Summer's Come and Gone

A rainy and wet harvest morning last week

Summer has come and gone, and autumn is marching on towards winter. This Saturday will be the last farmers' market of the season that we will attend. It is also the last outdoor market before things move back inside to the Division Street School for the winter season.

This time of year is always a little bittersweet - relieved that we made it through another season and can finally take a breather, but also little sad to see the season go and to contemplate the coming of winter.

Despite a few real cold nights and some very rainy weather recently, we will still have a respectable array of produce for the last market. We have an abundance of fingerling potatoes, both the red French Fingerling and the yellow Russian Banana type. We will continue the sale on them we started  a few weeks ago - buy one quart at regular price and get a second quart at half price. This is a good time to stock up; potatoes can store for months if you have a cool dark place to keep them. Storing in the refrigerator is fine as well.

We also have a lot of green bell peppers available at a special discounted price. These are great to eat fresh, but are also easy to freeze and use in the winter to cook with. Just wash them and cut into strips or dice, and pack into zip-lock bags to freeze. There is no need to blanch or cook before freezing.

Spinach abundance

We continue to have a wide assortment of salad and cooking greens. Spinach has done real well this fall, so we will have plenty of that. Unfortunately, the lettuce has suffered from all the rain in October, so that will be in short supply. We will also be harvesting the last of the chard, kale, broccoli raab, escarole, and boc choi. There are even a few tomatoes that we picked before the big freeze, so still plenty of produce to make it worthwhile to come to market.

Still lots of baby greens for mesclun

Last planting of lettuce in the field tunnel

 Overall, we have had a great season and really can find little to complain about this year. The weather was definitely quirky - hot in March, too wet in April and May, hot and dry in July and August, and wet again in September and October. I guess that all balances out in the end. Quirky is the new normal, so I'll try to get used to it.

We had an outstanding farm crew this year. Everyone was a returning employee from previous years, so things ran pretty smoothly. We thank them all for their hard work and dedication through the rain, heat and cold. We literally could not do this without them. This was the year's line-up:

Martin, our resident artist and political analyst, completed his fifth season with us. He is off to Japan for the winter, so we wish him the best of luck and hopes he returns by spring.

Maureen, our official 'bag lady' (but don't call her that), also completes her fifth season helping at the farm and the market. She expects to spend much of the winter in Florida.

Desiree, our official snake charmer and chard expert, was back for her second year. She will spend the winter selling chocolate and diamonds, but swears she would rather be selling vegetables.

Maura, the fastest bean picker in the east - I can't even begin to figure out how long she has been with us. I do know that during that time she has had two great kids and has spent most of her non-farm time as a mother and nurses aid.

And Sue, familiar to most our customers as one half of Effie's Bakery, was a total Godsend at the market, doing a superb job as the main checkout person and helping set up and breakdown the stand..

And finally, a big thank you to all our fabulous customers for your dedication and support throughout this whole season. You are the best.

Lots to clean up in the tomato field

A lush cover crop of oats and peas sets our thoughts on next spring

I'll spend the next few weeks cleaning up the farm and trying to get to all those neglected projects that have been put off all summer. Our plans for the winter are vague, but I'm sure they will include travels to some place warm.

We'll keep you posted...

Hot Time on the Farm

Swiss chard

What a change in the weather from our last posting- from rain and showers every other day, to hot and dry with no rain in sight. While trying to keep everything watered adds to our list of chores, it's still preferable to having it too wet. During the past few weeks, we have been able to keep to our seeding, planting, and weeding schedule and  finally feel that we are almost keeping up.

Lettuce grown for full-sized heads

The farmer's market has been going like gang busters with mostly decent sunny weather and large crowds turning out to shop. While we regret to disappoint our regular shoppers, by not attending the Wednesday market this year, having the extra day on the farm each week has really made a difference in our sanity and the state of the farm.

July weather has brought on an abundance of vegetables at the market. In addition to our standard salad mixes and sprouts, during the past few weeks we have added other crops including: escarole, frisee, Swiss chard, radicchio, fennel, baby eggplant, and mini-cucumbers.

Our farm has always specialized in some of the more obscure vegetables out there. We enjoy growing crops that are not well known and introducing them to our customers. This often leads to the question at market, "What do I do with this?" We love to cook, but frequently don't use recipes, relying instead on experimentation and some basic cooking guidelines. Nearly every dish we make seems to start by chopping and sauteing an onion...

