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.

Not the Best June

I really need to post here more often but I seem to be doing most of my farm writing and photo posting over at Facebook.

A lot has been going on bad weather. Too much rain but I think that has stopped for now. This month we have had well over 10 inches of rain and it caused us to bring in the garlic early in order to keep the entire crop from rotting in the soil. Some was so wet and muddy when it came out of the ground that we washed it with water, something they say never to do but I figured they are already soaking wet what will a bit more water do other than remove the soil? So far this seems to be a good thing but we won't know for sure for another 4 weeks or so when the curing process is finished. I will say the garlic is huge and the 90% that did not rot away seems to be of high quality. probably due to the fact we applied fertilizer this year so they were well fed garlics.

Broken equipment (the 14 hp BCS does not want to work reliably but Eugene keeps nursing it and can get it to work for up to an hour at a time). He jury rigged a new air filter and changed the gas that seemed to work for a couple of days. I do wonder if the machine got damaged in the flash flood we had earlier in the month that filled the basement of the barn with 2 feet of water(where the BCS and a lot of other equiment lives). Actually I wonder if the gas got water in it. He has mentioned that there was dirty gas in a fuel line. On the plus side we have not had many days in June when the soil could be tilled safely so the tiller being out of service has not been a huge issue

Betty has been Hell on various farm related things like the roses on the watering cans, bagged apples on the two youngest apple trees. Eugene spent hours fashioning bags than putting them over very young pommes in order to keep pests and diseases off of them so that we will have big perfect apples without spraying a lot of toxic chemicals several times a week through the growing season. Betty has found that bagged apples on the tree are a great thing to jump up and grab and take down. the other morning she managed to get 8 or 9 off the tree and that get her repremanded big time and since that morning she has left the apples alone. Now she is into wrestling with Nate in the aisle ways between garden beds (which is a no no but she tests this rule out many times a day and always gets yelled at. I will say she quits after the first "Betty, NO! Out of the garden"). She also likes to go after rodents in overgrown beds, which is not too bad but it does mean she is in the garden which is against the rules around here.

Oh and did I mention the heat? Pretty much all of June has been 10 degrees above normal for around here and very very humid to boot. It's like it is August. This has made it hard to work when it is not raining and it has set up the stage for bad fungal diseases, most of which love hot humid conditions. the good news here is we bought and used a product called Root Shield and it seems to be working as I have seen very little evidence of disease on any crops that have been treated. I did find a cucumber covered in white mold a couple of weeks ago but once that was removed no more problems in the early cukes. And the tomatoes are showing no signs of any diseases (knock wood). Usually by this point the leaves are getting blighted and we know that the plants will likely produce but will die before the first frost. It looks like this year that will not be the case all because we treated their soil that we start the seeds in with the stuff. Time will tell, but I do know late blight has been seen in our county and so far we have zero signs of any disease on the maters (or peppers and eggplant which were also treated but usually they do not have blight issues).

There are 5 more days left in the month and it looks like they will be less humid, cooler and very little rain-Yay!

Planting the 2009 Garlic Crop

Planting garlic on a beautiful Indian Summer evening

We started planting garlic this past Tuesday. We are planning on doing 8 50' x 4' beds this year and growing 5 different types, Music, Purple Glazer, Shvilisi (Chesnok Red), Persian Star and German White-all hardneck garlics. The Persian Star, Shvilisi and German white we have grown for years. Last year I traded some rare tomato seeds for the Music and Purple Glazer and we planted the 3 corms of each last fall and got 41 corms of the Glazer and 31 of the Music which translated into 1.3 beds of the Purple Glazer and .6 beds of the Music. We also planted two beds of the Persian Star.

It took an amazingly short amount of time to get the garlic positioned and in the ground. Around 45 minutes a bed with 2 people laying out and planting 450 cloves per bed. Granted, the beds were ready to go. The tilling, raking and applying compost and other amendments would have added another 45 minutes to an hour of time. Though we did put down Sul-Po-Mag right before planting and that took maybe 2 minutes per bed.

Sul-Po-Mag

At any rate, between 4pm and dusk we planted over 1500 cloves of garlic. Our best time to date. We still have another 1300 to put in whenever it decides to not rain and we get a good day for planting root crops.

