One More Post... More Pictures!

I just got some of the pictures uploaded and had to do one more post dedicated just to pictures. There are some more pictures of the farm on my facebook.

Alas 'tis Time to say Goodbye

I have now left Quail Hollow Farm CSA. I am moving on to have new adventures. I have stayed for a little over a year and have had AMAZING life changing experiences. Quail Hollow is really a second home to me and the people I got to work with really feel like a second family. Some of the things I have learned there that aren't related to growing plants and farm animals are...

• hard work
• diligence
• facing and conquering fears
• gaining confidence
• being decisive
• responsibility
• discouragement
• joy
• myself, and my personal mission on this earth
• life and death
• being calm
• patient
• accomplishment
• and so much more.

I have also been learning Western Tang Soo Do Martial Arts. Doing this I have been taught about balance, putting all of yourself into everything you do to get the needed power to achieve the goal, doing your very best, and not showing weakness, doing hard and painful things that stretch you to your limit and allow you to improve.

Laura put in the Share Basket newsletter this week a whole paragraph on how much I have changed since coming a year ago. I don't have the newsletter with me right now as I write this so I will have to paraphrase a little bit. She mentioned my first day and how she didn't think I would actually last the month... then how I showed her what kind of stuff I was made of and that when I was determined I would never give up. She mentioned how steady and consistent I am. She said some other really nice and touching things. I began to tear up as I read it.

There were times I was tempted to just quit and leave. The work was too hard and it was too hot. I also felt so slow and like I wasn't any help at all. I felt like a failure. How ever these times when I felt like this helped me to have this AMAZING life changing experience. I left feeling like a success and a leader. The farm was filled every day with exhausting hard work. And with all the challenges, discouragement, fears, etc..... I wouldn't trade this experience for a trillion bucks. I have become more of who the Lord created me to be. And the joys, accomplishments, confidence, and all other things have canceled out the bad. This was one of the best years of my life so far. I hope I never forget what I have learned at the farm. There is so much you can learn and discover by reconnecting to the earth and helping life to flourish.

I am so grateful for the time I have had to grow and learn and become at Quail Hollow Farm.

Thank you to all of you who read this, and helped motivate me to keep doing posts.

Thank you Laura and Monte Bledsoe for this experience!

This is the last post I shall do on this blog for a while. When I have my own farm in the future I may continue with this blog. I fare thee well.

High off of Tomato Fumes

Two new interns came... Shannon Hess came 3weeks ago, and my cousin Sariah Mitchell came two weeks ago. Both of them are awesome to room with and work with. :D Before Sariah came the main event to tell about was The Annual Tomato Tasting Event. 4 days before the event all our 18 rows of tomatoes were still green. (which is annoying because now we have ripe tomatoes completely filling the living room. There is barely any room to walk or sit.) We were also having it a whole week later then the one we had last year. So we were picking all that looked like a good sized beautiful tomato or any that had even the slightest coloring. We put them in brown paper sacks with green-ish banana's to speed up the process. By Saturday we had a few to put out. We have I think over 40 varieties and we were able to put out a tasting of half of them. We even put out a conventional boring store bought variety to see if people noticed the difference in taste. It was very noticeable, in color, slicing, and especially in taste. The winner of the year was Amana Orange, Amish Gold, and another yellow one that I can't remember the name of.

However some that I think would have won if they had only been ripe are Green Zebra, Cost...? Genovese, and Cherokee Purple. These are also some of the prettiest tomatoes in my opinion.

When one harvests tomatoes you become green tinted and itchy. And it can take hours and hours. While harvesting you often find ones that chickens have pecked, ones that have a little split or bug bites, or sun scalds. All of these go in to the Sauce bin. After that you need to sauce them a.s.a.p. otherwise they start to spoil very quickly. The saucing process goes like this.....

1. you quarter the tomatoes and cut out any really nasty spots. (this is actually the worst part of the processing because you have to stick your hand in the sauce bin that has rotting tomatoes and juices. It also smells nasty... like dirty dish rags or smelly socks.)

2. you put them in the saucer machine which removes the skins and seeds and leaves nothing but a nice tomato puree or pulp.

3. you pour into large pots and boil for a long time and the full pots will reduce until only half of the pot is full, however after it has boiled and decreased in amount it is such a beautiful dark red color.

