COOKING CLASSES WITH YOUR FARMER.

CSA shareholders, we have a treat for you!This year, Hannah and I are experimenting with something we would like to add to the CSA experience: cooking classes!These events are only open to CSA members, but they are free. How it works is this: starting in late May, every month throughout the season we will host people out at the farm here in Lawrenceburg for a few hours. We are thinking there will be either four, possibly five events, depending on how they go and they will all be mid-week in the evenings (if we have a substantial amount of interest in a weekend event, we could consider one at the end of the season). And although we are calling them "Cooking Classes" they are more like "Delcious Farm Food Preparation Classes". The goal is to show you everything that will be coming up in your CSA baskets, demonstrate some ways in which you can prepare these items, and give you a chance to see your food growing in the fields. We will also all snack heartily as the night goes along. Our hope is that this will help connect you to your farmers and farm a little more and give you plenty of good ideas for how to manage your vegetables.These events will serve as a sort of "prototype" for genuine cooking classes when we eventually have a commercial kitchen. But anyone who signs up for the CSA, will always get a significant discount on any events we hold. This year, that discount for CSA shareholders is 100% off!We will be announcing the official dates soon. Let us know your thoughts, inputs, questions. And we do still have CSA shares available, so please tell your friends!It will be a kid-friendly event, and a good chance to meet like-minded folks and to get to know your farmers!We hope to see you, well, here!-Jesse + Hannah.

FRANKFORT CSA UPDATE: WE HAVE A DROP SPOT!

As we mentioned last week, we received enough inquiries from the good residents of Frankfort to decide to extend our CSA to the area! And we now have the delivery location!We will be taking our CSA shares to the Kentucky Coffee Tree (which we love dearly) on Friday evenings and dropping them there for you to pick up. Let us know if you have any questions and of course you can click HERE to learn more about how the CSA works.-Hannah + Jesse. 

OFF AGAIN. ON AGAIN.

For those of you who don't know Hannah and my story, we lived off-grid for many years. But as Hannah pointed out the other day, "off-grid" is a misleading description: we were basically feral.For several years we hauled all of our drinking water. We didn't have electricity until the very end, and even then it was only enough to run the Internet for a little while. We did eventually get water to our house , but we had to heat it on the stove or in the greenhouse for bathing. During the summer, we just bathed in the creek. All of our heat came from a wood stove and we grew the vast majority of our own food, cooking almost every meal at home, on a small grill (summer), or the stovetop (winter).And we loved it.As hard as it was, honestly none of that was the reason we moved. We loved our neighbors––LOVED our neighbors––loved our market, and loved our lifestyle. But when Further was born, things changed. Specifically, what we loved had to make sense for our child, too. And for us, hard as it was to leave Bugtussle, that meant being closer to family.So we moved. And it was hard for many reasons - not the least of which was adjusting to having electricity and running water at our fingertips, and the expense that came along with that convenience. I am growing used to it––to not having to charge our phones in the car; to the light switch; to the hot water heater; to refrigeration. They are amazing inventions and I appreciate them with every ounce of my soul. That said, I cannot truly love them until they are something––like the water in our old cabin, like the heat from our wood stove––that we get to control, and that come from renewable resources.So, to any friends and followers who may have perhaps been bummed to see us depart from that lifestyle, I feel ya. But I also want to say that we are not officially back on-grid as much as we are firmly in-between. Both Hannah and I long to return to wood heat and solar power. It will just take some time (and really, by time, I mean money––we have to put a tin roof over our house before we can even install the stove). So for those of you who watched us and helped us build up that beautiful off-grid cabin, bear with us. The story has changed but the goal of self-sufficiency is as alive as ever.Only now, we're going the other way––from on-grid to off––and we hope you will come along with us as work to make it happen. Perhaps it will present a more realistic approach for those who want the lifestyle we had but can't live in the middle of nowhere where no one cares if you spend a few years without electricity or running water. Either way, you can bet it's gonna be a journey. As always, thanks for reading, and we hope you'll enjoy the new story.-Jesse.

WENDELL WEDNESDAY!

You read that right: it is Wendell Wednesday again!A couple years ago Wendell got sick. His hair began to fall out, he scratched constantly, and no one could tell us what was wrong. We tried everything natural we could think of and yet he continued to suffer. So we took him to vets and tried what they recommended. Some things would help, but eventually the itch always returned. Then after we moved, we got a new vet and he couldn't figure it out either, though he had an idea. Maybe it was scabies. Apparently, these little jerks can bury themselves deep in the skin so that they are really difficult to detect in skin scrapes (of which we have done several). This diagnosis has not been confirmed, but that is what we're treating him for and, by golly, Wendell is doing really well and we wanted to share! It has been a hard couple years for our beloved pup, and it just feels really good to have him back. So, Wendell Wednesday, indeed!-Jesse.