The Pits

I undoubtedly inherited a love for stone fruits. My mother is the ultimate peach fan; at the beginning of every summer, she keeps an eye out for the first peaches to hit the local grocery store shelves. She notes whether they are coming from Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Colorado, or California. When she discovers peaches coming from a new provenance, she buys a couple to take home and sample. If they turn out to be particularly good - that is if they are juicy, smooth-textured, sweet, and robustly flavored, she makes it a point to go back and get a ton more.

I remember being inordinately excited, while attending college in Iowa, to discover that peaches grew there. A mere four-and-a-half hours south of my hometown of Saint Paul, Minnesota, in whose Northern climate stone fruit aren't much more than an agricultural pipe dream. No matter that the Iowan varieties were only about the size of golf balls.

With this background in mind, you'll hopefully understand how happy I was to work at the Farmstand last weekend, purveying not only excellently ripe peaches, but also nectarines, cherries, plums, apricots, and pluots. Pluots, a delectable cross between a plum and an apricot, were the real champions this past weekend. Practically everyone who tried them off of our sample platter was bowled over by their sweetness and deeply floral flavor. What's more, these ruby and emerald-colored fruits came to us from neighboring Solano county. For a stone-fruit lover, I live in paradise.

Broad-Breasted Bronze!

Try saying that ten times fast! In addition to a tongue-twister, broad-breasted bronze is the variety of turkey we are raising. We recently added sixteen precocious young poults to our menagerie in the barn. I call them precocious because, despite being only about ten inches tall, they seem to rapidly be turning into teenage turkeys. The males are feigning adolescence by displaying miniscule fans of tail feathers to the mostly uninterested females. These creatures are also beginning to expand their avian vocabularies from infantile cheeps and whistles to more adult gobbles. All in all, they are much less timid than their next-door neighbors, the Rhode Island red chicks.

Broad-breasted bronzes are somewhat of a classic turkey. According to the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, their ancestors were domestic turkeys from Europe and wild turkeys of North America that mated after being brought together by colonists. Over the years, breeders selected for the current variety's meat production prowess. Since the 1960s, however, commercial producers have largely given up the broad-breasted bronze for broad-breasted white turkeys.

Soon enough, we'll be moving our quickly growing birds to new digs outdoors. It's not hard to believe that they'll be full-size by Thanksgiving.

Baby Tomatoes, Baby Chicks, and Baby Apples

Wow, it's been quite some time since I last updated! Thanks for sticking with us through these busy few weeks. There have been a number of projects in the works.

In case you were waiting with bated breath, I'm happy to report that the weather did clear up and we got the entire half-acre upper field planted. By my rough estimate, there are now close to 2000 tomato, pepper, eggplant, and basil starts in that field. Wowza! Our current project is driving metal stakes into the tomato beds, along which we will hang twine to support the plants as they grow and bear heavy fruit. We will also put in drip tubes for irrigation.

These here cuties arrived a couple of weeks ago. We are now the proud caretakers of 100 Rhode Island Red chicks. I took these photos when they were just a few days old; in the meantime they have about doubled in size. When we introduced the day-olds into the pen that Omar built for them, we had to take on the role of mother hens, gently dipping their beaks into water to show them how to drink.

Our other recent farm hijinks have included thinning young apples (from approximately five in a cluster, down to two), watering plants (it's actually getting pretty hot and dry around here), and flame-weeding (trust me, it looks pretty hard-core).

At the farmstand, we're starting to get some reaaally nice summer stone fruit (think juicy cherries, peaches, apricots) as well as berries from farms in neighboring Solano and Sonoma counties. If you're in the area, stop by next weekend for a treat!

Stay tuned for...baby turkeys?!