A special Halloween educational newsletter from Fresh Earth Farms! But first some announcements.
The season is over. Don’t plan to pick up your produce this week since there isn’t any. If you come out to the farm we will put you to work so please dress accordingly.
We are accepting orders for 2020. Our goal next year is to have perfect vision and grow only as much as we need to satisfy membership. We don’t want to plant too much for the number of shares we sell since no matter how much you plant the only revenue to pay for the supplies and labor is from those who join the farm. So if you plan to rejoin we’d like to know ASAP. Sometime in January we will cap the number of shares we plant for next season. Please sign-up soon by sending in a $100 deposit or ordering from our online store. Hope to see everyone back next season!
Farm News
Since there isn’t anything interesting going on at the farm I thought the following was an appropriate topic for this Halloween week. My youngest son Alex, who you may have met since he works on the farm during the summer, is taking a Human Anatomy class this school year. And with it being Halloween week the focus of the class is the skeletal system (actually I don’t know if the teacher planned it this week but it does seem to be apropos). Alex told me that the human body constantly renews its bones so that you have a new skeleton every 10 years! Who knew? It explains why as we get older we have more skeletons in our closets. Where else are you going to keep them?
But more importantly, it got me thinking about this newsletter I wrote seven years ago (ha, didn’t think I could remember that far back did you?) In it I mention how each share from the farm contains a part of the farm — literally. The produce is grown by plants taking minerals and water from the farm’s soil, mixing it with oxygen from the air, and through the magic of science creates a delicious red tomato. That tomato, which absorbed the calcium excreted by the earthworms, is now eaten by our members where their bodies then use the calcium from the worm poop to replace the bones in their skeleton. We have bones made from worm poop. How awesome is that?
So now that we have been serving this worm poop infected produce for the last 17 years some of you have replaced your whole skeleton once with farm produce and are currently working on your second skeleton. I must say I’ve noticed the difference. Each of your skeleton iteration just gets better and better.
But then this got me thinking. Do other body parts renew constantly? Thanks to the internet I now have the answer, which to prevent all of you members from googling this all at once and clogging the google servers I will now tell you: Yes! (Hopefully my giving you the answer frees up some of your precious time to do more important things than googling what body parts you can abuse since they will be replaced soon). In fact, some body parts are replaced every 2-9 days! That would be the lining of your stomach and intestines. Speaking of linings, the lining of your body — otherwise known as the epidermis — regenerates every 2-4 weeks. And every four months your red bloods cells have been replaced. A hundred million new cells are generated every minute and a hundred million old cells are destroyed and excreted. That takes a lot of worm poop!
So it occurs to me that our farm is a greater part of our members at this time of year than at any other time! Unfortunately over the next eight months or so you will slowly lose these farm-derived molecules only to be replaced by McCorpuscle (TM) from McDonalds or $5 foot-long intestinal lining from Subway. But you’ll not lose all of the farm. We will still be a part of you for years to come. You can’t get rid of us that easily.
What will we have this week?
Nothing. Didn’t you read the announcements?
Produce Usage Ideas
Since you may still be working through some of the produce we gave out I thought I would share this recipe we made this past weekend. Those of you following our Facebook group can skip this since I put it there earlier.
Curried Pumpkin and Chickpea Soup from Fresh & Natural. I won’t rewrite the recipe since you can just click on the link but I’ll mention we used a medium sized butternut squash and it doubled the recipe. So be aware that you get a lot of soup out of a butternut squash.
That is all for now. As always do not hesitate to contact me with questions, comments, suggestions, body part renewal rates or anything else you think I would enjoy.