We realize that this cooking strategy doesn't work for everyone, so here is a simple recipe that utilizes some lesser known ingredients that are available now. This comes from one of our favorite cookbooks, A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen by Jack Bishop.

Fennel

Spinach and Radicchio Salad with Fennel-Red Onion Dressing

4 ounces baby spinach
1 medium head radicchio, leaves torn in bite-sized pieces
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 small fennel bulb, stalks and fronds discarded, bulb very thinly sliced
1 small red onion, halved and thinly sliced
  Salt
3 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
  Freshly ground black pepper

1. Place the spinach and radicchio in a large bowl.

2. Heat the oil in a medium skillet over medium-high heat until shimmering. Add the fennel, onion, and 1/2 teaspoon salt and cook, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables are softened and browned,

Radicchio

6 to 8 minutes. Stir in the vinegar and cook just until syrupy, about 30 seconds. Remove the pan from the heat and stir in pepper to taste.

3. Scrape the fennel mixture into the bowl with the spinach and radicchio. Toss to combine until the salad greens wilt slightly, about 1 minute. Serve immediately.




As we head into mid-summer, we are anxiously awaiting the harvest of some of our favorite crops. The fingerling potato crop is looking awesome. I can't remember a season when the tops were ever so tall and vigorous. Hopefully, the tubers underneath will be as healthy. Remarkably, we have found hardly any potato beetles on the plants this year. Perhaps the population has been reduced since we have not had potatoes for the past two seasons. Last year they rotted in the ground before sprouting, due to the rain, and in 2010, we did not plant them since we were on sabbatical.

Potato crop

 The heirloom tomato crop is also looking good, but taking their own sweet time in ripening. Their lateness is probably due to a very stressful start at transplanting. They got planted a week or two later than planned, as we waited for the ground to dry out. At planting time the holes were actually filling up with ground water as we dug them...not a good sign. We plopped them in with a splash, and hoped for the best. After a week, many had turned yellow from having saturated roots, but amazingly, after a month they had greened up and were growing nicely. They are now 3 to 4 feet tall and putting on a lot of green fruit. I think the harvest will be late, but plentifully.

Tomatoes in their tunnel

Baby eggplant

A new crop for us this year is baby eggplant. We are trying four varieties that are bred to by harvested small, at just 4 to 6 inches in length and about an inch in diameter. Thin skinned and with essentially no seeds, they are ideal for slicing in a stir-fry or putting on  the grill. So far the plants look vigorous and prolific. They are just starting to produce, so we have not had too many to sell yet - so come early to market if you want to try them.

That's about all the farm news for now. We'll try to keep in touch.

Gardening Time

Wow, Memorial Day is upon us...does time speed up as you get older? Perhaps this is an example of the TPR principle- that's the Toilet Paper Roll principle: the closer it gets to the end, the faster it runs out. Regardless, the unofficial start of summer is this weekend, of course the astrological start isn't for another few weeks, so don't panic.

Minglewood crew hard at work

Most significantly though, Memorial Day is the traditional weekend to get your vegetable garden planted. The average last frost for this region is May 20, so it should be safe to put out all those warm weather crops like tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, cucumbers, and basil. Of course, with the totally random and unpredictable weather we have had this spring, I would recommend keeping the sheets and blankets handy to cover plants, just in case we get an unusually late frost.

If you are a gardener, be sure to stop by our stand at the Saratoga market to check out all your planting options. We have a wide selection of over 25 tomato varieties, both heirlooms and hybrids, plus peppers, eggplant, herbs, lettuce, cucumbers, zucchini and summer squash. We offer the only Certified Organic plants at the Saratoga market.

On the weather front, farming has continued to be a challenge this year. We have had some absolutely perfect sunny days, however, the rainy periods in between have prevented us from keeping on any kind of regular planting schedule. With our heavy soils, we are forced to wait as long as possible for the fields to dry and then planting like crazy the day before it rains again. With the saturated soils, I am sad to say that crops have not been growing particularly well this spring. The most affected crop has been the field grown spinach. All our early plantings have essentially drowned. They hung on for quite awhile, but finally this week the plants succumbed, turning yellow, struggling for a last gasp of air...and died.