Eugene using a rake to mark out rows in the bed

Garlic needs to be planted in the fall. Usually we plant between Halloween and Thanksgiving but this year we had our first freezes in Mid October and the Sella Natura Biodynamic planting calender we use indicated that Tuesday afternoon and evening was a terrific time to plant root crops. So Eugene spent the day harvesting potatoes and doing the final prep on the garlic beds while I got the farm share stuff together. Than around 4pm I went up to see where the garlic planting was headed. Saw Eugene was just beginning to poke the first garlics into the ground and so I grabbed a trowel and started doing the same.

Laying out the garlic. This bed is finished and ready for planting.

While we were planting our garlic crop our neighbors were taking out their soy bean crop. The difference between how we farm and how they farm was striking. We were doing a human scale farming project. Our tools were a couple of buckets, some Sul-po-mag and garlic. They were doing and industrial machine scale farming project. Their tools were a combine with a bean head, a tractor with a gravity wagon and a semi tractor trailer. They were covering lots of acres (I believe the field next to us is 25 acres) while we were covering a small space, maybe 800 square feet at most. And yet we will likely net more money from our small space in garlic than they will on that 25 acres. And we do this having used a small fraction of the energy used in the industrial machine scale farm project.

Took a break after one bed and found that we had been doing this job for under 30 minutes and at that pace we could likely get another 5 or 6 beds done before dark. Drank a beer and sat around for 20 minutes breaking up German White corms into individual cloves because we felt we could plant another 6 beds before dark in 1.5 hours. After a few minutes we realized we really had time to do only 3 more beds as we realized that we had not accounted for laying out the garlic. That that task can sometimes take almost as long as poking the cloves in the ground. Plus we did not have enough garlic prepared for planting to do 6 beds.

Planting the Music at dusk. This was the last bed of the day.

So we headed back up to the garden and finished up the Persian star and than did the Purple Glazer and Music. Plus we finalized where the 3 beds of German white and the bed of Shvlisi will go.

All in all very good work.

Now We are Merely Whelmed

Yesterday was overwhelming but today was merely whelming.

We had a lot of help from Sarah our twice a week volunteer for the next 3 weeks. She has an excellent work ethic and helped us get more garlic out of the ground and put up in racks to cure. We also got nearly 40 half pints of raspberries picked, all the shallots harvested, all the tomatoes tied for the second time, a hoop house frame removed from the tomato/pepper/basil beds it was covering about 7 weeks ago, catnip harvested and now Eugene is weed eating around garden beds and where the chicks will be come tomorrow afternoon. He'd mow but the mower is still without a belt and now is covered in drying garlic.

Oh yeah, and got a bunch of stuff harvested for the farm Share members. Boy, they got a nice share this week. Lots of nice food including green and wax beans, garlic, cabbage, zucchini, arugula, scallions, oregano, tarragon, snow peas, raspberries, strawberries and kale.

I would not say we are exactly caught up. But only because from now until sometime in September we will never feel caught up as there are always a 100 things to do, it seems. But things are under control and no longer overwhelming

Garlic Time

A Picture of the garlic cloves at about the half way point. When I was all done I had broken apart around 30 pounds of garlic

Ah the stinking rose!

Monday and Tuesday were taken up with garlic activities.

Monday we spent all day (8am to 6:30pm) prepping garlic for planting and than planting around 2000 cloves. prepping means collecting the nicest bulbs we have and than breaking the bulbs down to the cloves. this is what I did Sunday from 8 am until around 3pm. Tedious work that has, in the past, made my left hand very sore and swollen (but not this year for some reason). After breaking up garlic bulbs so I have 3000 cloves more or less (more really since about 1/3 of the cloves in most of the bulbs do not make the cut for seed garlic due to size and/or quality) I count them to make sure we have enough (and for two of the 3 types I did not have nearly enough and had to go hunting for garlic bulbs that were big enough to yield suitable cloves for planting and spend another hour or so breaking them up).

While I was working with the garlic Eugene was up in the garden putting a hoop house back together. The plastic came off in some unexpected high winds that came through Saturday night. than he helped prep garlic for a couple of hours than went back to the garden to do final preparations on the 6 beds slated for garlic production, taking thousands of cloves with him. By the time I got up to the garden he had the German White just about laid out (I wish I had brought the camera with me to get a photo of this). I helped him finish laying out the cloves and than repositioning them (another tedious task, but if this is not done in an anal retentive, OCD way we pay big time in the spring and summer because things are not growing exactly where we need them to be growing) So after 45 minutes of repositioning the cloves and adding a bunch more to the 2 beds I started putting the cloves into the soil.

