I have been trying to write the post with delicious meat recipes for three weeks now! Not sure where time goes! We have had fun getting the spring push done! We planted 200 pounds of potatoes with the help of a GMU volunteer group! On our own we planted hundreds of raspberry and black berry plants, 1,000 strawberry plants and 6,000 onions! Oh my! This was in addition to several hundred veggie starts that go in every week. We are so thankful the rush is behind us!As we bring the winter CSA to a close we are excited to begin again for the summer season (after a week off and a quick trip to Williamsburg!). Thank you all for your support! I wanted to share some of our favorite recipes. We love to eat what we grow, it keeps us going to be able to have enough energy to do all this! I try to make sure by 9 am I know what is for lunch and dinner and have all the ingredients ready. When that falls apart I grab for the instant pot and it all works out anyway!Instant pot spanish rice goes great with some ground beef, sour cream, greens and there you go! Perfect for a quick and easy lunch or dinner.Our bacon rub deserves mentioning because we use it on so much! Our bacon is unseasoned to avoid chemicals and ingredients we can't pronounce! So we sprinkle 1 TBS of rub onto our bacon and place it on a rack with a cookie sheet (with sides) under it. We bake at 400 for 16 minutes.....PERFECT BACON is what we get! The rub is also perfect for seasoning our hams which can be made in the instant pot with little work. My simple version is to place a ham (sprinkled with 1 TBS per pound of meat) into the pot with 1 cup kombucha and cook for 1 hour at high pressure. This recipe sounds fun if you want some more details. I also think it's perfect on chicken!With just a little prep ahead of time we love to enjoy some short ribs after a long day working! Each time we enter the house during the day we smell the deliciousness that will be on the table later! Put on top of some instant pot mashed potatoes and a side salad of rubbed kale and you have some happy farmers! We just take our homemade dressings and massage in into the kale, but for some fancy recipes try this!Lastly my favorite last minute dinner is to throw packages of stew meat (even frozen stew cubes will work) into the pot with some broth (about a cup) for 30 minutes on high pressure. Then I use the quick release and add 2 cups rice and 4 cups liquid (either water or half water and half tomato sauce) and any seasonings you like. Then I do 20 more minutes at high and serve with a salad. It's really so easy to eat simple, wholesome meals and we love it!We enjoy sharing our 'fruits' with you, our 'farm-ily"! Blessings,The Bakers
Happy Spring!
We are so excited with all the baby plants around here! We are about to plant some basil out in the green house and I wish I could do a scratch and sniff Instagram post! Along with the baby tomatoes popping up, I am ready for summer and BLT's! But without getting ahead of myself, I will tell you what else has been keeping us busy! We are all settled in with the new cow (Timmy named her Ducklegs)! She has decided she likes us afterall....whew, training new cows is always hard, but this one was particularly challenging. All is well now also with her calf "peekaboo" who would love a pat from you when you come to the farm store.The farmer girls have been hatching eggs in the incubator and having lots of fun with baby chicks, ducks and they even have some goose eggs that are fertile. It took three years for our geese to decide to like each other enough to have fertile eggs! Very exciting. Gracie is in charge of the hatching and doing a great job with it! But we all like to help her.We have some new soap flavors coming to the cabin soon, so stay tuned! We are about to make a goat milk soap that we only offer seasonally when we have goat milk! Our "man" soap is back in stock finally, pick up a bar of 'Real Blokes Soap' next time for a special man in your life. It has a great woodsy smell.Here are some great recipe ideas for this weeks share:Young chardBeets Mashed beets anyone?Cabbage and purple radish slaw What a different slaw, so good!SpinachSweet Potatoes Fries! But I always use lard or coconut oil instead of a vegetable oil!Enjoy and have a great Easter!Blessings,The Bakers
Week 20 Winter CSA, Babies everywhere!
