You might think after a winter of cleaning pig stalls and taking care of piglets and lambs, of moving fences and corraling sows, of sweeping snow from row cover and cleaning arugula in 20-something weather and slipping across alternately ice-crusted and…
Planting from seed? Not yet. Massive harvests? Soon, but for now the vegetable bounty is minimal. Plowing fields, dealing with irrigation, wrestling with pests? Nope, negative, not one bit. The plant part of our farm equation now rests, for the…
They have been arriving nearly every day since December, the tiny lambs. Their moms, the ewes, have been heavy with offspring, in many cases twins, for months; the gestation for lambs is 152 days, give or take. Now lambs totter…
Today marks two years to the day since Austin Elsborg started roasting beets, wizarding ambrosial barbecue sauce for pork and turning out some of the finest tavern food in Colorado at Bramble & Hare. All from a kitchen the size…
The new bottles of California Malbec thrill the Black Cat family not just because the wine is superb. We cherish and champion the Sonoma County elixir, too, because winemaker Jesse Katz grew up in Boulder, and originals of his father…
It arrives on a Friday every year, and the profound sense of bittersweet returns the next day, too. It is the Friday and Saturday immediately prior to Thanksgiving, which always marks our last harvest for the farmers’ market in downtown…
The bulk of the harvesting for 2018 is wrapping-up. We spent a good bit of time this week in the field that holds our polenta corn, which has been drying on the stalks since August. Now, we harvest the cobs…
Sometimes we almost feel like those Japanese ranchers who spend so much time and effort fussing over their Wagyu herds, the kind of cattle that produce kobe beef. We don’t massage our heritage Mulefoot pigs, but we have crowned them…
Harvesting crops is never a breezy affair — even on a 72-degree June afternoon with the sky the color of an Adriatic lagoon it presents challenges. It is physically demanding, requiring that we bend over and pull or dig. We…
It’s been quite the week — especially for our pigs. We raise more than 100 of them, mostly heritage Mulefoots, on one of our properties. They are one of the foundations of Black Cat Farm, which is the only certified…