Tag Archives: turkeys

10/19/06 Vol. 3 #28

Wow, has it really been a month?  We have moved heaven and earth (literally) around here to get things mostly to bed for the winter.  We took the turkeys in for processing and it is always a long and exhausting day, up early catching them before daylight and then watching over things at the processing plant.  As a whole they looked really good, a bit lighter in weight than last years but the quality seems good.  They are now down at the freezer plant sleeping until Thanksgiving.  Our focus then turned to getting the soil and cover crops ready for the winter and next spring.  Miles of pepper trellis had to be deconstructed first and the landscape fabric that we use for mulch in the hot peppers had to come up.  Then the endless tractor driving.

I spend more time on the tractor during this time of year than all the rest of the year combined.  Days and days of going round and round.  First all the remaining crops have to be mowed down so they will more easily till into the soil.  Before the soil turning begins I have to spread what ever mineral amendments the soil tests (that I took last month) indicate we will need to grow next years crops.  Not too bad this fall, only a bit of lime and even less phosphorus (P) and potassium (K).   Then the heavy metal comes out in the shape of a heavy disk harrow that cuts the soil a few inches and throws some of it over the crop residue.  Then a pass with the spring tooth field cultivator which rips and lifts the soil about every foot and about a foot deep.  After this lifting another pass with the disk to really cut those crop residues into the top soil.  Now the heavy work is done, the soil is loose but the tractor driving is far from done.  Any crop that gets planted before late April next year goes onto a raised bed, this is primarily so the soil drains and warms up faster in the cool of spring.  Without a raised bed it is almost impossible to prepare the soil for planting when we need to in February, March and April.  So round and round I go again with a four disk hiller, throwing up the loose soil into rough ridges.  200 beds raised  (20,000 feet and two acres) and another three quarters of an acre in what I call flat fields,  thankfully we don’t have to plant and take care of that all at once!  As Betsy says “It would make it hard to get up in the morning to face it”.  Finally it is time to spread the cover crop seeds.  On the tractor once again to spin out the grain crops, rye and oats, depending what cash crop will follow it, 400 pounds total.  On foot now I follow the grains with the legumes, hairy vetch and crimson clover,  to fix the nitrogen to feed the cash crops, using a chest spreader to spin them over the rough ground.  The rains came beautifully the day after I finished and the cover crops look beautiful.

The last big project is to move one of the sets of “Big Tops”, the big four bay high tunnels that cover a quarter of an acre.  Need to get them out of the way so I can get that last bit of soil prepared for next spring.  We will reconstruct them in their new field sometime later this winter.  We did get all the parts down and moved out of the way, what remains is to unscrew the legs from the ground, today and tomorrow and it should all be done.  We have had a pretty good frost and the dahlias are blackened along with other scattered damage.  Betsy’s flowers for next year are going in, in small lots.  Larkspur, bachelors buttons, Gloriosa Daisy, the tulips are planted in their crates for the winter chill period.  The vegetables for Thanksgiving are really starting to grow, even the Brussels Sprouts that struggled in the late summer heat have come out of it and are putting on good new top growth.

My much anticipated hiking trip to Paria Canyon in southern Utah turned out radically different than we had expected to say the least.  Most of this walk is through very narrow slot canyons (some of the longest in the world).  It requires perfect weather because of the danger of flash flooding.  We new it had flooded two days before we headed in and that the forecast was for 50% chance of rain the next day but clear after that.  Eight of us started in down the muddy river bed only to be stopped after 4 miles by a rescue helicopter landing in front of us.  The forecast had changed and flash floods were a distinct possibility.  We were given no choice, we had to get out of the canyon.  At least several of us got a free helicopter ride over the incredible landscape.  That left us to come up with plan B for ten people.  We ended up in Zion National Park and had a great time in an equally incredible landscape, just not what we had planned so long for.  I guess I will just have to plan another trip!

