CHICKEN

We are going to be bringing a new batch of chickens to market this weekend. There are only 60 available. Make sure you get your order in. Our next batch after this will not be until November!

We are accepting preorders, but they must be in by 8 pm tomorrow! If orders are not picked up by noon then they go back up for sale!

In other words, get to market early!!!!

Thank you!!!

So as I have been writing this blog for however long now. There have been times where I wondered, "Is anyone reading this? Should I continue to do this?"

I got my answers this week! Thank you so much to all of you who read my blog and love it! I am glad that you guys enjoy the stories, pictures, announcements and sometimes silly off the wall posts. It is nice to know that you all are truly interested on life on the farm.

Thank you!

Apple Butter

Every year we get apples to sell at market. We generally sell most of them but every now and then we get some that we don't sell. I then try to figure out some way to use them. Normally it is by making apple pie, applesauce and apple cake.

This year I was trying to think of some way to turn it back into another product that we could have to offer. So began my online search. I found this great recipe for Apple butter in a crock pot! I was so excited.

As a kid I remember going to my grandma's house and the fresh biscuits and bread would be there and the always delicious apple butter. I could not eat just 1 piece of bread with apple butter on it. I could have eaten the apple butter with a spoon. Sometimes I did of course when she wasn't looking. She may have known though and just ignored it. I am not sure. Either way it was delicious.

Why did I not think of this before?

So tonight Eric and I peeled, cored, and chopped a whole bunch of apples and put them in the crock pot. We added sugar, ground cloves, ground cinnamon and a touch of salt. They are now sitting in the crock pot cooking.

The aroma in the air is almost too much to handle. It smells like fall!

What are some of your favorite things about fall? Some of your favorite recipes and traditions?

Farmer's Breakfast?

What is a farmer's breakfast?

After posting about our fall festival, I have had some questions as to what a farmer's breakfast is. If you Google it, you will come up with all these recipes for farmer's breakfast. Different people do different things.

What it means to us is..............a breakfast made with all local farm products. This includes the eggs, sausage, peppers, onions, biscuits and whatever else we decide to include! I am in the process of still talking to some farms to find out who we are going to get what from, but when I figure it all out I will update on that.

Many of the people we do market with have the stuff that we need. So most of you will know the people/businesses we get the product from. We also hope to have some stuff from the different farmers for sale at the festival as well.

So I guess what I mean to say is...........if you want to know....come to the festival to find out!!!!!!!! : ) See you there! October 9th and 10th from 9 am to 11 am for the breakfast but the festival goes to 4 pm. Be there!

1st Annual Cross Creek Farm Fall Festival

So this morning we were having breakfast and talking business. Which is what usually happens on Sundays. We had talked about doing some sort of fall sale/event. As we kept talking things progressed into...maybe we should do some games, free candy for the kids.....farmer's breakfast! We all thought it was a great idea. Then dad says, "Well what do we call it?"

And so began the idea of the CROSS CREEK FARM FALL FESTIVAL!!!!

This is not my photo but I thought it was a gorgeous picture!

October 9th and 10th from 9am-4pm. 
It will begin with a farmer's breakfast from 9am-11am $5.00 for adults and $3.00 for kids 10 and under. It will continue with games and activities for the kids. There will be pumpkins, squashes, apples, dried herbs, baked goods and much more for sale.


Please mark your calenders and come join us! Lots of fun for all, not to mention a beautiful fall drive!

A Long one...

I will start off by saying that those who follow Cross Creek Farm on facebook. I am sorry it took me so long to post this. I know I have been saying I was going to post it for a while.

Our big helper!

To start, we went through the tomato field after the torrential rains and flooding that happened in our area to salvage what we could. We actually thought we would have lost more than we did. When we started picking we were thinking that we had a lot. Well as we kept going we noticed that there were still a ton of green ones.Which means we will end up picking a lot this week.

