2012 Tomato Tour

Planting A Fig Tree

Garlic Powder revisted

As many of you know I have been making garlic powder for many many years, at least 10, maybe more. This is what you do when you grow thousands of corms of garlic and have many unsellable corms (too small, damaged by bugs or harvesting, or one clove is bad but the rest of the corm is good). This year we had a bumper crop of small corms as the Purple Glazer garlic we grew was a complete failure and all the corms instead of being huge as they are supposed to be all were tiny things, elven garlic if you will.

I had gotten to the point of dreading the garlic powder manufacturing. Peeling a bushel of garlic, literally tens of thousands of cloves is incredibly daunting. Plus the past 3 years the powder has, despite the use of many, many silica desiccating packs, gotten moist and turned into a garlic powder brick. So I was not going to make any garlic powder this year until I saw this short video


This has changed how I peel garlic and a job that used to take several days to do now takes several hours (and is a pretty good work out to boot, maybe better than the Shake Weights that seem to be all the rage).

So after 2 hours I had this big bowl of about 4 pounds of garlic cloves ready to be put through the Cuisinart food processor.

And that is another change I have in how I make garlic powder. In the past I would usually not peel the garlic at all and put cloves with skins still on into the dehydrator and than when they were dehydrated and a bit smaller, than I would remove the skins. This was still tedious but took about 1/2 the time of peeling fresh cloves but it still meant hours and hours of peeling. But it also meant 3 to 5 days in the dehydrator at fairly high temps (130F) to get the cloves dry.

But with the noisy bowl technique, I get beautifully peeled cloves quickly and because they are naked I now put the cloves through the food processor using a few good pulses as you want a very rough chop and not a puree (I believe you can use a blender for this or even chopped them by hand) and than put the chopped garlic into the dehydrator (I have a big Excalibur with a temperature setting, most cheaper dehydrators do not allow you to set the temp) at 110F which means it does not cook. The chopped garlic is dehydrated in about 12 to 24 hours. Once dried it is ready to be processed through a blender with a glass or stainless steal carafe (do not use plastic, you will be sorry as you will now have a blender dedicated to garlicky things and you may get microscopic plastic chips in your powder) or you can use the chunks and do no more processing.

I would love to say, it's that easy but making garlic powder in small batches by hand is not easy at all, even with the noisy bowl technique it still takes days to make a couple pounds of the stuff. but once you taste it it is hard to go back to the insipid stuff posing as garlic powder you buy at the stores for real cheap.

The Fall Chickens

GMO Video

GMO Crops Farmer to Farmer

interesting video about how GMO and conventional farmers feel about growing GMO crops. Talks about the broken promises such as single pass farming, better yields, low risk of contamination, etc..

Interesting and disturbing as it is clear many farmers do not want to grow this stuff but have been railroaded into it by Monsanto and other biotech Ag corps.

Winds of March

It's windy and the wind is trying to blow the row covers and plastic off, delaying onion set planting

Meet Tilly

We have a new farm dog, Tilly. Like all of our dogs and cats, she is a rescue. She is under a year old, female and seems to be a mix of chow, some sort of shepherd (sheltie, Aussie, Shetland sheepdog?) and perhaps golden retriever or maybe beagle (or maybe both). She is what we used to call a Heinz 57.

She arrived on the farm on Sunday afternoon after a phone call from our buddy Rockhead asking if he could bring this dog to our farm. He said he was at Marge and Gary Glaser's house (Marge has been a staunch and very long time supporter of us Boldarians and is in the process of building one of the most incredible houses I have ever seen. Gerhy and Gaudy, I think, would like the place), scouting rocks and clay for the house project and this dog wanders into their lives. Mark (Rockhead) could not take her as he lives in a house full of animals (dogs, foxes, owls, opossums and other wildlife-his SO is a wildlife rehabilitator, among other things and has made it clear that no one brings more dogs into the house as they have several). Marge didn't want her so the two of them thought that we might take her.

Seeing as how we have needed a dog since Betty bought the farm back in August of 2010 we said yes. And thus this medium sized yippy dog arrived at our farm. Yes yippy as this is what she does when she is nervous or excited or wants someone to toss a frisbee. She and Nate got a long very well from the start. The cats were not at all happy with this change in our lives but once they found out she was not going to kill them they were kind of okay with the idea, though they both lived up stairs for a day until Tuttle could no longer stand being away from us and came downstairs and braved the new dog.

Tilly was into chasing Tuttle until Tuttle became a ball of fur claws and hissing teeth and let her know in no uncertain terms he does not want her to touch him much less get up in his face. Now she keeps a respectful distance and has learned we do not want her to chase him through the house (though I have noticed he is beginning to encourage that behavior and seeing as how they are about the same age I suspect within a few days they will be fast friends and playmates).

