Well, alls I can say is WHEW!  Man… what a rough way to start the season.  That was BY FAR the most difficult startup yet.  I believe God was stretching us and it doesn’t appear He is done yet.  With the weather, two trucks BOTH losing transmissions in the same day and then all the other assorted mechanical problems, it’s looking like it was a $10,000 week.  Yikes… that’s not the kind of week we can survive if they come too often.  That’s not even to mention the emotional drain of it all.  The flood was the worst I’ve seen since we’ve been here.  I have never seen it overflow the banks into the front field.  We just brought in 14 dumptrucks of gravel and the creek washed away 100 feet of the gravel on the other side... it's just GONE.  I have included two pictures so you can see the comparison. 

The food suffered a little… we had some problems with lettuce being too soggy…. That’s why some of your heads were small because we had to peel the outside layers.  The wetness and the hail did some damage a week or so earlier.  Last couple of years we’ve been dry… this year, not so much.  Too much of a good thing ain’t so good.  Overall though, since it didn’t freeze, we are in good shape and we should have plenty of apples, pears, peaches and berries this year.   YAY!!! We love fruit!

Two trucks breaking down at the same time was what would make me awake in the middle of the night sweating realizing it was all a bad dream… but this time it wasn’t.  We were scrambiling like crazy sending up trucks and drivers shuttling off the food to different locations.  When Rachel called in the afternoon and told me the second truck wouldn’t move… well… I thought it was a bad joke… but it wasn’t.  At that point, we just sort of went into “bring everyone home safe and count our blessings” mode.

So… what did I learn from all of that craziness?  Well… God is still good and He is still in charge.  We are still amazingly blessed.  I wouldn’t trade what I do for a minute in my old life.  I also learned that no matter how much you plan… how much you think you have everything under some sort of control… you don’t.  One second everything looks good… the next a tornado bears down on your head and it’s all gone… or YOU are all gone.  It made me realize that life is fragile and I can take nothing and no one for granted.  The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.  I thank and praise Him that I still adore Him despite the adversity and that he gave us strength to lead our troops through this with at least some grace and poise.

So… on the good side… our chicken processing building remodels are just about complete and we really love the improvements.  Rachel is thrilled since that’s her area of responsibility.  We got the baby egg laying pullets out into the field today… the “Egg Mobile” rolled out into the front pasture and the girls got let out for the first time.  They were just a little hesitant to climb out at first.  They’ll get the hang of it.  We’re pretty happy about the new paint jobs on the trucks.  Hopefully you think so too.  We just had to ignore the bugs that got stuck to the paint while it was drying [Arrgghh].  Well… there’s just a ton going on and we’re a little overwhelmed, but it’s good.

The reason we’re ok… the reason we don’t just fall apart… is our God.  To Him be all the praise and glory.  He has numbered the hairs on our head and He knows us and loves us.  I am so grateful that I can serve a God and love a God no matter what he put us through, because I know that the crown of glory waits and the world is passing away and it’s all just chaff.  There is only one worthwhile thing on this earth… just one… and that is coming to know Christ.

Amen

If you want to see a sort of “this week in pictures” then please visit our photo album.  We will be putting up some videos on a YouTube account soon… so you can see some video from the farm too.

Welcome Nissan Americas Franklin-based Employees!

We are so proud to be lining up with Nissan's corporate goals in green living and partnering to bring local, farm fresh food directly to your workplace.

Hello Friends!

Our Spring/Summer Program has quickly come to a close with today being our last delivery day of the season!  It's bittersweet because we know this means there will be some of you we will not see until next Spring, we'll miss the regular harvest of fresh produce, but we'll also be able to take a little down time and regroup.  Winter is always a good time for us to re-evaluate policies and procedures as well as working with our farmers on a growing plan.  Be on the lookout for another email from us asking what kinds of produce you'd like to see next year.

We won't be back up in Nashville again until we deliver turkeys on Sunday, November 23rd.  If you ordered a turkey, you'll be receiving a special order email in case you'd like to order anything else for your Thanksgiving dinner.  We plan to have some holiday breads, our fresh harvest canned goods as well as our usual meat and eggs.

This Winter we are also going to begin plans to begin bringing canning and baking back onto the farm.  This will allow us to increase our canned goods variety (such as soups, broths, stocks, etc) as well as develop new bread recipes.  I've been wanting to try an "Ezekiel" bread recipe for the longest time!  :)  We do plan to have some winter produce available.  Our Amish farmers in the Pleasantville area are very resourceful.  Ron and Heath will be working with these farmers in the next couple of weeks to develop an abbreviated production schedule for winter produce.

Our chicken production is doing wonderful.  We have an inventory built up and have another 1,100 chicken out in the pasture.  We will have plenty of chicken for the winter program.

