Expired Twinkies and Muddy Farm 2011

A couple female farmers I've know have made the analogy that starting a new season is like giving birth--if you remembered how painful the experience was, you'd never do it again.  They have kids, so I take their word for it.  I think I'd get my ass kicked for saying that, so I'm just quoting here.  However, it does take some intense mental trickery to commit nearly every waking hour and a whole lot of start-up money to another season.  I am already enthusiastic about 2011, though.  It is the goals I have set for myself that are the inspiration.  My main goal is to make this blog the number one page that comes up anytime someone does an internet search for "Expired Twinkies."  While I don't know how this fame is going to help sales of my organic (Certified Naturally Grown) veggies or free range eggs, it is the wind beneath my wings.

In addition to wanting those in search of expired Twinkies to find themselves at the Muddy Farm blog, I also have some exciting vegetable growing ideas for 2011.  One of them is that I want to grow carrots.  In previous seasons, carrots would have been a disaster on this property.  I know because I tried a number of times.  The weed situation I inherited was atrocious.  Carrots take about three weeks to germinate, and once they come up, they grow very slowly.  Most of the weeds on this land take about half a week to sprout and they grow aggressively.  In previous seasons, they smothered the carrots before they even came up out of the ground, but I have finally gotten the weed situation more under control.  Also, this place was water-logged and the soil was very heavy.  Carrots like fairly loose soil.  Because I am using the raised bed system that I mentioned in other posts, I believe they will now work well.  This is exciting because I love to try new crops on this land.  Also I don't believe there were a lot (if any) carrots at my market this season.  I don't leave the stand much to scout out what other people have, but customers requested them and said they weren't at the market.  I have been looking through seed catalogs and circling all the varieties I will grow next year.

While I am out in the field this late Fall, I have been thinking full time about next season.  These are just two of many ideas, which hopefully you'll see at the stand.  Uh...it is unlikely you will see expired Twinkies there, though.  To my knowledge, that would break several regulations.  I have, once in my life, seen a Twinkie (hopefully) well past its prime.  I used to walk my dog in these woods in Sullivan County where there were old glass bottles buried.  I think it was a garbage dump for a summer camp that was there in the 40's and 50's.  You could kind of feel  something weird beneath your feet when you'd walk by and sometimes I would dig around, with a stick, beneath decades of composted leaves, to find antique glass bottles.  I gave them to someone I knew who collected them.  Well, one time, I swear I dug up--with a twig mind you--what looked like a Twinkie from the 50's, still in its wrapper.  The Twinkie looked perfect, but I'd like to think the flavor suffered a little over the decades.  Either way, the experience seems to have marked me.  I promise I didn't eat, open or keep the product.  I actually have no idea what I did with it.  Probably it's still there in the woods beneath more layers of leaves, unlikely to ever make its way to my farm stand.