Tilly loves playing frisbee and is one of those dogs that will leap high into the air to catch the disk. She bonded quickly with the Nylabone® Frisbee® we have had for over 5 years and that none of our dogs have had much interest in playing with in the past. Arlo when he was younger like playing Frisbee® but as he got older he lost interest (and his sight. There might be a connection there, hmmm) and Nate, Dani and Betty had zero interest in the thing. So it is all for Tilly.

A short Video of Tilly (at this point she had no name) meeting her new best friend, the Nylabone® Frisbee®

As I mentioned, Tilly has some sort of shepherd in her and she has already exhibited a strong desire to herd. I have never owned a herder but I know they are valuable on the farm especially if one has livestock. Perhaps we will get her some sheep in the future but for now she will have to be content with herding cats.


We have been impressed with how quickly she picks up on things. She learned her name in about 2 minutes. She has already learned not to jump on us (most the time-it took Nate's hip dysplasia to get him to quit jumping and Betty had not learned this at the time of her death, despite months of lessons and telling her/showing her "down" hundreds of times a day).

I have a feeling Tilly will make an excellent farm dog

Beekeeper leaks EPA document

If you eat you must watch this because without the honey bee and the wild bees we will lose most of our fruits-apples, peaches, squash, melons, berries, etc., as well a a lot of other crops that are dependent on insects to pollinate their flowers. Write the EPA and tell them to do real science again and quit buying conventionally raised food that uses the very chemicals that are killing the bees (and these same chemicals are killing us, just a lot more slowly)

Tilling a Bed

A short video of 1/2 of a bed being tilled. Cameo by Betty

Tying Off Drip Tape Ends

Another Video lesson. This time how to tie off the end of a drip tape section so the water doesn't all run out the end. I did this video because of a discussion on the Market Farming Email list about this and not one person had this suggestion. This is what we have done for well over a decade and it works well and does not cost anything.

Laying drip tape and irrigation By Hand, 5 Videos

Here is a series of short videos I shot today that show how we at Boulder Belt get 4 beds ready for a hoop house. perhaps I should have broken this into 5 different posts, but that ain't happening.

Enjoy

Dogs Hunting Voles

This video documents the events that lead to the video of the vole swimming for it's life. The dogs are hunting for voles in the piles of brush that Eugene is burning.

A Vole swims for its' life

We were burning garden trash, asparagus and raspberry canes that had been sitting by the fire pit for up to 3 month. The piles of brush had many voles living in them and this fact has been driving the dogs crazy for a while as they cannot get to the varmints.

But today was different, the piles came apart and one lucky vole made its' way to freedom.

A CSA Film...

I seem to be starting the new month with Youtube videos. This one I found about 7 months ago and than lost the URL. This morning I found it again and had to share. This is a funny short film on CSA. I would like to stress that we DO NOT run our CSA this way (no night soil on our crops, no weeds or rocks disguised as tomatoes or eggplant in the shares)

Buy Buy American Pie

Compost in Snow w/ Betty!

Paul Stamets ways Mushrooms can Save the World

Watch this video and than buy his book via this blog

127 yard sale 2009 Day 2

It was slow on day two of the 127 yard sale. Real slow. I would say we got, maybe, 1000 people coming through, maybe less. The car count average was down by 2/3rds perhaps more (probably more).

I spoke to may of the other sellers about this and we all decided there were a couple of factors involved.
1) The first day of the sale should have the best items so that is the day to hit the sales.
I don't think this is necessarily true. It was observed yesterday that between Eaton and St Rt 73 there were about 50 small sales that had cropped up in the yards, barns and parking lots that were not there Thursday (and boy did they miss the boat!). So in that case the good stuff would still be there on Friday as it could not have been sold on Thursday
Add to that the fact that our sale is still picking up new vendors. I got a call from a guy in Michigan who said he would be coming in sometime Saturday morning. that means we will have a whole lot of items that have not been gone though.
Plus I know we continue to go through our house and barn and keep finding additional items to put in the sale as do a couple of our other vendors who live close by. I am positive we are not the only people doing this so this also keeps the sale selection some what fresh for buyers

2)Thursday has the truly serious buyers. the folks who are attempting to do the entire distance. In order to have a chance at going the whole way or at least more than one state you must start on Thursday. So that would go far in explaining the extremely heavy traffic on that day.

I did notice we were getting heavy traffic Friday from 7am til about 10am and that most of these people were from out of state and doing a lot of the sale. After 10 am the traffic dropped a lot and we were getting more locals than out of staters. Several people told me that they had taken a half day off from work to do the sales. And I did note that after 2pm that we were getting an increase of people, though now where near Thursday's volume. I expect traffic to be up today as it is Saturday and people have the day off

Breakfast Time

Week old chickens at breakfast