Putting Up the Sign

farm signThe produce is coming in like crazy: peas, early beans, squash, zucchini and more.  We put up the sign on Memorial Day but haven’t had any traffic yet.  Today, I am going to head down to the end of the drive with a table full of vegies to see if that makes a difference.  Bob is planning to put a sign on the main road with an arrow.  The lady at the bank suggested flyers and word of mouth.  I suspect it will be any and all of those ideas!  But we need to move some vegetables.  I’ve been freezing and jam making and we’ve been eating salads like crazy!  We even hauled a load of old radishes and bolted lettuce to a friend with a horse and goats.  We just hate to see it go to waste.

The weather has been cooperating nicely.  Rain when we need it with plenty of warm sunny days.  Perhaps a bit hotter than we might like but the next few days promise to be cooler.  The big rain that came through late last week made for perfect weeding conditions where the roots seem to come right out of the soil.  I spent hours in the flowers and raspberries, pulling weeds.  And Bob pointed me in the direction of the blueberries as well.

The wildlife seems to be everywhere this year.  Bunnies barely hop away when we emerge from the back door.  They drive Spot crazy and I worry for my arm as he strains at the end of the leash.  I’m glad I missed the black snake sunning himself on the back steps.  But I did catch a glimpse of the ground hog that lives under the old corn crib and the fox who silently swished through undergrowth near the silo.  Today’s treat was turkeys: two hens in the field.  Spot saw them, too, and his barking alerted them to our presence.  Once disappeared while the other scampered across the field and then took off with an annoyed cluck and landed farther along the rail road tracks.

I’m learning that jam making is an art: all three batches have been different, the first was too stiff, the second closer to perfect and the third a bit runnier but still very much edible.  And, I can’t figure out why the third batch made 8 pints when the first two with what I thought were the same amounts of berries only yielded 5-1/2.   I’m hoping there’s another round of strawberries so I can try one more time to achieve jam perfection.  On a side note, the stiff jam made a wonderful addition to frosting; I added a quarter cup to butter and confectioner’s sugar to get a slightly pink and wonderfully sweet concoction.

I’ll post pictures later but for now, it’s time to open the stand!