So we are off Monday, to Italy, for the Slow Food Terra Madre conference.  We already have a full list of farmers’ markets we want to go see and people we want to talk to.  Our delegation will be blogging from Torino and Betsy and I are scheduled for Friday the 27th.  You can follow our groups experiences at the Slow Food Triangle website.  Also while we are gone you can eat some of our heritage turkeys and support our friends at the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy in Pittsboro by having dinner at Panzanella restaurant.  For the fourth year they are having a Heritage Turkey Dinner (with our turkeys again this year) and 10% of the proceeds go to ALBC.  Unfortunately we will miss it but you all can enjoy it for us.  Look for another newsletter from us just before Thanksgiving with news from Italy and updates on the pre-Thanksgiving market.  Until then remember the Carrboro Market is open until Christmas, so keep on shopping with the rest of the market vendors.

4/26/07 Vol. 4 #6

Farm tour weekend, wow, always enjoyable and always long days.  We had our usual modest sized crowds which makes it much easier for us to visit with everyone and answer their specific questions.  Some of the farms, especially those with animals, have told me that they had more than 1000 visitors!  There is no way we could deal with numbers like that and enjoy it as much as we do.  It was great to see everybody especially our customers from market, we also get quite a few people who are farming or are seriously looking into it and they ask really good questions about why we do things in certain ways.  One of the highlights was the three van loads of farmers and extension agents who drove all the way up form Louisiana for the tour!

With the hubbub of the farm tour behind us we now turn to the next big projects on the list.  Yesterday we covered the four bays of the Big Tops, over the flowers, moving quickly before the winds came up.  We can now begin the last cultivation and weeding in those crops before we have to start trellising them in the next few weeks.  There are only a few big “hurdles” we must clear each year so we can move on with certain crops and this is one of them.  They punctuate the season which is dominated by little steps each day on the way to the end of the year.  Sliding the tunnels, preparing for planting tomatoes, covering the Big Tops, preparing for planting peppers; those are the ones that always loom large in my mind, three down, one to go.  The big planting of tomatoes went in Monday and they are very happy with this warm weather.  “Only” seventeen varieties in this planting including some new large sauce types from Italy and a cherry from Italy which is one of the Slow Food Presidia, special crops or foods that have been designated as such to help save them.  Here is a link to more information about Slow Food’s efforts to save endangered foods.  Pea trellis went up yesterday, the sugar snap peas have grown out of the freeze damage of a few weeks ago and are wanting to climb.  More flowers and vegetables have been planted and now we settle in on the chores of cultivating, trellising and keeping them watered.

Well many of you have been asking about the turkeys and if we will be raising them this year.  We normally would have the little poults here by now but have been waiting to receive word about the status of the new processing plant.  I finally talked with them on Tuesday and while they are making good progress on building it they could not assure me that it would be ready for Thanksgiving.  So the decision has been made for us.  No turkeys this year.  After two years of the stress of not knowing if there would be a place to have them processed we feel it is best to wait until we know for sure there will be a facility.  This is one of the big differences with turkeys as the heritage types, like the Bourbon Reds that we raise, take a full six months to grow so we need to be assured of the outcome far in advance.  With chickens they only take a little over two months to raise and are easier to get the chicks for, so those farmers producing them can still wait and have several flocks this year when the plant is ready to go.  Sadly no excellent turkey for Thanksgiving or stories of Mr. Tasty as the season unfolds.