This is what Sariah and I (Shannon had a family reunion so has actually been gone the last two weeks.) were doing all afternoon on Saturday after spending 3 hours harvesting the Roma tomatoes. We sauced for 4 hours straight. I was literally going insane. Sariah and I thought part of it might be from all the tomatoes we were smelling. We needed to smell a bunch of them because even though they looked pretty good on the out side they smelled like dirty socks when you cut them open. Eventually I couldn't smell anything different, I sat and smelled one tomato for probably 5 minutes, Sariah had to be my official smell-er for a while because they all began to smell. We went through about 8 3/4 bushel bins of sauce. It was really gross. I was so tired of tomatoes I was going crazy.

Now for some news not tomato related.

Some funny stories that say I've been on a farm too long.....or in the heat to long....

I am like the dogs in the Pixar movie Up... however instead of squirrels making me turn my head, it is tractor's and goats.

I have been getting ready to leave the farm soon, and so I wanted a picture of each of the milking goats... cause I want to do a scrapbook of my adventures, and I thought it would be fun to do a profile picture of each of them and then a funny story to go along with each. Well Shannon was willing to take the pictures for me (because she has a digital camera and I don't plus she was doing the milking that week and I was doing the other chores.) Well as I thought about this plan for the goat profile page and their stories I realized that some of them wouldn't be us understandable if you didn't know what their udders looked like. So Shannon took a picture of those for me as well. :D

We were washing eggs and randomly we noticed that one made a thumping noise as it was shaken by ones ear. Don't ask why we were shaking it by our ears. We don't know why. In case you are wondering why it made the noise it apparently had a large air bubble. But we showed it to Laura and Monte and they said they have never been tempted to shake an egg by their ear.

This is a funny story that doesn't have to do with farming.

Because Jenn, Amelia, Bronze, and Brodi knew I was getting ready to leave they surprised me and bought me a going away cake. They informed me that I needed to smell the frosting because they had paid a little extra to get scented frosting. I said "I didn't know they made scented frosting." Jen takes a slice of cake that is on a small plate and smells and her expression said "wow this smells amazing." So then she hands me the plate so that I can smell. I being the slightly gullible trusting person that I am bring the plate up to my nose to smell and Jenn pushes it in to my face. It was the most unexpected thing... mainly because it was Jenn who did it. If Bronze or Brodi had offered the slice of cake to me I hope that I would have been a little hesitant and doubtful, but it was Jenn. And Bronze caught the whole thing on video. ARRGGG!!! Then Amelia informed me that they had been planning this for weeks and Jenn thought I wouldn't fall for the scented frosting. Amelia said... "Jenn, this is Lark we're talking about. We could tell her that it looked like there were little allien looking shapes in the frosting and Lark would have put her face into the cake to get a closer look." The saddest part about this story is earlier in the afternoon Jenn and Amelia had told me not to trust anything that I was told that day. They had sort of warned me.

Bronze also made me this chocolate structure as a going away gift that was intimidating to look at. There was so much unwrapped chocolate. I'm going to miss my farmily.

Sad news.....

We no longer have one of our restaurant share holders so keep the farm and Bledsoes in your prayers as well as the owner of the restaurant and his family.

We have lost a couple of chickens and Rabbits because of the heat. It's almost like these animals are saying "just so you don't miss us too bad we will let you get as many opportunities as possible to pick up our dead before you leave for good."

Exciting news.....

On Monday (exactly one week ago) July the 4th we got a new baby goat!!!!!! We didn't even know that any of our goats were pregnant. Since she was born on Independence Day we had to give her a patriotic name. So we named her Abigail Adams. She is super cute and all white with ears that stick up. Every time you feed her she starts drinking then she pulls away and pees for a while as if saying she needs to make more room for all the milk she is going to drink. Then she comes back and finishes her meal. She also licks her lips a lot and makes a loud smacking noise when she eats.

Sariah had been in charge of milking that week and I was off feeding the chickens in the far pasture. So she was the one who discovered Abigail. But I get to experience one more baby goat before I go. :D

We also got 2 more pigs.... Our others have been sent to the butcher. Our new pigs are named Peter and Sophie. Well I guess those are technically their nick-names. Their real names are super long and are in Italian and are names of a really fancy ham and salami.

I think that is all for this post. ttfn