Well the brooder is full of 400 baby chicks, the baby goat kids are on display near the farm store (stop by and give them a pat) and the greenhouse is filling with seedlings! Winter may be blowing outside still, but the days are getting longer and everything is growing! We love seeing the customers come up to the fence to visit the puppies in the front yard. The Bernese Mountain Dogs are growing so much! Gus and Dolly are always up for a pat.Last week we enjoyed spinach, mustard greens, onions, carrots, cabbage and potatoes in the shares. This week you will find spinach, beets, lettuce, broccoli, shallots or garlic and sweet potatoes. We have been enjoying steamed broccoli, with sausage and roasted beets and sweet potatoes. The white sweet potatoes are by far the sweetest this year. We are peeling them this time of year (as the peels are tougher than before), cubing and tossing in lard and roasting for an hour at 400. Makes the perfect side dish!We love shredding up potatoes for homemade hash browns. This recipe takes the mystery out of how to get them to not stick! The sweet potatoes work as well and add a nice depth to the flavor. It so fun to have salad in the winter, though we are dreaming of cucumbers and tomatoes on top, we are enjoying shredded beets, radishes and carrots instead. It's fun to do a nice oil and vinegar dressing on top. We use a simple recipe to start all our dressings. It's 2 parts olive oil, 1 part honey or maple syrup and 1 part vinegar. Raw cider vinegar is our go to, but balsamic makes a nice change.Keep your eyes out for the green eggs coming in now. The brown egg layers preform all winter (thankfully), but the green egg layers take a break and start again in spring. Have a great week and we'll see you around!Blessings,The Bakers
Week 18 CSA
It's week 18 already! Only 7 more weeks in the winter CSA, a week off and then begins the summer season on May 1st. Send your email to sign up if you haven't already! Some yummy veggies headed your way this week!Kale(This soup sounds great, but I would make your own broth first!)Sweet and Spicey salad mixWatermelon RadishesCeleriac (Try this awesome soup) or just peel, dice and add to stir fry.GarlicSweet Potatoes (White)We made up a soup this week, that was so good! We made some broth from a turkey carcass(about 24 hours on the stove top with sea salt and a splash of vinegar and a few quarts of water) and strained it and added some peeled, cubed white potatoes (from last weeks share). There was about enough broth to cover the potatoes (we all know the 'farm-her' doesn't measure). We simmered it until the potatoes were fork tender (can be done on stove top or instant pot). I had some left over roasted garlic that I added, about 2 heads. Then I used the stick blender and blended until almost all the lumps were gone. I stirred in some sour cream and topped it with some homemade cheese and left over bacon. You would have thought I had served steak and shrimp! We had some very thankful farmers that night! (And it was so easy!)Ground beef uses?The healthy sloppy joe has been added to our menu! We serve it over homemade mashed potatoes for a filling, but gluten free meal. With salad or slaw on the side. I skip the brown sugar and add more mustard since we make our own and it's sweetened with honey.It's very windy out there with 40 mile an hour gusts, but we are thankful that everyone and everything is safe and sound so far. We have been moving generators all day keeping the fridges and freezers cold, the incubator and plant germination chambers and greenhouse warm and a few lights on in the house for the little farmers! We ran out of gas during milking and Farmer Boy and his two farmer girl helpers found themselves in the pitch black! Thankfully someone had a flash light and found more gas quickly. It's never dull here!We had two baby goats born this week, they got to meet CSA members on Thursday and hope to be around Saturday too. They are very cute and we hope you get to meet them soon. Watch facebook or instagram for pictures soon. We also hope everyone is safe and at home eating yummy food!Blessings,The BakersFarming with our family for your family
Middleburg Life Article
Below is an article from 'Middleburg Life' written about Day Spring Farm.
