Week 17
We made a small dent in the winter squash last week but still have a lot to haul. We planted less this year but are still struggling to find a place for them all. Hopefully by this time next week we will be have them all inside and breathing a sigh of relief.
The rain did a number on the cherry tomatoes but we are hoping to give you one more round of them this week.
Broccoli
Cherry Tomatoes
Acorn Squash
Kale
Shallots
Spinach - Small Only (large share next week)
Bok Choy - Large Only
Carrots - Large Only
Fall Salad Mix - Add On Veggie Only - For the last couple years I have been experimenting with seasonal salad mixes. We seed our regular salad mix weekly. Timing the lettuce to mature at the same time as the mustards is irrelevant because we can always pick different plantings to get them to line up. It is a little harder to time the seasonal mixes. I had wanted the fall mix to have radicchio in it but it isn't even close to ready. Instead it is a pretty mix of red lettuces and orange and yellow calendula.
Hope you all enjoyed your weekend. I am off to trim and bag onions and listen to the game with Kelly.
Sunday, September 25, 2016
Sunday, September 18, 2016
Week 16
Happy Autumn (well almost). Today is a beautiful fall day. I love working outside in the fall when the sun is out. It has a mellowness and a pleasant warmth to it that is so different from the harsh, but also wonderful, sunshine of summer. Today though, I am mostly inside, roasting and freezing tomatoes, making garlic chile sauce and maybe, if I get to it, some pickled peppers. We had a long day Friday - harvesting and hanging dry beans after we finished preparing for Saturday. It is comforting to see them hanging in the rafters of our metal building. We also had unexpected visitors for a late dinner on Friday. Kelly drove the dry beans home to hang them and I drove through the farm at dusk with a harvest knife and a bucket gathering a bunch of veggies to roast, herbs and the propane for the grill. It was a meal that brought summer (tomato and basil salad with grilled peppers and onions) and fall (roasted cauliflower, potatoes and fennel) together. Your boxes kind of do the same today with a nice mix of summer and fall. We decided to start the winter squash party with a spaghetti squash. These are a new variety (Angel Hair) for us and look a little different than the common yellow spaghetti squash. I was attracted to the smaller size. The small shares will get a single squash and the large share two of them. They look a little bit like mini pumpkins but they taste like spaghetti squash.
Carrots
Cauliflower
Corn - hopefully for all of you. This is a bicolor corn or as we like to say around here in our best Tennessee accent, it is white, half yellow. This is the response my dad got when he asked a farmer in Tennessee what color his corn was.
Spaghetti Squash
Cherry Tomatoes
Slicing Tomato
Salad Mix
Happy Autumn (well almost). Today is a beautiful fall day. I love working outside in the fall when the sun is out. It has a mellowness and a pleasant warmth to it that is so different from the harsh, but also wonderful, sunshine of summer. Today though, I am mostly inside, roasting and freezing tomatoes, making garlic chile sauce and maybe, if I get to it, some pickled peppers. We had a long day Friday - harvesting and hanging dry beans after we finished preparing for Saturday. It is comforting to see them hanging in the rafters of our metal building. We also had unexpected visitors for a late dinner on Friday. Kelly drove the dry beans home to hang them and I drove through the farm at dusk with a harvest knife and a bucket gathering a bunch of veggies to roast, herbs and the propane for the grill. It was a meal that brought summer (tomato and basil salad with grilled peppers and onions) and fall (roasted cauliflower, potatoes and fennel) together. Your boxes kind of do the same today with a nice mix of summer and fall. We decided to start the winter squash party with a spaghetti squash. These are a new variety (Angel Hair) for us and look a little different than the common yellow spaghetti squash. I was attracted to the smaller size. The small shares will get a single squash and the large share two of them. They look a little bit like mini pumpkins but they taste like spaghetti squash.
Carrots
Cauliflower
Corn - hopefully for all of you. This is a bicolor corn or as we like to say around here in our best Tennessee accent, it is white, half yellow. This is the response my dad got when he asked a farmer in Tennessee what color his corn was.
