News and blog
Today is the last day to sign up for our 2011 CSA season! March 1, 2011 we will be closing our registration for the 2011 season due to overwhelming early sign-ups! Sign up and pay in full no later than March 1, 2011 and receive $25 off the purchase of any produce or pantry share.
After March 1, 2011, we will no longer be able to accept sign-ups for the 2011 regular season.
Tomorrow is the last day to sign up for our 2011 CSA season! March 1, 2011 we will be closing our registration for the 2011 season due to overwhelming early sign-ups! Sign up and pay in full no later than March 1, 2011 and receive $25 off the purchase of any produce or pantry share.
After March 1, 2011, we will no longer be able to accept sign-ups for the 2011 regular season.
March 1, 2011 we will be closing our registration for the 2011 season due to overwhelming early sign-ups! Sign up and pay in full no later than March 1, 2011 and receive $25 off the purchase of any produce or pantry share.
After March 1, 2011, we will no longer be able to accept sign-ups for the 2011 regular season.
To sign up online and pay via Google Checkout, follow the link below:
http://simplywisconsin.smallfarmcentral.com/members
To sign up online and pay via PayPal, following the link below:
http://www.simplywi.com/store/233
WE ARE NOW SOLD OUT OF OUR 2011 MEAT SHARES AND HALF PRODUCE SHARES ARE ALMOST SOLD OUT!
Down load our 2011 CSA brochures for your location, by clicking on one of the links below:
Download 2011 Chicago Area CSA Brochure
Download 2011 Illinois North CSA Brochure
Download 2011 Madison CSA Brochure
Download 2011 Monona CSA Brochure
Download 2011 Vie Restaurant CSA Brochure
Download 2011 Thermo Fisher Scientific CSA Brochure (Employees Only)
We are launching our "Deep Winter CSA" share program today for our hardcore CSA members who want to continue to receive organic produce and eggs, cheeses, pantry items, and meats all from Wisconsin family farms delivered to their door February through May, 2011! Guidelines and first availability list below - click on the links to open the information:
DEEP WINTER CSA Availability List for the Week of February 22, 2011
Sign up now - the first delivery is scheduled for the week of February 22!
There is a lot of information in both the guidelines and the availability list, so read thoroughly and contact me at simplywisconsin@yahoo.com with questions.
Stay warm!
Deb
I received this via E-mail and while reading it, I thought the best way to pass it on would be to post it on our blog, which will then go to Facebook and Twitter. Comments? I think it's a great idea!
Congressional Reform Act of 2010
1. Term Limits. 12 years only, one of the possible options below…
A. Two Six-year Senate terms
B. Six Two-year House terms
C. One Six-year Senate term and three Two-Year House terms
2. No Tenure / No Pension. A Congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they are out of office.
3. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security. All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people.
4. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.
5. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.
6. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.
7. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.
8. All contracts with past and present Congressmen are void effective 1/1/11.
The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen. Congressmen made all these contracts for themselves.
Serving in Congress is an HONOR, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.
Interesting article in "Shine" about busting myths people typically spout about food, including eggs, a "raw diet", and more . . .