Sean and Jessie Baker had a vision for Day Spring Farm.“We wanted it to be based on the same ideas that farmers had hundreds of years ago,” Jessie said. “We wanted to humanely raise the finest animals that pro-duce the best meat, and to then provide that meat for family, friends and neighbors.”Day Spring Farm in Middleburg is a family owned and operated grass-based farm producing organic beef and lamb, non-GMO fed pastured pork and chickens, eggs, vegeta-bles grown without chemicals, herbal products, dairy shares and other organic foods. And just in time for Thanksgiving, the farm offers pasture-raised turkeys, raised much the same way as the pasture-raised chickens.Jessie Baker, whose parents, Rick and Karen Lowe, run Lowelands Farm next door, said that she “grew up in the herb garden” with her mother. “In fact herbs – they were sort of my first language.”The Bakers produce soap with lard from the pigs they raise, and recently made a first effort at making soap using milk from their goats. They also offer classes on how to use herbs and have yarn and wool items made from the sheared wool of their own sheep.“Our sheep make beautiful wool,” Jessie said. “We sell it in many forms, such as roving, yarn, socks, raw wool or even sheep skins.”Day Spring operates as a CSA (Com-munity Supported Agriculture). “Most people know about vegetable CSAs,” Jessie said. “But we have meat CSAs as well. It’s like becoming partners with your farmer.”Through Community Supported Agri-culture, Day Spring offers a “share” of what is produced on the farm, with members pur-chasing a subscription in return for receiving meat or other products every month. When the couple’s children were young, the Bakers decided that they wanted fresh milk, which led to Day Spring Farm’s raw milk share program, providing unpasteurized milk from five Jersey cows for approximately 70 families. Customers purchase a share, or part of a cow, and pay a fee to Day Spring Farm for boarding and other costs.Jessie had been a vegetarian for ten years, but following the birth of the couple’s first child, Sean suggested the possibility of raising their own meat. “The thought of eating meat humanely raised and slaughtered seemed okay to me,” she said. “We allow the cows to graze naturally, the way they were designed to eat.”The Bakers do not give their cows hor-mones, chemicals or unnecessary antibiotics. They eat grass and are supplemented with hay during winter. “By allowing the cows to graze and not be in a confined situation, they live a more stress-free life.”The animals are kept on pasture.“Because of that,” Jessie said, “they don’t get sick very often. When they do, we treat them naturally, with herbs, the same as we would ourselves.”The couple embraced farm life “pretty quickly,” Jessie said. “It just felt right to grow food for ourselves and our families and neigh-bors. We think it’s important to eat more sea-sonally, and that is what we focus on.”Instrumental to the running of the farm are guard dogs Ruthy and Buster, who keep deer from gobbling up the bountiful gardens. Just as importantly, the specially-trained dogs keep foxes, raccoons and other predators away from the chickens.Several years ago, Day Spring Farm was featured on Emeril Lagasse’s “Emeril Green” show for a Thanksgiving special. The epi-sode highlighted the pasture-based farm and heritage turkeys – two of which were roasted by Jessie and Chef Emeril during the filming at Whole Foods in Fair Lakes.Sean and Jessie Baker’s five children range in age from one to 16. The family cares for the animals together and the Bakers are committed to home-schooling their children. On a recent visit, one of the daughters was bottle-feeding a young (and enthusiastic) miniature donkey.“Our biggest desire is to have a relation-ship with our customers,” Jessie said.On a recent weekend, Zack and Amber Condry and their two young daughters came to the farm. The couple started as CSA customers and quickly became friends with the owners. In fact, they provide a pick-up spot in Vienna so that Day Spring Farm’s CSA members who live closer to that area can pick up their shares.“Sustainable agriculture ensures that our children and grandchildren will have good farmland left to raise food for their friends and families,” Jessie said. “That’s what really matters the most to us.”Day Spring Farm is located at 21388 Steptoe Hill Road in Middleburg. The website is www.dayspringfarmva.com.By Dulcy HooperFor Middleburg Life
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Spring Update
