tahlequahfarmersmarket.com Blog

February 14th 2010

Administrator — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 18:13:09 +0000

Today is February, 15th 2010. I haven’t written in a long time, because of the foul weather. Those spoons in the persimmon seeds were soooo, right. We’ve had more snow this year, than any year since 1988.

THE REAL REASON I WANTED TO WRITE TODAY, WAS TO SHARE THIS; Yesterday was Valentines Day and I wanted to do something special for my sweetie, so I made truffles. I used Farm Fresh eggs just laid that morning, some Oklahoma native pecans that I traded okra for this Summer, fresh churned, local butter, and semi sweet chocolate chips from the store in town.

I’ve got to admit – I’m not much of a candy eater, to the best of my knowlegde, I ‘ve never eaten a truffle before. To tell you the truth, this country boy always thought truffles were just some kind of mushroom over in France or somewhere. Who knew they were chocolate candy? But they were a sensation with my Wife! Definitely, an “Atta boy” for me! And easy to make too!

Three of the six ingredients grow right here on the farm, or over in the neighbor’s pasture (they own a dairy). This Summer, I traded 20 pounds of okra to another neighbor for 8 pounds of pecans. The eggs are laid by our chickens out back of the house.

The recipe is simple:

2 cups semi sweet chocolate chips

1/2 cup butter, softened

2 egg yolks

3 Tablespoons cream cheese

1/3 cup Amareetto liqueur

1 – 1/2 cups finely chopped pecans (don’t skimp on the pecans)

Melt chocolate chips in the top of a double boiler over low heat. (I just made my own double boiler, by placing a smaller pan inside a larger pan of boiling water).

When chocolate melts, remove from heat, stir in softened butter one Tablespoon at a time.

Add egg yolks to the mixture, and beat well with a mixer. (It will begin to thicken a little).

Add cream cheese, and Amaretto, and mix until smooth. Cover and chill until firm (about 2 hours).

Spoon out mixture, and shape into 3/4 inch balls (about the size of large marbles). Roll in cookie tray of finely chopped pecans. Set aside on waxed paper lined cookie tray. Refrigerate for about 1 hour. Makes about 40 or so truffles.

Serve in a good sized soup bowl, lined with decorative red wrapping paper. Cut paper in a circle a little larger than the bowl. Sscallop the edge of paper with scissors. Fold in half, quarters eighths, sixteens, and unfold, to create a cone shape, and place in the bottom of the bowl. Fill with chilled truffles, Scewer a pair of the chilled truffles with two red toothpicks, and set out a brandy or wine glass of Amaretto to use as dipping sauce. Enjoy!

See you this Spring at the Tahlequah Farmers Market!

Remember: Dry Creek Farm, Moody’s, Oklahoma.

Oganic Farm processing Kitchen

Administrator — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 05:50:10 +0000

I truely apollogize for the sporatic way that I have been keeping up with my blogging duties since November, but I have been spending every waking moment building an Organic Farm processing Kitchen by my-self from the ground up ( the only one of its kind in the State of Oklahoma) I hope to have it completed by April 15th of 2010, but as funds are short, I may not be able to achieve this ambitious goal on schedule without help to buy more materials to carry on construction. We break our Organic Garden with a mule named Jeff and dig our water lines by hand with a shovel. We use no weed killers, chemical fertilizers, or pesticides. It is our belief that what goes in is what you get out. We are fortunate in that we are able to farm in the Dry Creek valley and because of this, our soils are rich and deep. Our rich soils are amended only by the use of turnip greens and litter collected from the roosts of our free range chickens – who by the way, turn their noses up at chicken scratch and laying pellets, in favor of the earth worms and beetles they scratch up through all day trecks in the leafy woods. Their eggs tend to rip egg cartons upon attemps to close them over the abnormally large country eggs; a thing that always amazes our customers. As we are a small farm, we cannot afford a tractor, and so, we do all our labor by hand via horse and mule power. This takes an incredible amount of effort, but the sound of tugs and trace chains and the rising dust of freshly broken ground are so incredibly Earthy, that it is somehow worth every blister, just to experience this spiritual connection between beast, man, and Earth. It has been said that, ” A man who does a thing he truely loves, never works a day in his life. If a task is truely enjoyable, it is never a burden.

