7125 Old Stage Road Raleigh NC 919-322-0197
I read the following article on greek yogurt and whey, and some of the uses for whey. It was a good article with lots of nice tips. It was interesting to see that the rise in Greek yogurt has caused such a rise in whey production which is a problem for the dairy industry. However industry’s problem is a small operations bonus. If you are making yogurt or cheese and find yourself with too much whey left over, there are some good tips on what to do with it.
The menu has been published for the dinner we have coming up on June 28th.
We will be processing one of our large Ossabaw hogs this coming Friday and delivering it to Chef Mike early next week so he can get to work on it. I have lots of friends telling me they are coming so if you are sitting on the fence, now is the time to get your tickets before they are sold out. There are only 50 spots available total so don’t get caught short.
For Father’s Day, Cassia came by and delivered a framed picture of my favorite picture from the wedding. This was after just about everything was done with the wedding and just before I drove her and Johnathan off to start their new life. Of course the truck is in the picture but what I really love is the beautiful lady who’s been a weekly part of our lives since she was 12. Of course this new picture had to go on my desk at work (yes, I have a day job, don’t all farmers?) right next to the picture of the rest of the kids.
Now it feels like I have ALL my kids on my desk. Thank you Cassia for the great picture.
I know, welcome to the 20th century. Forget the 21st, I’m still catching up on the 20th. Seems everyone uses Twitter and I have studiously ignored it to this point. However someone younger and smarter (thanks Cassia!) than me said I definitely needed to get in the game so I’m going to give it a try. Now for optimum readability, I’m supposed to post 300 word posts on our website. For Twitter, it’s supposed to be 140 characters. Hmm. Brevity hasn’t been my gift up till now. One more skill to learn.
And because I cannot make a long post about all this, how about a picture instead.
This is how I feel learning Twitter.
We were approached recently to host an event June 28th on our farm. Thanks to Bar-B-Jew for turning us onto these nice folks and this opportunity.
After meeting Kristen Baughman of Gadabaout Food, who is putting the whole thing together, and learning the details of what they are doing, we happily agreed.
So what is the event?
Beltline Brew Tours is having a Southern Wake County event right here on the farm. Tickets are $55 for six courses of BBQ from Big Mike’s BBQ and beer from local breweries. The pig is one of our own Ossabaws so I can vouch for the quality of the pork. Seems like a deal to me since a bad dinner with the Mrs. last night cost more (the dinner was bad, SWMBO was beautiful as always).
We’ve also learned that part of the proceeds from this event will go to No Kid Hungry NC so feel good about the money you are spending.
The breweries committed at this time are:
I’m not much of a beer drinker, in fact I may have a gin and tonic in hand if you see me but as a pilot who has flown in and out of Triple W airport where Aviator brewing got their start, I may have to sample a few brews just to make sure they are staying to their roots.
We’ll have dinner on the lawn, overlooking the farm. You’ll be treated, weather permitting, to the sunset we enjoy every night overlooking the prettiest view on our farm. This is a small event and seating is limited so grab some tickets and support a good cause.
Today we harvested honey from our bee hives. We got almost 30 pounds of honey and left quite a bit behind. I probably will not harvest any more honey the rest of the year unless they really pack it away the remaining months. My intention is to leave the bees with full honey stores so they go strong into the winter. I really don’t want to feed them all winter like I did this winter. Of course I brought Spork and Bok Bok along to help. Some chores they don’t like, some they tolerate. Honey harvest is one where they beat me to the door.
I don’t have much in the way of fancy honey harvest gear. A stainless bowl from the kitchen, a large kitchen towel, SWMBOs kitchen strainer (shh, don’t tell her), and a honey bucket. I crush the comb by hand into the strainer, then let heat and gravity do the work to drain the now clear honey into the bucket.
The photographer on this adventure was Spork, who did a marvelous job. It’s really neat to see pictures from a kids perspective. Things are closer, shorter, and parts adults might not even notice receive a lot of attention when a kid had the camera. I really love it when the kids take pictures. Here you can see some of the old comb (the dark wax) and some new comb (the light wax below).