Picture of the Week
Just covered Big Tops and newly trellised Sugar Snap Peas

4/30/08 Vol. 5 #7

Success!  All the tomatoes are in the ground and only a day later than last year.  Thursday the guys got the last of the trellises built, most of the tomato varieties we grow are heirlooms which grow tall and need strong support.  In the wild (in Central America) tomatoes are actually perennials and will grow and grow, here where they get killed by frost we forget about that.  These old heirloom types are closer to their wild cousins than the new hybrid types that are bred to be shorter and easier to grow.  The standard tomato support system in the industry is called “stake and weave” where you drive a stake every other plant and then weave a string down both sides of the plants and around the posts and so on.  In the past we have done some stake and weave on short plants and I hate it!  For one it means driving 35 stakes per 100 foot row and it’s difficult to weave with tall stakes.  So we developed what I call the one sided tomato cage.  Research has shown that the best production is tomatoes grown in cages, round cylinders of wire mesh where the plants just grow up in the middle and out the sides.  The problem with cages is they take a lot of wire and room in the field.  So we run the wire, field fencing, down the middle of the row with plants on either side.  They grow up through it and we only have to tie up the branches that head out into the aisle.  It only takes nine posts to support it and it fast to put up and take down at the end of the season.  Trellising 101.

Trellis done we planted half the rows on Thursday and finished up Friday with the rest.  Only fifteen varieties in this main planting this year, kind of going back to basics.  Sometimes a person gets so carried away with trying new kinds that it doesn’t leave enough room for the ones we need to grow to make a living and the new ones don’t give us enough to really make a display at market.  There is a new red that several growers raved to me about at meetings this winter and we are growing Mortgage Lifter (a pink) again for the first time in years partly due to a Slow Food tomato taste challenge going on later this summer (I will let you know more details later).  We are still trying to settle in on one of those Italian paste/eating tomatoes we brought back that everyone has given high marks to.  After years of side by side testing we have settled in on just two yellow varieties Kellogg’s Breakfast and the high acid Azoychka and have let Nebraska Wedding go, just not good enough production.  The rest are the mainstays of our show- Big Beefs, German Johnsons, Viva Italias, Green Zebra and Aunt Ruby’s German Green and of course the champion Cherokee Purple taking up a full third of our production.

The other high point of the week was the arrival of the little turkey poults.  After a year hiatus raising turkeys we are once again back in the business.  You may remember all of the trials and difficulties we have participated in with poultry processing which is the reason we decided to take last year off.  The great news is we have a brand new processing plant in Siler City which just opened this month.  Abdul Chaudhry of Chaudhry’s Halal Meats has built a beautiful new poultry facility next door to his red meat plant and we are very excited to be working with him.  As usual the phone rings early, 7:30, and it’s the Post Office, “come get your turkeys” and you can hear them cheeping up a storm in the background.  Betsy zips off to Graham to collect them while I get their feeders, waterers and heat lamps ready.  Betsy returns with 66 energetic, Bourbon Red poults, maybe the best looking ones we have ever received.  Each on gets it’s beak dipped in the water then plopped down in the feed tray so they know where it is.  Now a week later they look great and it is nice to have them back on the farm.

Picture of the Week
What is this big animal in here bothering us?

5/14/08 Vol. 5 #9

I know it’s a bit of a late notice but if you didn’t already know we are hosting a Slow Food Triangle chapter potluck this Sunday afternoon here at the farm.  I have talked in the past about our involvement with Slow Food most notably our attendance at the world conference of farmers in Italy, Terra Madre.  They are also the group most visibly responsible for the resurrection/popularity of the heritage turkeys, like the Bourbon Reds that we raise.  Their emphasis is on food that is “good, clean and fair”.   Everyone is invited, you don’t have to be a member, just bring a dish that serves eight (preferably made with local ingredients), the beverage of your choice and something to sit on.  It looks to be a beautiful late spring day and the farm is at the peak of spring vegetable production.  For more information and to RSVP here is the link We hope to see you here.

The last of the big spring jobs begins today, pepper planting.  The heavy rains over the weekend has put us behind a few days but I managed to get the beds tilled last night, nothing like a raised bed on a slope to help things dry out fast!  I have already pushed the planting date back a week to better accommodate the flowering of the cover crop, partly to let them make more nitrogen to feed the peppers and it makes it easier to kill them so they don’t become a weed in the peppers later.  I also want to get the little transplants into the ground this week as they are at the perfect size and growing rapidly.  I believe in timing the transplants so that they are growing well and hit the ground running and continue growing fast.  If we hold them too long, say because it is too wet to plant, then they slow down their growth and can become stunted waiting in the small containers.  So I start to get nervous around this time of year if something holds us up, the peppers must go in!

