Saturday, September 26, 2009

Grateful Growers Farm

On Saturday we visited a farm called Grateful Growers Farm. They raise pigs, turkeys, ducks and chickens, and grow shitake mushrooms. The chickens and ducks are free range and the pigs have enough room to forage and wallow in the mud. If you ever consider the conditions in which our food species are raised (and you should), you will, perhaps, consider seeking out a source of humanely farmed meat. This website lists local farms in many areas of the country with contact information and what types of products they provide.

The proprietor of Grateful Growers was very informative as she took us on a tour of the farm. She discussed the reason that free range chickens are so much more expensive (and that she still actually loses money on chickens) and that even the big time, non-organic chicken farms only make a profit of cents per chicken. They make a lot of money by producing A LOT of chickens.







Naturally, their chickens aren't as happy as these.


And if you want to see some happy animals, take a look at these pigs!










Ooo, that mud feels good!









The shitakes mushrooms are grown on oak logs. Spores are inserted into holes drilled into the logs and they are placed in shady areas that are not useful for growing other types of food.









Gratuitous cute puppy photo:



And finally, which is the biggest turkey?? You decide.











Friday, September 25, 2009

Visit with our NC "family"

We had another fun visit with our friends in NC, Ed, Wendy and Nora. It really is like visiting family when we all get together. Nora is about midway in age between Megan and Nicholas, and all 3 kids get along great together. Our kids disappear with Nora on our arrival, emerging only for meals.
















Nora has a great playhouse built by Ed, and during this visit, the kids were running a bed and breakfast. The King and Queen (of what was not made clear) were in residence and I was privileged to observe the preparation of their breakfast.


Looks pretty good, eh?









On Saturday, we attended the Know Your Farms farm tour. We visited 3 of the nearly 2 dozen farms included on the tour. We had a great time, the weather held off, with only a short rain shower at the last farm, and a great time was had by all. See my next posts for descriptions of the individual farms.

Monday, September 21, 2009

Sunday, September 13, 2009

1st place in the first tournament of the fall season!

Megan's softball team opened their fall season with a bang, going undefeated to win their tournament this weekend in Knoxville.









They faced some good competition, and had to come back in extra innings to win the championship game, but they never stopped battling and came out on top. In fact, Megan scored the winning run by stealing home on a passed ball! It was very exciting!

The tournament was at Caswell Field, which despite their draconian rules concerning bringing food into the park (you can't), does have a pretty nice facility. The dugouts are HUGE and even have water fountains inside. Clearly they didn't think that all the way through, as the girls had great fun "showering" and spraying water everywhere.










Doesn't she look tough?








Nah!!!










Little brother Nicholas clearly hanging on every pitch (NOT!)








Here's Megan warming up...



...and batting....










....and I even got several of her scoring. Get out of the way, catcher!










But I didn't get one of the slide into home to win the game. It's hard to take a picture when you are jumping up and down!


Sunday, September 6, 2009

Small home improvement project

David ran a cable line into our dining room this weekend so we could move our modem and router down from Megan's room. We are hoping to improve the wireless coverage of our screened-in porch and downstairs. Can you believe, we couldn't even sit on our porch and surf the net???

He had a little help from Megan who held the flashlight and fished the string up through the hole.

How's it look up there, honey?

Success! And this post will prove it!

Nicholas goes roller skating...

Nicholas's friend Trey had his birthday party at Skatetown, USA this past weekend. It was his first outing to the skating rink. We have been ice skating before, but the wheels proved to be a bit more of a challenge than the blade.


Here's the birthday boy, Trey:


Nicholas spent most of his time doing the "wall crawl." He can actually get up some pretty good speed doing this until someone gets in his way!


A good time was had by all!

Friday, August 14, 2009