September 24, 2009 What a whirlwind of activity this week. We started out serving cheese at the Chateau Ste. Michelle Winery in Woodinville Sunday afternoon. We were invited along with Mt Townsend, and Willapa Hills Farmstead Cheese to serve a variety of our best at a Fall Winery event. What a Splendid Day! It was sunny and breezy, just perfect for fall. The hosts went all out to see that the Cheesemakers were well stocked and happy. They even took samples to be paired. Our Sheep Cheeses went well with the Chardonnay and the Merlot. We wholeheartedly agreed.   Not only were the Hosts most welcoming but the crowd of people was just plain fun. I met many folks that loved cheese and wine and were just out to enjoy it on about the most perfect fall day the Northwest has to offer. 

We finished our tour at the Nike World Headquarters with a final Farmers Market at their facility in Beaverton Oregon. I must say I do not think I saw the same pair of shoes walk past me all day. We have one more week at our Chehalis and Moreland Farmers Markets. We are breaking hearts daily. We are done with the fresh cheeses since the sheep are now done milking and in with the rams. We have a lot of customers who really like those fresh cheeses and I keep trying to explain that our products are seasonal since the sheep only lactate for about 5-6 months. Sigh, it is the kids who break my heart. 

Tonight we have been invited to the Heymann W(h)inery in Centralia to serve cheese to a crowd of “bikers”. Well this is a group of cyclists who are getting together to support Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital in Tacoma, WA. What a worthy cause. We hope to donate some of the proceeds we raise as well. I have worked with many families over the years whose children have been served by this facility and their work is invaluable. 

Tomorrow we will be preparing a cheese and fruit plate to serve at a wedding! What fun. At the same time we will be cutting up samples to serve at Metropolitan Market at tastings in Tacoma and Federal Way. We will be busy cutting and wrapping and making it all beautiful.

Our Tin Willow Tomme debuted this week at the Chateau event. It has been very well received. We will be sampling that tomorrow at Metropolitan Markets as well as serving it to the wedding crowd. What fun to have a new cheese to take along with us. 

The fall does bring about a change in our lives, out with the fresh cheeses but in with some of those wonderful aged cheeses that we have to wait for all summer. We hope to bring out our last make of the Fresh Pecorino for the Cheese Wedge in Portland, OR on October 3^rd as well as the above mentioned Tin Willow Tomme and the Black Sheep Tomme. Two Tommes? Absolutely. We make the Tin Willow from the milk we purchase from Terry and Doug in Eastern Oregon. It has wonderful grassy and sagey notes to it, representative of where the animals are grazed daily. Our Black Sheep Tomme has fruity nutty overtones somehow gained from our fields and hay fed here in Chehalis. It defines Terroir for me, “A taste of Place”. The flavors unique to a certain locale, a certain farm, a certain cave that ages cheese. That is the fun of several cheesemakers in the same locale. They will all differ in technique and produce varied tastes in their products.

Onward and upward, the Cheese Wedge is the next hurdle!

September 6, 2009   We have rain.  It has been a long, dry summer and our fields are drinking this up.  It was nice that the weather also decided it was ready to change when school starts, the sheep are drying up, and we dropped a couple markets.  It is a nice change.  We will still get a few days of warmth yet this month but it will cool at night now.  “Fall” is in the air!

The Sheep are being milked every third milking,  soon to go to every other day.  We will sort out the groups for the rams to breed next weekend.  We have yet to look at who is to breed who .  I usually start picking and choosing those groups in August but this year has been too busy to look that far ahead.  That is okay we will sit down and do it together.  One of our milkers went through the line of girls and gave me a great rundown of traits they have that are impressive and worth breeding in and items not desired.  Such as placement of teats, shape of udder, easiness to handmilk vs the machine.  All  of these will be balanced against the traits brought in by the ram’s genetics.  That is still hard at this time as we are just now seeing the outcome of the rams offspring.  It takes a couple of years to know what genes are going be dominant, and if we like them.  We had a black ram named Hershey we used for several years, His mother, Holstein, had a beautiful udder and was a wonderful milker.   Unfortunately his daughters did not all share that udder gene.  We have some good rams now.  Two were given back to us after the flood and one carries the genes of one of our best milkers that we lost in the flood.  We will see……

They all have something to offer.

We are down to making the last five batches of cheese.   

Seasons change for a reason.  We may not be any less busy but it will be different and Change is Good.

August 30, 2009 It is time for a change of season.  It is time to slow down and figure out what next.  Today we finish two of our four Farmers Markets.  The sheep have been milking once a day for two weeks now, still putting out enough for two markets but not four.  Jess our very worthy intern is in Milwaukie today.  Our last market of the year there.  Not to fret though, our good friends at Steve’s Cheese, New Seasons, and Market of Choice in West Linn will be carrying our cheese as long as the supply holds out!  Then there is the Cheese Wedge in Portland on October 3rd.  I got ahead of myself, I want to take a moment to bask in the crispness of a cool morning, plan a month promising to be much less hectic than the past  6 months and to look ahead  to prioritize what needs to happen before we start the crazies all over again. 

Jess has been wonderful.  We had an “intern” this summer who was able to jump right in, catch on to what needed to happen, read my mind even when it was tumbling around three jobs at once and I hope learned what she was intent on learning.  She will be leaving us now since the sheep are slowing way down and we will drop the two markets.  She has great plans to move onward and will no doubt be on a warm beach near the Equator by the time fall offically arrives. 

The Sheep are what set our seasons here.  Yes, markets could go on into October, and No it is not fall yet, but the sheep have slowed down and we have too.  I am so in need of this change in our lives.  This summer has been full and wonderful but school starts tomorrow, the markets have slowed, the sheep will dry up and we will begin breeding soon.  It is all good.  God created seasons for a reason.  I for one am going to wave good bye to the busyness of summer and fall in love with the slower pace of Autumn.

