Down on the Farm

Waverly

Waverly and baby Sam at market last week. You can see Cafe Wavo in the background.

Waverly and Sarah dancing at market. (Sarah is Sam's mom.)

Waverly weeding in the farm fields.

Waverly enjoying her new (to us) pool and the freezing cold water from our spring. (It's been wicked hot! The photos of long pants and long sleeves above are a week old.)

Looking for good recipes for garlic scapes

Our garlic scapes are in! They are a seasonal delicacy -- green scallion-like curls with a bright, garlicky flavor. We will probably give them out to CSAers in their basket this week. I'd love to give the CSAers a good recipe for them. Anyone have any good recipes for garlic scapes you could share? Post (or email) asap if you do. Thanks!

CSA Week Two

Here's the handout from last week's CSA, to give you a sense of what's going on around here!

News from the field:
Cold, hot, cold, hot. The weather can’t make up its mind. Last week we had to go find the wool hats again - this week it is back to swimming at Harvey’s Lake in the evening. But the veggies manage to keep tooting along.

It shouldn’t be too long now on a lot of the summer veggies - the cucumbers, melons, and zucchini are flowering in the field. Now the bees just need to do their work. And the potatoes and string beans are coming along - you don’t need to stock up on butter quite yet, but perhaps soon.

In the Basket:
Basil - We found a corner of the greenhouse for this normally mid-summer treat. Enjoy with pasta, butter and garlic.

Broccoli - This is a early variety with a slightly looser head that our mid-summer variety. In our recent household taste test Waverly loved OSF broccoli. Yummy and good for you!

Cherry tomatoes - Some folks get red sweet 100 cherries, some folks got yellow sungolds. The big slicing tomatoes are almost ready!

Lettuce - Peter’s going to harvest the lettuce tomorrow morning – to maximize freshness – so I don’t know yet what kind it will be!

Mesclun - Back again this week, as it probably will be for most weeks. Our mesclun is a mixture of several different lettuce varieties, cut at a baby size, and several different types of brassicas, such as mustard, tatsoi, and arugula.

Salad turnips - The tender greens on these are great gently cooked. I like them just wilted in a pan with olive oil and salt, though garlic is always a great addition. The turnips are great raw, but we’re also including another recipe – turnip souffle!

Sugar Ann Peas - Sweet, crisp, eat them raw!

Recipes:
I printed up the recipes for Peacham Turnip Souffle that a customer gave us last year. If you have any favorite recipes involving Old Shaw Farm veggies, we’d love a copy to give to others! Also, we’ll have at the CSA table a collection of veggie recipes from a group of CSAs in Wisconsin. Please feel free to read and/or borrow.

Peas

We brought fresh peas -- sugar ann peas, the kind you eat raw, pod and all -- to market this morning. Market opens at 9:00 a.m., and I think we sold out of peas at 9:04 a.m. CSAers each got a nice big bag too.

Here's a photo of a later planting of peas coming along nicely. Thanks to the Cub for the lack of weeds!

Hmmmmm . . .

I am not entirely sure where I come down on this one.

Reversing supers

The weather's turned beautiful again. Dry, sunny, warm. I thought it might be a good afternoon to work the bees a little. The cold, wet May had delayed far too long a basic hive inspection, cleaning the bottom board, and reversing the supers. Reversing the supers means switching the two boxes full of hive frames, so the bottom one is on top and the top one is on the bottom. The queen really prefers to go up to lay her eggs, and I had noticed that all the bees already seemed clustered near the top, so I thought they might like a super reversal.

Anyway, the bees did not seem in a mood to be worked. I remembered in the beekeeping workshop I went to a few years ago, the teacher said that if when you work the bees, after you smoke them (which helps calm them and warn them you're coming) and have done things slowly and properly, they still fly right in your face and buzz angrily, you may take that as a sign they really don't want to be worked right then, and come back another day. Anyway, I worry that its just that I'm out of the habit, but the bees in my face persuaded me to just reverse the supers and call it a day.

The photo above I took after I worked the bees. There're still a bunch of bees flying worriedly around outside, too upset for me to get too close with the camera, but I'm sure even by now they're well on their way adjusting to the switch and getting all in order.