Spaghetti Squash
Cherry Tomatoes
Slicing Tomato
Salad Mix
Sunday, September 11, 2016
Week 15
On Sunday nights do ever find it hard to believe that tomorrow is Monday again? Wasn't it just Monday? For us, and I imagine for many of you, it means that some of the things you had hoped to get done will have to wait until next Sunday. I am a little behind getting food put up. Last Sunday we did tomatoes, roasted and raw peppers and basil. I had hoped to do more tomatoes and apple sauce today but I spent too much time hanging out with the piglets we picked up last Wednesday. They are spotted, floppy eared, snorting little guys who love melons. I can't help but check on them…a lot. I also got the greenhouse ready for arugula, salad and bok choy transplants. We are just about done transplanting. Our last remaining flats to go out in the field are kale that we are planting to harvest raab off of next spring. It will go out this week and the greenhouse should be filled by the end of next week. Kelly did a bunch of tractor work and it feels so good to see some of the fields that we were done harvesting out of get mowed and disked. Our dry beans are about ready to come out and so is the squash. You can only fight the change of seasons for so long.
We hope to have corn in the boxes next week along with cauliflower.
Sweet Peppers
Lettuce
Japanese Cuke
Green Beans
Slicing Tomatoes
Sweet Onion
Melon
Eggplant - Small Only
Cherry Tomatoes - Large Only
Kohlrabi - Large Only
Yu Choy Sum or Shungiku - Add on Veggie Only - You will get one this week and the other next week.
Yu Choy Sum is an asian green in the same family as kale, cabbage, bok choy, etc. It is mild - not a bit of bitterness. I knew I would like it because I like greens but it isn't just a green for green lovers. It is mild enough to please everyone. I made Choy Sum with Garlic Sauce. It was quick and easy and yummy…less than 10 minutes start to finish.
Shungiku or Chrysanthemum Leaves - These are used in many Japanese dishes including shabu shabu, sukiyaki and tempura. In china the leaves and flowers are used in soups. They have a distinct flavor and are very aromatic. We grew a small patch of them last year. I used them in salads and in chicken broth. A customer used them to make gomae and brought me some. The simplest recipe I found here, however in the version I had the sesame seeds were ground into a paste. There are many recipes for gomae on the internet with lots of different vegetables. The seeds are traditionally ground with a mortar and pestle but a coffee grinder works great too. Chrysanthemum cooks very quickly. You only need to blanch it for a minute. The raw leaves can be added to salads.
On Sunday nights do ever find it hard to believe that tomorrow is Monday again? Wasn't it just Monday? For us, and I imagine for many of you, it means that some of the things you had hoped to get done will have to wait until next Sunday. I am a little behind getting food put up. Last Sunday we did tomatoes, roasted and raw peppers and basil. I had hoped to do more tomatoes and apple sauce today but I spent too much time hanging out with the piglets we picked up last Wednesday. They are spotted, floppy eared, snorting little guys who love melons. I can't help but check on them…a lot. I also got the greenhouse ready for arugula, salad and bok choy transplants. We are just about done transplanting. Our last remaining flats to go out in the field are kale that we are planting to harvest raab off of next spring. It will go out this week and the greenhouse should be filled by the end of next week. Kelly did a bunch of tractor work and it feels so good to see some of the fields that we were done harvesting out of get mowed and disked. Our dry beans are about ready to come out and so is the squash. You can only fight the change of seasons for so long.
We hope to have corn in the boxes next week along with cauliflower.
Sweet Peppers
Lettuce
Japanese Cuke
Green Beans
Slicing Tomatoes
Sweet Onion
Melon
Eggplant - Small Only
Cherry Tomatoes - Large Only
Kohlrabi - Large Only
Yu Choy Sum or Shungiku - Add on Veggie Only - You will get one this week and the other next week.