http://shine.yahoo.com/channel/food/6-biggest-lies-about-food-busted-2391419
The butternut squash harvest has begun and there is still a lot of it in the field to be harvested. It looks like it will possibly take two weeks to get it all out of the field and we want to get it out before a frost. We may need to make additional crates and move some tables out of the greenhouse to make room for all the squash. Once again we are offering very good pricing on the butternut squash for large orders and would like to refer our customers to our availability list for additional information. The harvest of acorn squash will probably start the end of this week. We are delaying it somewhat because not all of the squash have the orange coloring on the bottom where the squash has been in contact with the ground which indicates that it is at peak ripeness. All of the spaghetti and buttercup squash have been harvested and are in the greenhouse. We are closely watching the potatoes for die back of the vines but so far they are still very green. This means that the tubers under the ground are still bulking up even though some of the reds and yellow flesh varieties are already at a very good size. We dug up one hill of the yellow flesh potatoes and it yielded 9 tubers so we are looking forward to a good harvest. The timely rains have considerably helped the potatoes this year. While we had the digging fork in our hands, we also decided to dig some salsify. The tops are also still very green on the salsify but the roots are quite big and they still have about 6 weeks to go before they need to be harvested. The roots were also very straight which makes them more marketable. We think this may be attributable to the deep tillage we had done on that field this spring to loosen up the lower layers of the soil so the roots can more easily penetrate the deeper and more compacted layers of clay soil. The roots of salsify often go 12 inches deep so digging it is a challenge since we do not want to break off the roots. This week we will chisel plow most of our fields to get them ready for the winter cover crops. We will plant both winter wheat and winter rye. The fields with wheat will remain as wheat for harvest next year and some of the rye will be harvested next year because we use it as fuel for our pellet stove in the greenhouse. Our greenhouses will be reorganized to maximize the growing space in them. We will move all the potting mix equipment and supplies into the wash station where we will continue to make our own potting mix. Our potting mix recipe has been very successful over the years. We will continue with that recipe to provide our customers with plants that are very viable throughout the growing season.
George Kohn, West Star Farm
Most of the delicata squash has now been harvested into crates and stored in the lower level of the barn where temperatures are somewhat moderate. The remainder will be harvested on Monday. Then the drip tape will be removed from the field and the vines from the squash plants will be chopped so they can start to decompose in the field. It looks like the spaghetti squash is ready so it will be harvested next. The pumpkins are also ready so we are considering getting them out of the field and dipping them in an organically approved solution of hydrogen peroxide so they will hopefully store until later in September. Greenhouse #1 is nearly ready for the crates of butternut squash that will be harvested soon. Tables were removed from one side of the greenhouse and wood flooring was placed on the ground so we can move the crates of squash around with a pallet jack. It looks like the yield from the butternut will be similar to last year’s harvest, which amounted to several thousand pounds, so we will again offer good pricing on the butternut squash to our customers. Another of our fall crops is potatoes and it looks like they are sizing up. Last week we dug several hills of potatoes and they averaged about 10 to 15 tubers per hill. Many are at the size of a golf ball now and we expect that they will more than double in size over the next couple of weeks. Potatoes at this stage need a lot of water so we are hoping for rain this week. We also dug up some of the sweet potatoes and they were quite big already with a lot of tubers under each plant. The sweet potatoes need to be dug before a frost so we will be watching the temperature forecasts. A couple of salsify plants were dug to see how they are doing and it seems that the roots are already ¾ inch in diameter. Salsify still has a couple of months to go before it needs to come out of the ground so it should size up considerably more before then. Onions should be ready for sale this week and there is plenty of garlic still available. We have started the planning process for next year’s bedding plants. We will be ordering some supplies soon and sourcing seeds for next year. We were pleased to hear that we should be able to get seed for our most popular tomato varieties – the sun sugar and sun gold tomatoes. Some of our customers requested that we grow strawberry plants and we had a lot of requests last year for poblano peppers so we will grow those for next spring.
