White Fireweed Farm, Freest Fancy Creations

11/18/2025

I am sooo Excited a grandson from a rabbit I bred, White Fireweed Farm's Thunderstruck won Best of Breed at the largest rabbit show of the year, Convention and he is a black chinchilla to boot! I am also Excited that a son of Thunderstrucks has babies due to be born anytime. Thunderstruck is out of White Fireweed Farm's Salem and Moonrise Lost in the Woods. Thank you Jen Richardson for selling her to me :)

11/07/2025

Happy to have a rainbow litter of satin angoras with brokens in blue, black and lilac and solid blues and lilacs!!!!

11/07/2025

Happy to have giant angora fawns again, 2 in this litter!!!

10/12/2025

09/26/2025

Throwing this out there. Anyone interested in a bottle baby or once weaned. Her dam is half nubian half boer and her sire is pure angora. She is a beautiful badger pinto. Due to the amount of angora and boer in her she would not likely be good as a milker, but she will produce useable fiber called cashgora.

09/20/2025

Last Tanana Valley Farmer's Market of the season from 9 to 4 tomorrow. We will have corn stalks for drying for decorations, winter squash both for eating and decorations, scallions, baby summer squash, few green tomatoes and baby leeks along with handmade wares such as hats, mittens etc made from our fiber livestock. We raise angora rabbits which give us angora fiber that is as warm as qiviut along with angora goats for mohair and merino sheep which is the softest wool there is.

09/11/2025

Corn production numbers. We planted 290 stalks of corn this year and they produced 275 ears of corn. Of those:
* 120 ears (43%) sold at market.
* 69 ears (25%) never matured enough to consider pulling. They're still in the field.
* 86 ears (31%) were questionable enough that I didn't pull them for market, but pulled and shucked them later for freezer corn.

Of those 86 ears,
* 9 ears (10%) turned out to be nice, full roasting ears, so that means I left 9 ears in the field that could have gone to market (We'll enjoy eating them, so no loss).
* 26 ears (30%) had enough full, plump kernels that it was worth while to cut them off the cob for freezing. They made 2 pounds and 2 ounces of cut corn, so about 1.3oz of corn per ear.
* 51 ears (59%) were culls - not enough mature kernels to bother with.

I think the 120 ears sold just covered the cost of growing all the corn. Need to do better next year. Or charge more, maybe? I thought the price we charged was on the high side but reasonable. No one balked at it, and five or six people said it was too low so we'll have to think about that.

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09/10/2025

At the market last weekend I had one shucked ear of corn on display so people could see an example, but the rest stayed protected in their husks. Someone asked if they could shuck a bunch of ears before they bought any and I said no, that would ruin all the ones you didn't buy, but I only selected full, ripe ears to bring to market so they could be confident the example ear was representative of what they would get. They asked how you can tell which ones are filled out if you don't shuck it, so I thought I'd share some photos.

There are essentially four things I look at. First is whether the ear is heavy enough that it's starting to pull away from the stalk. If it's still holding tight to the stalk, it's probably not ready and I don't pull it for market. Second is size. If it feels skinny, for lack of a better term, there's a good chance the cob either doesn't have any kernels on it, or the kernels haven't filled with milk and plumped up. Third, and most important, is the silks. Before pollination the silks are white. After they're pollinated they turn brown and get a little bit brittle. Every single silk leads to one kernel of corn, so every single silk has to be blackened for a cob to be completely full. That may sound simple, but it can be a bit tricky. The first photo here shows the same six ears of corn before and after husking. The third ear from the left could be considered fully blackened based on a quick glance, but look at the cob - it's clearly got more immature kernels than mature ones. Likewise, the second from the right has quite a few immature kernels, even though the silks look pretty blackened. The first ear on the right has a good proportion of nice plump kernels, but it's not one I would select to take to market because of its size. It just didn't feel like a full ear of corn in my hand. The third ear from the right is the only one of these I would select for market. It's not perfect but it's pretty much full of mature kernels.

So if some that look blackened aren't filled out, how do you tell the difference? You have to pull those silks open and look closely to make sure they're all blackened, not just the outer ones. The second photo below shows an ear I wouldn't select for market because the inside silks are still white, and you can see that it has quite a few voids.

If an ear passes all those tests - pulling away from the stalk, good size, and blackened silks all the way through - then the last thing I do is run my thumb over it a few times to see if the kernels feel plump. In the last photo, you can see a bit of gap between the rows of kernels in the left ear, and you can see some plumper kernels that will feel like bumps next to their less plump neighbors. By contrast, the tight rows of all plump kernels on the right ear will feel like smooth ridges.

Is it a perfect system that never fails? No, but I try to err on the side of caution and leave it behind if an ear is questionable. And if someone brought one back and showed me a bad ear I'd probably give their money back. But I have high confidence that the corn I take to market has full ears of plump kernels without shucking every ear to check.

09/06/2025

Autumn is here and there's one more market after tomorrow (plus a bonus if the weather holds). We'll have our last 80 ears of sweet corn at the Tanana Valley Farmer's Market tomorrow, plus bell peppers, jalapeños, last of the green beans, last of the cauliflower, last of the radicchio, last of the sprouting broccoli, a little bit of summer squash, and a few other items. Come get it while you can, and thank you to everyone who stopped by and took home some of our veggies this season! We're curing winter squash and onions and ripening some tomatoes so stay tuned for what might be available next week, or after the last market.

09/05/2025

Wyn our beautiful broken sable marten jersey wooly kindled 4 healthy kits this morning.

08/30/2025

I'm taking sweet corn, jalapenos, snow peas, snap peas, kohlrabi, cauliflower, kale, radicchio, sprouting broccoli, yellow squash, and fresh eggs to the Tanana Valley Farmer's Market today. Forecast says mostly cloudy and mid- to high-40s today so you better wear a jacket and get there early before they all sell out.

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08/21/2025

Pulled the first test ear of corn today. Still need time for the kernels to plump but I'm really happy that the cob is completely filled out. Silks still aren't dry on most of the other ears so it will still be a few weeks before we have any to sell. If you recall, we had a hard frost on June 11/12 so didn't get the corn transplanted until the afternoon of the 12th. That's 69 days in colder than corn country soils and this is a 69 day corn so we're not necessarily behind schedule. Just hope we can beat the frost.