The girls are getting spring fever and laying more and more eggs each day.  We’ll be stocking Greenstar on Monday, March 1st and the T-Burg Shursave later in the week.  Eggs are for sale at the farm, just call ahead. 

New to duck eggs?  The yolks are proportionally larger than a chicken’s, rich and flavorful.  We enjoy them just about every day scrambled with salsa, fried with goat cheese, and omelets with sauted garlic and onions.  The large yolk is prized for baking and we wouldn’t even consider a waffle recipe without them.

The pruning crew at work on some of the older apple trees, we are still working on the dwarf apple trees.  We have finished pruning the pears and the limb spreading needed on these trees to develop good scaffold limbs.  The stone fruit and ribes (currants and gooseberries) are next on our hit list. 

Idunn loves her frozen black currants and blueberries. She takes them straight from the freezer.

In the spirit of growing the unusual we are expanding our varities of hot peppers. Last year we offered the orange Habanero (300,000 Scoville units) – weak on the heat scale compared to what we are planting this year. Just a few varieties we plan to grow in addition to the Habanero: Trinidad Scorpion (1 million Scoville units), Bahut Jolokia from India (1.5 million Scoville units), Yucatan White (500,000 Scoville units) + a few others.

Send heat freaks our way in August. Hot peppers are free if eaten in front of John at the market – must be 18 or older!

Hot peppers freeze and pickle well – a great way to enjoy them all winter long.

CSA members will be offered a choice of hot peppers (yup, peppers are fruit) or non-Bell sweet types.

Daring Drake’s Fruit CSA is full for the 2010 season. We will create a waiting list for folks interested in joining for 2011 when we add a few additional shares.

In yesterday’s orchard tour we were pleased to find the rabbit damage was to a minimum (so far). The rabbits spared our newer currant plantings unlike last year. They did manage to prune some of the older apple trees for us.