2022 CSA Registration

What is a CSA?

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is basically a subscription to the crops a farm has to offer. The customer pays a designated amount up front to become a member of the CSA. Then, throughout the growing season, the farmer provides the customer with weekly shares of the harvest. The customer benefits from the bounty and planning of the farmer, but also shares in any weeks that are less bountiful.

What crops will be included in the Fail Better Farms CSA shares?

We’ll offer washed and cut bagged salad, collard greens, spinach, kale, broccoli, beets, green beans, garlic, cabbage, green peppers, eggplants, carrots, turnips, scallions, storage onions, tomatoes, cucumbers, and basil. (Click here to see the projected crop schedule.)

What else is included in the Fail Better Farms CSA?

• You’ll receive a weekly newsletter letting you know which crops you’ll be receiving, suggested recipes for preparing those vegetables, and news about what’s going on at the farm. (Click here to see a sample newsletter from last year.)

• Each Saturday during the CSA pick-up window, customers are welcome to tour the farm and check out the crops.

• NEW THIS SEASON! Customers located within a 10 mile radius of our farm can opt for weekly deliveries of their shares.

What kind of person is the right fit for the Fail Better Farms CSA?

Our ideal CSA customer is someone who…

• enjoys cooking and preparing fresh food at home,

• cares about eating food grown with sustainable, organic practices,

• can find time on Saturdays to pick up their share,

• and wants to support a local farm.

What does an example share look like?

Below are images of sample CSA shares from last year’s season.

May 8, 2021

May 22, 2021

June 6, 2021

June 26, 2021

July 3, 2021

How can you learn more?

Check out our CSA Membership Agreement to learn more. If you’re interested in joining our CSA, simply complete the form at the bottom of the Membership Agreement.

Carrot Top Pesto

Waste Not, Want Not

Wasting food feels gross, doesn’t it? When I’ve purchased carrots in the past from the grocery store, I didn’t have to deal with the question of what to do with the leafy green part. Now that we’re growing our own carrots, I don’t want to just throw the greens away because they’re edible and they actually contain a bunch of vitamins and minerals. (More on that below.) So I went on a mission to find what to do with the tops of my carrots.

But first…why does the grocery store remove the carrot tops?

There’s a good reason grocery store carrots are bald. If the greens stay attached to the carrots, they steal a bunch of the nutrients and sweetness out the the carrots. Because of this, it’s important to remove the greens from the carrots as soon as possible.

Nutrients in Carrot Tops

Carrot greens are loaded with vitamins A, C, and K, potassium, iron, magnesium, carotenoids, calcium, and dietary fiber. They are the underappreciated “hair” of the carrot, and it’s about dang time we step up and accept their super food status. In an attempt to get my family to consume this nutrient-dense food, I whipped it up into a fine pesto, which I recommend. If you’re kids (or you) aren’t huge fans, you might mix the pesto with a marinara sauce before adding to noodles or pizza or whatever else you add pesto to.

Nut-Free Carrot Top Pesto Recipe

I had to play jazz with recipes I found online because my son can’t eat nuts. Here’s my offering for the world:

Ingredients:

• one bunch carrot greens

• one or two handfuls of fresh basil leaves (Spinach would work too.)

• extra virgin olive oil To Taste

• parmesan cheese to taste (I ended up using 8 ounces. Don’t judge.)

Directions:

1. Remove the leafy bits from the fibrous stems of the carrot tops, and Chuck those leafy bits into the food processor.

2. Add basil leaves to food processor.

3. Add some olive oil to food processor.

4. Start processing the heck out of that food!!

5. Add as much oil and cheese as you see fit. (Basically, keep tasting it until you say mmmm.)

Other Uses for Carrot Tops

You can add them to a salad or sandwich or soup. You could use them as a pretty garnish. You might even find them useful for tickling your sweet child’s little tootsies.

If you want more recipe ideas, check out the World Carrot Museum website. That’s right. There’s a World Carrot Museum. Isn’t it comforting to know that exists?

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Freezing Bell Peppers

Do you have more peppers than you can handle? Do you, like me, feel terrible when food goes to waste? Bumper crops are a blessing…until they leave you overwhelmed, frantically scrolling through recipes, searching for ways to use them. If these truths are hitting home for you, it’s time to make use of your freezer, my friend.

Super Simple Process

The great thing about bell peppers is that you can freeze them with very little preparation. Just grab a knife, cutting board, and baking sheet, and get started!

Step 1: Rinse and dry your peppers.

Step 2: Chop up your peppers however your little heart desires.

Step 3: Spread the chopped peppers out on a baking sheet.

Step 4: Throw the baking sheet into your freezer for about an hour.

Step 5: Store the frozen chopped peppers in a freezer bag in your freezer until you need them.

Step 2: Chop peppers.

Step 3: Spread peppers on baking sheet.

