Cantaloupe Jam

We had a fabulous melon season. Lots of very high quality melons were grown on our farm. But, sadly, not all the melons were sellable so when life gives you too many melons you eventually make jam (and freeze them as well but we already discussed that here on this blog).

I have had this melon jam idea in my head for a couple of years now but until a few weeks ago I did not get around to making such a jam.But faced with a growing amount of beginning to fester must be used ASAP and I already have filled the freezer with more than enough frozen melon I needed to do something so I looked around the web for a good melon jam recipe and found...none. Not a single melon jam recipe out there. I did find a couple preserve recipes but I had no interest in putting slices of melon into jars filled with a simple syrup. I wanted a real spreadable jam.

So I had to invent a recipe which I did. Fortunately the pectin box had a basic recipe for all jams which is 4 cups fruit, 4 cups sugar and pectin (and maybe some lemon juice). Since I had both regular pectin and low/no sugar pectin (and a lot of both) and a lot of melons I experimented. I found the best results with the low/no sugar pectin and around 6 to 7 cups of fruit an 2 cups of sugar. It had the best flavor, sugar to fruit ratio and set up well. The jam made with regular pectin always set up poorly, even when I paid attention to measurements and used exactly 4 cups of fruit, sugar, etc., etc..

I I used Organic sugar and regular cane sugar and found little difference in taste or how well the jam set up.

For flavoring I used salt and vanilla extract along with 1/4 cup of with either lemon or lime juice plus a TBL of butter which originally I used to keep the foaming to a minimum but used more butter because it added great flavor

so here is the master recipe
4 to 7 cups fruit processed to a smooth foam in a food processor (use only 4 if using regular pectin)
2 to 4 cups sugar
2 TBL vanilla extract
1 TBL butter
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 lime or lemon juice
1 pkg pectin

Prepare according pectin direction than fill hot jars that have been boiled for at least 10 minutes. put on lids and rings and than put in a hot water bath for 15 minutes. Remove from canner and put on a clean towel and let cool at least 12 hours. When cool remove rings, write on lid or label what's in the jar and the date and put in a cabinet.

Farmers Market late August/early September 2011

Freshly washed Melons

Eugene sorting and pricing melons the day before market

Melons and more packed and ready to go on the Van, the night before Farmers Market

Melons at Market!

Heirloom mater and jalapenos

Pearl Onions

Mini peppers

Another satisfied Melon customer

How to Freeze Cantaloupe

Freezing melon is insanely easy to do. It takes no blanching or any other cooking. All you need are ripe or even over ripe melons, two knives, a chef's knife and a paring knife (my paring knife happens to be ceramic, that is why the blade is white. A stainless steel or carbon steel will work just as well), a cookie sheet or other flat pan, a freezer and some freezer bags (do not use storage bags, there is a big difference in results)

Cut melons in half using a 6" or 8" chef's knife

Take out seeds but leave as much of the placenta behind as possible. the cavity should be groovy, not smooth

Cut into sections, again use a chef's knife. Note the bad parts are still on

Remove the rind and cut off any bad/soft parts. I use a paring knife for this.

Cut into cubes using a paring knife

Put on a cookie sheet or other flat container in a single layer

Put into the freezer and let the melon cubes freeze and than put into a marked freezer bag when frozen (there is such a bag under the cookie sheet)

We use the frozen melons for several things-melon daiquiris, melon smoothies, melon ice cubes in drinks in the heat of summer (Eugene's favorite is melon cubes in iced tea spiked with lemonade), you can even use them thawed in fruit salad, though the texture is a bit different than fresh but the flavor is still there (unless you used storage bags instead of freezer bags, than the flavor may be off/stale from the freezer burn that will happen within a month of freezing. these should last at least 9 months in your freezer.

How to Choose a Good Cantaloupe

How to Choose a Good Cantaloupe

(this does not work for watermelon)

Smell the blossom end (opposite of the stem end), there should be a strong, sweet aroma

There should be no stem as a ripe melon “slips” of separates completely from the stem when ripe in the field. If there is stem than the melon was harvested green but could still be ripe if the aroma is strong and sweet.