Yu Choy Sum is an asian green in the same family as kale, cabbage, bok choy, etc. It is mild - not a bit of bitterness. I knew I would like it because I like greens but it isn't just a green for green lovers. It is mild enough to please everyone. I made Choy Sum with Garlic Sauce. It was quick and easy and yummy…less than 10 minutes start to finish.
Shungiku or Chrysanthemum Leaves - These are used in many Japanese dishes including shabu shabu, sukiyaki and tempura. In china the leaves and flowers are used in soups. They have a distinct flavor and are very aromatic. We grew a small patch of them last year. I used them in salads and in chicken broth. A customer used them to make gomae and brought me some. The simplest recipe I found here, however in the version I had the sesame seeds were ground into a paste. There are many recipes for gomae on the internet with lots of different vegetables. The seeds are traditionally ground with a mortar and pestle but a coffee grinder works great too. Chrysanthemum cooks very quickly. You only need to blanch it for a minute. The raw leaves can be added to salads.
Sunday, September 4, 2016
Week 14
Well, August is done. The rain came. It feels like fall. However, I am sure we have some nice days ahead of us and we won't be moving on to winter squash and parsnips just yet! No need to rush, we have plenty of time to enjoy those. We do have a veggie making it's farm premier this week - celery. It is our first year growing it. We only had one planting and it looks and tastes great. It has a more intense celery flavor than what you buy in the supermarket, particularly the outer leaves. My mother told me that when I was little we use to eat braised celery. I don't remember it nor would it have ever occurred to me to make it if she hadn't mentioned it, but she made it sound delicious. I looked at a recipe out of Julia Child's first book but ended up making a simpler version I found on line. I included a link below. I used chicken stock instead of beef (Julia favors beef as well, but I had chicken on hand). I really liked it.
While Kelly was at market last Tuesday and I was frantically cleaning the house in hopes of making it look like we are just very neat and tidy people all the time, Ian and Jo did a nice job of getting most of the onions out last Tuesday. We had a big push early last week to get everything that had matured out of the ground before it rained. I meant to take a picture of them before it got dark but time slipped away from me. They look great. If you would have told me in April that we might have the nicest onions we have ever grown I would have either laughed at you or called you nasty names. There was a period when I wondered if we would even have onions this year. For some reason many of the seedlings died and those that didn't weren't growing any roots. I ended up seeding all the remaining seed we had left three weeks after our normal seed date. The first round ended up growing roots after doing nothing for about a month and the new ones which I seeded in different potting soil looked great but they all got transplanted later than we ever have transplanted them before. They all look great. There were a couple beds that got planted even later than the rest with some of the onions that took so long to grown roots. I was so doubtful about their success that I didn't even label the different varieties. They aren't mature yet and we left them in the ground but I am hopeful for those as well.
Carrots
Beets
Cherry Tomatoes
Celery
Zucchini
Garlic
Basil
Broccoli - Large Only
Slicing Tomato - Large Only
Braised Celery
Well, August is done. The rain came. It feels like fall. However, I am sure we have some nice days ahead of us and we won't be moving on to winter squash and parsnips just yet! No need to rush, we have plenty of time to enjoy those. We do have a veggie making it's farm premier this week - celery. It is our first year growing it. We only had one planting and it looks and tastes great. It has a more intense celery flavor than what you buy in the supermarket, particularly the outer leaves. My mother told me that when I was little we use to eat braised celery. I don't remember it nor would it have ever occurred to me to make it if she hadn't mentioned it, but she made it sound delicious. I looked at a recipe out of Julia Child's first book but ended up making a simpler version I found on line. I included a link below. I used chicken stock instead of beef (Julia favors beef as well, but I had chicken on hand). I really liked it.
