Last Tuesday we had a school group visit our farm. The students wanted to help with a farm task, so they helped us harvest all of the late crop Jack-o-lanterns in the u-pick field. They carried them down from the fields and placed them in piles near the road. We thanked them for their help by letting each of them choose one of the pumpkins they harvested to take home with them on the school bus. Some of the pumpkins were almost too large for the kids to carry! They had a great time (and so did we)!

A local restaurant that features our produce called and needed more heirloom tomatoes. The girls made a quick run after we the farm store closed to deliver a box of freshly picked tomatoes for the restaurant's guests to enjoy for dinner that night.

We were almost out of our homemade fudge again, so we stayed late on Halloween night and made nearly 40 pounds of Chocolate Walnut and Pumpkin Pie fudge. We use our own walnuts grown on our farm. We have been getting more and more requests to ship our fudge. Friday we shipped several pounds of Pumpkin Pie fudge to Florida. It's rewarding to see how folks appreciate quality and fresh ingredients.

I spent the weekend baking in our farm store kitchen. I baked Snickerdoodles, Honey Ginger Cookies (using wildflower honey harvested from our farm and our own free-range brown eggs) and my newest culinary creation: Oatmeal Pumpkin Spice Cranberry White Chocolate Chip Cookies. I'm trying to come up with a shorter name :-). They've already been a big hit at the farm store. Yumm!

Saturday the girls worked on the olallieberry patch. Olallieberries are from the blackberry family. The old canes have to be cut off at the ground, and the new canes have to be tied up on trellis wire. Fruit is only born on one year old canes. It is a lot of hand labor, and the canes are thorny. Hopefully time spent on tender loving care now, will result in a bountiful crop of sweet delicious olalliberries next June.

Sunday I took care of customers at the farm store while the girls hauled a pickup load of pumpkins to the cows and Grandpa's pigs. In the cow pasture, they took great delight in taking the pumpkins to the top of the hill and rolling them down playing our own farm version of bowling. It's turned into an annual ritual. The cows adore pumpkins, and graze from pumpkin to pumpkin first eating the seeds, and then the entire pumpkin itself. Nothing is left but the stem. Nothing like a herd of contented cows and a pair of happy girls with grins bigger than a jack-o-lantern!

Halloween is behind us ... yet pumpkin season isn't over. Thanksgiving is still a few weeks away, which means folks are looking for sweet tasty pumpkin and winter squash varieties to make pies, soups, breads and all sorts of other holiday goodies. That reminds me, a need to up-load some new recipes and up-date our current harvest section on our website.

Monday the girls spent the morning harvesting culinary pumpkins in the front field and brought them to the farm store to sell. We brought in some late season winter squash (mostly Butternut and Spaghetti), a few Cinderellas, lots of Baby Bears (make great soup bowls), and some One Too Manys (white with bright orange stripes). Hopefully we'll get the rest of the field finished tomorrow.

Tonight the girls went to a Young Farmers and Ranchers meeting in San Luis Obispo. They are looking forward to meeting other young people involved in agriculture and who farm for a living. Farmers face so many complex issues today. Land use, building codes, environmental health, water quality, erosion, insurance, encroaching development, etc. The list goes on and on! All of them with a fee, permit, license or $$$ signs attached. The Young Farmers and Ranchers keep abreast of the myriad of issues facing farmers, and the girls hope not only to learn, but to educate others about the many issues that must be overcome if small family farms are going to be preserved in our local community.

My it's late! I'll try and pop in again next week and let you know what took place on the farm.

Joy