Skin should have a golden cast to it and strong netting. green ribbing is common in many heirloom ‘loupes and is not an indicator of unripeness

Golden Gopher heirloom melon

Summer Summary

Fall is here which means the summer of 2009 is officially history. It was a really good summer growing and marketing season for us. the weather was cool and for the most part dry. but when we did get rain it was generally a lot and at just the right time. Still we are down over 4" on rain for the year but perhaps this fall will be wetter than normal and we will make it up.

We grew the best melons ever (and Eugene is an excellent melon grower). Maybe 2% of them were not absolutely excellent. we had several customers (and these are people who's opinions about such things I respect) tell us that our water melons were the best they have ever eaten.

The alliums out did themselves again this year, meaning they are better this year than last and last year they were incredible. Sublime garlic, gigantic leeks (and so far, all we have harvested are the small fall leeks, the winter leeks which should be 2x to 3x larger won't be ready for another month or so), beautiful onions and wonderful scallions.

The tomatoes, despite the plants succumbing to some sort of local blight (not late blight but rather something we contend with every year) fairly early, still produced a lot of huge fruits. Or at least most of them did. We did have some failures such as Black Krim which gave us few very cat faced fruits. I believe we got about 4 usable maters from 15 plants. I do not believe we will grow these again. The Paul Robeson did not do well for us but when the plants did produce typical fruit it produced some gorgeous tomatoes. I saved seed early on and this will get a second chance. The Green Zebra was something else-I believe a small red saladette type mater, something we have far too many of already. Baker Creek messed up on that and as this was about the 7th time they have messed up with us, we will not be ordering from them in 2010. I do like their philosophy but they will have to do far better with selling us correct seed, good seed and getting orders to us in a timely fashion. There are several other seed houses that do heirlooms that give us better service such as Seed Savers Exchange.

Ah enough ranting, back to maters. The great White tomato, while a bad seller, was a great producer of beautiful ivory white fruits with a good acid bite. they came on early and produced longer than just about anything else except early girls which, while early and prolific were a bit of a disappointment this year. The early girls were not as big as last year and found the flavor lacking. fortunately we had GL-18 (AKA Glick's Pride) as our mainstay red mater and they far exceeded our expectations. they were far bigger than they have been before. The shape was about perfect and they rarely cracked and had zero cat facing. It would have been nice if they could have held on a week or two longer but they got us through most of September and we had big red maters when no one else did at the farmers market, cha-ching!. The other reds we grew-the canners did really well for us but I don't think as well as last year (or was it two years ago?). We grew Amish paste and Opalka again. The Amish paste out produced the Opalka about 4:1. We grew enough of these to make and can ourselves plenty of tomato sauce, ratatouille and salsa plus we sold about 300 pounds to others so they could put up tomatoes.

The cherry tomatoes were only so so (which is actually a good thing since when they do really well that means someone has to spend several hours daily picking them and than we have to figure out what to do with the excess). We have decided never to grow green grape again since it does not sell. This means it will produce hundreds of volunteers all over the farm in the future. It is hard to get people to try the green maters. Though it seems when I can get someone to try a green grape they get hooked quickly. they are a very nice mater but for most it is hard to get past the color. The yellow pear barely produced and a lot of them were green again this year. I think it is time to get new seed. the Sun sugar did well for about 3 weeks than quit producing much and the plants now look like hell. This is good as everyone at the farmers market(s) grew this kind this year so the market was flooded and sales were way down. I think next year we will cut back a lot on the cherry tomatoes. We do not need all that many for the farm share-maybe 20 to 30 plants and it seems they have become passe at market. that will free up beds for something else next year.

