Daring Drake Blog

We have completed fruit tree pruning and half of the small fruit pruning is done.  We’ll finish up the rest of the small fruits this week.  Hoping for some warm days for more sap!

Thanks to all the families who have signed up for our Fruit and duck egg CSA for this season.  The CSA is now full.  Please email to be placed on the 2014 waiting list.  We send out an email in early November offering shares to current members and folks on the waiting list.

Spending our days collecting and boiling sap, pruning, and making plans for spring planting.  The ducks and chickens are running around the orchard looking extremely happy.

Burned last winter’s fruit prunings this weekend.  The dry season last year was not conducive to raging flames.  Cider, fire & friends.

3-9-13

Our maple trees were tapped two weeks ago and we have been having fun doing daily bucket checks.  Idunn loves a big cup of sap.   John will prune the newer fruit trees today while maintaining the fire to boil down the sap.

John had a good time talking with folks at the CSA fair yesterday.  We have 4 shares left and don’t expect those to last long.  Thanks to all the local fruit fans!

Just a Taste will be featuring Daring Drake goose eggs on their menu this week.  We had one goose egg that tumbled to the kitchen floor twice without breaking open.  That egg became this morning’s omelette.  yum!

Spring must be around the corner.  The ducks are starting to lay like mad along with the chickens and for the first time at daring drake – goose eggs!  Two goose eggs make an awesome omelette for the three of us.  Let us know if you are interested in purchasing goose eggs.   We are also going to experiment with blowing out the eggs for pyskanka.

Daring Drake Farm is offering shares in their 2013 Fruit CSA.  Receive a diverse array of Daring Drake organic fruit for 20 weeks beginning mid-late June.

This is a fruit CSA for the adventurous culinary types!  For information:  http://daringdrake.com/csa/

What a season?!?!  By far, the most challenging growing season we have faced in our ten years of farming in the Finger Lakes.  I’ll skip over the lost crops, low yields, and potential weather disasters to address why Daring Drake duck eggs are so hard to come by this season.

When we began planting our orchard ten years ago we knew we would need all the help we could get in organically controlling pests.  We decided to raise a small flock of ducks – a Buff/Runner mix – to roam the orchard eating insects.  When we ate our first duck eggs, we were hooked.  We grew our flock of ducks and sold the eggs to support purchasing local, organic grains as supplemental feed for our waddling orchard workers.

Enter the winter of 2011-2012 – the mildest winter since we began raising ducks.  Our ducks consistently laid eggs the entire winter, the first season the girls skipped their January and February hiatus.  This was okay, it was nice to stock Greenstar with eggs all winter, but a duck will only lay so  many eggs per year and we knew production would be down slightly in the 2012 season.  Then, in June our neighbor’s dog got into our orchard and slaughtered a number of ducks, along with our laying and meat chickens.  That was quite a set-back.  More recently, we have had a very brazen fox snatching birds. All told, our flock is down 40% over last season.

We are spending the 2012 season rearing young birds to replace our duck flock, however it will not be until 2013 that this effort will be seen.  For the duck egg fans out there – absence makes the heart grow fonder.  Can’t wait until the 2013 eggs arrive!