Attached is a flyer promoting our Winter program as well as the Winter registration form.  Please write if you have any questions.  The only deadline is if you want to prepay for the Winter and receive the 10% discount, you'll need to do so by or on the first day of deliveries (11/30).  Robbie Poe has been doing all of our flyers, he's a dear friend and very talented, thank you Robbie!

Please consider staying with us this winter.  Winter months are difficult for farmers and this CSA supports 18 employees as well as 46 small family farms in middle Tennessee.  I wish you could see how much of an impact you are making in many lives.

We love our customers and look forward to serving you in any way we can. 

Thank you for your friendship and business!

Tim & Jennifer Bodnar

Avalon Acres Farms

Hi everyone:

The details of the Winter CSA program are finally completed and we are taking registrations. The program will run 20 weeks and deliveries are bi-weekly (every other week). It will consist of all natural meats, canned goods, baked goods and the occasional winter produce offered for special orders.

We really appreciate all the support we can get in the winter. Obviously, farming is a tough deal in the winter and it is always tight for us to make it to the spring. You winter support is part of what makes it possible for us to do what we do in the summer. Without winter sales, we literally might not make it.

We are raising chickens feverishly and expect to have plenty of chicken for the winter. In about a month our "chicken drought of 2008" should be coming to an end. Thank goodness!

All the details of the program (pricing, schedule, drop off locations, etc.) are in the attached document below... clicking on the link will take you to Acrobat.Com and allow you to download the form. If for some reason it does not work, you can always e-mail us at farmer@avalon-acres.com

Thanks you in advance for all your love and support of our way of life and the affirmation that our lives bring you value.

Tim & Jenny

!!! LOOK HERE LOOK HERE LOOK HERE !!!

Download the Registration Form Here

!!! LOOK HERE LOOK HERE LOOK HERE !!!

You gotta love it.  You just have to.  You can't just do this because it makes money.  It'll chew you to pieces and spit you out.  It's 9:00 p.m. at night and my crew isn't back from Ethridge yet.  Cell phone reception is sketchy out there and I haven't been able to get a hold of Heath.  I am worried that they won't be rested enough tomorrow when the run the deliveries.  I get concerned they will burn out.  OH… I hear them… It’s 9:05 p.m. now and the first of the trucks is rolling in finally… thank God. 

I am not so concerned about myself... I mean it's my company (well, it's God's really) but I mean I expect great sacrifices from myself.  It's not the same for other team members.  Yet despite my fears, they seem to be really bought into what it is we do... they love it too.  You have to just not to go nuts. 

Our week sort of starts on Friday morning.  This is the only day of the week we start later in the day... 9:00 am.  Two crews go two different directions to go harvest the food.  The farmers started around 5:30 a.m. to be ready for us to pick up.  The food gets loaded onto the trucks and we get back here around 6:00 p.m. most nights.  When we get back from one of the runs Jen and I start putting in meats and special orders.  This process takes from two to four hours if we’re lucky.  Saturday is a packing day and it starts around 6:00 am to be able to get shares delivered to Jackson TN by 11:00 am.  This is the one day a week we get off in the early afternoon if we don't have any other special projects to do.  Of course Sunday is a delivery day and we run two trucks.

Then phase II... the Wednesday delivery cycle.  This is the one that seperates the men from the boys.  We have twice as many deliveries on that day… it’s over 400 now.  Monday we harvest produce again… though more… a lot more.  Also Monday mornings are chicken slaughtering days… Ricky heads out at 6:00 am to go

pick them up and the crew spends the day killing, scalding and plucking 200 to 300 birds in a day.  When we get back from harvesting Jen and I again start putting in all the specials and meats… usually Monday nights run into about 3 or 4 in the morning.  Those hurt.  We have a saying around here... "you can sleep in the winter!"

Tuesday morning everyone shows up to the farm at 7:00 am… Ricky starts at 6:00 am to go do the egg run (collect the eggs.)  Ricky hasn't slept in six weeks!  Neal and Michael start cutting up and packaging pretty white chickens.  Rachel, Kestin, Heath, Adam, Bruce, Wayne and Jerry all head out toward Etheridge.  They’re met out there by Andy Yoder, Johnny Yoder and his wife and Kenny.  About 10 people run the boxes down the line.  The "build" starts at 10:00 and it goes ALL DAY.  The trucks are being closed up around dusk.  At 10:00 in the evening they’re still running around here on the farm making the last of the preparations for the next day because doing it in the morning is no good… too many opportunities to miss something.  The farm goes quiet around 11:00 pm.