By this time the sun was sinking low in the sky but was not yet really setting. the air was brisk but the soil still had summer warmth. I sat down (this saves the back big time)and started poking cloves into the soil with the root end always pointing downward. We always plant 3 rows per bed with the cloves set 4" inches apart. I worked on the middle and one of the outer rows working my way north. While I planted the German White Eugene laid out 2 beds of Chesnok Red (AKA Shvlisi). By the time I finished the germ white Eugene was poking the Chesnok Red into the soil. I wandered over to those beds and got to work poking garlic cloves (root end down) into the soil and as the sun started setting we finished up 2/3 of the 2008/09 garlic planting.

Tuesday Eugene finished up the last 1000 cloves including the two new types we have-Purple Glazer and Music. So We have around 3000 cloves planted that should grow into around 3000 garlic plants that will be harvested in early to mid July 2009.

I traded tomato seeds with my virtual friend Natalie Foster (AKA The Garlic Lady) for garlic and she sent a lot more than I expected. I got a box with 4 bulbs each of two kinds of garlic. It will be nice to have two additional garlic types after growing the geopolitical trinity of German White (Germany), Chesnok Red (Georgia) and Persian Star (Iran).

While Eugene finished planting, I started the process of drying garlic for our famous and powerful Progressive Garlic Powder. First I had to clean up tarragon and cinnamon basil with which I had filled the two Excalibur dehydrators. That took about an hour. After that was done I was ready to load garlic into the dehydrators. I started with all the cloves that did not make the seed garlic cut plus any extra garlic cloves that were big enough to be seed but we did not need. I put those cloves on dehydrator trays. In the past, I would have filled up all the dehydrators I had (a small Excalibur plus 3 other cheaper models) and still had more garlic to do. This year, because I bought the biggest dehydrator Excalibur sells, I had enough room in the one big dehydrator for almost all the garlic. But all the garlic are not just the rejects from planting. I also use any deformed, damaged or small bulbs that are in the sales baskets. This meant I had to collect more garlic bulbs and break those apart so they would be ready for the dehydrator. Now the garlic just has to dry out for about a week and than it will be ready to be processed into garlic powder. And than we will have garlic powder again and that makes me excited.

Autumn Update

Fall has finally arrived and with it a lessening in the work load and nicer weather in which to work. the market garden is pretty much done with tomatoes, we have planted a fall crop and they have tomatoes on them but there are only 30 or so plants vs the 450+ tomatoes planted for the main crop.

The peppers in the hoop house are about over for the year. Heat or blight or bacterial wilt or arm worms or something did a real number on them. We got one good one for every 5 to 10 on the plants that rotted in some way (and this is why green peppers are generally 50% to 75% cheaper than ripe peppers-it's easy to grow a green pepper but quite hard to get a pepper from green to ripe without problems). the 200+ pepper plants planted after the hoop house pepper have not done much at all. I am getting some beautiful green fruit from one bed and the jalapenos are doing okay but there are very few peppers ripening and those that are are very under sized. These plants should have had ripe peppers at least 4 weeks ago and they don't. Most barely have 1/2 grown peppers on them. Bad pepper year. But if it stays mild for another 6 to 8 weeks we should get some ripe peppers out of the main crop. There is always next year.

As we get away from the summer crops the fall things are coming in. We harvested the first spring mix (yes I realize it is autumn so the stuff should be called fall mix or something but changing names on a product don't work good for no one) this week. It looks wonderful but since it is selling well we have not had any yet. We also dug the first parsnips and they look fabulous! I don't believe we have ever grown such nice parsnips.

We have been pulling leeks for about 3 weeks and will continue to do so until we run out (sometime in March or April). I have been using a lot of leeks and they are yummy, much better than what you can buy at the grocery in both taste and the fact we take great pains to get long white shanks on the leeks and that means extra work hilling them numerous times during their long growing season.