Unlike last year, we have a lot of ripe peppers. Last year the peppers were very late and we got a killing frost before they got ripe. It did not help that on Sept 14th 2008 we had hurricane force winds for about 6 hours that knocked down all the pepper plants. This year things are completely different. We have a lot of huge bell peppers and they are getting ripe well before it gets cold. I have also learned to take them off the plants when they show color and they ripen up just fine indoors away from pests and diseases that tend to ruin about 50% of the ripe peppers (which is why red, yellow and orange (ripe) peppers cost twice as much as green peppers).

the raspberries out did themselves again this season. The Lathams, our early summer raspberry, was spectacular again. Heavy production and excellent quality. My only complaint was we did a piss poor job of pruning in the early spring which made parts of the raspberry patch almost impossible to harvest. Next year I am cutting back a lot more than Eugene will deem necessary (he has a problem with thinning out plants and wants to leave a lot more than should be left). The Heritage raspberries, which we mow down in early spring, had quite good production and the flavor has been sublime, far better than the Lathams (which, as I said were excellent). Eugene has this crazy notion that we should let the heritage grow and produce in spring. I have this crazy idea that he can do all the harvesting as well as tilling, seeding, transplanting and other spring chores if this happens. You see we do not need a second kind of spring raspberry when the Lathams are pumping out over 30 gallons of fruit. As it is we do not sell all the Lathams produce (we come close but in order to get rid of them we have to sell in bulk and drop the price 33%). We do sell pretty much 100% of the Late summer berries and if we allow the Heritage to have 2 crops we will lessen the fall yield by about 60% and not have enough for the FSI, store and farmers market in August and September. In other words, Eugene's idea of more spring/summer berries is a bad one on many levels.

The strawberries have not been the best. I don't think we have them in the best place and they need to be replaced this fall with new day neutral berries. the yields have been down and disease problems up. We did get a very nice crop of April may berries because we put a hoop house over them. Granted, the hoop house got nailed twice in the winter-once by heavy wet snow and than a month later by high winds. But neither incident seemed to have any effect on the berry production. it is ironic that the first year the berries have been less than great we do a farm tour and in November a workshop on sustainable berry production. I will say the farm tour attendees did not seem to care what kind of shape the berries were in. Next season we should have a new crop of berries in a new and better spot and hopefully we will be swimming strawberries all spring summer and fall next year.

The greens have been around all season. In spring we had lots of lettuce, spring mix, arugula, kale and various Asian greens. Summer we lost the lettuce-we did try to grow some several times because it was cool most of the summer but every time we started lettuce we would get 5 to 8 days of heat and humidity, always a week or two after germination and that would cause the baby lettuce to get bitter and bolt to seed. now that it is autumn we have several beds of nice lettuce growing as well as volunteers coming up around the market garden. the same thing happened with spring mix. After late June it got impossible to grow it though we did try. We did get several harvests of arugula for our efforts through the summer but nothing else from the spring mix beds. Kale and chard were the summer mainstay greens, they always are.

Broccoli did badly for us but we did get some decent cabbages. I dunno why we have such problems with broccoli, perhaps we should quit growing it. Spring radishes were hit and miss and the early red meat radishes were a complete failure. But we do have a 1/2 bed of them now that are very nice. We got really nice early rutabagas as well as red turnips. the fall red turnips are ready to harvest and store for winter, though it will be early next week before that will happen.

Finally, the Farm Share Initiative has been a great thing for us. It allowed us drop a farmers market and make more money while being allowed to stay home and get more work done. Definitely a win, win for us and the fact very few people seemed to notice there is no longer a Tuesday evening market in Oxford (maybe 10 people have asked about this this summer) tells me that we would have made less money this year than last at that market. So it is good that we are doing the FSI.

I think I will change a few things on how the FSI is run next season. This season I allowed members to sign up for the entire season but pay monthly. That will stop as it is not fair to the members that ponied up the cash for the entire season upfront. And the members who did this have all dropped out for the last month, not good. They also got a few extra weeks as I was treating them like the paid in full members as I expected them to go through the entire season. I think the monthly farm tour/pot luck will go as well since we only were able to hold two this year mostly because of a lack of interest on the part of most of the members. I think a once a year farm tour/pot luck will suffice. I am having a hard time getting it through to the members that farm visits are a very important aspect of the farm share/CSA experience. This is how one connects to their farm and without farm visits one might as well buy their food from the farmers market. I also think it is time to drop the month to month deal. This has the potential of getting very confusing which will lead to mistakes -especially when the FSI grows to more than 30 members. It will be replaced by what I used call "Share Cycles" where I break the season down into 2 or 3 month increments for those who cannot do an entire season for whatever reason.

