photo-of-the-day

My adorable Lacy Lou (due to calve in August) wants you to know there’s only 27 days until spring.

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  1. Winnie Nielsen says:

    I know she is looking forward to lots of tall green grass in her pastures too. Her light markings around the eyes and nose give her such a pretty face. Looking forward to her good news come August.

  2. bonnie ellis says:

    She is so sweet! I wish I could just reach out and hug her! I’m glad she will give you another calf.

  3. Congrats Lacy Lou ! hope you have a healthy baby ! Im sure Granny MaryJane will send all of us farmgirls photos of the new arrival !

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photo-of-the-day

Our bantam rooster, Percy, is well-mannered and a pleasure to have around the farm. He was a gift from our farmhand, Julie. He was raised by her children and handled regularly—consequently, he’s an agreeable chap.

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  1. Winnie Nielsen says:

    Percy is quite handsome with those multi-colored feathers. I am happy to hear that he is an agreeable sort of guy too. Nothing worse than a rooster who comes after you every time you enter his space.

  2. Brenda White says:

    Beautiful❤️

  3. CJ Armstrong says:

    He is a handsome fellow! Glad he’s agreeable, as many roosters are not!
    Our neighbor’s rooster is downright mean and you can’t go into the pen without protecting yourself!
    CJ

  4. I do so love bantam eggs for dying at Easter – just so cute, so does Percy have a girlfriend? The local Mennonite farm where I used to buy them switched breeds and now they are raising very large , very beautiful glossy black chickens. I keep meaning to stop by and ask what breed they are. I think they are meat chickens, no eggs for sale signs lately.

  5. What a beautiful bird Percy is!!!
    What a great gift!!! It makes a huge difference when animals are raised in a loving manner!! Have a blessed day!!!
    Susan M. Crowder

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photo-of-the-day

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  1. Winnie Nielsen says:

    Can’t you imagine when these machines were humming away and local folks brought their wheat to be ground into the best flour for light biscuits, delicate cakes, and hearty bread that formed the staple of everyday lives? I can imagine how friends and neighbors gathered and chatted with Joe Barron about things like the weather, their farms, their joys and hardships, the War in Europe while their order was ground into sacks to take back home. Like general stores, flour mills were important places to get the supplies needed to keep families going and a day of errands also meant a time to catch up with what everyone else was doing. Oh the stories that these old mill walls have heard!

  2. We still have Snavely’s Mill , the oldest continually run mill in Pa and one of the oldest in the country. They specialize in winter wheat- good for baking. Even though they are right here and the flour is sold in those old fashioned bags that are tied at the top ( ok now its a metal clip ) you can’t hardly find it in local stores, go figure. check out these links. they have a lot of organic flours
    http://snavelysmill.com/
    http://snavelysmill.com/sub_page_amenu.pweb?pagelink=Coarse-WW-Flour
    http://snavelysmill.com/sub_page_amenu.pweb?pagelink=Organic-Flours
    some history:

    Snavely fed the furnace periodically throughout the day and finally, twelve hours after arriving, called it a day, shoveled coal into the furnace and banked it for another night. Some days he stayed at the mill for fourteen or fifteen hours.
    On the first floor Snavely pointed through a dust-coated window pane. “That house,” he said, as his finger swept across the mill pond and up the road several hundred yards, “was the first mill around here. It was built between 1713 and 1715.” One of Snavely’s four children lives there now.

    Inside the mill where we stood, the same race has been turning a water wheel for nearly two hundred years and the elemental power generated by the wheel has been grinding wheat into flour. The “product,” as Snavely refers to the all-natural flour, raw bran, wheat germ meal and whole wheat flour he grinds, is made from grain gathered within a fifty mile radius of the mill. So fine is the flour that it takes five cups to make a pound instead of the usual four cups. As for using shortening, “Well,” Snavely advised, “if you go by ‘feel’, you’ll know how the dough is coming along; if you go by ‘measure,’ then you use twenty percent less shortening with this flour.”
    Snavely began working at the mill when he was twelve and had been concerned with the “product” for fifty years when a friend, who had come to the United States from Germany, began talking with him about expanding his operation. “This friend was a miller,” Snavely explained, “and after he was in this country, he became a professional baker. No one could know more about the product including how it was milled and how it served the baker as dough. When he went back to Germany, I asked him to check on new equipment. He looked at mills for a year or so and then recommended one built by Roncaglia.” Roncaglia of Modena, Italy, are makers – according to Snavely’s friend – of the best milling equipment in the world.
    In April, 1974, in the summer of his seventieth year, Snavely and his wife, Viola, flew from New York to Geneva, Switzerland. It was his first trip abroad. They rented a car and drove through the Alps to Modena in northern Italy. After a day and a half at the Roncaglia works, the Snavelys motored through parts of Austria, Switzerland and southern Germany looking at milling equipment in operation. Roncaglia was his choice……. one is reminded of the arduous process which brought sophisticated gears and mill works to the grist mill which had been built across Snavely’s pond at the beginning of the eighteenth century. From the wharves along the Delaware River at Philadelphia, imported manufactured articles traveled by wagon to the Market Street Ferry across the Schuylkill River and then westward in the lumbering precursors of the great Conestoga freight wagons on the old Conestoga Road toward Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and finally, from the road head, to their ultimate destination by pack horses.