The winter squash was a disappointment this year. Last year we had a bumper crop of butternut but not this year. this year the plants went in a bit too late (actually the went in about the same time as last year but the rains had stopped and it got hot) and they were not able to thrive and produce a lot of high quality squash for winter storage. Instead, we got rather small fruits and many had to be harvested too early before they matured because they were being badly attacked by squash bugs (like the bugs were swarming over the squash so you could not even see them under the insects). We did get a decent crop of delicata and sweet dumpling squash but everything else was just so so at best.

The pear tree was loaded with pears until Ike's winds came and knocked down 8 bushels of pears. We did go out and pick up all the drops (which is why we know that 8 bushels came down). We will sell and use the pears but will not be able to get top dollar for them because they are damaged. I supoose in about 5 weeks we will be making gallons of pear wine and pear jelly among other things out of the dropped pears. Despite the wind there is still about 5 bushels of pears still up in the tree. That tree must have had well over a 1000 pounds of pears hanging off it. That's a lot of pears for a single tree. I am very surprised that the tree did not lose several major limbs in the wind storm. It did lose 2 minor limbs. It is in a very protected spot and that is likely why it did not get more damage.


The barn roof has been fixed and it stronger than it was before along with far fewer holes in the roof thanks to a lot of silicone caulk being applied over the whole roof (not that the roof is covered with caulk).

The remainder of fall will be taken up with several fall tasks including the unexpected hand watering. We are starting water certain things daily by hand because the drip irrigation just ain't doing the job, especially for seeds and seedlings that have just emerged. Than there is planting crops for winter and early spring, putting up hoop houses for the late fall and over wintering crops, hoeing and harvesting and putting the beds to sleep for the winter. Which means taking up any mulch (we use landscape fabric which has to be cleaned of roots/weeds and than rolled up for winter storage), drip tapes (these we roll up onto garden hose caddies), planting cover crops in beds that won't be used until mid May and removing all debris such as tall weeds and the dead crops. We have found over the years that getting the garden cleaned up in fall is very important. If you don't do this you will have a bug and disease problem the following year. The plant corpses go on the compost piles and thus feed the soil next year.

The season officially ends with the garlic planting in late October/Early November. In reality, the work never ends it just ebbs and flows.

Farm Pictures

The onions, garlic and leeks in the foreground and row covered crops (carrots, broccoli, beets, etc..) in the background. This is what you see first going up to the garden from the barn or store

Early tomatoes, about 2 weeks from being ripe. We transplanted these into a hoop house April 15th and it looks like we will have ripe tomatoes by July 4th. I believe these are Yellow Taxi, an heirloom that we have been saving seeds from for over 12 years

The raspberry beds looking north. we have around 300' of these things. two kinds latham (which is pictured in the fore ground) and heritage which you can kinda, sort of see in the distance. the latham are loaded with berries. I have never seen as many raspberries as we have. this is scary and exciting. as long as nothing major goes wrong (disease, hail, large flocks of fruit eating birds) we should have a bumper crop of berries to sell. The berries have been very very good so far this year and they have just started to ripen and the weather has been about perfect the past 5 days or so for raspberries and strawberries to develop the best flavor they can.

Hot Time In the Garden

It is not yet the solstice and already the weather has gotten HOT. After a long cool wet spring we have suddenly changed to hot humid conditions. Yuck.

I hate working in high heat. I have gotten heat stroke before and since than I do not do well with work if the temps get into the high 80's. So that means I don't do heavy work outside past noon or before 6pm. Eugene will and sometimes gets cranky with me for not going out into the hot noonday sun. I just remind him if I do there is a good likelihood that I will end up in the hospital and be useless for any kind of work for weeks or months. Oh and that he is nuts for working mid day when it is so hot.

Though I might not like the heat the summer crops do and the garden is thriving, especially after the 3+ inches of rain we got between Tuesday and Wednesday. Yesterday evening I helped Eugene put up pea fencing and noted that the garlic scape are ready to harvest on the Hardy German White garlic (and I did get in one bed of scapes so we now have them), the D'Avignon radishes are ready to pick, we have medium sized peas on the English pea plants and lots of flowers on the first planting of Snow and Snap Peas. The yellow beets look wonderful and next week I will be thinning them out so will have baby beet greens.

The strawberries are in full roar-we are getting around 15 pints a day from the 300' of berries that are producing and the strawberries we put in this year are desperately trying to reproduce by putting out runners and flowers. I dutifully pick off both. I will let them go to flower in about 3 weeks but since these are day neutral berries I will continue to take off the runners. By late July we should have double the output in berries and likely will be able to drop the price a little bit.

