Down on the Farm

Out with the old in with the new

Mimi and Peter pulling tomatoes out of the upper hoophouse to plant to fall greens for the fall CSA and Thanksgiving market mostly. The strings Mimi is tying are the strings we use to trellis the tomatoes.

I am excited about the idea of marketing longer into the fall, but again its a potential marketing/production issue. I mean, I am mostly in charge of marketing and Peter mostly production, and the two often have different agendas. Vegetable production is simplest for veggies that come ripe from mid-August to mid-September. But it is hardest to sell veggies in that time. All the farmstands are full, and people's gardens are so bountiful that they are giving away their produce. So from a marketing perspective, selling outside of the mid-August to mid-September period is easier, at least theoretically. The issue for late fall, from a marketing perspective, is delivery, how to get the veggies to the people. Even though we've had great weather on market days recently, realistically, soon the weather will be harsh enough that folks won't want to come out. So we're going to try this mini fall CSA, see how that works, maybe try having the farmstand open Friday afternoons. Whatever happens, we'll certainly learn from it and have some fun along the way.

Waverly dancing in the rain

This is photo from Wednesday. It was hot!!

CSA Week Sixteen

News from the field:

It is hard to believe, but it is now the middle of the end. It isn’t quite the beginning of the end anymore, but more like the middle. Foliage season is upon us, we have had a killing frost that thinned the vegetable herd, and now we have only this week and two more of the CSA left! The warm spell early this week doesn’t change much for us. The days are getting shorter and the nights longer, and that means the plants don’t grow as fast. So we will squeeze what we can out of these last few weeks, and then it is already time to think about next year.

Announcements:

Our annual basket amnesty is in operation – we need those baskets back when you get a chance! We started the season with over 100, and we only have about 20 on hand right now. Please bring back any baskets you may have – no questions asked!!

Also, we have jack-o-lantern pumpkins and pie pumpkins and lots of gourds for your foliage displays. See us at market or stop by the house. The pumpkins are out in the front yard, serve yourself style.

In the Basket:

Fall salad – Spinach and romaine lettuce can stand up to the cool evenings. And we still have a few tomatoes from the greenhouse.

Broccoli raab – This is a spicy Italian green that we love. There’s a recipe on the back to eat it with pasta, or you can skip the pasta in the recipe and eat it as a side green. If you go looking for other recipe ideas, know that there are a lot of other names (and spellings) for this green: rapini, rabe, cime di rapa, etc. There was an interesting looking recipe on the blog Chocolate and Zucchini for Broccoli and Cornmeal Upside Down Cake, which one commenter said would be good with raab, but I haven’t tried it yet. If you do, let me know what you think!

Onions and garlic – This is the time of year we start stocking you up to help get you through those barren CSA-less weeks ahead. But we don’t want to overwhelm you yet, so just two pounds of onions and two heads of garlic this week.

Red potatoes and parsley – The red norlands are best boiled. Peter makes them with a little butter and mustard and some chopped up parsley.

Orecchiette with broccoli rabe

adapted from Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone

Ingredients:
1 bunch broccoli rabe
12 ounces orecchiette (ear shaped pasta)
4 tablespoons olive oil plus
salt
3 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
½ teaspoon red pepper flakes
finely grated parmesan
lemon wedges
capers

Bring a big pot of water to boil. Add the broccoli rabe and cook for 3 minutes. Remove with a strainer and chop. Salt the water and cook the pasta in it.

Meanwhile, warm the oil with the garlic and pepper flakes in a wide skillet over medium heat until fragrant. Add the rabe and cook gently. Drain the pasta and add it to the greens. Toss with more olive oil and capers if desired. Serve topped with grated cheese and with lemon on the side.

The middle of the end

Maples turning color behind a stand of frost killed corn

It isn't really the beginning of the end anymore -- we are pretty squarely getting into foliage season. But it isn't really quite the end yet either. We still have a couple of weeks of our farmer's markets left, and then our fall CSA add-on runs until Thanksgiving. So we still have some farming to do this year, but the end of the end is coming up on the horizon.

Studying up

Waverly and Henry attempting to i.d. a caterpillar they found on the dill. I'm pretty sure it was a black swallowtail.

The East will rise again!

Time to snap up that ag land in the northeast.

Happiness is a patch of good tilled earth

We have this great video called Farmers and their Innovative Cover Cropping Techniques that the kids love to watch, mostly for the tractors, but is really helpful and informative. Anyway, in that video, one of the farmers, Will Stevens I think, talks about how he used to think a brown field was a clean field, but now he has come to appreciate the beauty of green fields even more. Cover crops harvest the power of the sun to feed the soil, I think he said. And I am sure he is right, but still, a patch of fresh tilled earth is a beautiful thing.