Now for those of you who have been our customers for a while know that a couple years ago we had an early frost. It affected a lot of the farmer's tomatoes. Not ours. The year that everyone had blight, we were one of the last to get it. This year when everyone in or around our town has some sort of disease and lost all their tomatoes, we have not.

Eric and I have been trying to figure out what we have been doing. Or shall I say lack thereof. As a small farm with a lot going on, 2 children under the age of 3 and to many different projects, the weeds tend to grow very quickly and out of control. Now I am not saying "do this at home." But that is the only thing that we can come up with that has protected our tomatoes. The year of the early frost, the weeds around the tomatoes got frosted on the tips but the tomatoes remained untouched. The year of the blight the weeds were tall and we were one of the last to get it in our area. This year, Stoughton's farm lost their tomatoes, Iron Kettle farm lost theirs, our neighbors tomatoes have some sort of disease and ours "Thank God," remain ok.

Heirlooms, 4 Mt fresh and 4 Romas on the bottom

Now this is not scientifically proven, it is just our "theory!"

With that being said, if you are looking to order tomatoes and/or fruit get your orders in now. The season is starting to wind down and things will go fast! We go to Cornell Orchards to pick up our fruit for market every Friday. Get your orders in by Thursday and we will get it for you.

On to HERBS:

This is where our great news begins! I guess I talked it up a little bit too much on Facebook. People at market were asking what it was. At least I know you are paying attention! : ) So here it is and I hope you are not all disappointed.

As you all know, our dried herb shakers have taken off. We decided to go wholesale with them this year since they went so well at winter market. We first approached Cornell Orchards and they are now carrying them in their store. Their order was for 120 herb shakers.

We then talked to Stoughton's Farm in Newark Valley about carrying them. Now I had finally got some of our stock bumped up thinking, it's only Stoughton's I don't think that they will order a ton. Well I was wrong. They ordered 212 herb shakers. So all week we were going crazy trying to get their order together. But the good news is is now you can get our Herb shakers at Stoughton's Farm.

I am also hoping that by next week I will have enough so that we can take them to Iron Kettle Farm which has already agreed to take them.

We have been taking some to Ithaca Farmer's market. I have not been able to keep up with the shakers to be able to bring them to Otsiningo farmer's market.

We also have finally released the first of many to come seasonings! We released our Italian Seasoning and our Lemon Lime Fish Seasoning. I will have a poultry seasoning and a Thai seasoning that I will hopefully be getting out within the next couple weeks.

CHICKENS:

We will be sending our next batch of chickens to the butcher on September 29th. Which means we will have them at market starting on October 1st. Please feel free to order your's ahead of time.

Our next batch of little ones are starting to get bigger. It is starting to get colder, which is not very good for little ones. The power went out on Friday night at 10pm. Of course it was one of the colder nights we have had so far. Eric had to run down to the barn and get the generator and bring it up here so we could hook the heat lamps up so they would not be cold.

So needless to say it has been a long busy week. We have not had to deal with as much as some of you have with the flooding and all but we are crazy busy. But the kids are in bed, I am exhausted and I am going to head to bed. I hope you all have a great weekend and thank you to those who came out and supported the Otsiningo Farmer's Market and it's vendors.

OTSINIGO PARK FARMER'S MARKET

We will be at Otsiningo Park this weekend. The head of parks and recreation said that the park is a little dirty, but that they have cleaned the area where we have market! SO I hope we see you there!

I will be posting another update with photos and some great news later today! I just wanted to announce that we would be there so you could plan accordingly to come visit us!

Farmer's helping each other out.

We were just told recently that the Downtown Binghamton Farmer's market is extending an invitation out to all farmer's who markets were affected by the flood and they aren't able to go to come to Downtown Binghamton's Market. This is a thoughtful gesture. Many farms were not just affected by the flood on their own farm limiting what they have to sell but the market that they normally sold at has been cancelled until further notice or shut down all together for the season.