I will close here as it is almost 6am and the sun is just coming up enough so I can see to harvest leafy greens such as spinach, arugula and baby lettuce before it gets too hot today to do anything.

Saturday Sales in Winter

Yesterday we had a great market day. I had sent out an email announcing we have a lot of food to sell and three people took advantage of the opportunity. Sold almost $200 worth of produce and chicken. Cleared out a lot of space in the fridge in the store.

One of the people getting food is an old friend I had not seen for several years named Frank. I know him from working at Di Paolo's. Not that we ever worked there at the same time, he came after I left. Now he's the chef for the president of Miami University. Look's like many of us Di Paolo alums are doing well for ourselves. Frank tells me that Pres. Hodge is taking Miami in a green direction. Especially where food is concerned. this explains why suddenly Miami's food service is sourcing as much local food as they can find. Unfortunately their protocol does not allow the various chefs and cooks to buy directly from us farmers at the farmers market or directly in other ways without special exemptions. Oh well, they are just getting into this and I am sure protocols will change to fit the situation.

Another person (people, actually) came over from Fairborn to get food. They loaded up on a scad of produce and a few chickens. the other sale was to the Streits, the folks who supply us with raw milk.

It was nice to sell some stuff and make a bit of money during the off season. Hopefully we can get more business in the future during the winter but it will take some education on our part and flexibility on the part of the locavores.

You see, winter growing is tricky. Most crops do not want to grow in the cold dark season but we have our ways of getting them to respond, usually. But if there is too much cloud cover or it is frigid for too many days things will not grow at all and that means nothing to harvest. Granted we do have things store in the root cellar (i.e. the barn and store). The tricky items are the leafy greens like arugula, kale, lettuce, etc.. But if they decide to do nothing between mid December and early February we still have squash, taters, onions, garlic, dried herbs, parsnips, leeks, etc.. ready to sell and eat.

Ah Garlic!

Planted the garlic this past Thursday. Put in around 1600 cloves of the stinking rose in 5 beds. like the past 7 years or so we planted three kinds: Persian Star, Chesnok Red (Shvilisi) and German White.

Planting all that garlic takes us a whole day. We start by carefully cracking open corms and separating the cloves from special garlic we kept back from the rest of the garlic that we are selling. Not all cloves are worthy for planting and those are set aside for making into garlic powder. Some have been ruined by onion maggots and have to be composted. I marked three paper bags with the names of the garlic to go inside, one for Chesnok Red, one for German White, one for Persian Star. I start with one type of garlic and finish that type before going on to the next type. this way we do not mix the varieties and keep them pure. After a couple of hours of opening up hundreds of corms the garlic is ready to be planted.

Planting consists of getting the beds ready by tilling, than putting compost, sul-po-mag and green sand on the beds and raking those items into the soil as well as flattening out the bed. Now the beds are ready for garlic placement. This year we did three lines of garlic per bed. In the past we did 4 to 5 lines per bed but noticed the garlic was getting smaller and smaller. So this year we decided since we have the room we could give the garlic plenty of room to grow big and strong.

Now I don't know what happened to us Thursday afternoon but basically the garlic planting broke down and did not get back on track until around 4pm, just 2.5 hours before dark. So at 4 pm I wandered up to the market garden and saw that Eugene had placed garlic in 2 beds and 2 more beds were all ready to go and the 5th bed was just getting its amendments put on and still had to be raked flat. So I grabbed a bag of Chesnok Red and proceeded to place cloves of garlic every 5 inches or so down the length of the 50' bed. After 15 minutes or so I had 3 neat rows going about 3/4 of the way down the bed. That done I grabbed the bag of German White and placed them in the bed to the east of the Chesnok and easily got a full bed with extra garlic still in the bag. While I was working on the German White, Eugene finished up raking and started placing the Persian Star in the bed he was working on. Than we both took the extra garlic cloves and found places for them such as the 1/4 bed that the Chesnok Red did not fill and that I filled up with Persian Star.