The girls will be bred by three different rams.  We have had some really good milkers and some not so.  Some have already been culled and are mowing yards elsewhere.  Some we will try for another year.  A couple of the new Ewes we brought in after the flood had such nice wool they will go to a wool shepherdess not as a milker.  Decision time.  Who we breed to which ram for the best production and wool and size of lamb.  What is most important what is acceptable as a milking ewe.  We had one that would have given us 1000 pounds of milk if we had done the one day weaning…..we do not have the personell for that.  She did give an actual 600 pounds which is a great amount for us in our operation.  We like to feed grass mostly and grain in the parlour.  We like hardy stock which is sometimes a bit of a mix.  We do not have any papers on any of our animals and that is okay for now.  When we reach the upper echelons of milkers and want to take on the challenge I guess we will…..don’t hold your breath.  For now our milkers are just what we need, they are hardy have easy babies take the milking stand well, or they are goners, and most importantly we enjoy having them.

July 22, 2009 It has been a grand but busy summer. We have had many helpers this year and that should make all go smoother, no? Jess had been a great intern taking to marketing cheese like she grew up doing that! What a blessing and tireless in making the cheese in preparation for market. She has a keen sense for details that I overlook. Sherry Livigne has spent a week here. She is on her way to opening a cheese shop on Capitol Hill in Seattle and came to see how the process works. She got thrown in on a very busy week and then some. She helped at a couple of markets, made a Libyan cheese with Brad and followed with Ricotta. They made some Peppered Tommes for our Christmas deliveries, and got to tub up fresh cheeses for both markets and stores. Then on her last night here she made dinner for us as well! Wow, check out her accomplishments at her calfandkid blogspot. Charlie from MO came through on his amazing odyssey to discover how to best accomplish a dream he and his 7 kids are hatching. They have a vision of a farm, restaurant, cheese plant and butcher shop all complementing one another....they all have various skills and interests to bring to the venture and he is on a fact finding mission. What a huge and well thought out undertaking. I wish both of these guys the best and hope we were able to impart a bit of help along the way. My accomplishment for the week, I finally folded all the laundry that has been piled on the couch for a month....and then I took that last load out of the dryer and we start all over again. It has been a fast and furious summer. We are doing four markets and we ar blowing through a make of cheese in 6 days. They don’t even last a week. We will slow down soon as the sheep are drying up. They say they lambed 5 months ago and it is time to be done milking, get a break and then will be bred this fall to start on next years cheese. We have not even had a chance to plan the dating game or even decide who stays and who is culled. Sigh.....soon! Brad will harvest alfalfa next week and we go to a farm party at Tin Willows Farm, pick up milk and continue with our craziness. But our girls are slowing way down on Production. Terry’s girls are also. The season is changing. July 17, 2009 Wow, What an event. What a fun time we had last night at the Oxbow Farm in Carnation, WA. I had never really known what the “Outstanding in the Field” folks do. Wow, if you ever get an opportunity to attend one of these events it would be memorable. Google outstandinginthefield.com to see pictures of previous events. It is an organization that takes people to farms to enjoy the beauty and “simplicity” of a farm dinner prepared on site. The organizers have done dinners in 30 states plus a few provinces in Canada. They have also organized a dinner in an art museum in Italy. They choose a local farmer and a local chef who in turn chooses local products and then they have a beautifully prepared dinner in a field on the farm. It was so well run, relaxing, and fun. We were blessed when Dana Tough of Spur Gastropub in Seattle asked to use our cheese, which gave us an invitation to attend this amazing feast. The first thing we did was to find the Farm and tour around Snoqualimie and Carnation. We came from the south avoiding the interstate as much as possible so we had to read the directions backwards. We did great and had a nice drive in the foothills of the Cascades. Then we arrived and were served a very nice refreshing wine from the Novelty Hill Winery. Dana and Brian of Spur served our fresh Sheep milk cheese on crostinis with pickled grape and flowers. It was divine. The instant the grape touched my tongue my mouth was watering and the cheese and the bread melded the flavors together. We then got a tour of the farm. It is an Organic farm run by Luke Woodward and Adam McCurdy and their families. They have established a nonprofit organization that will veer off toward educating children and others about organic farming and sustainability. The energy in how they shared about all they do was infectious. I want to get out and revitalize my garden! The tour ended up at a long row of tables set up near the river. Chilled broccoli soup started us off with some of our Queso de Oveja melted on top, and yes it did melt nicely, with nasturtiums. The wine was a Novelty Hill Sauvignon Blanc. The next course was Oxbow’s baby beets, heirloom lettuce, with some of our Mopsy’s Best shaved over the top with a white vinaigrette dressing. Again Dana and Brian did wonderful things with our cheese. It was rather fun to see really good food that we had a part of. When we send the cheeses off to a restaurant we don’t always see what it does. Then there were two amazing meat courses using meat from the Stokesberry Farm in Olympia, WA. A chicken dish with new potatoes and sweet peas and mustard. Also a red wine braised beef dish with baby carrots, fennel and chard. Again Novelty Hill Wines complemented each course. Roussane with the Chicken dish and their Stillwater Creek Vineyard Sauvignon with the Beef. They finished off with Honey biscuits raspberries and Creme fraiche, and Januik Bacchus Vineyard Riesling. Mike Januik is the Winemaker at Novelty Hill and also has a few of his own wines to offer. It was a hot day, we seated for dinner at about 5 pm and the air cooled slowly till dusk and I almost wanted my sweater by the time we walked to the car. Sigh. We had a mini vacation in the midst of an absolutely crazy season.