Well, that's the summery of our summer

CSA: Week Two

I have just finished packing up the second installment of the Boulder Belt Eco-Farm Winter CSA shares.

It was a cold experience, let me tell you. All the food is in the store and we have yet to turn on the heater in there because we are cheap (and green). So it is no more than 35F in that building. It is definitely above freezing because nothing outside of the fridges has frozen yet, but it's still damn cold. It took a good 15 minutes for my hands to thaw out. Yow!

The shares this week contained:
1 6 oz bag of spring mix
1 pound of rutabagas
a pound of carrots
1 charantais melon
2 pints of strawberries from the hoop house
2 green peppers
1 pound of mixed chard (wasn't planning on including this but the weather dictated that it should all be brought in. Now we have about 20 pounds of chard.)
6 or so pears
5 leeks (we have a lot of leeks)
3 tomatoes
A bag of Italian Parsley and 2 other kinds of fresh herbs (Dill, Cilantro, Thyme or sage)

Not a bad haul for the middle of a cold November.

Our Season So far

Despite the drought, we have had a good growing season. Not everything has grown well but most of our crops have done well for us this year. Roots have not been all that great for us. The carrots have been ravaged by carrot maggots and we have lost about 1/2 the crop. Beets have been hit and miss all summer. We have generally had a few but they have rarely been great beets. Some kinds of radishes have done exceptionally, other types have barely made roots. Onions, garlic, leeks and scallions, on the other hand, have done very well for us this summer (and will continue on into fall and winter).

Kale has been spectacular, though lately it has not been growing well. The chard was doing well until early August when it got some fungus that looks like black pepper has been sprinkled all over the leaves before the leaves turn brown and rot. The leafy cool weather greens did well in spring and we have had arugula since early August. Who knew arugula will grow well in hot dry conditions with no irrigation? Annual herbs have done especially well. We planted a lot of basil this year and all of it has produced abundantly. Parsley has also done well, though we had some major germination problems this spring so only have 12 plants. Dill has been a surprise. Eugene planted some in early summer and it got forgotten until late August so it went to seed all on its' own and has done a super job of thickly reseeding itself making for a gorgeous bed of cutting dill. Cilantro has been real hit and miss. It hates hot dry conditions so has not grown very well most of the season, that should change in a few weeks since fall has now arrived.

Winter squashes have done well but by mid summer the summer squashes had begun to give up on life. Same with the cucumbers, we had great cukes early but the main season cukes were hit and miss. Probably because we were growing several new types and did not know what we were doing with them. Melons were decent. Not terribly prolific, well, they were but so were the voles early on. The voles damaged at least 75% of the early melons. But Eugene and the dogs got on the ball and got good control of the varmints so we got many cantaloupes, Winter squashes have done well though, by mid summer the summer squashes had begun to give up on life. Same with the cucumbers, we had great cukes early but the main season cukes, charantais melons and watermelons all through August and September.

Corn was another disappointment. We rarely do good sweet corn. It is very hard to get clean well filled ears producing it organically. We do not use treated seed so we cannot plant until the soil is at least 60˚F which this year was mid May, well after they rains had left. So from the get go we had some serious issues with the sweet corn. What we ended up with was basically crappy corn. About 10% was sellable another 15% we froze for winter and the rest was composted. I don't know if we will continue to grow sweet corn. In theory, we need it for the farm stand, though our sales were not horribly impacted by not having much corn this year and I believe that we can get our customers not to expect sweet corn but to look forward to over 100 other produce items we grow at the store. For all the time and cost put into growing sweet corn it is one of our least lucrative crops. But I am positive Eugene will hanker to plant sweet corn next year and so it will be planted.