Once we were done placing garlic we went back over the beds and moved cloves around until we were satisfied with their positions. once that was done we were ready to put the cloves in the ground (always with the root end facing down). And it was a good thing were ready to plant because we were losing light fast. I can plant a bed with 330 garlic cloves in just under 15 minutes, Eugene is a bit faster. We had 5 beds to plant (we could not leave the cloves on top of the soil overnight as it was going to be frosty and they likely would not make it through 12+ hours of such exposure) and about 25 minutes before it was completely dark. So we got to work and quickly got them all in the ground before we lost 100% of the light. I gotta say the last 10 or so cloves were nearly invisible but we got them in.

Than it was beer :30 and we called it a day.

The next day, I cleaned the dried basil that was sitting in the dehydrator and filled the trays with garlic cloves and soon the house was filled with the aroma of drying garlic which is pretty damned pungent, I'll tell you what.

The garlic planting signals both the end of the current planting season and the beginning of the 2008 season as it is the first crop we plant for next year and, other than a few cover crops, will be the last thing we plant in 2007.

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.

Dinner From the Garden

Tonight's supper is a work in progress. So far I have in a big saute pan 3 kinds of heirloom tomatoes (Crnkovic Yugoslavian-dark pink with almost black seed cavities, nice acidity, sweet taste, Boulder Belt striped-red with yellow stripes, inside yellow with a Bright red heart-low acid, very sweet and Dr Wyche's Yellow-huge orange fruit, low acid sweet), 2 heads of shivlisi garlic (aka chesnok red), a head of cauliflower, 2 yellow onions, a green patty pan squash that is coming up in the delicata beds (from seed we saved) Oregon giant snow peas and a Chinese giant pepper (or maybe it's a Marconi). I think I will add a can or black beans and some cumin, chili powder and cheddar cheese and let it simmer a while. Than eat it with tortilla chips. The salad is a skinned and sliced telegraph cuke, a couple of Siskyou sweet onions, sliced, chunks of charentais melon, halved strawberries, several kinds of tomatoes (mainly yellow and orange), chopped coarsely, olive oil, kosher salt and balsamic vinegar. Fresh Italian parsley is good in this too.

Should be good, few things more satisfying in oh, so many ways than eating from your garden.

Rainy Spring Days on The Farm

It's been raining for the past two days so we have not been doing much farming-the soils just too wet. That is not to say we didn't need the rain, we did. And the lettuces, peas, spring mix, spinach, asparagus, strawberries, radishes, onions, leeks, raspberries, kale, broccoli, chard, scallions, herbs rutabagas, etc., look quite happy about the rain

Before it rained we got almost all the onions in the ground. All that is left are some late planted seedlings that are not big enough for transplanting yet. Now we have 3 or 4 beds of leeks to get in and we are pretty much done with allium planting until October when we plant garlic.

The next big transplanting project will be tomatoes, peppers and eggplant that will go in the end of May or early June. Looks like we will have around 1500 plants to put out over a couple of days.

Meanwhile we will be transplanting broccoli, cabbages, cukes, zucchinis, melons, winter squashes, lettuces, pac choi, etc., and doing a lot of direct seeding of various crops like carrots, turnips, spring mix, radishes, basil, parsley, sweet corn, potatoes, etc., throughout May, June and July. Unlike home gardeners we have to keep planting over and over so we have a constant seasonal supply of produce so there is no putting in the garden over a day or weekend. We will be done planting sometime in November or December.

While it's been raining we have started clearing out the storefront of a lot of detritus (aka yard sale items) and putting that in the barn where the huge, commercial, 3-door fridge used to be and moving all the equipment we use to package produce (scale, plastic wrap, pulp boxes, plastic bags, wax boxes, salad spinner, wash tubs, chest freezers etc., from the barn to the back of the store which is being turned into a packing shed. This will greatly streamline selling produce out of the store having the refrigeration where things are being sold so no one has to run to the barn to get more bags of spring mix or strawberries or a chicken and than at the end of the day take everything back to the barn

We also bottled homemade pear wine and beer over the past two days. The beer ought to be ready to drink for my birthday May 11h

A Busy Monday

A busy Monday.

We had a woman named Lauren come out and helped us weed out the raspberry patch this morning/early afternoon. I met Lauren at the march Winter market in Oxford. She had just moved to town and needed a place to play in the dirt and asked if she could help us out. I said yes. And she works for food. She was an interesting person, secular and politically left of center and because she teaches Medieval Lit at a college in PA she is fluent in middle and old English. I think that's way cool. She's here to be with her SIO while on sabbatical. And she seems to be a careful gardener which is good. We have lots of work for her to do this spring.

