2008 Annual Newsletter: Email me if you need an order form!

Windy Willow Farm
windywillowfarm@verizon.net, http://windywillowfarm.blogspot.com/

Dear friends,

We hope that 2008 finds you well and enjoying the beginning of a fantastic year. We are savoring the quiet winter on the farm, watching the snow fall, melt, and fall again and keeping tabs on the kids. We made many major changes to our farm this past year, which has added to our overall quality of life. Please see below for our new offerings.

Our Philosophy
Our family farm’s core belief is to practice and promote sustainable and organic agriculture. Although we are not certified organic, we follow the organic guidelines. We believe that both the land and our animals should be treated with respect and gentle care. We minimize off-farm inputs and maximize use of compost and natural pest control. We keep our animals healthy and happy by rotating them to fresh, lush and nutritious pastures and feeding them certified-organic grains. They don’t need medications, hormones or antibiotics. The end result is a garden full of delicious produce, picked at the ripest, most nutritive moment; and healthy, robust animals. Healthy animals make the best meat: don’t forget that grassfed meats have been found to be lower in cholesterol and higher in amino acids and essential fatty acids.

We invite you to spend an hour or a day with us on the farm, to experience the best our land has to offer.

New Stuff at WWF
One of the more exciting changes we made this year was to establish our farm blog. If you haven’t discovered this, it’s Gwen’s area to wax poetic on her usual (and unusual!) topics. Our customers have found this to be an excellent way of keeping in touch with Windy Willow Farm during the off-season, and it’s where we’ll be posting our weekly CSA newsletter. We also have cool links and recommended reading, if you’re so inclined. Please check it out often: http://windywillowfarm.blogspot.com/. We also welcome your comments and feedback on what we write.

We also took the plunge and installed two solar systems to add to the passive solar design of the house. Our new systems heat our hot water with the sun, and generate electricity. We love standing at the garage, watching the meter spin backwards! We’re thrilled to reduce our carbon footprint to help us to live lightly on this earth. If you’re interested in solar, come on by and talk to us!

Friday Farm Stand with email alerts
2007 was a big year of change for us at WWF. We decided to have only one day of CSA pickup and not to participate in any farmers markets. This was a tough decision, since we had been at the Gloversville Farmers Market for five years! We decided that we needed to focus on growing our children and keeping our farm business a manageable size. We know that many of our customers missed us at the markets and we missed you too! That’s why we’re proposing a Weekly Farm Stand on Friday afternoons. If you’re interested, let me know and I’ll send you an email on Thursday or Friday morning, letting you know what vegetables and fruits we’ll be stocking at our farm stand.

WWF Grassfed Poultry
This was the first year we raised turkeys and broiler chickens, mostly for our own use. It was a resounding success, and I’m thrilled to bits every time I bring one of our chickens out of the freezer. And the Thanksgiving turkey was outrageously delicious- very lean, but juicy. The birds were raised in the regular WWF way: with Certified-Organic grains, fresh water, lush green pastures, and lots of TLC. We raised the chickens to be big: when we roast a chicken, we want some meat for leftovers! Our goal was a 5-6 pound chicken (bigger than other farms), making them rather expensive to sell commercially. But the meat is delicious and amazingly tender. We are offering a limited number of chickens and turkeys, so order now if you’re interested.

CSA
Our CSA is based on a pre-payment program: participants pay for their “share of the harvest” in early spring. Then, every Wednesday for twenty weeks, from May 21 through October 1, 2008, our CSA group comes to the farm to pick up their share of what is ripest, freshest, and picked at the peak of nutrition. Our customers receive a wonderful variety of produce and a strong connection with our family farm. The amounts and varieties of produce in the share vary with the season; there are always some crops that grow wonderfully and others that don’t do as well. We are experienced enough growers that we will always have something to offer our customers. We also include an informative newsletter that highlights information on the veggies, discussions on life at WWF and several recipes for items included in the share. This year’s newsletter will be posted each week to our farm’s blog with a reminder email to the members when posted. Wednesday pickups are from 4-6 pm, any shares not picked up in this timeframe will be considered forfeit. Since we run our business from our home, we strictly adhere to these rules. We do try to accommodate the occasional emergency (we ask that you give us as much notice as possible), but we do expect that you agree to these times. We also ask that you let us know if you’ll be away for a pickup day, so we can adjust our harvest accordingly. We encourage you to recruit family members or friends to pickup in your place, should you be away. This is a great way to introduce new members to our farm and CSA system.

