What I really want you to know this week is how satisfied we are after our first on farm chicken slaughter both for our own food and for pay. Last year we tried it out just for us, and this year we made the leap to getting a permit and growing more and selling some. I was nervous. More nervous about handling meat for you than I was to handle it for myself. So I invited some experienced friends over to help me and I am so grateful to them. I felt less nervous with them on hand to ask questions and to copy their techniques. Last year we just followed instructions from a book with grainy photo illustrations. This year was better.
What I want to tell you is how quiet it was this morning, cutting lettuce without the company of 120 chatty chickens. I won’t be lonely long, for in two more weeks, the next batch of chicks will move from the barn to the field. Those chickens will be ready to eat in early September.

Community Farmers Market Dinner and a Movie Event, featuring the new film “Good Food” by Mark Dworkin and Melissa Young-a Moving Images Video Project, www.movingimages.org/goodfood.html. July 10 at the Olympic Club Theater, Centralia. “A film to awaken our taste buds and our courage to create a food system aligned with what the earth needs and our bodies yearn for.”-Frances Moore Lappe, author, Diet for a Small Planet.
Proceeds benefit the Farmers Market, Chehalis-www.communityfarmersmarket.net.
More info, call 360-880-9546.
This is not a farmers market we participate in, but we like them and we want to support the efforts of everyone we can toward the goals of providing access to quality food for everyone.

A friend of mine has a cookbook from a place called Café Gratitude. This real restaurant is located somewhere in California, of course, and it’s lal about raw food, and furthermore, a very positive and woo-woo philosophy. All of the dishes, recipes, have names indicating some quality of being, so it’s an affirmation exercise to eat there, or use the cookbook. This is all leading up to the recipe for “I am Giving Massaged Kale Salad”. All the titles are like that, “I am grateful , I am energetic, I am loving, I am whatever, you get the point. And since I returned my friend’s copy of the book, I sort of have to remember and make it up, but I think that’s fun and I want to try to give you a special way to prepare Kale. The main parts of the recipe are Kale cut into thin strips, grated carrots, sliced cucumbers, and some kind of seaweed bits. The marinade dressing thing has lime juice, ginger, garlic, jalapeno, and sesame oil, and rice vinegar, and shoyu. After you make the veggies into small bits and mix up the dressing, combine the two with your hands and really get into it, smashing up the kale. This makes the flavors all get together nicely and I think it makes the kale easier to digest in its raw form. I have made this so many times, substituting so many of the ingredients, that I can hardly remember the original recipe, but it turns out delicious every time. With great fresh kale to start with, you can’t go wrong.

My friend just called me to tell me the real recipe, but it’s too late to print here, as it is time to make the copies and box the produce and get on with all of Wednesday. You can check the website later today for the actual factual recipe with real measurements and everything.

Enjoy the green garlic while you can. In another few weeks it will begin its morph into dry garlic form. We plant the garlic in October, it grows slowly all winter, then faster in spring. We get the scapes, sneak out a few greenies, and then before you know it, it’s the middle of July and time to harvest the whole crop. We pull, bundle and hang them up in the barn all in one or two days with the help of the kids at Garden Raised Bounty. It’s a sort of working field trip for them. I’ll be sure to tell you all about it in a few more weeks.

Other non-chicken related activities on the farm lately include planting out all of our solanacea family. This means peppers, tomatoes, eggplant, and some of them are protected by plastic hoophouse structures and others are taking their chances in the great outdoors. We choose different varieties for each situation, some are more suited to the climate here, generally smaller fruited types, and others like the more tropical atmosphere inside the hoops, generally speaking these would be the larger, beefsteak tomatoes.

This week on Saturday we plan to plant out round one of the winter garden. It seems strange to be thinking winter in July, but that’s how it’s done if you want great cabbages, Brussels sprouts and cauliflower later. Yes, we will be growing more of that crazy lime green fractile romanesco cauliflower.