Step 5: Store frozen chopped peppers in bag.

Using Frozen Peppers

I cook with frozen peppers pretty much exactly the way I would raw peppers, except that I allow for slightly more cooking time. Because the peppers bits are frozen individually on the tray before they’re put into the bag, they’re easy to scoop out of the freezer bag when you need them. Your peppers should last in the freezer for a year.

Perks of Freezing Your Peppers

Freezing your peppers with this method is doing a favor for future you. You’ll be making a recipe in November that calls for peppers, and you’ll say to yourself, “I need a quarter cup of bell peppers, self!” Next thing you know, you’ll be reaching into your freezer and voila! The prep work of chopping your peppers has already been done! You’ll thank your past self and move on with your life.

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Read more about Fail Better Farms!

Kale Cubes: The Answer You've Been Looking For

Why make them?

Kale is a healthy green. If your children are anything like mine, it’s sometimes a fight to get them to consume healthy greens. Kale cubes are a great solution for sneaking greens into other dishes like soups, sauces, or smoothies.

How to make them?

Simple! You seriously just blend kale leaves and water together. Then freeze. Here. I’ll make it look like a recipe so you take me seriously:

Ingredients and Materials:

• 1 bunch kale (or other hearty leafy green)

• 2-3 cups water

• ice cube trays (or other freezable containers)

Directions:

1. Remove kale leaves from stems, and place a few handfuls of kale leaves into blender.

2. Add 1-2 cups of water to the blender.

3. Blend kale and water until kale bits are pulverized.

4. Take the blender jar off the blender base, and use a fork to scoop out the solid bits of kale and pack them into the cells of the ice cube tray. (At this point, leave the green juice in the blender jar.)

5. Add a few more handfuls of kale to the blender, and pulverize again. (Add more water if needed to get the blender going.)

6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 until all of your kale is blended up and the solid bits of kale are packed into ice cube trays.

7. pour the green juice over the ice cube trays.

8. After the kale cubes have frozen, store the cubes in a zip-lock bag in the freezer, and use within six months.

How to use them?

• I’ve been adding 4-6 kale cubes to our morning smoothies, and I make sure to also add dark berries so the kids don’t notice the green color of the kale. So far, so good.

• I added 6-8 cubes to a marinara sauce the other day, and no one was the wiser. Mwahaha!

• I’m planning to tuck these cubes into soups as we move into the cooler months.

Watch My Video!

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Learn More About Fail Better Farms

Pullets for Sale

What’s a pullet?

A pullet is defined as “a hen of the domestic chicken less than one year old” (Merriam-Webster). That’s actually a pretty vague definition that allows for a wide variety of interpretations, but folks in the egg-raising community consider pullets to be lady birds that are between 15-22 weeks old. In the life of a chicken, pullets are pretty much teenagers. They haven’t necessarily started laying eggs yet, but they’re close.

What are the advantages of buying pullets rather than chicks?

1. You’ll be months closer to producing your own eggs.

2. You can avoid the loss of baby chicks. (When you purchase day-old chicks, you run the risk of losing some of them in the first two weeks of life.)

3. You won’t need to coddle these girls the way you would baby chicks. No need to worry about setting up a brooder with a heat lamp and checking on the chicks regularly.

4. You won’t end up with a surprise rooster.

Living Conditions and Health

• Our girls are raised on standard chicken feed and open pastures.

• They’ve been vaccinated for Marek’s disease and Coccidiosis.

• They are handled regularly by our resident chicken whisperer, Olivia.

• Their wings have been clipped, a painless process for them that removes their flight feathers.

For more information on how we raise our birds, check out this blog post.

Breeds of Birds on Offer

• Whiting True Green Females

  • These ladies mature at 22 weeks, which means they started laying around August 23.

  • They lay large green eggs, and they lay them well! (You can expect between 281-365 eggs per year.)

• Cuckoo Marans Females

  • These birds mature at 20 weeks, meaning they started laying around August 9.

  • They lay extra large dark brown eggs. (You can expect 221-280 eggs per year.)

• Black Australorp Females

  • These girls should start laying at 24 weeks, which means around September 6.

  • They lay large brown eggs. (You can expect 281-365 eggs per year.)

• Black Minorca Females

  • They mature at 20 weeks, which means they started laying around August 9.

  • They lay extra large white eggs. (You can expect 221-280 per year.)

All of these breeds are excellent free rangers, which means you can set them loose on your lawn and they’ll eat the greens and bugs they find. The food you provide will supplement their diets.

Whiting True Green

Cuckoo Marans

Black Minorcas

Interested?

If you’re interested in purchasing pullets from Fail Better Farms or you have questions, please contact us at mary.failbetterfarms@gmail.com. Customers should plan to pick up the birds at our farm. (Pro tip: bring cat carriers if you have any, as they are the best way we’ve found to transport chickens in a vehicle.)