Our friend Tam is coming in July, and I'm hoping when she's here she'll help me do a more thorough inspection of the bees. From what I saw today, the hive seems still relatively small and with relatively few honey stores, which is understandable given their late start last year and the cool wet spring. But they seem to be working hard and thriving, so I'm optimistic they'll have a good summer.

Hello!! And welcome to the 2005 CSA season!!

This was the first week of our CSA. It was wicked fun, and everyone remembered to pick up their baskets! Yay! Here's the flyer we handed out, in case you're curious what was in the basket.

News from the field:
Despite the last week’s sultry interlude, it has been a very cool and slow-growing spring for the veggies. Fortunately, we built our first heated greenhouse this winter, to accompany our three unheated hoophouses, so despite the season’s slow start, you should still have a few goodies in your basket from the greenhouse.

In June, we are busy finishing our annual plantings, and getting ready to tackle the first brace of weeds. Our big annual plantings include potatoes, onions, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, leeks, cucumbers, melons, corn, summer and winter squash. Those are all in the ground and growing. We only need to let them grow and pray for more warm weather. Most of our other crops, such as lettuce, mesclun, greens, string beans, broccoli, and cauliflower, are planted in constant successions throughout the season.

If you want to see more about how we plan to get rid of those pesky weeds, you can see a recent post on our blog at www.oldshawfarm.com that discusses our new-to-us cultivating tractor.

In the Basket:
Lettuce - Something to spruce up those sandwiches for lunch at work this week, or to combine with the mesclun to make a monster salad.

Arugula - tender and full of flavor. Yummy mixed into salad or on a sandwich with goat cheese or as a bed for a salmon burger.

Mesclun mix - our mesclun is a mixture of several different lettuce varieties, cut at a baby size, and several different types of brassicas, such as mustard, tatsoi, and arugula. If you want to try something different, check out the recipe for pasta with mesclun. A Griffin household favorite!

Sugar Ann Peas - These peas are for eating raw - pod and all. These were planted by CSAer Dana Kraus and her son Ethan. Thanks Dana and Ethan!

Sungold cherry tomatoes - the true first taste of summer. These babies burst with flavor!

Hungarian hot wax pepper - Another treat from the greenhouse. Medium hot to hot, good for frying up with your onions and garlic.

Salad Turnips - When you grab a bunch of these, your first thought may be, “What the . . .?” These are an Asian variety of turnip grown specifically for raw eating, like a radish. Except they are much more mild than radishes, and have a slight turnip after taste. We chop them up raw in salads, or sauté them, or stir fry them. More thoughts from CSAer Chris Lehrich, and one of his recipes, on a separate page.

An Unkindness of Ravens

I vividly remember the day we found out my Mom's books were going to be published. We were on our big family trip out West in an RV, but my Dad wasn't with us yet. I was 12 I think? We were at a Pizza Hut eating dinner, and my Dad was opening the mail on the phone with my Mom when they found the letter. We all started running around the Pizza Hut screaming with excitement. It was awesome.

I feel a little bit this way now. All my Mom's novels are now re-published and available as print on demand from this site!!!

The books are all very fun summer reading - historical, mythic, with a healthy shot of romance. Check them out!! Here's what my Mom wrote about them:

I have tried to write novels like the ones I enjoy reading--with characters I can love and treasure, carrying them around in my head for days and weeks, sometimes even longer. Each of these novels will take you, not into a fantasy world, but to an early medieval one where, for a little while, you can forget the grit of the one we live in today. dmm

Congratulations Mom!!!

Please donate

UPDATE 6/27: We reached our goal!! Five different people donated a total of $170! Yay!! Thank you!! !

Please help us raise $81.25 so that a low income family can be a part of our CSA this year through the Farm Share Program.

Vermont Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA) has a great program to help low income families join CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture - the buy a share of the farm in the spring, get a basket of veggies every week all summer deal).

In the Farm Share Program, the family pays half the cost of the CSA, NOFA pays a quarter of the cost, and the farm raises donations for the other quarter. Most CSAs raise their part through donations that CSA participants make when they sign up, but we found out about the program too late to do that. So we had planned to start participating in the program next year.

But then Enid, the director of NOFA-VT, called and said that there was a family this year who wanted to participate in our CSA through the Farm Share Program. Enid asked us if we would consider joining the program this year. She asked us to try to raise as much of the $81.25 for that share as we can, and NOFA will chip in the rest.