Hello everyone! So glad it is getting warmer, spring is finally here.Here is what’s going on at DAY SPRING FARM. Princess lollipop had her calf on Feb.21, a healthy bull. He is adorable, bouncing about in his outdoor calf pen and drooling on customers fingers. We recently found out that two more of our cows, Fawn and Dolly are expecting calves l. Dolly in October, Fawn on Christmas day! We will let you know when they are born.Gardening, gardening, gardening! I think that is all we do now that it is warmer. Peas are being planted in outdoor rows. It is normally too cold outside to plant anything in the ground but since we have a plastic mulch layer, it warms the soil to the proper temperature for warmer weather loving crops. The proper temperature is about 60 degrees Fahrenheit. Broccoli and kale are steadily being planted under row cover. TIP: If you don’t want to buy row cover (in my opinion it is well worth the buy) you could use bedclothes. We have spread lime to raise the PH. of the soil as the PH.[of the soil] should be 7-7.5; chicken manure and fish meal to be followed by greensand and potassium to replace nutrients. We planted potatoes a week ago. We tilled a swath about 7 feet wide and 150 feet long and planted them, eyes up, every twelve inches with rows twelve inches apart.We have tomatoes growing out our ears! Roma, Striped German, Big Beef, Black Cherry, Clementines: you name it, we have it. They were planted in the middle of March and will be planted outside on the first of May. Cucumbers are planted in soil blocks. Soil blocking is potting soil that is watered and then pressed firmly into a metal frame, then ejected. The seed is then placed in a small indentation in the top of the soil block. The advantages to soil blocks are that
- it reduces the use of plastic.
- it air prunes the roots when the root reaches the edge so the plant does not get root bound.
- it is very good for transplanting cucurbits(squash,cucumbers,watermelons etc.) because they DO not like their roots disturbed
We are trying a new kind of cucumber this year. The name of is West Indian Burr Gherkin. I won’t write anything about them yet as I don’t have any experience with them yet. But Pam Dawling who gardens 3 ½ acres in central VA has a wonderful article about them at a website she writes for. You can find it at: www.growingformarket.com.Just recently a friend gave us a little garden cart that needed a face lift. It was 36in wide and 48in long.I and my sister tore it down to the bare metal frame and rebuilt it. We used reclaimed oak fence boards and a few 2x6 boards. It is now 50in wide and 60in long and very sturdy. We chose the dimensions so it would carry fifteen 1020 flats without any room to jostle around. I have included a few pictures below.
Valentine's Day
There is nothing cuter than a new kitten! Happy Valentine's Day from Day Spring Farm!
We are still awaiting our next calf, who is due to be born to Princess Lollipop sometime this month. She is having her vacation from giving milk and she can be seen in the front of the farm lounging with the horses. Hopefully she doesn't get used to the lazy days with the horses and not want to head back to work with the dairy cows after her calf arrives. They work night and day making delicious milk no matter what the weather is. With our fodder production (green barley sprouts) they don't drop in milk production the way the used to in cold weather. Even in the past few very cold days the udders are full and the milk still has lots of cream! What a Blessing.The chickens on the other hand, though they are enjoying their fodder, are not laying very many eggs on these cold days. The days are already lengthening and soon there will be plenty of eggs again. The baby veggies are being planted in our basement and are emerging from the soil each day, before we know it, it will be time to head them out to the green house. Keep your eyes open for baby lambs, we'll move them closer to the cabin once they are born. The ewes are walking more slowly these days with very round bellies, hopefully carrying lots of healthy twins! Even in this cold there are lots of signs that Spring is surely around the corner!Reminders:1) Don't forget to curl up with some homemade hot cocoa with day spring farm milk and enjoy some quiet time before spring gets here!2) Sign up for the CSA online soon, space is limited www.dayspringfarmva.com We have meat, veggie and lots of options3) We are now on instagram so please follow us for cute farm pictures to let you know what your farmers are doing! We will also be having a contest on soon to win some free products so follow us and stay tuned......Day Spring Farm is our nameKeep Warm,The Bakers