Read More About Life at Fail Better Farms

Farm Volunteers are Welcomed!

DISCLOSURE: THIS POST MAY CONTAIN AFFILIATE LINKS, WHICH MEANS I MAY EARN A COMMISSION IF YOU CLICK A LINK AND MAKE A PURCHASE. FEEL FREE TO CHECK OUT MY DISCLOSURE POLICY FOR MORE DETAILS.

Sunday on the Farm

Bruce Daniels, Aaron’s beloved grandfather, published a collection of short stories from his epic life experiences entitled Sunday on the Farm, and a sequel called Just Another Sunday on the Farm. Both are worth your time. The man lived a full life and had a way with words. In keeping with the idea of making Sunday on the Farm an experience, we’re opening Fail Better Farms to volunteers on Sunday mornings starting in April.

What You Can Expect

Volunteers will help us tend to animals, crops, and/or infrastructure. You can expect to learn something, get a little exercise, bond with our Great Pyrenees, commune with nature, and receive top-notch entertainment from our kids. We guarantee no pay and hours of arduous, back-breaking work in the hot sun. Cheers!

A Few Tips

• Wear clothes and shoes you don’t care about because they’re bound to get dirty.

• If you plan to use bug spray, make sure it’s DEET-free. (We’re picky about chemicals here.)

• Bring work gloves if you have them and don’t want to get your hands dirty.

How to Sign Up

Because we’re living in strange times, folks interested in lending a helping hand are asked to schedule their visit in advance. If you’re interested in experiencing farm life while enjoying the company of Aaron, Mary, and their wild kids, send an email to mary.failbetterfarms@gmail.com. We’re happy to have you!

Let’s Talk Eggs!

DISCLOSURE: THIS POST MAY CONTAIN AFFILIATE LINKS, WHICH MEANS I MAY EARN A COMMISSION IF YOU CLICK A LINK AND MAKE A PURCHASE. FEEL FREE TO CHECK OUT MY DISCLOSURE POLICY FOR MORE DETAILS.

Raising chickens is fun, and it makes us feel like real farmers. We just got a shipment of 82 chicks in the mail, and you’d better believe picking up a cheeping box of fluff balls from the post office is the cutest thing in the world. In celebration of our new feathered friends, let’s chat about our birds and their eggs.

Pasture Raised

Our girls are pasture raised in the spring, summer, and autumn months. When we have hogs on the farm, the birds are rotationally grazed behind them. (Click here if you want to see what I mean.) Since we’ve decided to forego our swine companions this season, we’ll be rotationally grazing the chickens at their own pace. This benefits the fields through the fertilization of chicken poo, and it benefits our girls by providing a continuous supply of fresh grass to nibble.

A Space of Their Own

We’ve learned we need to keep our hens contained within an electric fence because if they’re allowed to roam free A) they take over our yard and destroy my flower beds, B) they surreptitiously hide nests of eggs, and C) Samson, our Great Pyrenees, plays a little too rough. (Let me prove it.)

Hens Within Electric Fence

Happy Birds

Liv Holding Henny Penny

Samson Checking Out Birds

Health Benefits

Getting our girls outside to frolic freely in the sunshine creates a healthier egg for at least two reasons.

1. Regular exposure to sunshine allows our hens to produce egg yolks rich in vitamin D3. (Check out the results of this study demonstrating that “the vitamin D3 content of egg yolk was three- to fourfold higher in the groups" of hens "that were exposed to sunlight compared with the indoor group.")

2. A diet of fresh grasses increases the vitamin E and healthy fats in our eggs. (Read a bit more about how "pastured hens' eggs had twice as much vitamin E and long-chain omega-3 fats, 2.5-fold more total omega-3 fatty acids, and less than half the ratio of omega-6:omega-3 fatty acids.”)

Colorful Eggs

We choose to raise breeds of birds that lay blue, green, dark brown, light brown, and white eggs. The color of the egg shell doesn’t change the flavor of the egg, by the way. We just like colorful eggs because it’s fun to create an ombre effect in the carton.

Read More!

What Early March Looks Like on the Farm

DISCLOSURE: THIS POST MAY CONTAIN AFFILIATE LINKS, WHICH MEANS I MAY EARN A COMMISSION IF YOU CLICK A LINK AND MAKE A PURCHASE. FEEL FREE TO CHECK OUT MY DISCLOSURE POLICY FOR MORE DETAILS.

What’s going on with us?

Things are pretty nonstop here. When we aren’t actively farming, we’re planning and dreaming of what we want the farm to look like. Here’s a quick peek at what’s happening here.

Outside

Aaron is prepping the beds by checking pH levels, laying out landscape fabric, and using low tunnels to warm the beds.

Collins (does not at all) lend(s) a helping hand in the garden, while Samson looks on from the other side of the garden fence.