While Kelly was at market last Tuesday and I was frantically cleaning the house in hopes of making it look like we are just very neat and tidy people all the time, Ian and Jo did a nice job of getting most of the onions out last Tuesday. We had a big push early last week to get everything that had matured out of the ground before it rained. I meant to take a picture of them before it got dark but time slipped away from me. They look great. If you would have told me in April that we might have the nicest onions we have ever grown I would have either laughed at you or called you nasty names. There was a period when I wondered if we would even have onions this year. For some reason many of the seedlings died and those that didn't weren't growing any roots. I ended up seeding all the remaining seed we had left three weeks after our normal seed date. The first round ended up growing roots after doing nothing for about a month and the new ones which I seeded in different potting soil looked great but they all got transplanted later than we ever have transplanted them before. They all look great. There were a couple beds that got planted even later than the rest with some of the onions that took so long to grown roots. I was so doubtful about their success that I didn't even label the different varieties. They aren't mature yet and we left them in the ground but I am hopeful for those as well.
Carrots
Beets
Cherry Tomatoes
Celery
Zucchini
Garlic
Basil
Broccoli - Large Only
Slicing Tomato - Large Only
Braised Celery
Sunday, August 28, 2016
Week 13
I already regret complaining about last week's heat. It is just that I got a little too hot but now I am not hot enough. I need help. Really though, I do. Kelly's family arrives on Wednesday…11 of them! They are only here for a couple days and they are staying in a hotel so it really shouldn't be a big deal. The rub is that we like things to be perfect and it is hard to ever be perfect but it is particularly challenging for us in August. It is hard to explain August but it is not the easiest month to get through.
I am looking forward to cooking a nice meal and sharing with them the food we grow. I am also afraid that they won't understand how much that food and what we do with our lives means to us. It isn't that they aren't great people. I feel incredibly lucky to genuinely like my in-laws. It is just that our life is so different than theirs and I am not sure they will appreciate the things that we value about our life. I am fine with people thinking we are little crazy and in the case of my parents that we work to hard as long as they enjoy the food. The other day my dad told Kelly that the watermelon he gave him was the best watermelon he had ever eaten. It made my day.
I know that the veggies in your box aren't always perfect (although we try) but I hope you are enjoying them and sharing food and meals with people you care about. Knowing that people are enjoying meals together with food that we grew (along with a lot of help) is one of the things that makes my job great. I love it when people send me photos of their kids eating veggies or tell me about what they cooked. Don't worry, I become much less emotional once September arrives…more sleep, less sentimental!
Enjoy your veggies.
Arugula
Rainbow Peppers - you choose, there will be a basket full on the stand.
Kale - Hopefully mixed bunches If you have ever wanted to eat a kale salad but been afraid that it will be all chewy and tough this is your best chance. The last few years we have given the farm share our first picking off the fall kale. It has been living under row cover for bug protection and it is very tender. I will put a couple kale salad recipes at the end but I have a couple general suggestions. I like to remove most of the rib and slice it thin or chop it and I either massage it or let the dressing sit on it for a little while (it is the first thing I make if I am having it for dinner).
Cherry Tomato
Slicing Tomato
Cucumber
Melon - I am not sure what awaits us in the melon patch tomorrow. The Tuscan melons and piel de sapos are close.
Eggplant - Large Only
Little Gem Lettuce - Large Only
Shiso - Add On Only - This will start on Wednesday and then continue next Monday. Shiso is a Japanese herb that is in the mint family. It is sometimes called Japanese basil. It has an amazing aroma and a distinct flavor that is hard to describe. You will have green shiso. It is often served wrapped around sushi and can sometimes be found in rolls. You can use the leaves like little wraps around rice, grilled chicken skewers or veggies. When I asked a friend born if Japan if the shiso looked okay she became very excited, laid it on her palm and than clapped her other hand down on it to release the aroma. Here a few things to look at: Ume pasta with shiso and nori, shiso wrapped chicken, shiso cocktail, sushi roll with plum and shiso
Kale Salads
Shiso - Add On Only - This will start on Wednesday and then continue next Monday. Shiso is a Japanese herb that is in the mint family. It is sometimes called Japanese basil. It has an amazing aroma and a distinct flavor that is hard to describe. You will have green shiso. It is often served wrapped around sushi and can sometimes be found in rolls. You can use the leaves like little wraps around rice, grilled chicken skewers or veggies. When I asked a friend born if Japan if the shiso looked okay she became very excited, laid it on her palm and than clapped her other hand down on it to release the aroma. Here a few things to look at: Ume pasta with shiso and nori, shiso wrapped chicken, shiso cocktail, sushi roll with plum and shiso
Kale Salads
Sesame Kale Salad
The following two recipes are similar. Both have a lemony dressing, bread crumbs and grated cheese. The second is basically a slightly different rendition of the first with the addition of raisons and walnuts. Both ways are great, but the first is the simplest. They both call for Tuscan kale or Lacinato kale but any kale will be fine.