So please consider a donation of $10 or $15. Make your check out to NOFA-VT (it's tax deductible!), and send it to us at P.O. Box 181, Peacham VT 05862. We'll gather up the donations and send them in a bundle to NOFA.

Thanks very much!

Not all fun and games

Well, I haven't been posting much because it has been an absolutely brutal spring. First, it was so cold and rainy that all our crops are still, literally, 3-4 weeks behind schedule. Then, we are having a disease problem with the greenhouse tomatoes we worked so hard on. It seems that the disease problem is a fluke thing, most likely brought on by some bum seeds, but still, it will significantly reduce our tomato yield this year, and it is a blow. Then, our truck had some engine trouble requiring a four-figure repair. And then this past week it has been so hot and humid, it is hard to sleep, let alone work outside all day.

So instead of writing a post solely about how crappy it has been this spring, I decided to wait until I had something positive to add, and I came up with this post about our new-to-us Farmall International Cub.

Ours dates from the early 1970s, which makes it almost brand new, at least by Cub standards. It is a cultivating tractor, which means it acts as a huge mechanical hoe to physically disturb the soil and uproot weeds. Cubs were the standard cultivating tractors for about 50 years because of their high-clearance and off-set engine design.

Our Cub has two sets of hydraulics (rear and belly mounted), which raise and lower racks of metal tines. The tines can be adjusted to match up inversely with the rows of veggies in each bed, and then the tines are lowered slightly below the soil level. As the tractor moves forward, the shovels and sweeps attached to the bottom of the tines disturb the soil and kill the weeds. The off-set engine allows the driver to clearly see the rows of plants below the tractor, which makes it easier to keep the tractor on line.

Here are the rear tines set up to get weeds in the rows between each bed.

We are only at the very early stages of figuring out how to use this machine, but already, the implications are a little staggering. This tractor will radically improve our weed control, and radically reduce our weeding labor.

So, the Cub is something positive this spring, and I am sure the summer and fall will have more positivity to balance out the rough patches. Now that I am thinking about it, another positive is the awesome farm crew we seem to have put together, but I guess that will need to be another post some other time.

Baba comes to visit

My father swung into town for a quick visit this weekend. Here he and Wavo play in the sandbox Maryellen, Wavo, and I built a few weeks ago.

And then Baba got a demonstration of the new-to-us Cub cultivating tractor.

I am working on a separate post about the Cub, which is the latest addition to the tractor shed, but it is not quite done. I know, I know, you can't stand the suspense, but please try to be patient, I'll get it done soon.

Morning harvest

We've switched this year to a morning harvest. That's Laura cutting baby arugula above, and Peter and Cat below.

Last year we harvested in the afternoon. But, especially by the end of the season, we would run out of light at wash time, because we could not start harvesting until the heat of the day was gone.

Now we start harvesting at 6 a.m., and get all the vegetables in while its still cool, and then have time to wash afterwards. So far, it seems to be working well.

Morning harvest also makes Friday evenings less hectic for us as a family, though it still seems that things come up that need to get done Friday night. Like Peter's on his way to the market in Waitsfield right now, to drop off some things. (Since our truck is in the shop, a friend (and CSA member!!) lent us his truck. It's a little smaller than ours, so Peter's making an extra trip to make sure everything else will fit in the morning.)

Planting out peppers

The weather here is perfect for planting out warm stuff. Warm days and nights, sunny in the morning and rainy in the afternoon. We planted out red and yellow sweet peppers and Hungarian hot wax. The Hungarian hot wax are a medium hot orange pepper, and I'm already excited for orange salsa with Hungarian hot wax peppers and sun gold tomatoes. Yum.

We will still have red, yellow and orange sweet pepper seedlings, plus a few Hungarian hot wax, jalapenos and cayennes for sale this weekend -- Saturday 9-1 in Waitsfield or at the farm. We'll also be at the co-op in St. J on Friday from about 12-1. (We'll also have tomato seedlings, cucumbers, squash and other stuff.)

Some of our baby peppers were lucky enough to get a kiss goodnight from Waverly.

To read the blog, you might think Waverly is our main farm help. That's just because the only time we seem to remember to bring the camera is when Wavo comes out to help. Plus being with Waverly helps us slow down enough to remember how much fun we're having.

We actually have an awesome farm crew this season (all very part time). Here's Cat.

And Donna.

More about them and the rest of the farm crew later.