, and should have plenty of our pasture raised "market" turkeys available. Stay tuned for all the email updates as they continue to scratch and gobble around the farm.

Not sure 100% what you need? You can always update or change your order later. It's best to at least get on the list and get something reserved.

This is our Fresh Fork order form for delivery on the truck. The OCP order form (with prepared offerings and pickup in Ohio City) should be live by the weekend. That will be announced in a separate email.

See above our corn silage video

It's the first sign of fall when silage gets put up.

There are milestones in farming communities. There is the spring when the plow hits the ground and the corn planter comes out.

There are the sites of shocks and caps in the fields in July, just weeks before the wheat is threshed in a traditional "threshing circle."

Then in fall the farmers are busy cutting and reaping corn to make silage. This is usually early September. Following that, corn is picked (harvested) for either ear corn or kernel corn for animal feed.

This week my neighbors were putting up silage. I stopped in and got in the way - I mean helped - for a little while. I know better and I bring snacks as payment! They know I want to tell you all about it.

Step 1: Wait for the corn to dry down.

In previous newsletters I talked about the difference in sweet corn and field corn - also known as dent corn.

This is a good example of dent corn and what it is used for.

The photo to the right shows the milkline in an ear of corn. At this point, the corn is quite hard to the touch. The kernels have started to dry down and have a dent in the top of them. The yellow represents the hard part of the corn; the white represents the soft milky part. The milkline is about 1/2 to 2/3 up the kernel. This is the ideal time to harvest the corn for silage.

By contrast, in about 45 days from now farmers will look for the "blackline" to indicate that the corn is completely mature and dried down, ready to shell for kernel corn.

Step 2: Cut the corn plant and bind it into a shock.



This is the really old fashioned way to do it. The Amish use antique reaper binders that are obsolete. These old machines cut the corn plant about 3 inches off the ground. About 5 stalks are collected together and tied off with a piece of twine.

Step 3: Shocks are loaded onto the wagon.



The shocks of corn are usually transferred up a conveyor from the reaper binder onto a wagon that rides beside the reaper.

In this photo, I'm collecting all the ones that fell off the wagon on the way back to the barn.

Step 4: The corn is fed into a chopper



The chopper is driven off of the PTO (power takeoff) shaft on a tractor. The driveshaft powers the machine where a belt pulls the stalks of corn into a blade that chops it up and blows it out the side.

The farmer manually feeds the corn stalks onto the conveyor.

Step 5: The chopped corn is packed into a silo.



The chopped corn is still green and wet. It is packed into the silo like making sauerkraut. The sugars in the corn start to ferment in the anaerobic environment. This preserves the corn and makes certain nutrients more available.

The silage also smells and tastes good to the cows. Marion, here, uses the silage to supplement his dairy ration in the winter. It is high in energy and nutrients, making it ideal and affordable way to feed a dairy cow (which requires a very rich ration to produce milk and carry a calf).

The men work in teams:

Reaper/Binder: 1 man driving two horses to run the reaper binder. This is the loud job.

Wagon Teams: 1 man drives and 1 catches/loads the corn onto the wagon. 3 wagons were in motion at once to provide continuous flow to the chopper.

Chopper: 1 man feeds the chopper as he unloads each wagon. The wagon teams switch wagons and horse teams when they drop the loaded wagons off at the barn.

Packer: Usually the chopper blows directly into a vertical silo. In this case, the silo was already full and a "bunk bag" was being filled. One man drives the skid loader to transfer the chopped corn to the bunk bag and pack it in tight.

All together there were 9 men working on this project. They break at 11:30 for a large lunch together prepared by the farmer's wife and his daughters.