I know for us we did not get flooded on the farm, but we did not have Otsiningo Market last weekend and we are not sure if we will be having it this weekend. As farmers that is basically our only source of income is markets. Lucky for us we go to Ithaca Market which was not affected by the flood that much. I cannot even imagine the farmers that have lost their markets and have no where to sell their product. That is if they still have product to sell and didn't loose everything in the flood.

Updates are coming in slowly and we should know by Thursday whether we will have Otsiningo Market or not this weekend. As soon as we receive news on it I will post it here and our facebook page as soon as possible. And unfourtunately we do not have much to sell here at the stand at the house. A lot of our tomatoes were split and ruined by the rain. We have quite a few green ones still that we are waiting to turn red. We have salvaged some second tomatoes as well. And we will always be able to get some fruit from Cornell so if anyone is interested in second tomatoes or fruit from Cornell and would like to place an order we will gladly see what we can do. We also still have lots of eggs. Being that we didn't have market last weekend we have quite a few. If you are in the need for eggs please don't hesitate to stop or call the house to get some. You can email me as well. crosscreekfarmfamily@yahoo.com

I wish you all the best of luck and hope that you are recovering well. If anyone needs some help please let us know.

Picking up the pieces

Now that the flood waters have kind of subsided, things are starting to slowly work their way to normal. Even though we did not get flooded it has affected us as far as where to get food, gas and that type of stuff.  But we are starting this week off with a "bang."

Because of the rain we have quite a few tomatoes that we have to go through to see what we can salvage. We are going to try to get some boxes of second tomatoes together for sale. If you are interested please let us know. Either via email crosscreekfarmfamily@yahoo.com or facebook.  We are also going to be getting a load of peaches and things in this week. It is getting towards the end of market season so if you want your fresh fruit for canning, storing, or eating, you need to let us know a head of time if you want a large quantity.

We had our last batch of baby chicks for the season arrive the day the flood started. We have 300 little chicks running around! Our next batch to be butchered is going to be in about 2 weeks. We will have chicken again at that point.

Rabbits, we have quite a few that are going to be processed this week. If you want to stock your freezer, now is the time to do it.

Please remember we always accept pre-orders for market as well. Just make sure your order is in by friday night at 8 pm. Then you need to pick up your order by noon at market or else it goes back up for sale!

Flooding, Devastation and Friends!

Aerial view of Owego.

As many of you know there has been a very devastating flood in and around our area. Appalachin, Binghamton, Candor, Catatonk, Conklin, Sidney, Whitney point, Castle Creek, Nichols and Owego all got flooded with water. It will be days, weeks and possibly months before all of this gets cleaned up and worked out. My heart goes out to all the people affected by the flood.

I am very grateful that we live on a hill. We did not have any damage or anything. Besides just rain. We took a drive through Candor and Catatonk area and stopped at Iron Kettle to check on our farmer friends. They only had a little bit of water and only lost some products nothing compared to some. We know that some of our farmer friends down in Windsor got flooded really bad as well. We were told that Binghamton Urban Farm also got flooded to the point that they will not have any fall crops. :( We are so sorry for you all!

I am sure some of you readers got it as well. This has been heartbreaking to say the least. But if there is anything that we can do please let us know and we will try to help out the best we can. We have a ton of eggs if people are looking for eggs. I know some grocery stores are out. We have some rabbit meat and some tomatoes if anyone needs some of that stuff.

This is Main St- Grocer store, drug store, insurance
company and gas station after water receded. The gas station
was flooded as well that is the parking lot I took the picture from.

The small town right near us (Newark Valley) had some flooding as well. It was like a river was running down Main St. The highschool was flooded and the only grocery store in town had water in it rumored 5 ft high. This is very sad and hard for a small community like ours that doesn't normally expect this type of disaster to recover from. There is only 2 gas stations in our town and 1 was completely flooded and the other was fine but I am sure will possibly be running out of gas soon. We can go to Ithaca or Cortland for food and groceries, some have traveled down to Hooper Rd I heard and the grocery store was open there but picked through pretty good.