Big day yesterday for the turkeys, their first foray outdoors.  You may remember two years ago when we first let them out and they went wild, flying all over the farm.  We had to chase them through the woods and all around.  I know that was probably caused by having to keep them in longer than I like because it was so wet and I didn’t want them out on wet ground at first.  So we were a bit apprehensive when we opened the door yesterday even though it was at the three week old stage I usually first expose them to the outdoors.  They were very timid, and just stood massed at the opening. blinking in the sun.  It took hours before a few were bold enough to make it down the ramp and another few hours before the scouts went another few feet into the field shelter.  Relieved that we didn’t have to chase turkeys we left them on their own to explore the new green world.

Picture of the Week
This has got to be a trick, why would he let us out?

5/28/08 Vol. 5 #11

The sprint is on now, the blueberries are beginning to ripen and the urgency to get other things done around the farm before we are all lost to berry picking is keen.  This is one of those transition weeks in the season when old crops begin to wane and the new ones are beginning to flex their “you need to come work in me” muscles.  Thankfully this is the last week and fifth week of wholesale lettuce deliveries to Weaver Street Market.  For seventeen seasons we have grown all the spring lettuce for Weaver Street and it dictates the pace of my spring work.  We plant nearly 9000 heads beginning in early February, covering, cultivating, irrigating until the late in April when I cut lettuce four mornings a week.  Monday and Thursdays are the large harvest days for the stores.  Early in the morning I call and get the orders from the produce departments so I can start cutting first thing when the lettuce is cool and with dew.  Most days it is twelve to sixteen cases, 24 heads to a case, some days it can be twenty or more.  It is the one thing on the farm that only I harvest, there is an eye one has to develop to know that the head is big enough for the stores.  I fall into a steady routine, Red Leaf is first as it is the most heat sensitive and usually I have to cut the most of it for the orders.  I move right to left down the beds after I cut a number of heads out to have a place to set the crate.  The lettuce is three plants across the bed and hopefully they are all the right size otherwise there can be substantial skipping around.  Cut the head off with the special lettuce knife at the base and then inspect the head for quality, peeling off a few of the old outer leaves, littering the ground around my feet with them.  The first layer in the case is three rows of three, layered in like singles; then layer of six heads followed by the final layer of nine.  I can barely get 24 full size heads in a case but do, carry it to the back of the truck, snap the lid on and pick up another empty crate.  Green Leaf follows next, then the Boston, Romaine is always last.  Romaine can take the heat better and is the easiest to cut and clean when I am getting tired.  When it is really large I tell myself it is like cutting down redwoods.  If the planting is really uniform I can cut ten cases an hour, fifteen seconds a head.  When I have to skip around it slows me down to six an hour.  With the days order cut I pull the truck down into the deep shade for a few hours before I take it into town.  Wednesday’s and Friday’s cuts for market are smaller only around eight cases but still the same.  After five straight weeks of wholesale lettuce I am ready to do something else every morning, it’s time for the season to change.

Big day yesterday the turkeys moved to the field.  The first time a batch of turkeys is exposed to something new they get crazy, this group seems especially jumpy so we have been careful in this big transition to the outdoors.  First we let them run in and out of the brooder to the field shelter just to get the hang of it.  Then we move the field shelter further away from the brooder and put food and water in there.  Finally we close the brooder and make them stay the night in the field shelter.  This group has not been high on the scale of early adopters, plenty of distress chirping and generally not getting it at first.  On field moving day we have to catch each one and carry it to the new field where we have moved their familiar feeders and waterers, lots of panic and chasing around.  Once they are all in the new field we move the field shelter (the new mothership) into the field and leave them alone for the rest of the day.  We were worried that come night fall we would be herding them around to get them into the shelter for the night, not being the highest achieving group.  Hallelujah, at dark they were all self loaded and we just had to close the door!  Transition complete.