When she arrived I was folier feeding garlic, spinach and the strawberry plants in a hoophouse (that are already in flower!). Eugene and I had already made 2" soil blocks and transferred some basil and pac choy to those and he was getting ready to plant more seed. he stopped his seed planting and worked with Lauren weeding out the raspberries for about an hour and when I was finished feeding fish emulsion to plants I got in on the action.

I noticed the raspberries are beginning to leaf out. This is early for them but considering we have had temperatures about 25 degrees above normal who can blame them. They probably think that it is far later in the spring than it is. They are hardy plants as long as they are not producing flowers and fruit so if they leaf out and the weather decides to go to 25 degrees below normal next week they should be alright.

Lauren had to leave around 2pm. She got a nice big bag of lettuce and a couple of garlic bulbs and a bag of dried basil. It's like having a CSA again only this time the member is engaged with the farm and I do not write a newsletter. Of course no money is changing hands, but that is okay with me. Right now we can use help more than cash.

After she left I read email and than ordered the first of the planned 600 meat birds. I ordered a straight run of 50 rock cornish cross day old chicks to be picked up this coming Sunday and a second batch of 100 cornish hen chicks to be picked up Easter Sunday. It sure will be fun to have baby chicks again. They are entertaining and a good source of meat, manure and income for us. Hopefully Danny boy and Nate will not think of them as snacks. Last year Nate was quite bad about wanting to kill the chicks but we managed to keep most alive other than the first day we stupidly put them on pasture and than left the farm to do a farmers market and also left the dogs out to "guard" the chicks. When we got home, Nate had pushed their fence down and had killed a couple of the chicks and was mouthing a couple of others when we arrived. We had to punish Nate and gather up about 25 peeps that had run into tall grass and weeds to hide from the huge predator and put their fence back together all before unpacking from the market. It was a bad scene, one that will not be repeated.

As I write this blog entry I am making a chicken and vegetable soup for dinner. I have been having cooking problems for the past week, ever since the element in the oven burned up. I find I am oven dependant and not having one has taken me out of my cooking comfort zone. Granted, I know how to make literally hundreds of dishes on the stove top but complete meals here often include baked squash, biscuits, a cake, roasted potatoes, roasted chicken, etc.. And at the moment I cannot embellish meals not make dessert from scratch (which is a good thing health-wise but a bad thing enjoyment-wise)

March Winter Market Day

Me at market in Oxford, OH this morning before we sold out of most things

Went to market this morning to sell dried herbs, garlic and leafy greens. Sold out of all the leafy greens we took, sold about 20 heads of garlic and a few packets of herbs.

there were a decent amount of vendors selling all sorts of things from bread made in a brick oven to veggie seedlings to meat to eggs to soap to apples to goats. yes goats, Deborah Bowles brought two buck kids to market and was selling them for $35 plus a feeding bottle and instructions. They were way cute. One started bleating when Crossan Curry (old family friend, artist and former goat man who was made to give up his goat herd due to age infirmities) showed up. I guess the one knew when a goat devotee is in the house

It was clear but cold with a brisk wind careening through the market. After it being in the seventies earlier this week no one seemed to appreciate the invigorating breeze. I believe we are all more than ready for spring to come on in.

Saw 3 of my canine friends-Skye the Scottish deerhound, Gilligan, the Heinz 57 and Stormy, the chocolate lab. Saw lots of human friends as well.

Bought a months' worth of meat from the Filbruns and was happy to Evelyn, the matriarch of the farm. She does not often come to the Oxford Market, usually it's Dale or some combination of their kids. I also bough eggs. I don't have to buy veggies as the garden is providing them regularly now.

Scott, the guy who sells apples and cider next to us, told us about a weasel that has been getting into his chickens and killing them. The weasel is driving him crazy because he cannot find it to kill it. Says the thing has got him muttering things to himself. Varmints will do that to a person.