Bank parking lot with auto shop after water receded.

Some people do not see the whole picture when it comes to this. Not only did it affect the people's homes that got flooded, but it will be awhile before the businesses recover and have the necessities that are needed. We stopped in Candor to get gas yesterday and saw a couple that was traveling and was filling gas cans because they were not sure when the next gas station that would be in operation was.

It breaks my heart to see some of the devastation on people's faces. The hurt the pain of losing everything. It is just something I can't describe.

We still have not heard a lot about Nichols and we have a farmer friend who lives there that last we had heard  was under 7 ft of water. We heard that  on Wednesday I believe and have not received any other news. We are concerned hoping they are ok.  The waters that are receding here right now are headed for that direction. I read a comment on Facebook that the news people put on stating that they cannot report on what they can not get to and at this time they can't get to Nichols to say what is going on. We praying for everyone in the devastation.

It is amazing however that we have not heard about deceased or majorly injured at this time. It is unbelievable that a disaster of this nature has not taken lives thus far. If it has and we have not heard about it I am truly sad and sorry for those families.

National Guard here to help.

I found some pictures through news and friends that I thought help show the devastation.They are just unbelieveable. We are praying for all and hope that things recover quickly!

RABBIT MEATLOAF

Yes you saw right, we had rabbit meatloaf last night for dinner. We had a few older rabbits that needed to be butchered so we kept them for ourselves and Dad ground them into rabbit burger. We were going to have burgers but then someone said rabbit meatloaf -or- rabloaf. Dad and mom also made some unfried (baked) rabbit pieces (loin and legs).

It was amazingly delicious and moist. Eric Jr devoured it asking for more numerous times. Julianna even enjoyed it.

I will have to say that it is not as cool as the Rabbit buffalo wing that a customer of ours made from our rabbit. And I wish he would make for me! Check it out on our facebook page. But this was very enjoyable and warming on a cold rainy day!

So my tasty Tuesday recipe is going to be Rabbit meatloaf.

RABBIT MEATLOAF

1lb ground rabbit meat
bread crumbs
1 egg
rosemary
garlic
onions
poultry seasoning
Homemade tomato sauce

Bake at 350 for 1 hour.

We also had freshly picked green beans from dad's pole bean plants! They were delicious. I absolutely love that we can eat everything pretty much from what we grow ourselves.

I still plan on making my own hasenpfeffer this winter. So hopefully you will see more recipes and posts like this about our rabbit.

Or even when our next batch of chickens and cornish hens are ready we will have a dinner of them and post that on here!

The Fruit is coming in!

This week at market, we had a wide spread of fruit. Cornell has had overwhelming fruit coming in. We had seedless grapes, peaches, prune plums, red and green pears, Gala apples, Sansa apples, Ginger gold apples and we know there is more coming this week!

We dropped off our first order of Cross Creek Herb shakers to Cornell Orchards. We have a wide variety of herbs there. This gives you the opportunity to not have to wait for market to be able to buy them. anytime you would like to buy them you can go to Cornell Orchards and pick them up!

We just ordered what will probably be our last batch of meat birds for the season. We ordered 150 of our normal Cornish Cross chickens and 150 of Cornish hens. We decided we would try raising some of the Cornish hens. We have had numerous people interested in them. So we figured why not add more of a diversity to our farm! So that means that the Cornish hens should be ready in October and the bigger ones should be ready by November. Just in time for our winter markets!


We will still be at Otsiningo Farmer's Market through the end of October. We are hoping to start indoor markets at that point and go from November straight through until markets start in the spring! Ithaca market runs through December! So don't forget us, keep coming to the markets and buying local. Just because fall and winter are approaching doesn't mean that you can't have local produce, meat, eggs and specialty goods.

We also will have apples for winter market. We have talked to Cornell and they are excited to supply us with apples throughout the season. Last year we didn't get our apples from them through the winter we tried buying a bin from someone else and keeping it and it didn't work out so well. So this year we have decided to get them from Cornell.