George Kohn, West Star Farm
Nearly all the crops are early and big this year due to the timely rain and warm weather. Even the popcorn is nearly 8 feet tall and forming ears and silks. The raspberries are nearly ready to produce a second crop for the season as the branches are now loaded with green buds. The potatoes are forming hooks underground. The hooks are formed on the root structure of the plant and each hook represents a potential potato. We started applying an organic fish fertilizer to the potato plants to help set the hooks on the plant so they do not abort. A few of the plants that we dug up last week had 15 to 16 hooks. The blue potatoes were planted this year without cutting the seed. As a result, the rows are heavily populated with potato plants and it looks like we could have a lot of blue potatoes available this fall if they all mature. With the organic fish fertilizer, we incorporated an organic product that will hopefully help the plants resist the late blight. Late blight has been confirmed in both potatoes and tomatoes in several counties in Wisconsin. The tomatoes are starting to ripen fairly fast now so we should see a good crop in the next few weeks. As always, the sun sugar cherry tomatoes are sweet and the plants have lots of tomatoes. It is hard to walk by the plants and not pick off a tomato to eat. The small greenhouse was planted earlier this year with tomatoes, okra and ghost peppers. A lot of okra has already been harvested from the plants and it looks like a lot more may be ripening soon. The ghost peppers are the world’s hottest pepper at 1 million scoville units. They are also known as the bhut jolokia pepper. The plants have lots of green, wrinkly looking peppers on them so we will leave them on the plants for a while to see if they turn color when they ripen. We began harvesting corn last week and expect to have more this week. There is a difference in ear size depending on the variety of corn. The trade off is that the variety with smaller ears seems to have a sweeter flavor than the larger ear variety but all the varieties harvested so far this year have a very nice sweet corn flavor. A lot of attention last week was directed toward cleaning up some small areas of weeds between rows and around the perimeter of the fields. Some weeds are forming seed heads so we do not want to see them go to seed. We will probably not see a lot of new weed growth any more this year but the seeds from the weeds would still be around next year to cause problems. The fields look very nice when they are free of weeds so it makes us all feel good about working at the farm.
George Kohn, West Star Farm
The butternut squash plants are now so big that it looks like we will not be able to get through the fields any more to fertilize them without stepping on the vines. We sprayed them last week with a mixture of organic fertilizer and an organic product that smells like cedar. The cedar smell is designed to repel the cucumber beetle which was starting to invade the field. The delicata squash field is full of blossoms and small fruit. The fields are all fairly clean of weeds and many of the plants are big enough now that they will shade any further growth of weeds. The salsify crop is about 6” tall and the rows are full with plants. We have about 3500 feet of salsify planted this year so we hope to have a good supply of salsify this fall. Some of the first planting of sweet corn is tasseling so we will be watching the corn now for ear formation. The raspberries are ripe and it looks like there are a lot of them so we will be picking them on Monday. The potato planting was finished last week. We received a lot of the all blue variety of potato seed earlier this year so we worked up an extra field to plant them. There will possibly be a lot of blue potatoes available in September when we harvest them. We didn’t need the entire extra field for the potatoes so the rest of the field was planted with a cover crop of buckwheat. Buckwheat is a fast growing grain that forms a good vegetative mass which shades weed growth. It will be chopped down before it goes to seed. When buckwheat flowers, the honey bees at the farm find the buckwheat blossoms and resulting buckwheat honey is quite good. Earlier this year a neighbor loaned their brush mower and tractor to us so we could cut down some winter rye that was about 5 foot tall. It was too big for us to use our chopper to chop it down so the brush mower worked very well for doing that. Last week we decided to purchase our own brush mower. It is hooked up to the 3 point hitch on the John Deere tractor and operated by the PTO on the tractor. We can now get into small areas and mow down weeds before they go to seed. Some thistles were starting to go to seed so before we got the mower we had started cutting them by hand with a scythe. Unfortunately, after we cut them, while the thistles were lying on the ground, the seed heads opened even more to the point where they were ready to blow around with a wind. So we flamed the seed heads first and then went into the field with the brush mower and mowed them down. Thistles usually grow in patches in fields so they are somewhat controllable if they are continually cut down. The brush mower will also permit us to mow around the edges of the fields which will help to keep the fields looking a lot nicer. Because many of the crops are earlier than normal this year, we will be watching the garlic this week for dying of the leaves. Each leaf on the plant represents a wrapper on the bulb so when a certain number of leaves die back, we will dig the garlic to preserve the maximum number of wrappers on the bulbs. More wrappers on the bulb enhance the storage of the bulbs. We dug some garlic last week and the bulbs are already big and the flavor is quite good.
George Kohn
West Star Farm