Inside

The seeds are starting to sprout under UV lights, and Aaron is converting a washing machine into a greens dryer.

All in All

It’s a lot of work, but we’re happy to have the opportunity to do it. Farming is challenging and rewarding, just like anything else worth doing.

The Method to the Madness

DISCLOSURE: THIS POST MAY CONTAIN AFFILIATE LINKS, WHICH MEANS I MAY EARN A COMMISSION IF YOU CLICK A LINK AND MAKE A PURCHASE. FEEL FREE TO CHECK OUT MY DISCLOSURE POLICY FOR MORE DETAILS.

Farming is like anything else: it’ll absorb as much time, energy, and money as you want to invest. The more you invest, the more success you’ll have…hopefully. Aaron and I are both school teachers, and we’ve used the past few years to figure out how to make farming fit into our lives. That fit has sometimes been a square peg in a round hole, but we’re committed to growing good food, so we persist. Part of making farming work for us means we need to strategically spread out the workload over the course of our off-season. Once spring rolls around, life becomes a whirlwind of chores, and there’s not much time to step back and take in the big picture.

The Obsession

Aaron has spent way too many hours so far this winter methodically mapping out our garden beds for the coming season. (This does not include the hours he’s spent ogling seed catalogues, by the way.) He’s applying the knowledge he’s gained through a Market Gardener Master Class facilitated by J.M. Fortier, a Permaculture Design program through Oregon State University, a C.A.S.E. certification (Curriculum for Agricultural Science Education) at Kentucky University, and the endless gardening podcasts he listens to. The man doesn’t mess around.

The Plan

The spreadsheet Aaron created to plan our crops is intricate and proactive. It includes important dates for sowing seeds, transplanting, fertilizing, cultivating, etc. He’s been going at it like a mad scientist for weeks now. Adhering to the measure-twice-cut-once philosophy, he’s hyper planning now so that we can more easily carry out the heavy lifting of farming in the spring and summer months when it’s harder to think on your toes.

The Rules

Crop planning around here follows a few rules:

1. The crops we plant in our 20 beds are scheduled in a 10 year rotation where a given crop of heavy feeders are followed by nitrogen-enhancing crops (the plant equivalent of dainty eaters—leafy greens).

2. Our crops are planted in clustered intervals so that they don’t all ripen at the same time.

3. Crops are planted as close to one another as possible in order to maximize output and eliminate space for weeds.

4. We don’t plant foods our kids refuse to eat. (Sorry, fennel.)

5. We respect the natural soil food web and therefore plant cover crops liberally. (You’re welcome, worms.)

The Application

Each season of farming teaches us something new. How best to enrich the soil through compost and natural fertilizers. Which weeds to let grow because they improve the land. Which crops people in our lives most enjoy. How to prevent the kids and dog from destroying the insect netting. There’s no end to learning when you recognize nature as your teacher. We use the winter months to harness our learned lessons from the previous growing season and apply them toward the next.

The Video

Watch the video below to hear a little bit about why we plan the beds the way we do.

CSA Coming Soon!

DISCLOSURE: THIS POST MAY CONTAIN AFFILIATE LINKS, WHICH MEANS I MAY EARN A COMMISSION IF YOU CLICK A LINK AND MAKE A PURCHASE. FEEL FREE TO CHECK OUT MY DISCLOSURE POLICY FOR MORE DETAILS.

Fail Better Farms is continuing to evolve as Aaron and I learn how to juggle the different components of farm life. We’ve decided the best model of produce sales for us is a CSA, so this coming growing season we’re seeking five households that are interested in joining us on this adventure.

What is a CSA?

Community Supported Agriculture is basically a subscription to the crops a farm has to offer. The customer pays a designated amount to become a member of the CSA. Then, throughout the growing season, the farmer provides the customer with weekly shares of the harvest. The customer benefits from the bounty and planning of the farmer, but also shares in any weeks that are less bountiful.

What’s in the works to make this happen?

• We recently ordered a hoop house to extend our growing season.

• Aaron built a bubbler, which we’ll use to clean fresh salad greens before bagging them for our customers.

• We’re working to create a cold storage room on property using a CoolBot. This way we’ll be able to store crops at peak condition for our customers.

What crops will be included in the CSA shares?

We’ll offer kale, broccoli, green cabbage, tomatoes, collard greens carrots, beets, turnips, sugar snap peas, eggplant, scallions, basil, yellow squash, cucumbers, green peppers, green beans, spring onion, salanova lettuce, and sweet potatoes.

Why are we only taking on 5 households?!

Plain and simple, we want to provide our customers with the best experience possible, and we can’t do that if we stretch ourselves too thin.

How can you learn more?

Check out our CSA Membership Agreement to learn more. If you’re interested in joining our CSA, complete the form at the bottom of the Membership Agreement.