"Help- I'm drowning....."

The spinach goes down

Fields so wet, the geese think it's a pond!

Fortunately we've had the greenhouse plantings for lettuce and mesclun, which have provided a respectable supply for market. We have also had a good run with sprouts at market. It's nice to have at least one crop that is not weather dependant. While we have had issues with airborne mold spores causing trouble during the most humid periods of the summer, generally they are an easy crop to grow.


We produce them in our dedicated sprout room in an automated sprout machine - "Auto-Sprout". This has served us well for 13+ years. The basic process is to soak the seeds first in a very dilute disinfecting solution to kill any bacteria on the outside of the seeds, and then to rinse, rinse, rinse. This process is required by the FDA to insure that the sprouts are safe from pathogens.

Rinsing the seeds

We then soak the seeds in water for 6 to 8 hours, and then spread them on the screen trays. Then we pop them in the sprouter and turn it on. The machine automatically mists the seeds every half hour for 30 seconds. After four days, we start to green them up with a grow light. At five to six days they are ready to eat. We take them out of the sprouter on Saturday morning and bring them to market - voila.

Spreading out the seed on trays

Trays loaded into Auto-Sprout

Sprouts at 1 day old

Sprouts at 3 days old

Sprouts at 5 days old

If only growing spinach was that easy...

Winter to Spring

Toes toasting in front of fire

Well, here I sit on May first in front of the wood stove... this weather is just not right. I think back so fondly to mid-March when it was so sunny, warm, and dry. Alas, it's too early in the season to start complaining about the weather, so...

Happy May everyone! This blog has had a long hiatus since the last posting, but the advent of spring brings all kinds of bloggable topics. This past winter was eventful, but relaxing too. We had lots of time for all our favorite things: sleeping, reading, eating. We had visits from family and friends including Chris' sister from England, and Tammara's brother from St. Louis and sister from Austin.

Chris and Tammara at Playa El Tunco, El Salvador

We also had time for what has become nearly a winter tradition for us - travels to Central America. This year we went to Guatemala and El Salvador. This completes our check list for visiting all the countries of Central America - not that we were really counting.

Martin cultivating in lettuce tunnel

The farm season got off to a real jump start this year. With virtually no snow melt and little precipitation in late winter, our fields dried out earlier than any other of our 13 previous farm seasons. This allowed us to plow, till, and spread compost over all the fields by the end of March. Early plantings got in the ground on time, and we are off to a great start.

 It was actually so dry that I had to set up the irrigation in April, something I've never had to do before. As luck would have it, after spending a whole day setting everything up, the pump would not work. So for several days I had to revert to watering all the crops with a very long garden hose. Finally, I took the whole pump apart....to find the innards jam packed with hickory nuts! I guess those squirrels were busy last fall filling the intake hose with provisions. We eventually got everything put back together and working- just about the time it started to rain.

Drilling shiitake log

With it too wet to plant, we have kept busy with other projects. We harvested, drilled and inoculated about sixty new shiitake mushroom logs. We do a new batch every spring. It takes a year for the spawn to colonize the log and be ready to produce mushrooms, so what we prepared this year won't be ready until the 2013 season.

Sealing in spawn with melted bees wax

Seedling waiting for transplanting

We've been quite busy in the greenhouses, getting lots of plants started. With the rains delaying the transplanting for two weeks now - the main greenhouse is bursting at the seams. This week we put up our temporary tunnel to start hardening the plants off, as well as, to make room for this weeks seedings.

Salad beds ready to be cut

We are gearing up for our first market of the season this Saturday, May 5. One big change for us this year is that we will not be attending the Wednesday markets. We have debated this issue for a long time. We are constantly trying to find the right balance between time, size and sanity to make the farm a sustainable venture, both financially and personally. Not attending Wednesdays will give us an extra day to do field work on the farm, as well as, giving us more product to sell on Saturdays. We hope this does not inconvenience to many of our dedicated customers and apologize if it does.

We will once again be offering our Minglewood CSA Dollars option at our stand. This allows you to buy shares which are used as credit for any items sold at our stand. Shares range from $100 to $500 and save you from 10 to 20% off the regular prices. Be share to ask us for details at the market.

We are looking forward to a great season. Hope to see you at market.