Greetings from Harrisdale Farmstead
Our best wishes to you as we all adjust our lives in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. We hope that you stay healthy and safe.
Produce available
• Spinach - Large bag (½ lb.) for $6.00 and small bag (1/4 lb.) for $3.00. We have a limited amount, so will fill any orders first come first served.
Ordering info: To order please contact us by e-mail (HarrisdaleFarmstead@gmail.com) or call us (712-243-3310) to inquire about availability and delivery options. We’ll work with you to get produce to you safely.
Farm activities
It has been a longer time than we would have liked since our last newsletter in late January. We’ve been running behind on many fronts and many of our winter projects remain on our to-do lists. One reason is that Gil came down with a virus infection in early February. After two and a half weeks of constant coughing he was diagnosed with pneumonia. He has continued to cough off and on, which is not good given our COVID-19 situation. Fortunately, through careful hygiene practices, Ardy was able to avoid getting sick from what Gil had. However, she was left with picking up some of Gil’s workload. We are now doing our best to avoid COVID-19.
Ardy has been harvesting the first spinach of the season and we are offering it for sale. We find overwintered spinach to be very tasty and to have a more robust flavor than that grown in warm weather. In below-freezing temperatures spinach plants produce sugars that enable their leaves to withstand the cold without damage, so the leaves have a delectable sweetness. With the unseasonally warm days that we’ve had, we have to be careful to open up the plastic tunnel covers on sunny days. Fortunately spinach is fairly heat tolerant for short periods, because one day we found the thermometer registering 110F when we went to open up. We’ll have other greens available in the next couple of weeks. Depending on the weather, we are expecting our asparagus harvest to begin as early as mid-April.
Since late February Ardy has been planting seeds in the Rolling Acres Farm greenhouse. She has started the first two succession plantings of broccoli (a mini variety), cabbage, cauliflower, snapdragons, and some herbs. Last week she planted eggplant of a variety represented to be more cold resistant than most. She soon will be starting tomatoes and sweet peppers.
We have been planning for the coming growing season. We are looking forward to offering spring crops. Then, for this summer we want to shift our emphasis toward pre-orders to pick up at the Produce in the Park Market or at another designated time and place for those who want an alternative to Thursday afternoons. We have also been evaluating the labor that we have been investing in planting, weeding, watering and managing, harvesting, and preparing for market so that we have an idea of what is a fair price from a grower’s perspective. We also check prices at Hy-Vee. This week one brand of organic baby leaf spinach was on sale for just under $9/lb. and another brand of essentially the same spinach was selling for $16/lb. Although we grow our spinach without synthetic fertilizers and without synthetic pesticides, it is not certified organic. Our spinach has larger leaves, but we think they have better flavor and texture than the dry baby leaves on the Hy-Vee shelves. Considering everything, we’ve priced ours at $12.00/lb.
In the last week we’ve had the first three of our second set of ewes give birth. All three bore triplets, but, unfortunately, the births were in the night and one lamb from each was dead when Gil got out in the early morning. We are glad that the remaining two lambs from each ewe, though starting out very small, are thriving. Gil is looking forward to having lambing finished in the next 10 days or so. Our December-January lambs seem to be healthy and growing rapidly. In early March, Gil found a source of baled hay south of Villisca, so getting a new supply has reduced his stress about rationing hay and worrying about what he would feed the sheep until the grass was ready for them.
Harrison (Hairy Harry) has really been growing. When Gil measured him recently he stood 26" high at the shoulders. He is clearly still a puppy in that he chews on nearly anything he can get his mouth around. The area around our back door is littered with well-chewed cardboard pieces, shredded row cover scraps, sticks, bones, chew toys, and increasingly smaller pieces of a length of broken soaker hose that once lay near the hydrant. He manifests boundless energy by prancing, leaping, and spinning round and round with chew toys and weed stems. At the same time, coprophagy seems to be of declining attraction and he is starting to act like a guard dog, barking at noises and prowling the farmstead. He hangs out with the sheep part of the time, gaining access to them by crawling through spaces under our barn lot gates. His presence among the sheep now causes no disruption as they have come to accept him.
The two kittens that we wrote about previously are also growing. Gil has named them Cat 1 and Cat 2--names that he thought were appropriate for working barn cats. Only later did he realize the resonance of those names to similarly named creatures in Dr. Suess’s Cat in the Hat book. The kittens are now prowling the farmstead and seem to have solved the problem with mice eating holes in feed bags. Although the cats still won’t let us pet them, they and Harry have become best buddies. They constantly follow each other around. The cats tolerate Harry pushing them around with his big nose. They rub themselves against Harry’s legs and Cat 1 often stands on its back legs to rub itself against Harry’s chest. One corner of Harry’s kennel has a gap between the ground and the chain-link fence that allow the cats to go in and out. Many mornings we find one of the cats with Harry in his doghouse.