The nightshades-tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, potatoes have all done quite well. I have noticed these crops tend to do much better in dry conditions than wet. Last year we harvested, maybe, 200 peppers the entire season and most went into the freezer and were not sold. This year we have already harvested close to a thousand sweet peppers and the season is far from over. The hot peppers have loved the hot dry conditions and have been extra prolific. Tomatoes would have liked a bit more rain, I think, but overall they did well, though it seems the season was a bit short as after this week we will likely not have any tomatoes and I noticed at market this week very few other farms still have 'maters. Eggplants have done better for us in the past but this was a good year for them, no the less.

The strawberries have been a real workhorse all season. Early and mid September was not a great time for the berries but other than that they have produced high quality fruit. The raspberries have been a disappointment. Between the Easter freeze, birds and Japanese beetles we have not gotten a good harvest from either the Latham which produce one time or the heritage that produce spring and fall. The berries we have managed to harvest have been excellent, just not at all plentiful.

Now that it is autumn we will be harvesting spring mix and lettuces soon. Hopefully, we will get some rainy weather this fall, though I am not counting on it. Lettuce, especially, likes rainy conditions. Thankfully we have a drip irrigation system and we know how to use it so the leafy greens will grow well enough for us.

It is So Wet

Wow, within 24 hours of writing the "It's So Dry..." post we got over 2 inches of rain (2.2" to be percise). This will help things out immensely. The last time we got over 2 inches of rain was back in April

Starting around 3pm we got hours and hours of heavy (but not too heavy), steady rain. This gave us time to harvest all the tomatoes that were either ripe or showing some color. Had we left them on the vines we would have had around 20 bushels of garbage and none to sell. You see, rain, especially after a long dry period, will cause full sized maters to crack badly. Thus making them unsellable. So Eugene and I spent hours harvesting maters as well as strawberries, okra and melons (which will do the same thing as tomatoes when exposed to copious amounts of rain).

The rain has stopped for now but is supposed to return this afternoon. If it does we may not go to the Tuesday Market which will be a bummer because we have a lot of stuff that needs to be sold. I guess I can always open up the store and sell a few hings there.

Of Melons and Business

Because it is Sunday we had the farm store open from 11am til 5pm. The past several Sundays (127 yard sale excluded) we have had next to no business. Maybe one car would stop but often the people would not buy anything. This has gotten us rather depressed about things (well, that and the damn drought which gets worse and worse each day). This has made us start questioning the wisdom of doing this farming thing for a living (okay we have been doing this full time for over ten years and our sales at the farmers markets are doing very well).

Last week we had a lot of cantaloupes for sale and sold not a one at the store. I was very hot and we had little fridge space for the 'loupes. This meant that by the time the Tuesday farmers market rolled around we had a lot of over ripe "eat 'em right now" melons to sell. So we did a half price on the over ripe cantaloupes and unloaded all of them.

Fortunately today several people stopped at the store and bought melons, among other things and the store made some money.

What I must remember is it takes time to cultivate this kind of business. It took us many years to make $300 in sales at farmers markets (something you really have to do if you do this full time and it is your sole source of income). I takes a while to build up a customer base and of course when we started we had no idea what we were doing. If we did we probably would not have stayed in farming. We had a very steep learning curve as far as growing organically on a small commercial scale went. That and all the wrong equipment. But over time we learned what he hell we were doing and accrued the proper stuff, eventually buying he most important piece of all-a farm of our own.

So now we have this farm and it is on a busy highway (albeit at the top of a hill that has a nasty blind curve on it) and it has a barn and good land and the Farm Store. And because the farm store is not wildly successful from the git go we worry about it. We forget that we have several repeat customers, that we have spend zero funds for advertising (with the exception of $4.95 a month to keep adds off of the Boulder belt Farm web site and buying the domain for that site) and than Preble County is not exactly the center of the local and organic food world (but I am working on that) and that it just takes time to get something meaningful going.

So I end the day in better spirits than I began simply because we had a few people stop and they all bought cantaloupes and watermelons. It would be even better if the threatening clouds would produce some actual rain