We will be slaughtering 2500 chickens throughtout the month of August. The birds weigh out between 4.5# to 6.5#, are Vermont State Inspected and cryovaced for optimal storage. We often feel that this is the single best item we produce on our farm. The flavor is outstanding. If you've never tasted pasture raised chickens before you are in for a huge treat. The birds can be ordered through the web site and picked up here at the farm or at the Burlington Farmer's Market. Contact us to make arrangements.

Our first CSA pick-up was last night. We have five locations in South Burlington, one in Bristol and a Thursday pick-up here at the farm. We accept new members throughout the season, using a pro-rated formula. Feel free to contact us if you have questions and are thinking of joining. We can put you in touch with some of our membership if you are looking for feedback. We are very proud of our CSA and our connection to the community. "Vote with your fork!".

Congrats to Ann Kowalaski for winning our name the eggmobile contest! We liked the name "poultry in motion" so much that we decided to use it as the tag line for our new egg labels. Just as exciting (to us at least), the birds arrived this week. 500 layers are happily running around, out on pasture, living as good a life as a chicken can live.

Our greenhouse will be open for retail sales this Friday, Saturday and Sunday, as well as for the following four weekends. Buy direct from the farm at considerable savings. Good starts make good gardens, it's that simple.

This last Sunday CSA member and professional photographer Natalie Stultz came to the farm and snapped some photos for the New York Times project "a moment in time". Click here to be directed to her blog and check out the photo she submitted. Thanks Natalie!!

Four or five years ago we employed John Wetzel for the summer. Smart and motivated he proved to be a great addition to the farm. Farm laboring paid the bills, but John's real passion was teas. He had traveled the world as an employee of the Dobra Tea House, and every day during lunch he broke out his stash and introduced us to the world of teas. We were hooked, and to this day drink tea all day everyday. John went on to start Stone Leaf Teas in the Marble Works in Middelbury. You can check him out on the net at www.stoneleaftea.com, but we recommend that you visit his store next time you're in Middlebury.

We find inspration in all aspects of our work, it's not a stetch to say that learning about teas has changed our lives. On a seperate but combined note, last year while attending the Vermont Fresh Network annual event we listened to Woody Tirsh, founder of Slow Money, give the keynote address. We'd never heard of him before, but we liked what he had to say. Somebody in the audience asked "what is slow money?". Woody responded by explaining that slow money is an investment where the return is so small that you can actually understand it. That's how and why we lent John $500 to buy teas for his shop during his recent travels to China. It's a simple concept, lend a small amount of money, get paid back in a year and collect a little interest in the form of world class teas. Nobody's getting rich, but then again micro loans have never been blamed for world wide economic meltdowns.

We are honored to be supplying a pig for the Cochon 555 event in Boston. This is a world class event featuring 5 chefs, 5 wines and 5 pigs. Click here to link to their website or better yet, join us this Sunday in Boston for what promises to be a great time.

Keenann has been busy starting seeds of all types. For the last several years she has grafted our greenhouse tomatoes. In much the same way that apple growers graft apple trees, we take tasty tomatoes and graft them on to hardy, disease resistant root stock.

Speaking of greenhouse tomatoes. Last year, as I'm sure you all remember, was a very challenging tomato year with widespread blight throughout the state. We fought the blight for many months with continual copper treatments but eventually pulled our tomato plants out early. What to do with all that valuable greenhouse space? We overwintered spinach which is currently being sold at City Market, Healthy Living and Mountain Greens. So if you need a greens fix after a long winter go get a bag.

March 15th is the cut off date to save $25 off of your CSA share. It is also the last date that you can place an order for seedling shares. Checks can be postmarked and mailed the 15th and still count.

You can help our CSA by signing up to be a neighborhood captain. Our goal is to bring fresh, local produced vegetables and meats to as many people as possible. One of our niches is convenience. By distributing our veggies, meats and eggs in your neighborhood you help us and save money:

Sign up 5 new members and get 15% of your total membership.

10 new members and get 30% off

15+ new members and get 50% off

This is a great way to connect with your community, save money and eat well. Contact us for more information if you're interested in this oppertunity.

Last year we re-booted our CSA program. This effort would not have been such a success without the help of our good friends Leah and Rob Skiff and Common Roots. We held our pick-ups in the South Burlington High School parking lot. This year we got a call from Healthy Living Market asking if we'd be interested in doing the pick-up in their parking lot. For a number of reasons this makes sense. First, it's a great store; our members can augment their vegetable pick-up with grocery shopping. Second, they have a clean bathroom. Third, it helps our relationship with one of our most important wholesale accounts. In addition to a Healthy Living drop we are adding neighborhood pick-ups and an on-farm pick-up. We'll have pick-ups in Starksboro, Bristol, and three spots in South Burlington (Healthy Living, Orchard neighborhood, Vermont National neighborhood). If you are interested in hosting a pick-up in your neighborhood, give us a shout!

When we started our farm journey fifteen years ago we were obsessed with soil. We read everything about it, played in it all day long, got together with friends at night and talked soil. Since we started farming in the Burlington Intervale, the soil was amazing. Rich sandy loam that grew everything you threw at it. When we arrived in Starksboro it was a wake up call. Rocks, gravel, ledge, and depleted soils were the new reality. We've adapted but it's taken time, and now a new vision is emerging. What we've learned after all these years is that the answer is grass. Vermont grows great grass, it's always been a pastoral state. How to take advantage after years of dirt farming? Our new farm vision starts with grass, add lambs because they mow grass, rotate on poultry (layers and broilers) to fertilize the ground, follow the next year with winter squash. Since we peel butternut squash we feed the seeds to pigs, which imparts a distinct flavoring (the best pork is finished with a seed crop, think Spanish pigs and acorns). So there it is grass+lambs+poultry+winter squash=great pork.

Food awareness is everywhere you turn these days, as a result one of the fastest growing trends in agriculture is connecting the consumer directly to the producer. 12,500 farms in the U.S. ran CSA's last year. Community Supported Fisheries is an exciting new addition to the mix. Originally started in Rockland,Maine (great town by the way) by the Port Clyde Fresh Catch Fishery, this is an idea whose time seems to have arrived. Consider a similar effort launched in Boston. Organized by the Gloucester Fishermen's Wives Association, MIT Sea Grant and the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance, initial hopes were for 50 members to start; 750 Bostonian's joined the first year and 500 more are on a waiting list. The politics of food are complicated but fishing politics are really complicated. What's good and what's right? Small, local, regional, fresh caught are all buzz words but what does it all mean? The Port Clyde Fresh Catch has partnered with the Island Institute and initiated some strong conservation measures, especially in the area of shrimping. However CSF's do not as a rule regulate catching procedures. One of the main controversies is the type of species being offered, a number of which are listed on various red list maintained by such groups as Blue Ocean Institute and the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch program because of concerns about over-fishing, habitat impacts and mercury. The author Samuel Fromartz (Organic INC.) is taking a different approach with his SeaSA. Basically, a buyer's club he intends to source only sustainable fish, regardless of the carbon footprint. An obvious example is fresh caught salmon from Alaska. You can read more about this effort by visiting his excellent blog ChewsWise. We are excited about these developments and will keep a watchful eye as this idea progresses. We intend to offer exciting add-ons to our CSA and Meat CSA such as Doe's Leap goat cheese and Kefir, Vermont Coffee Co. coffee, etc. Why not fish someday?