Kale Salad with Bread Crumbs
Kale Salad with Bread Crumbs, Walnuts and Raisons
The following two recipes are similar. Both have a lemony dressing, bread crumbs and grated cheese. The second is basically a slightly different rendition of the first with the addition of raisons and walnuts. Both ways are great, but the first is the simplest. They both call for Tuscan kale or Lacinato kale but any kale will be fine.
Kale Salad with Bread Crumbs
Kale Salad with Bread Crumbs, Walnuts and Raisons
Sunday, August 21, 2016
Week 12
We had two goals today after delivery. One was to thresh the seed from the beet plants we pulled out of the ground and spread on tarps last week and the other was to get space cleared out/cleaned up to start receiving onions. The onions started falling over here and there a week or so ago but in the past couple days a lot of them have fallen. Everyday I marvel at how quickly time passes.
Lettuce
Carrots - Purple Haze
Broccoli
Cabbage
Cherry Tomatoes
Potatoes - Satina, gold skin, gold flesh
Korean Melon - Sun Jewel - Small Only
Watermelon- Large Only
The beets took a while(most things take longer than we think they will) so I am off to join Kelly to make some space in our blue metal building for the onions. Hope you all had a great weekend.
We had two goals today after delivery. One was to thresh the seed from the beet plants we pulled out of the ground and spread on tarps last week and the other was to get space cleared out/cleaned up to start receiving onions. The onions started falling over here and there a week or so ago but in the past couple days a lot of them have fallen. Everyday I marvel at how quickly time passes.
 |
| I took this picture about a week and half ago when they where just starting to fall. Once an onion's neck goes soft and the top falls over it is done growing. There was a point in the spring when we thought we may have lost all our onion seedlings and we thought it might be too late to start new ones. I am ecstatic with how great they look. |
 |
| As seed growing newbies we don't have a lot of fancy equipment or a definite plan for how to accomplish the threshing but we made do and it went pretty well. |
Lettuce
Carrots - Purple Haze
Broccoli
Cabbage
Cherry Tomatoes
Potatoes - Satina, gold skin, gold flesh
Korean Melon - Sun Jewel - Small Only
Watermelon- Large Only
The beets took a while(most things take longer than we think they will) so I am off to join Kelly to make some space in our blue metal building for the onions. Hope you all had a great weekend.
Sunday, August 14, 2016
Week 11
We hit the melon patch on Friday. We harvested a few almost ripe watermelons and a few Sun Jewels, the Korean style melon. Some melons, such as the Sun Jewel, are really easy to judge when they are ready to eat. First they turn yellow and then if they are ready the stem will slip which is means it will release from the melon when you apply the smallest amount of pressure to it. Some melons are what we call forced slip, meaning they are ripe when the stem releases with a little encouragement. Some melons are harvested based on color and skin condition. The watermelons are the trickiest. We look for a tendril that is dying down or dead depending on the variety. Sometimes we look for a nice yellow spot where the melon sits on the ground and sometimes the skin changes color just a little bit. We also thump them but that isn't always reliable and each variety has its own quirks. We eat a lot of melons during melon season, particularly new varieties to make sure we understand how to harvest them. It is fun to wade through the patch grabbing random melons and sampling them (along with hot, sticky and dusty and melons are heavy and difficult to haul out of the field - just incase you are jealous I will give you the full description).
