Back To Reality!

Farmer Brad - FARM ON!

Day 2 of the Grower's Symposium was really good.

We got a run down on good varieties to grow and a work shop on the history of Brad and Jenny's farm and how their Community Supported Agriculture group helped them get their start out in Brenham. They have grown their operation from 27 families up to over 100 this season! Think of all of those healthy people!

After a wonderful lunch, we trekked over to Brad's farm and he walked us through with Dr. Novak from A&M and we got some great ideas and info on everything from soil types, cover crops, insect identification to how NOT to do various things.

All the while we were in the company of other like-minded folks who are dedicated to providing more local, healthy food in their various areas. People were from all over, too, Ohio, Arkansas, Fort Worth and lots of folks from Central Texas of course, too. Austin has a huge jump on us here in the DFW area, that is for sure.

Gathering for our technical farm tour.

I got to see Boggy Creek Farm in Austin - what a great place! About 5 acres in the heart of a little neighborhood on the east side of Austin. The place was crawling with folks buying up the local produce, fresh coffee, fresh baked bread and just visiting! A lot like our Market Days - which will start up again soon - April. (Next preorder day is March 14th by the way.)

Market Day at Boggy Creek Farm in Austin

Well, hope you like the new pics, and I'll put a scrap book on the web site later, too.

Here is Miss Carol - my gracious hostess, and her menagerie of critters....

For those of you interested in perhaps growing a bit of your own food at home;

I'm in the process of ordering some seeds and will have some extra seed potatoes available at the shop. I've not scheduled an "open" date yet, but I'm in the process of securing Jay Mertz, founder of Rabbit Hill Farm", to teach a basic organic vegetable garden class hopefully in March.

Watch your inboxes for info on the class and spring shop hours. I'm slowly starting to rejoin the real world. It's good to be back.....

And now for a real taste of reality....

Check out the info Farmer Brad brought us on NAIS on this link (scroll down to the podcasts) - keep sending in your letters to your congress people - we don't need big brother inputting chips into our chickens, horses, etc. (and soon, the way they are going, ourselves!) The proposed program does nothing to chip the animals in the large factory farms - just the small farms, where the least of the problems occur. Hope none of you work for the chip industry, but it looks like they are the ones who stand to make the money off this deal if it goes through. That is a LOT of chips sold. Plus, we the farmers will have to log every step of our lives to the gov't. via a microchip and GPS on our farms. Nice eh? Makes one want to disappear.....

Marie
Eat Your Food - Naturally!