Christmas Turnips

Administrator — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 19:00:53 +0000

Wednesday morning it was 5 degrees in the garden, so when someone at church this morning asked me if I still had turnips, I said,”I don’t know?” I just didn’t see how they could have survived the freeze, Our water line didn’t survive it! After Church services I walked out to the turnip patch to check on them and was pleasantly surprised to see that, even though the tops were burned back by the near zero temps, the actual turnips looked pretty good! I picked about 15 of them for our Church diner tonight. One of them is about 2 1/2 pounds!

December 13, 2009

Administrator — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 18:49:53 +0000

Double yoke eggs: Supposedly, chickens will lay off of egg laying when the days get shorter in December, but our hens seem to have picked up the pace. Now we are getting double yoke eggs every so often. We have been letting them free range all Summer, when I first bought them scratch this Fall, they would not even eat it. Now that the green things are getting harder to find, they finally started to peck at it very lightly. Last week, I bought them some Purina Layena laying pellets, they would not eat that either, until I dicovered from a neighbor that they like it better if you mix it with water first. They are still free ranging, but they seem to like the Layena mixed with egg shells from breakfast and grease, with warm water; they certainly deserve the special attention after the double yoke eggs!

Hey guys, I really appreciate all the ginuine interest in the Farmers Market site. We are currently pulling turnips and enjoying the last of the garden before we till it under for the Winter.

Administrator — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 16:10:47 +0000

Soil Conservation

Administrator — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:50:42 +0000

We, as organic farmers and ranchers, think, almost constantly of ways to improve the soil by planting late season crops such as; oats, crimson clover, rye, or Austrian Winter peas, to be plowed under in the early Spring. This allows for regeneration of the soil’s nutrients (much the same way that God regenerates his fields by freeze killing Summer grasses, then flattening them with the weight of heavy, wet, snows and strong winds, so that they will come in full contact with the soil to be eaten by micro-organisms and worms, returning and replenishing nutrition to the soil, by rotting and decomposing them back into the organic matter that made them.
I noticed this morning, it was cloudy and rather dark still by 7:40am. My family had left for school already; my wife to college, my kids to grade school and to high school. I also noticed that nearly every light in the house was still on; for the seasons are changing and the days are shortening to the point that it is no longer light enough to see in the early morning when they are getting around.
I was raised in the Nixon, Ford, and Carter, era. President Carter started a great movement to conserve energy. I remember the orange stickers that were issued to cover the school light switches, that read,

“Turn off the Lights when leaving the room”.

Shouldn’t we, as conservation wary farmers, be aware also, that we are becoming very slack in our conservation of energy?
I turn the lights off all over the house, almost every day. Sometimes I miss turning off the outside lights until I see them burning in the middle of the afternoon when I come back from the fields. I try to drill into my family’s conscience that we have an electric bill that is eating our lunch and popping the bag, but they don’t seem to really take heed that a penny saved by not wasting energy, can be spent on better things. I would wager that the pennies saved in a year could buy a new couch. The Bible says, “It’s the little foxes that spoil the grapes”. Little things like, ‘not turning off the lights’, will slowly, but surely take a toll on your families income. Living conservatively is good for the Planet, good for society, and good for our children. If we are not good stewards of the land and not good stewards of our households that are small things, then why should God trust us with the big things?
I think we are all good stewards in our hearts, but maybe we need to make our minds aware of it. If we think collectively to make a conscious effort to conserve, our Planet will be a better place because of it.

Hickory Horned Devil

Administrator — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 15:00:31 +0000

Fall, State Fair weather is officially here when you see the Hickory Horned Devil crawling on the ground. If you see him before October, it’s going to be an early Winter. This week end marked the first sightings of the Hickory Horned Devil crawling on the ground in Cherokee County. It’s only September, so you’d better dig in; between all the persimmon seeds saying spoons forever and the Hickory Horned Devil crawling, looking for a borrow before the end of September – LOOK OUT! In Cherokee County, we’ve gotten a little over a foot of snow in one storm pretty regularly every ten years since 1967. In March of ‘67 it snowed a foot during the school day. In January 1977 Tahlequah set a State record in one night, with a 20 below zero morning and 14 inches of dry snow. In 1987 we had another 12 inch snow just after we came back from a construction job in Malone, New York. That was the year a man from Texas won the Hulbert Tough Man Contest, because no one else was stupid enough to sled down Boston’s Hill naked. It’s been a long time since we’ve had another snow like that, the nearest thing to it was in 2000, but it was only 8 inches deep and melted quickly. We are WAY!!! over due for a big one!
READ ALL ABOUT THE HICKORY HORNED DEVIL ON ANIMAL PLANET.COM or just Google – hickory horned devil. It’s really cool; the Hickory Horned Devil is a little known, local resident of Tahlequah, who is only about 45 days old right now, but he’s big as a hot dog and blue green, with two to five sets of black tipped, orange, spiked, barbed, horns. He lives in a tree, but in the Fall he crawls on the ground, looking for a burrow. He looks terribly mean, but he can’t really hurt you. If you see him, try to make sure he finds a soft, leafy place to dig a hole for the Winter and maybe you’ll see him again next year. Remember, October 3rd, 2009 is the
Tahlequah Farmer’s Market Fall Festival. I would like to hear your family’s version of the persimmon seed Winter weather forecast and hear some good caterpillar stories too!