    Snavely has employed two men at his mill for several years. One will now move to the multi-buttoned console of the high-powered electrical apparatus. The other will continue at the water-driven works. Side by side, the antique canvas conveyor belts, housed in their smooth wooden panels and the modern gleaming stainless and glass pneumatic tubes will carry the grains and flours of Snavely’s mill.

  3. bonnie ellis says:

    Such wonderful stories of the mills. The picture is so nostalgic it makes you think of times gone by. Minneapolis was once the milling capital of the US. Pillsbury and General Mills had their mills powered by St. Anthony Falls on the Mississippi River. Unfortunately the mills are no longer in operation but the historical society has a wonderful interpretive museum at the spot. Thank you both for the stories.

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Still Paying It Forward

Occasionally here on the blog, we get a chance to give you an update on a post we’ve previously shared. A while back, I shared the story of a Philadelphia pizzeria by the name of Rosa’s that created a pay-it-forward program so successful it was feeding hundreds of homeless people in the City of Brotherly Love. Rosa’s patrons began donating pizza slices to their community as a random act of kindness in a city that continually sees some of the highest poverty rates in the nation. These RAOKs were originally tallied by post-it notes stuck on the walls of the pizzeria, and although they still adorn the place, Rosa’s has since turned to other methods of accounting.

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It turns out we weren’t the only ones smitten with this story. It went viral, with statistics like 35 million shares on Facebook and 800,000 shares on the Internet. All those shares brought owner Mason Wartman into the limelight, garnering him interviews with the likes of Ellen Degeneres, as well as features with Good Morning America and People Magazine.

And what do you suppose has happened as a result of all that media attention? 50,000 slices of donated pizza happened. In just one year. And the program is showing no signs of slowing down. In fact, Mason has plans to open a second location very soon, with a possibly expanded menu. There’s also talk of expansion to Rosa’s online store, which currently gives away a pair of socks or a pair of gloves for each pair sold. Fifty percent of the sales of the rest of Rosa’s apparel, which features the designs of homeless artists, goes back into the program, and those sales now account for 10 percent of all donated slices. Amazing! And as an added bonus from this boom in business, Rosa’s Pizzeria has had to bring on more staff, so Mason coupled with agencies that connect homeless folks with jobs. The old adage “start by helping those closest to you” certainly applies in this case. If we could all follow Rosa’s lead, maybe 2016 will come to be known as the year the world exploded with random acts of kindness.

  1. Winnie Nielsen says:

    Thanks Megan for this update. It is amazing and heart warming that one small location of generosity exploded into a business that is rapidly expanding it’s help to Philadelphia’s most needy citizens. I am joining you in hoping that examples like Rosa’s will help the world explode with RAOKS in 2016. There is so much need out there!!

  2. Virginia Meyer says:

    There is a company “out there” that sells shoes, and for every pair bought, one pair is donated to a homeless person. I wish I could remember their name, but I’m sure one could look them up on the internet. I thought that was very cool.

  3. every time I read about the good works of Rosa’s it brings tears to my eyes.This is a man/family who is living the real deal and truly making a difference. So why aren’t we hearing about any Pizza parlors doing this all over the country? And why still so many homeless people?

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photo-of-the-day

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  1. Winnie Nielsen says:

    Hmmmmm, are those wheels from the old Barron flour mill? The old inside wood boards in the background are making me wonder if this is the location of the photo today?

  2. bonnie ellis says:

    It’s fun to imagine the hum of the machinery when that flour mill was in operation. The well-worn patina on the wheels has a nostalgic feeling.

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