You don’t have to buy a honey bucket. You can buy this neat little knife valve and mount it to your own bucket. I was clean bucket poor so I bought the ready to go deal. I’m glad I did. I’ve never had the valve like this before. It’s very worth the 9 bucks it costs because it handles the sticky honey beautifully.
If your kids won’t work with you. Get bees. Kids will be right there when it’s bee time. Also, most kids are afraid of “bees.” Because all wasps, yellow jackets, etc. are “bees.” When they participate in a honey harvest and see no stings on daddy, and sweet sweet honey to eat still warm from the sun, they have a whole new perspective on bees. If you don’t have bees but you do have kids, look into it.
Sticky fingers inserted into the honey dripping. It’s not exactly hygienic but it’s my kids and my honey and they only do it a little bit. Well, some of it will go to Angie at Angie’s restaurant but she kisses my kids so I think she’ll be ok. We will take a couple of germs for the experience they are getting.
Here are the kids cleaning up after we put all the comb and honey into the strainer.
At this point my hand is dripping with honey up to my wrist. Despite the kids sticking their fingers in occasionally, I’m actually clean. I’ve seen lots of tools for doing this part but the old hand works great and cleans up easy.
Ok, so I’m a kid in a bigger body. I’m covered in yummy goodness, what did you expect me to do?
At long last, we reach the final post about our farm truck restoration. This was a month’s long project and it came together the day we needed it to be ready to go to the wedding. Fortunately it wasn’t a photo finish like you see on those car restoration shows and I wasn’t screwing things together on the ride down. It wasn’t far off though!
Thank you for coming along on this ride with us. Enjoy the wedding pictures below.
Many thanks to Cassia and Johnathan McKay, the McKay family and the Lewis family for letting us be a small part of a really big day. And best of luck to Johnathan and Cassia on their lives together.
When I started this blog over a year ago, I made it a goal to post every day, or at least to average a post per day. Some days you’ve gotten long diatribes, other days it’s been quick thoughts or even a link to something else going on in the world. And some days it is a picture of poop because you know, it is a farm. Either way, over 300 posts later, I feel like I’ve met my goal of one interesting post per day. I also feel like we have a nice repository of content on our site where people that are new to our farm can browse and learn about what we do (raise and sell really high quality meat) and what we do not do (make any money).
So with that said, I’m going to start a new chapter in the blog and forego the goal of one post per day and instead try to have my posts be high quality and routine, but not daily. Don’t worry, there will still be pictures of poop, and cows, and chickens, and even the kids on occasion. But if you don’t hear from me a couple of days, don’t worry, I’m not dead.
Thank you all for your continued business and for following our little blog. I promise there is still plenty more to come.
You may have noticed that I stopped posting pictures from our hog class a while back. The reason is, some of our followers, who love us and love our food, just weren’t excited to see hog parts on their daily feed (Hi Kelsey). While knowing your food and your farmer is very important, I think we can put the killing in it’s own box for a while. I’ve uploaded the rest of the pictures to the gallery so anyone who wants to see the details from our class can scroll to their hearts content. Everyone else can use our feed to stay up on what is happening currently.
Just because we’ve stopped posting pictures doesn’t mean we have given up on our hog class. Thomas Locke, from CFSA attended our class and fully participated. He also went home and wrote up a very nice article on the class and posted it on CFSA’s website. I can’t thank Thomas enough for his and CFSA’s support of our farm. If you aren’t familiar with CFSA, they are a great organization that is behind a lot of what we enjoy in our vibrant farming community.
March 15th. Final check. The glass man, while installing the glass, was kind enough to ding my door for two big paint chips. I can’t worry about it now, nobody will see it so I’ll have to get it fixed after the wedding.
I didn’t have time to wash and detail the truck after we were done. I had to go out-of-town for business so I had a friend who manages a car wash come and detail the truck for me. I asked him to just knock the dust off of the brand new paint and to detail everything else. The guy shows up and POWER WASHES the truck and doesn’t detail anything. Sigh. Nobody will see the scratches he put in the paint nor notice the bumpers have bug marks on them. Too late now to do anything about it anyway.
Last trip to Loop Road for parts to fix the few things that weren’t right. It’s time to go to a wedding!