Carrots
Lettuce
Cucumbers
Cherry Tomatoes
Sweet Onion
Herb Choice - most likely cilantro, dill, parsley or basil
Bell Pepper
Slicing Tomato
Sun Jewel Melon - Large Only
Papa Cacho Fingerling Potato - Add On Veggie Only
Papa Cacho-
Can you believe what you read on the internet? We have tried to grow fingerlings before but we always end up underwhelmed with the results. The seed costs more, they have a lower yield and because they are small they get culled harder for blemishes. One blemish on a large potato isn't a big deal but who wants to peel a bunch of baby potatoes? Anyway, I have a habit of deciding something isn't worth growing only to be lured in by some description on the internet or seed catalog that convinces me we need to try growing it again. Papa Cacho has a cool name, is from Peru and lives up to its fingerling name with long somewhat strange looking tubers. It is suppose to have decent yields and late blight resistance. It is also uncommon and I had never seen seed available before. Oh yeah, I fell for it hard. When our seed potato shipment arrived in the spring we unpacked it and put the potatoes into crates to check for any rot and to let them come out of dormancy before planting them Kelly remarked on them. Something heavy with with sarcasm like "I bet these are going to do great" came out of his mouth. Well, I dug a plant today and I really hope they all look like the ones I dug today do. They are beautiful - bright pinkish red and blemish free. The flesh is also pretty - white with pink streaking. The yields don't seem great, but decent for fingerling and the plants look healthier than any other potato out there. Maybe, big maybe, I have found the fingerling for us!
We hit the melon patch on Friday. We harvested a few almost ripe watermelons and a few Sun Jewels, the Korean style melon. Some melons, such as the Sun Jewel, are really easy to judge when they are ready to eat. First they turn yellow and then if they are ready the stem will slip which is means it will release from the melon when you apply the smallest amount of pressure to it. Some melons are what we call forced slip, meaning they are ripe when the stem releases with a little encouragement. Some melons are harvested based on color and skin condition. The watermelons are the trickiest. We look for a tendril that is dying down or dead depending on the variety. Sometimes we look for a nice yellow spot where the melon sits on the ground and sometimes the skin changes color just a little bit. We also thump them but that isn't always reliable and each variety has its own quirks. We eat a lot of melons during melon season, particularly new varieties to make sure we understand how to harvest them. It is fun to wade through the patch grabbing random melons and sampling them (along with hot, sticky and dusty and melons are heavy and difficult to haul out of the field - just incase you are jealous I will give you the full description).
Carrots
Lettuce
Cucumbers
Cherry Tomatoes
Sweet Onion
Herb Choice - most likely cilantro, dill, parsley or basil
Bell Pepper
Slicing Tomato
Sun Jewel Melon - Large Only
Papa Cacho Fingerling Potato - Add On Veggie Only
Papa Cacho-
Can you believe what you read on the internet? We have tried to grow fingerlings before but we always end up underwhelmed with the results. The seed costs more, they have a lower yield and because they are small they get culled harder for blemishes. One blemish on a large potato isn't a big deal but who wants to peel a bunch of baby potatoes? Anyway, I have a habit of deciding something isn't worth growing only to be lured in by some description on the internet or seed catalog that convinces me we need to try growing it again. Papa Cacho has a cool name, is from Peru and lives up to its fingerling name with long somewhat strange looking tubers. It is suppose to have decent yields and late blight resistance. It is also uncommon and I had never seen seed available before. Oh yeah, I fell for it hard. When our seed potato shipment arrived in the spring we unpacked it and put the potatoes into crates to check for any rot and to let them come out of dormancy before planting them Kelly remarked on them. Something heavy with with sarcasm like "I bet these are going to do great" came out of his mouth. Well, I dug a plant today and I really hope they all look like the ones I dug today do. They are beautiful - bright pinkish red and blemish free. The flesh is also pretty - white with pink streaking. The yields don't seem great, but decent for fingerling and the plants look healthier than any other potato out there. Maybe, big maybe, I have found the fingerling for us!
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