The heat before the freeze
Farm News (aka the weather report)
As the mercury rose to 80 degrees this afternoon, the accelerating wind speed and nearly bare trees acknowledged the dissonance of this late October day. We carried on with preparations for winter, shedding layers of clothing as we worked; pruning out the dead canes from the blackberries, shoring up the hay stocks in the barn, tilling up garden beds, taking supers off the bee hives. It doesn’t feel right to sweat in late October; something bad is sure to follow. Indeed, the sky is darkening as I write, and the blackness isn’t just the onset of dusk. The wind mill is shifting furiously outside our house triangle window; first north winds blow, then west winds and now EAST winds (that almost never happens around here). Within a few hours, the temperature is expected to drop 40 to 50 degrees. By morning tomorrow, there will likely be a skiff of frost on the spinach and kale. I am bracing myself for frozen feet at the farmers’ market on Saturday.
Farmers’ Market News
My rationale for coaxing you out of your cozy covers on Saturday morning is the promise of rich, fall-milk cheese and gelato that you can take back home to enjoy by a roaring fire. We’ll be attending two markets this Saturday, October 27th: Urbana and Green City Market. This Saturday will be the final outdoor market of the season for Green City Market, so come out and stock up on your favorite cheeses. Don’t worry. You’ll still be able to purchase our cheeses for the months of November and December. We will be moving inside to the Peggy Notebart Nature Museum starting November 3rd. The Urbana Farmers’ Market stays outside through November 3rd, and then moves inside the Lincoln Square Mall for the remainder of the fall. Also, don’t forget: now is the time to start freezing your chevre to get you through the bleak winter months when we are out of production. We will be bringing the following cheeses to market:
- Fresh chevre: plain, herbs de Provence and cracked black peppercorn
- An assortment of bloomy rind cheeses likely to include Angel Food, Little Bloom on the Prairie, Black Goat, Ewe Bloom and Black Sheep. We are now selling our final batches of Ewe Bloom and Black Sheep of the season, so buy them while they last.
- Sheep milk feta
- Roxanne
- Moonglo
Urbana Market goers can grab a few pints of gelato to stock up in their freezers. We should have:
- Vanilla
- Chocolate
- Hazelnut
- Lemon Verbena Thyme
- Pumpkin
- Ginger
among other surprise flavors. I promise you, it will be worth getting out of bed for!