Pumpkin patch

Henry playing in the dirt at market

Wednesday was perfect market weather. Warm, sunny, dry.

Henry was totally dirty after this, with a little cloud of dust trailing him, a la Pigpen.

CSA Week Fifteen

News from the field:

Three frosty nights in a row have stopped some of our field crops in their tracks. So cucumbers, sungolds, melons are all in our rear view mirror for this year. But the cold hardy stuff continues on, as does some of the stuff we could cover. Salad turnips return this week, plus we have some kale, and winter squash – all harbingers of fall.

In some ways controlling the temperature isn’t the hard part about fall – between covering things in the fields and growing stuff in our greenhouses, we can keep temperatures up well into the fall. The real problem is that we start running out of daylight this time of year, which means that the plants. . . really . . . slow. . . down. . . in terms of their growth. It makes planning and managing your yields so much more challenging.

In the Basket:

Fall salad – lots of lettuce, salad turnips, tomatoes.

Cauliflower – Use it with the salad turnips to make something very white. CSAer Lisa Whitney likes to roast cauliflower: toss with olive oil and crushed garlic, roast at 450 for 20-30 minutes, till tender. CSAer Heather Copp likes it boiled and with butter and/or vinegar. When I was a kid we used to eat it raw dipped in mayonaise.

Delicata squash – The first of the winter squash. This has a very thin skin which you can peel with a vegetable peeler or leave on as you wish. I prefer it steamed, and Peter usually bakes it, either way it is good. Delicata cries out to be paired with a blue or similar cheese, and there is a delicata and blue cheese quiche recipe on the back

Carrots – this year has only been so-so for our carrots, and this bunch we got planted a little late, so they are still nice and small and tender.

Kale – A cold hardy cooking green that is good for you to boot! Chop it up, steam it down, and add lots of butter. Or try “For the love of kale” CSAer Nichole Ruggles’ great recipe for kale and pasta.

CSA Week Fourteen

Lisa has a large basket CSA share.

News from the field:

Finally some rain. We had been really dry for about 3-4 weeks – to the point where most of our veggies stopped growing for a week or two, and some stuff beyond the reach of our rudimentary irrigation system had begun to die. It had been as dry as it had ever been in the five years we have been doing this. But now we are close to being back on track with the rain we had this week. Our fall salad turnips will pull through, for example, but they will be a week later than we had hoped. We also pulled the leeks this week and they are a little on the small side, but the lack of rain had really beat them up a bit. Don’t worry – they still have that leek-y goodness, and the potato leek recipe is still yummy.

Otherwise, as summer turns to fall we naturally say goodbye to some things. This week, for example, we don’t have any cucumbers – they are done for the season. But we also harvested a bunch of winter squash, gourds, and pumpkins this week. They will cure for a week or so before they are delivered to your plate.

In the Basket:

Summer treats – we won’t have them too much longer: Tomatoes and sun golds.

Good greens: lots of lettuce, lots of broccoli, and a big bunch of chard.

Potatoes and leeks – Pick a blustery day and make the potato leek recipe on the back. A tasty fall treat. This was one of the most loved recipes from last year and one worth repeating.

Bunch o’ beets – Eat the beets, eat the greens. Good for you too.

CSA Week Thirteen

News from the field:

The beginning of the end? We are supposed to get our first frost tonight, and even though it is not supposed to be too cold, it is still the beginning of the end. The light has shifted, and the days are getting shorter. We even have some leaves changing here and there. It has also been dry dry dry at our place, which just gives the plants one more reason to not grow much. So we start the switch to more fall-like baskets, as we start harvesting pumpkins and winter squash and start them curing.

Note: We wrote this Tuesday night. It didn't end up frosting. Now it is actually hot -- 94 today. Its supposed to cool off tomorrow, but they're not predicting frost any time soon.

In the Basket:

Summer sweethearts: Tomatoes, sun golds, red pepper

Good greens: broccoli, lettuce

Brussel sprouts - Summer still in full swing, but the fall vegetables are starting to come on. Nana Alice, Peter’s mom, is visiting, and she cooked up some delicious brussel sprouts this way: steam them till bright green and not quite tender. Slice in half. You can do that part ahead of time. Then when you are ready to eat, cook some shallots or onions in butter, then add the brussel sprouts and heat it all up.

Onions - Five pounds of onions this week. There is a French Onion Soup recipe on the back, but if that does not interest you, these onions are cured and so will keep for a month or more.

Garlic - Also dried and cured like the onions. Roast the whole head it all now and spread on toast or use clove by clove in recipes over the next few weeks. Or if your herbs survived the frost, make up some pesto for the freezer.