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Fresh from the Farm this Week

One of our goals has been to send out emails as we have items available from the farm. This is the first edition of that notice. Currently we have available:

  • elderberries
  • garlic (very limited supply)
  • raw honey from the farm in Bennett (yes, it is back – we sold out last year’s supply)
  • raw honey from Troublesome Gap
  • comfrey

You can place your order our store. You can go to the store directly at https://www.simplyusfarm.com/shop/ or click on the store icon (circled in red below). Any of the produce will need to be picked up locally. We do porch pickups in Sanford.

Freeze Drying Comfrey

We freeze dried our first batch of comfrey and stored the test batch in a vacuum sealed canning jar with an oxygen absorber. The freeze dried comfrey was easy to turn into a sorta powdery consistency after the freeze drying completed. The comfrey freeze dried fairly quickly. The entire run fit in a single wide mouth mason jar after we crunched up the leaves and stem. I’ll call it a success.

Next step is to make a salve.

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First Comfrey Harvest

Over the past year we have been planting comfrey in the food forest. We have also started planting comfrey with many of the trees and bushes that we plant. Comfrey is a great plant that has several jobs on the farm. These jobs (also known as function stacking for the permaculture crowd) include:

  • ground cover that suppresses grass and weeds for the plants and trees that we plant the comfrey around
  • living mulch that we can chop and drop in the fall to compost in place
  • medicinal plant that can be used in a salve or poultice

Today, we harvested enough comfrey leaves to make a full run in the freeze dryer. The plan is to freeze dry the comfrey and then make a salve. I’ve never made anything before with comfrey so this will be a new experience

We plan to offer comfrey on demand. When an order is placed, we’ll schedule a day for porch pickup in Sanford (most likely a Saturday). This allows you to have comfrey that was harvested earlier in the day. Next year we hope to offer comfrey root cuttings so you can plant your own comfrey.

The picture below shows comfrey leaves ready to go into the freezer and then the freeze dryer.

Elderberry Harvest Continues

We are still harvesting elderberry. The dry weather in June seems to have caused us to have smaller berries this year, but we are still getting a nice harvest.

Figs Growing Taller and Taller

It is nice to see our fig trees continue to grow. Many of them are covered with figs. We can’t wait to try them