Any time you can find a way to bring a cute, furry animal to school, it’s going to be a hit.

Photo by Karin Belgrave

So, our son created his science fair project entirely around bringing ‘Smalls’ to school. Smalls (as you may have guessed, she’s our littlest lamb) is an orphan and the project was to determine whether a ewe with triplets is more likely to reject a lamb than ewes with twins and singles.

Above are the results. Pretty interesting! But now to get Smalls from the ‘nursery’ and bring her to school.

Photo by Karin Belgrave

Kayla helped round her up and drove to school with Smalls on her lap. Who can resist a lamb?

Kayla did a lot of explaining about the lambing process and answered a ton of questions. My personal favorite: ‘Is this, like, your PERSONAL lamb?’.

Everyone got a chance to hold Smalls and then it was time to get back to the farm and to class.

Did you ever wonder how mushrooms are produced by growers? If you’re not foraging for them and want to have a steady supply of mushrooms, it takes some doing. Andrew and the vegetable crew were busy this week doing just that: innoculating logs with shiitake mushroom spores to secure future harvests.

First you have to drill the holes for the innoculant.

These wooden plugs are soaked in shiitake mushroom mycelium (that would be the vegetative part of a fungus, to us laypersons).  They look like gnocchi!

Then you have to hammer the wooden dowels into the logs and seal the holes with soy wax. Here is Ian hammering and Dori using the soy wax.

Finally once the logs are all coated with soy and ready to go, they can produce mushrooms for up to seven years. Seven years!?

This kind of longevity makes the mushroom crew happy!

I can almost smell the saute now…

Thanks to Stephanie for the pictures!

Wow. We flung open the doors (and the garage bay) and just let it happen.

People got to see what we’ve been working on for 3 years and I think they liked it! I know the farmers and Andy (our long-suffering GC) had a good time…

And they really got to connect with our customers – the people who will end up buying and appreciating all their hard work in the fields.

There were giveaways to be had and sandwiches, brownies, cookies and ice cream to be bought and devoured. So delicious. There was NOTHING left!

We are so thankful for our excellent teams on the farm and at the market for everything they did to make this ‘soft’ opening a huge success. And, no, I will not be posting pictures of the after party…