Picture of the Week
Cozy at first light, waiting to be released for their first full day in the field

6/11/08 Vol. 5 #13

Hmmm, let’s see what’s the news?  HEAT!!!!  Talk about a rude start to the summer, bang, here I am.  The 100’s really pushed the blueberries and Friday we could only get two out of six rows picked there were so many and turning blue in front of our eyes.  So Monday we called in the troops and had eleven of us out there going hard.  We did manage to get through those four unpicked rows and the fruit quality was really good.  Thank goodness they are blueberries and not blackberries.  When it gets that hot blackberries actually get sunburned and get white sections on the berries where the color has cooked out of them, technically it is called “leaking” (I am not making this up).  So now we are caught up and Monday was the peak day of the season.  We can now easily manage the rest of the season (only another ten days or so) with four additional pickers.  Whew!  As is our standard practice we do not work out in the fields after noon and this week it has been hard to stay out there until noon.  Betsy and I have been out early letting the turkeys out, irrigating and picking other crops before the blueberry picking begins at 8:00.

Two interesting extra curricular activities this week.  The first was a Slow Food co-sponsored event at Meredith college with the Durham-Chapel Hill Dieticians group.  Two short films about local food were viewed and then a panel discussion followed.  It is always interesting being the farmer on a panel of other food related folks.  Great questions about our local food system but barely enough time to just begin to scratch the surface.  Yesterday I went to the State Legislature to speak to a group of legislators about organic agriculture in North Carolina.  This Organic Legislative breakfast was just that, it started at 7:30 a.m. in the cafeteria, in the basement of the Legislature building.  While they ate organic food brought in from North Carolina farms, myself and three other farmers told them about our experiences as organic producers.  This is the second year that Carolina Farm Stewardship Association and other sustainable ag non-profits have put on the breakfast.  The idea is not to really press them for anything in particular but to just make them aware of organics and sustainable farming and hopefully more comfortable with the idea.  As I went to get coffee I overheard several of them saying to each other “Who knew we had organic pigs here in North Carolina?”  Nothing like a pork product to get a politicians attention.

Picture of the Week
Turkeys and Hydrangeas

6/26/08 Vol. 5 #15

Newsletter a day late, this week has been like a fire drill since Monday.  One of those weeks where its nothing unusual or a major type event, just too many small “extra-curricular” items that tip the cart.  Monday had an extra trip to Burlington for supplies, I had to help our 84 year old neighbor fix his mower, we did deliveries and took the big truck to the mechanic and then topped it all off with a lovely evening at Watts Grocery in Durham for their wine dinner which featured our products.  Tuesday (after arriving home late the previous night) we hit the road at 7:00 a.m. for an all day meeting in Goldsboro, we are on the Board of Advisors for the Center for Environmental Farming Systems.  Back to the house about 5:30 in time to turn around to head into Carrboro for another board meeting for the Growers’ Choice poultry cooperative.  Wednesday up at the crack of dawn for the unusual chores and to prepare the brooder for the second round of turkeys that normally arrive at the Post Office early in the morning.  No call by 8:30 so I begin calling around to see where they are.  “Yes they were shipped on Monday”, she says at the hatchery.  Now we’re worried that they are sitting on some hot tarmac somewhere cooking (we hear these horror stories from other growers).  Second call to the Post Office, “no not here yet but there is one more plane that comes in at 10:30”.  Finally the call comes in at 11:30 they are here.  Betsy rushes up to Graham to collect them while I continue to work with the staff on the days projects.  By 1:00 the birds are here and installed in the brooder, all healthy and running around.  A quick bite of lunch and then we have to load and head off to market in the 95 degree heat.  By the time I get home and in the house at 8:00 last evening we are both fried.  Dinner and to bed by 9:00.

