Harvest Tour

Highlights from Magic Mama's last tour of the season!
Five breeds of chickens at Blue Gate Farm:
Americana, Buff Orpington, Plymouth Bardrock, Silver Laced Wyandotte and Red Star

Mobile Home School

My 12 year old son and I traveled from Eau Claire, WI to Kansas City along HWY 35. My 9 year old daughter spent the week in Minneapolis with her grandparents, aunt and cousin. It was a great opportunity for my young roadie and I to listen to audio books, have some "grown-up" chats and enjoy some quiet time together.

Our first scheduled performance in Ames, Iowa was canceled on short notice which has lead me to revise my booking requirements for the future.

The next stop was in Des Moines for a performance at the Ritual Cafe. Des Moines has had a makeover since a flood in the 1990's, we were impressed by the architecture, sculpture gardens and public art. Ritual Cafe is located downtown, right near the sculpture garden. They have fantastic smoothies, a great menu with healthy options and local ingredients, good coffee and desserts. Quite an impressive wall of posters featuring previous performers, this place really supports musicians, artists, farmers and other creatives. Every Tuesday, the Ritual Cafe becomes a gathering place for the CSA members of Blue Gate Farm. Jill Beebout arrives early with boxes full of farm fresh treasures including eggs, honey, jams and whatever produce is ready to be harvested that week. Some members also get local cheese made by Reichert's Dairy Air.

Blue Gate Farm Eggs can be distinguished from others at the farmer's markets by the range of colors (thanks to the Americanas for the blue-green ones).

Blue Gate Farmer Sean tends about 40 hives of bees.

We didn't get any pictures at the show in Des Moines, I wish I had. There were a few kids who stayed up front near the stage and danced the whole night, they had some great moves too! A handful of elders in the back stayed for the duration and bought CD's afterward. The youthful adults were even dancing and playing shakers and cheesepuff bags! A reminder that Magic Mama performs music for ALL AGES (just in case you are tempted to describe me as a "children's musician").

For a few days following the performance at Ritual Cafe, we stayed at Blue Gate Farm. We enjoyed sharing a few meals, hiking in the woods, playing with the farm dogs, weeding the beans, , gathering eggs....
and visiting the lily pond.We became fast friends with our hosts Jill, Sean, Leo and Gloria and are looking joyward to visiting them again.Farmer Jill wearing her infamous chicken hat. Jill is also an interpreter in two styles of sign language, she spins fibers and both she and Sean are theater majors. Their talents are as diverse as their crops, no mono-cropped GMO's here!

From Blue Gate Farm, we traveled to Kansas City and stayed on the Kansas side above Fat Matt's Vortex. Thanks to Joni for the hospitality! We discovered some rad graffiti art on the Missouri side, and enjoyed Lulu's Thai food in an arts district.
The next morning we went to the sculpture garden and toured the Nelson-Atkins museum of art. We spent most of our time studying ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome.

After a lunch of leftover Thai food, we went to the Downtown Kansas City Public Library for an afternoon performance. The library is a renovated bank building, complete with vaults in the basement. The vaults have been turned into little movie theaters and the top floor of the building has been extended to create an auditorium. Rooftop gardens of native grasses border a life size chess game. The weather was in the 80's and quite humid, it began to rain heavily during my performance. Packing the van, earthshaking thunder as if the sky just cracked over our heads, water up to our shins rushing down the street. Apparently this is all just a day-in-the-life of Kansas City. Thriving arts and music scene, impressive architecture, abundant fruit and nut trees and cultural diversity to rival Berkeley.

Now we're glad to be home again, tending to the gardens, harvesting the fruits of the season and preparing the beds for next year. Despite being away from home for much of the growing season, we still managed to preserve a bounty of produce. We have pasta sauce, salsa, pickles, corn, peppers, berries, kale, squash, potatoes, garlic, onions and more. We mostly missed out on the broccoli and beans, they have all gone to seed. I saw an unusual butterfly laying eggs on the fennel so I decided to leave them.

And so begins the booking season for Magic Mama. I still have a few fun performances scheduled for this fall, including a Monster Mash costume party at the Raw Deal in Menomonie, WI. Our most adventurous tour is right around the corner and across the Pacific Ocean....stay tuned!