Boxes of cheeping cheepers
Here at BOTL Farm, it’s baby chick time! Our chick brooder (farmer jargon for ‘a place to keep baby birds at their ideal temperature’) is one of our sweet 1970s repurposed RVs. It’s a cheep (hehe), mobile way to provide both indoor shelter when the birds need it as well as pasture access as soon as they’re ready. The brooder is heated with a combination of red heat lamps, infrared heaters, and lots of insulating hemp bedding. We have heat sensors, smart electric switches, and an old cellphone that we use as a chick cam. It’s pretty fancy, if we do say so ourselves. Also, we idiotically run all of this during the coldest months of the winter. Despite the fact that the baby birds require a consistently 95 F environment, we’re out here in November with a bunch of babies running around. What’s wrong with us?
The past few years we’ve gotten chicks in December and that was our plan again this year (you know we love A Good Plan). The chicks grow for six months before they start laying eggs, so December babies start laying in May and it coincides with the beginning of our busy summer market season. Recently, we committed to doing a winter farmers market (December to March at Wooster Square in New Haven, CT!) and we decided not to wait until December to get chicks since we’ll be doing a big market over winter. Instead, we asked our chick supplier to get us our yearly order ASAP and they came in last week. Luckily we’re old hats at getting everything ready for chicks and could do it on short notice: brooder cleaned up, set up with electronics, fixed everything that broke last year, patched all the latest leaks, and ordered chick feed. We picked the day-old chicks up in their little chick boxes which are surprisingly loud when full of cheeping cheepers.
Solar dreams come true
Since we were baby farmers, we’ve wanted a big, beautiful solar system. When we were searching for property to farm on, we looked for ones that already had solar. It didn’t work out, but when we planned our barn we made sure it had a large south-facing roof so eventually we could hopefully afford to fill the whole thing with panels. We had priced out solar many times over the years, but never had the capital to secure this particular dream. Now, with a few years of electric bills that reflect brooding chicks in the middle of winter, electrifying miles of electric fence, keeping meat in tens of chest freezers, and having an upright display freezer in our farm store, we felt the fiduciary imperative to install solar ASAP. We committed a little over a year ago, but we had a long road of applying for grants, waiting for grant review teams, watching the grant landscape change dramatically, giving up on grants, and funding it ourselves.
We’re grateful Earthlight (the installer) was patient with us on this process and honored a frighteningly old contract (13 months!) to install solar for us last week. It’ll be a few weeks of inspections before we can flip the switch, but we’re stoked to see this particular dream come true.
We’re a sausage… machine
Here’s a riddle: if your vacuum has a bunch of hair caught in it and you remove the blockage, what are you? That’s right, a vacuum cleaner, haha. Similarly, if sausage is meat stuffed into a casing (farmer jargon for intestine), what happens when you eat meat?
Hilarious. One of us is still furloughed from her day job and has extra time to devote to farm stuff so we’ve recently started referring to ourselves as a Sausage… Machine. We’ve set a record for the number of hours in a month we’ve spent at the commercial kitchen, dutifully stuffing meat into casings. Not only have we been cranking out our normal (delicious!) bratwurst and breakfast patties, but we’ve lost track of what stop on the Sausage Adventure we’re on because they’ve been selling out so fast! We have a bit more of the Maple Breakfast Links (omg those tiny lamb casings were awful to work with and we’re far from sure we’re ever going to make breakfast links again) but the Spicy Fennel is gone.
Aaaand, we had an additional (possibly bad?) idea to make our first-ever red sauce/meat sauce/pasta sauce. After hem-ing and haw-ing, we decided to call it Zesty Pork Pasta Sauce. We sourced tomatoes, onions, garlic, and parsley from our local farm buds (thanks Willow Valley, Four Root, Waldingfield, Still Life, and Assawaga!) and combined it with our pork sausage in a bubbly, slow simmer. If only we still sold our meatballs, this would be a decadent meat match!
Complexities and opportunities: running an online store
We love feedback. Someone told us once that feedback is a gift and we wonder if they’ve ever spent more than 10 minutes reading reviews on the internet, but we often get thoughtful, honest feedback from our customers and it helps us improve our business. This month we’ve gotten a record-high number of orders from our online store, but we’ve also gotten a record amount of feedback that the store is confusing, specifically the pickup and payment options. This winter we’re going to transition to a different store platform so it’ll work (hope hope hopefully) more intuitively, but it will offer many of the same options we currently offer. So let’s try to clear up a thing or three.
Q. What does the self-serve option mean? Can I show up whenever I want and shop?
A. If you’re looking to show up and shop, it needs to be during our farm store hours which are Tuesdays noon-2pm and Saturdays 1-3pm. The self-serve option requires placing an online order and it means you can pickup anytime between 8am and 8pm on a certain day, but we will not be there to meet you. You pick the day during checkout.
Q. Great, but I want to pay cash or check because ya’ll whine so much about credit card fees. Can I order online and pay cash/check?
A. Thanks for asking and we appreciate your dedication to helping us save on credit card fees. Yes, you can pay cash or check when you order online. Choose the cash or check option at checkout and the platform won’t ask you for any credit card payment info. You bring cash or check when you pickup and pay then. Further details will be in the order confirmation emails that are long, boring, and no one reads.
Q. Awesome. I’m ready to order but I need animal feed or bacon or eggs right now. Like, today. Same-day. Your stupid online store won’t let me pick today as an option?
A. Right, that’s a feature, not a bug. Orders must be placed by 6pm the day before pickup so we have time to process, pick, pack, and prepare the order. This means that you can’t select same-day pickup at checkout.
Q. Okay, but I really want some animal feed or bacon or eggs right now. I’ll do anything.
A. Got it. We have an expedited order policy for that. Head over to read the full policy here. Spoiler alert, it costs extra and we may not be able to fulfil the order if we’re busy farming or have (maybe?) left the farm (together?) for the day.
Q. I have more questions! You haven’t even covered the question I think about at 3am!
A. Respond to this email and ask away. We always read and reply. Or show up to our next AFA (Ask a Farmer Anything) event and ask.
Find Us
On farm store: Every Tuesday noon - 2pm, every Saturday 1 - 3pm. Pre-order
On farm self pickup: Everyday 8am - 8pm. Pre-order only
Wooster Square, New Haven CT: This market runs every Saturday from 9am - 1pm until the end of November. We will be there every other week. Dates we’ll be there in November: November 08 and November 22. Pre-order
Assawaga Farm Market, Putnam CT: This market runs every Saturday 9am - noon until the Saturday before Thanksgiving. We will be there every other week. Dates we’ll be there in November: November 01 and November 15. Pre-order
Sturbridge Monthly Winter Dropoff, Sturbridge MA: This is a once-a-month dropoff starting October and ending February. Location is Deep Roots Distillery in the old mill building at 559 Main Street, Sturbridge, MA. The November dropoff date is November 15. Pickup hours are noon - 8pm. Pre-order only
Ask a Farmer Anything, Virtual Question Sessions: Friday November 07 from 8 - 9am and Monday November 17 from noon - 1pm. Registration free but required
It's too many dates! Save me!
Want to get these blogs in your inbox? Sign up for our newsletter.