As my sister in law says, who is a nurse who works a crazy schedule of something like six twelve hour days straight, “I am headed into the tunnel”.  This is how she refers to going back to work after her days off.  We are headed into the tunnel now too, all of the growers at market are in the same place.  The early season excitement is past, the rush to get cool season crops in and out, the beautiful spring days, the planting and tending of the summer crops.  Now the heat is here and it is a careful balancing act to keep it all going while not burning the body out.  You can begin to see it in their faces now, that look of too many nights without enough sleep.  Now don’t misunderstand me, we still love this work and life, but all jobs have parts that take more effort or patience to get through to the next step.  How many days is it until the first frost?

Great news, we recently heard that we have been accepted as delegates, once again, to the Slow Food Terra Madre conference in Turin, Italy this October.  As you may remember, we have been extremely fortunate to have been able to attend the previous two Terra Madre’s in 2004 and 2006.  We have another strong group going from the Triangle area including eight of us from the Carrboro Farmers’ Market.  This world meeting of farmers, chefs and others in the food system has been an inspiration to us and we hope to be able to expose others to some of what we have been able to experience there.  Slow Food pays for all of the delegates expenses once they get to Italy but they have to get themselves there.  Look for various fund raisers this summer and fall, sponsored by Slow Food Triangle, to help send our local people.  The first of these is this coming Tuesday, July 1st, at the Lantern Restaurant.  A Greek wine dinner, featuring a Slow Food Presidia wine (Presidia are projects aimed at helping to preserve a food or food making tradition).  Andrea at Lantern says there are still seats available.  It will also feature some of our products on the menu.

Picture of the Week
Happy three day old Broad Breasted Bronzes

7/16/08 Vol. 5 #18

Well we seem to be in the tourist season now.  Last week the National Academy of Sciences, today a bus load of extension agents here in North Carolina for the National Association of County Agricultural Agents meeting.  Next week we have an all day turkey production workshop for 50, put on by our friends at the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy.  They were going to hold it down at the Center for Environmental Farming Systems in Goldsboro but all their turkeys got eaten by coyotes and they needed a new location that had heritage turkeys on pasture!  In two weeks we might be hosting a big press conference to announce two new endowed chairs in Sustainable Food Systems at NC A&T and NC State.  In three weeks we have 90 civil servants from India coming to see what farming techniques we use.  In four weeks we will be taking our summer break to rest up from all of this activity!  So we have been mowing and cleaning up the place.  Not that we don’t constantly do this kind of maintenance but usually not all at once.  All of the rain has made the mowing more critical as stuff is growing like wildfire.

The rest of our days are as usual, a steady pace of harvesting, planting and crop control.  I had predicted this week to be the peak week of tomato harvest but it appears as if last week actually was.  That week of 100 degree temperatures in early June is probably part of the reason.  When it’s that hot tomatoes don’t pollinate well.  That combined with not a lot of sun last week to help ripen the fruit and we seem to have a drop in production this week over last.  Still we have tomato plants to tie up, peppers and lisianthus to trellis, zinnias to be weeded and lots of flowers to be seeded for next years early crops (already?).  The last planting of zinnias and sunflowers went in the ground this week and the first of the fall lettuce too.  The little turkeys graduated yesterday, their first time out of doors.  It is always surprising how fast these broad breasted turkeys grow compared to the heritage birds and these guys are looking good.  In two weeks they will join the older birds out in the field.

Picture of the Week
Limelight Hydrangeas

7/23/08 Vol. 5 #19

A couple of really thick days, the last few, the kind that remind you what living in the south used to be like before air conditioning.  The “Raising Heritage Turkeys on Pasture” workshop went well despite the heat.  They were here all day on Monday in the heat but we managed to keep them in the shade for the most part.  Organized by the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, whose headquarters are in Pittsboro, is an organization founded in 1977 that is the pioneer organization in the U.S. working to conserve historic breeds and genetic diversity in livestock.  The ALBC is the group that really has brought the heritage turkey back from the brink of extinction by working with breeders to increase the stock and others like Slow Food to glamorize and popularize the eating of these birds.  As all people working to save endangered food species, whether it’s animals or plants, say “you have to eat it to save it”.