Persimmon seed Lore

Administrator — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 14:10:14 +0000

We just got back from a family reunion at Wildwood. We always crack persimmon seeds this time of year to see what Winter is going to be like. We cracked ten in a row and they all came out SPOONS.
In our family, Spoons mean: a lot of snow – cold wet Winter. Some of the old timers call the spoon a scoop shovel because you’ll be shoveling a lot of snow before spring.
Forks mean: It’s going to be a cold, dry Winter, drought conditions, like pitching dry hay.
Knife means: December will be so foggy that you’ll have to cut through it with a knife, then in January the cold winds will cut through you like a knife. From what the persimmon seeds say, “It looks like we’ll be in for a lot of heavy snow this next Season”.

Hickory Chicken – Hen of the Woods – Weshie

Administrator — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 13:41:56 +0000

September 24th 2009,
All this rain (15 inches in three weeks) and cold temperatures
(52 degrees in the mornings and 72 at noon) have made the Hen of the woods mushroom come out a month early! Every year about the first hard rain in October, there is a big mushroom hunt up and down the Illinois river where we live. This year, we were kind of wondering if this early cool weather would change things in the mushroom cycle. and as we soon found out by going a short ways into the woods at Dry Creek Farm, IT DID !!! My youngest Son; Joshua, who is going to be eleven in two weeks was soon yelling, “Dad! Dad! Come here!” Josh had found two huge Hen of the Woods Mushrooms within 100 feet of our house. We live right in the edge of the woods, where deer, squirrels, turkey, and rabbits, really play havoc with our gardens, but on the other hand, it sure is peaceful to walk out the back door and right into nature. Our Dry Creek is running clear and pristine this morning. It is fed from a huge spring about a half mile from here and has washed away our foot bridge again. I had to salvage the remains of the sawmill 2×12s to cross the creek to see where Josh was. The Hen of the Woods he had found were about ten pounds each. They are a mushroom delicacy that grows in the Fall of the year. They are ruffled like the feathers of a mad hen with baby chicks. The Cherokee call them Weshi, some people call them Hickory Chicken, Some call them Hen of the Woods. This mushroom is very large and grows on dead and rotten hard woods like oak and hickory. These two were growing on the floor of the woods in the long rotted remains of many oak and hickory trees that have washed up into drifts along the Dry Creek. Chert and flint rock are more common than dirt in this area, but the mushrooms are about twice the size of football helmets! If you are a mushroom enthusiast, don’t wait until October this year, because Hen of the Woods is here a month early! For some good pictures go to Mushroom Hunters Club. com
Fall is definitely Here, see you at the Tahlequah Farmer’s Market Fall Fest – October 3rd

Fall Round-up

Administrator — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 01:51:24 +0000

We were blessed this afternoon by the arrival of a guest from the State of Arkansas; Roy Ratliff came to visit today. You may have seen him on the road on the way to Moody’s, he drives a homemade wagon, painted on all sides with the words, “ROY’S STAGE LINE”. It took Roy 5 days to get here from Arkansas, as one of his horses threw a shoe and he needed repairs. We put him up at Bill Trammel’s place and went right to work. He also needed a new front window; a dump truck with a limb hanging out had gone by him and the hanging limb broke Roy’s window Payne, windshield out. We fixed him a new one from Plexi-glass. Since he was staying near by, the folks at Dry Creek Farm fixed him up a road trip basket of goodies for his horses, and his three Bantam chickens. Around here; you can’t just drive five days from Arkansas in a wagon without stopping by a Tahlequah Farmer’s Market Vendor for a road trip basket of fresh okra, radishes, turnip greens, tomatoes, potatoes, bell peppers, onions, and a complimentary bottle of “GREAT BALLS OF FIRE” pepper sauce to wash it down. This is the second time Roy has visited this year; he was here back in June. We really enjoy his visits. We are so blessed by God with his abundance, that we are able to bless others with the over flow!