Weds mornings start early again… lots of bustling at 7:00 am.  Three trucks leave here in three successive shifts… the last of the trucks roll out of here around 11:00 and then I begin the only time I have to do repairs and special projects.  Trucks roll all day and begin coming back into the farm around 7:00 pm and one after the other we debrief from the day.  The last of the employees, usually Heath, leaves around 10:00 or 10:30 pm.  Whew… what a week.

Thursday… well Thursday we don’t do anything.  We spend a lot of time sleeping.  I read the bible and write a bit.  I joke with all my employees that if I see any of them on Thursdays I will shoot them.  We tried having some people on the farm on Thursday but we quickly realized that when you run a business from your home, you lose a big part of your life.  This is just a boundary that we keep in order to hold onto our sanity.  What this means is that you shouldn’t expect us to respond your e-mails on Thursdays either.  It’s not that we don’t appreciate you… we just need a day to ourselves to hide from the world and that’s Thursday.   Unfortunately Jenny posts your payments on Thursdays… but at least she can do it in her pajamas!

I hope you don’t feel like we’re complaining… because we’re not.  We are so grateful to you.  We couldn’t have our lives without you… and we love having our winters off too!  We love what we do.  We deliver the best food in the world and it’s a passion for us.  That’s what keeps us going at 3:00 am… we just love to hear your comments on how amazed you are at the food.  Ya know what?… so are we.

Thank you for being there so we can serve you.

Well you sure are gonna like this post.  We just found the most delightful place inhabited by some of the sweetest and unique people we’ve ever met.  We got a call from a nice lady at a place called Homestead Blessings… about 5:48 am.  It’s a little farm out on Russel Creek Road just down the dirt road a piece from Jonas Miller’s and Lew Beachy’s dwellings.  We had no idea it was there and even less of an idea of what we had in store for us when we got there.

We left late today… had to get the pigs to the butcher and found out we had no trailer lights.  Well… can’t have that so I got into a 2 hour death match with the wiring.  All the while the temperature was getting warmer and I was getting more and more stressed, knowing your food had already been picked.  Finally I dealt the fatal blow and resurrected the trailer lights with only a dirty back and a few gravel dents in my flesh.  We set out for Pleasantville.

Of course, I should have just relaxed (like usual) because God is in control and our farmers are not stupid.  Everyone had the food tucked away in cool 50* basements and none was worse for our lateness.  I began to relax.  After about three and a half hours we had completed our run and had only to stop in and visit Vicki (Mama) West down at her place… Heath told us she had some extra lettuce and wanted to talk to us about growing some other things for us.

We meandered down the ever narrowing road until we came to a hand painted sign; “Homestead Blessings.”  We pulled in and “Mama” West came hurriedly scurrying down the stairs, hair wet from an early afternoon cool shower and

introduced herself.  She was bubbling over with enthusiasm.  We exchanged pleasantries and each of us shared a bit about what had brought us both to be in this place in our respective lives sharing a moment.   Within minutes we found that we (us and her with her daughters) were all His sheep.  She ushered us around an absolutely magical garden full of herbs, vegetables, edible flowers and love.  Her and her “girls” moved to the small Amish community and learned everything from the indigenous folk who took them in and gave them the tools they needed to survive on a homestead.

She bubbled away so much so that I was having trouble keeping up with her emotional energy... she was much like the bubbling brook only a few feet away;  I was really overwhelmed.  She was pulling some herbs and handing them to me so I could plant them at home and she began to tell us of their love for making candles, soaps, singing and, above all else gardening.  She told us about their love for performing Blue Grass music… Appalachian “mountain music.”  We’ve loved this type of music ever since seeing the movie “Oh Brother.”  Mama told me "We love gardening so much that we sing to make enough money to keep gardening."  The beautiful thing is, with your food dollars rolling into their farm, they can perhaps do more of what it is they love to do.  She went on to tell me about what a Godsend it was that we were now working with the Amish in Russell Creek (her neighbors) as well as Ethridge.  Mrs. Beachy echoed the same sentiment only half an hour before saying “I don’t know what we would have done if you hadn’t started coming this year.”  Praise God that we have the priviledge of being involved in something that helps others in such a way.

Mrs. West told us all about their music and their website and how they actually had a video made in trade for using their song in a movie (Inherit the Land).  We were pretty impressed with how much they do…  or rather how much they ARE.  They were incredibly thick and rich in being… in substance.  People get amazed when we tell them about our journey in farming and they think we are courageous… let me tell you, these people make me feel tame and urban in comparison to their homesteading life.

We got home and hooked up to the internet and were blown away.  We watched the video in amazement… we had just been their on their farm and here it was on the internet in a music video they made.  It captures all the charm of who these people are and we are pleased to share it with you. That whole thing was filmed on location at their farm. Click here to watch The West Girls music video "Green Beans In the Garden."