Ashfield Farmers Market

Well, winter is here but the hay is good.

The barn keeps us sheltered from the wind and rain, but we love snow as long as there is plentiful good hay and water. Ice is a problem. We are not graceful on ice in spite of having four legs and a rather suspicious approach.

When the sun shines we like to lay down in the barn and chew our cuds. Our miraculous stomachs can in this way digest the cellulose. Our farmers Janet and Nort put in fresh bedding every week. Mixed with our manure, this will make a rich contribution to spread for growing more good hay.Read more

Well, the day must come. This week will likely be the final midweek pickup of 2009. I'll admit that there is a certain adrenaline rush to plunging your arms up to the elbows in a produce wash tank of cold water in 20 degree weather, but there's probably an adrenaline rush in stepping in front of a charging bull too, and you don't want to do that so often either. So this will be it, unless we get a sudden burst of sunny and 75 with a light breeze for next week.Read more

And now that you spent the entire weekend lolling about on the couch in a trytophan-induced haze, watching football games you weren't actually interested in, and thinking that one more slice of pumpkin pie would actually make you feel less full, I feel that you would be receptive to a public service announcement about... bok choy. Yes, bok choy - secret restorative vegetable of the ancients, calorie-burning wonder vegetable green equalling a jog around Ashfield Lake, and an integral part of celebrity beauty routines world-wide!Read more

Hello all!Read more

We do about 4 or 5 official farm tours every summer, and the number one most frequently asked question is "Do the cows have different personalities?" Now understand, in that they are not persons, we prefer to think of them as bovinalities, but regardless of the official terminology, they are in fact quite different from one another. Let's use the relationship with grain as an illustration...Read more

Hello all!

Last year, we did all of our breeding with bulls. We had two little yearling Normande bulls named Rodney and Roderick, who while somewhat timid around people, were ideal employees in that they were enthusiastic and focussed on their assigned task, but had no interest in leading revolutionary coups. Once the fall came, and Roderick started looking at us sideways when we got too near his girls, they both went in the freezer, and everyone declared them to be delicious.Read more

Hello all!

As if the rain weren't enough to make a mess out of a perfectly good lettuce planting, we now have six - yes six - firmly entrenched and expensively fed deer. Three does, three fawns, all very cute, all fat and shiny from a healthy diet of Sidehill farm greens. They have eaten lettuce. They have eaten radicchio. They have eaten escarole and swiss chard. And, as the ultimate insult, they have eaten all of our czech black peppers. The entire plants. All the way to the ground.Read more