If there is no economic reason to grow a bird or a tomato then they just become museum items that eventually disappear after the last crazy old guy who kept them passes on.  This kind of loss happens everyday somewhere in the world.  The Cherokee Purple tomato that we all love is an example.  One gardener in Tennessee had it in his garden when a tomato collector/nut found it and asked for some seeds and then grew them.  It was so good that he passed the seeds onto several small seed companies who presented it to the world, that was about 1992.  If the Tennessee gardener had died without passing it on we would never have it today.  If you are interested in other endangered foods Slow Food USA has the Ark of Taste, with a list of the foods they are trying to promote and save

Animals are even harder to save for many reasons that one can imagine; size, numbers, room to keep them, etc.  While we grow the Bourbon Red turkeys and are part of the food system that is needed to save them, we are not doing the heavy lifting required to really save the breed.  The breeders are the ones who keep these animals year round, feeding and caring for them, selecting for the best hens and toms to keep for breeding, and hopefully hatching out enough eggs to make it all worthwhile.  This is not like keeping a small vial of seeds to replant next year.  This takes lots of room, facilities and skill.  To keep enough genetic diversity in a flock, a breeder needs to have 200 hens!  So you can see the difficulty, it’s not like raising dogs where you can work with two or three animals and keep a breed going.  At this workshop we were fortunate to have the god father of heritage turkeys and the master breeder, Frank Reese, here to lead the discussion.  Frank has devoted his life to saving these turkeys.  If you have ever had a mail order heritage turkey, it was probably one of Franks as he raises more than anyone else by many many times.  This year he and his partners are raising 17,000 birds!

It has been our search for the best quality foods that we can raise in an sustainable system that brings us to things like Cherokee Purple tomatoes and Bourbon Red turkeys.  The work done by many people and groups like ALBC, Slow Food, the North American Fruit Explorers, chefs we work with and your experiences that makes it easier for us to find and learn to grow these things.  Our job is to interpret the information we get (some times very old), to our farming conditions and system.  Sometimes it works, other times it doesn’t but that’s the nature of farming.

Picture of the Week
Turkeys headed out for the days work, eating cover crop and playing in the Zinnias

8/20/08 Vol. 5 #22

Wow, I almost forgot to write the newsletter this morning!  I woke up thinking about the turkeys and then just forgot that it was Wednesday.  We had one of those turkey events yesterday that makes one question why we raise them.  Most of the time the birds are well behaved and get along fine, but as they get older they become teenagers and lose all common sense occasionally.  Just like teenage boys the toms get full of themselves and can start picking on each other.  The problem with turkeys is once they draw blood they just keep at it until their victim is dead or disappears.  Such was the case as I went out yesterday evening to feed and water them.  I found two birds cowering under the roosts with the backs of their heads all bloodied, one seriously.  I separated them out to the hospital pen to heal and the others don’t even know that they are gone.  It is one of the things about raising any livestock; injuries, sickness and death occur more often than one likes.  It is something that you have to get used to, ready for and become somewhat hardened about.  It is just not the same kind of emotion as when a hail storm comes or a disease kills your tomatoes.  Fortunately these two should recover completely and will be reintegrated with the flock with no further troubles.  From now on though we have to keep a closer eye on them as you never know when they will get crazy.

We had a good evening on Monday at the Panzanella farm dinner.  Great turn out and the dishes they made with our produce were very nice.  It is hard to beat a good tomato and mozzarella salad or pasta with a fresh tomato sauce, just two of the dishes they offered up.  For us one of the best parts is seeing everyone who came out to eat food with our produce and to spend time with our own assembled group.  We always end up with a large table surrounded with our current staff, some former staff and other friends.  We carried on, told stories and hopefully weren’t too loud.  The next farm dinner features Chapel Hill Creamery and their great cheeses.

Picture of the Week
Dan and Cov cleaning up the lisianthus for the last time