Dependent on the weather, the amount of produce in each week’s share changes. Last year, the weekly share ranged from 4 (the first weeks of the season) to 14 different items. Each share is designed to supply enough produce for a family of 4, or 2 vegetarians. Occasionally there is enough supplied to put up for the winter, and often we offer extras for additional purchase. We grow a huge variety of vegetables (asparagus, summer and winter squash, peppers, tomatoes, onions, garlic, etc.), fruits (strawberries, raspberries) and herbs (basil, oregano, rosemary, sage, dill, chives, etc.), over 75 varieties of produce grown throughout the season.

Our CSA is unique from other CSA farms in that it includes some fruit in the share (strawberries and raspberries). Many CSAs offer a fruit share separate from their vegetable shares. We find our customers love our fruit, and always want more: to meet this need, we offer additional fruit outside of the CSA share, either U-pick or ordered in advance.

This year we’ve several new varieties to our produce offerings, including: orange “golfball” sized tomatoes, broccoli raab, Chinese cabbage (after a year’s hiatus), round zucchini, purple kohlrabi, mini cabbages and more red buttercrunch lettuce. We can’t wait to start sharing these with you!

This past year we added a “Love it/Hate it” bin where shareholders can drop items they just don’t care for or pick up additional produce that they really love. It received rave reviews in our surveys. We will definitely continue this practice this year.

Grassfed Meats
Lamb
Due to the high labor costs of pasture-raising lamb (moving fences multiple times per week), we will not be offering lamb for sale this year.

Pork
We raise our pigs with the utmost of care and respect on our lush pastures. We purchase them as weanlings, and raise them on our rotated pastures until September. When the pigs are full-sized, we send them to our favorite butcher, who treats them with kindness and respect. They are cut, smoked and vacuum sealed to your specifications. Our customers rave about out pork; the meat is tender, juicy and flavorful. We also share with you cooking tips, since grassfed pork cooks differently from supermarket meat. We have also found a wonderful grassfed meats cookbook: “Grassfed Gourmet” by Shannon Hayes. It has wonderfully inspiring recipes that highlight our meats beautifully.

We continue to be challenged to keep farming affordable, as the price of our organic feed has doubled in as many years! We hate to raise the price of our pork, but due to our costs, this year’s pork price will be $5.00 per pound, hanging weight. This includes custom cutting and smoking of hams and bacon. If you are interested in additional meat smoked (such as hocks or roasts), or linked sausage, there are additional fees.

For all meat purchases, pickup will be on the farm. We will give you at least 2-3 weeks’ notice of the pickup time and date. Please bring several coolers or boxes to bring home your frozen meat. Your balance is due at this time as well.

Many Hands…
We always try and include our customers in our farm workdays; it allows folks to have a closer connection with the earth and offers us much-appreciated help. We find that our work parties foster comraderie and ownership of our crops. Who wouldn’t like eating broccoli from plants you placed into the ground as babies? It’s also a great teaching tool for kids to begin to understand just where their food comes from. We’d love to have you join us: please send me an email of your interest.

We are also looking for a part-time employee for the growing season. If you know a friendly, mature and hardworking person that would enjoy working with us, please let us know.

We look forward to a wonderful and healthful growing season. We look forward to seeing you at our CSA pickups, Friday farm stand and meat pickup days! Call on us if you have any questions or need additional information. We are always happy to chat about our passion for farming.

Sincerely,



Gwen, Mark, Sarah and Jason Hyde


Karen’s Annual Essay
We are so fortunate to continue to share our summers with Karen Burke. She volunteers her time here every Friday during the growing season, in return for all the veggies and fruit she can eat. Here are her thoughts from the 2007 season:

I have just finished my third summer at Windy Willow Farm. As usual, I am enthusiastic about my experience there. This year’s theme is “The Magic”.

I think I have spoken before about the mind easing qualities of farm work. There were some Fridays that started with the woes of the week still weighing heavily on my mind – it was hard to wake up and even harder to get going but I knew, I always knew, that the magic was waiting. As I drove the 25 minutes towards the farm, my spirits would begin to lift. When I got to the fields and started putting baby plants into the ground or pulling the weeds that threatened the babies, my mind would clear and a peace would come over me. That is not to say the problems of life were not still waiting when I got home but for those hours, as close to the soil as one can be, the spirit of Mother Nature entwined with my own and it was truly MAGIC!!

Four days of the week I spend at my “real job”. That’s the one that pays the bills. I am not sure that I consider it my “real” job – in fact, if I am ever drawn into a conversation and the dreaded question, “What do you do?” comes up, I almost always mention my farm job first - I have a lot more to say about planting, weeding, weather, camaraderie, values, priorities, friendships and well-being, all resulting from my volunteer work on the farm. When I talk of my “real” job, I cannot keep from mentioning the dullness, wastefulness and general malaise that results from that daily regimen. Thankfully, the farm allows me to have a really real job! And to have some real magic in my life.

Sarah and I experienced some magic together. She is as delighted by critters as I am. We held wooly bear caterpillars and toads. Gently, in awe, they were handled and released. And then one day, up in the far fields, we all discovered that Garlic scapes can TALK. Think of it, talking garlic scapes! Imagine yourself having a conversation with a garlic scape. If you had been there, you would have heard them, as clearly as Sarah and her Mom and I did that sunny afternoon.

I have been trying to write the conclusion to this essay for weeks now. The darkness of December caught up with me before I finished. I went into hibernation mode, as I usually do. One day I woke up and it was January. So, please accept my apologies for the lateness of this little composition.

With the lengthening of the daylight hours, my mind starts to look forward to all the possibilities that await us in this New Year. I can’t wait for spring! Hope to see you at the farm! I miss my farmers!

Winter Riding

One of the joys of winter is riding my horse in the snow. We avoid much of the regular season preparation, like grooming, pre-ride lounging (to get the bucks out) and schooling/ring work. I just collect him from his pasture, pick his hooves, run a quick hand over his thick coat, saddle up and mount up. He doesn't do too many crazy/I-haven't-been-ridden-in-weeks actions, except a little passage (french for a slow, collected trot) because of the deep snow.

Within a few minutes, we are deep in the woods, accompanied only by the quiet crunching of the snow underhoof and the occasional bird's call. We travel on paths that many have passed before: with the aid of the snow, we can see where the forest "highways" are. Some paths are traveled heavily, some none at all. Of the footprints we see, some are from small animals, with prints close together, some travel dragging their tail, and some are from larger species, with several feet between prints (a running deer, maybe?). There are no human prints to be found.

My horse bravely trudges on, occasionally stopping to cock an ear this way or to peer intently into the trees (he's looking for horse-eating monsters). His trust in me is complete: he knows I would not allow him to travel in areas where he's likely to get hurt or encounter afore-mentioned horse-eating monsters. It's not until I decide that it's too dangerous to attempt to cross a frozen stream that we turn around to retrace our steps. To my horse's delight, he encounters his own hoofprints. He travels with his nose in the snow, to better smell his equine partner. And then, jackpot! A manure pile to sniff. This evidence of fellow equine emboldens him to pick up his pace and move energetically through the forest, thinking, "that brave horse traveled here, so I'll be fine." I don't think it matters that the prints and manure smell just like him; he clearly feels supported by his find.

We pick up our pace along a straightaway with good footing. With a gentle squeeze of my legs, I encourage him forward into a lovely trot, and then a rocking horse canter. The cool wind rushes by my face and the snow flies from his hooves. Life does not get better than this.

At the end of our ride, I blanket him with a fleece cooler for the long job of drying out his thick coat. We walk and walk, seemingly for hours, until his coat stops steaming. Back into his snowy pasture he goes, guaranteed to roll within 10 seconds of liberty. Sure enough, with snow covering his face and ears, he faces me on his side of the fence, "Well, mom? What's next? I'm ready!" I throw him another flake of hay and give him a good rub on his ears in thanks. I head inside to warm my toes full of happy, warm feelings for my big-hearted steed.