Our bane, once again, is voles. The little bastards are having a fine time eating our snow and snap peas we have planted in a hoop house. Eugene way over planted the peas so they would survive the onslaught but I am wondering if there are enough peas on the planet to feed these voracious rodents. We do have a decent stand of peas and they are getting big enough to with stand the vole onset but they have over grazed fairly large areas and every morning we find more vacant area. We have traps in the hoop houses and the dogs have been busy all winter hunting moles and voles and have been getting 2 to 3 a day so we know the population is steadily getting smaller. Someday they will be under control.

Oh yeah it looks like I get to manage the Tuesday market for this year. I will be working with someone named Derek on getting vendors to come to this market. It will be officially known as the Tuesday Mini market. Sounds a bit like a convenience store only one that does not sell beer or cigarettes. Deborah Bowles said she was willing to help with this too. I was hoping, 3 years ago when the OFMU took over the Tuesday market, I would not have to be manager any longer but last year things went south on the market and it almost was killed off. I now realize this is my baby, I have been with this market since its' birth and if I want it to succeed I am going to have to spend a few more years nurturing it. But, at least this year it sounds like I have some support other than my buddy Jules who was the real originator of this market and who came out retirement last summer to keep it alive with me. Hopefully this will become a wonderful, growing, weekday market.

Another Nondescript Post

It's the last day of January, it is cold and a bit snowy (enough to make it look wintry but not enough to play in).

Things are at their slowest point. The seed ordering is mostly done for the year (there are still some rare and funky tomatoes to order from Seed savers Exchange, one of my favorite seed companies-a seed bank and seed growers network really). The real seed starting has not yet kicked in. We have started onions under lights and Eugene sowed some radish and lettuce seeds in one of the hoophouses a few weeks ago but the real work is still ahead of us.

Today we did house cleaning. Eugene was in the kitchen and decided to pull the stove and fridge away from the wall and clean underneath, next he was attempting to get the floor clean and swept and mopped it twice. It still looks like crap but at least we know it is cleaner. Mopping floors is something I do not like doing though I have had many jobs where mopping was in the job description and I learned over the years how to do a good and efficient job. I guess if I were paid $10 an hour to mop I would do it daily instead of monthly. While he tackled the kitchen I did laundry, cleaned the bathroom and tidied up the living room. Later on Eugene vacuumed the living room (now a daily occurrence) while I hung the laundry up in the spare room upstairs (no, we do not have a dryer and if we did I still would not use one. I have dried clothing about 4 times in the past 13 years using a clothes dryer, they are such an energy waster).

Yesterday was errand day. We go to get our share of raw milk every Tuesday and try to combine that with as many other errands as possible. So we hit the credit union to make a deposit, paid the mortgage, went to the post office to pick up mail and send off an order of garlic powder (I sell garlic powder I make from garlic I grow via my local harvest store, among other things). Than we drove south to Wehr Rd to pick up our milk and talked to Janet and found out she had had a nasty fall walking between the barns on her farm. She slipped on some ice and hit her head and had likely sustained a concussion. We also found out their newest cow had calved (bull calf) on Monday evening. That means more milk production for them. drove back to Eaton and stopped at Kroger's for food we cannot source locally and did our shopping for the week. Got home and made burritos for dinner.

I dunno what we will have for dinner tonight but it will involve some pork chops I cooked up Monday. I'm thinking biscuits made with souring raw milk from last week and sauteed cabbage and onions. What ever I cook it will make the kitchen floor dirty. Some habits one learns from working for years in professional kitchens are hard to break and getting food all over the floor is one of them. It would not be so bad if I had a pantry cook/dishwasher to clean up after me.

Tomorrow one of my most favorite people in the world is coming to visit. My friend Julie from college who is visiting her folks up in Van Wert, OH from California. She will be arriving with her son Patrick and we will have lunch and conversation. Maybe some sledding if it snows enough (doubtful, but you never know)

Winter Farm Life

This is a "what we small full time farmers do in the winter" post.

Okay today I got up late-around 8am due to a late night drinking raspberry moonshine and eating a spicy meat and fish soup at Julies' and Rosie's house. We had not seen our friends since before Christmas so we had lots to celebrate. Actually we went to their house to borrow a wine bottle corker so we can bottle up the pear wine the 4 of us started about 5 or 6 weeks ago. Did not succeed in finding the implement but had a good time none the less.

Any hoo, that caused me to get up about 2 hours later than I normally get out of bed. but since we had little planned for today getting up late was not a bad thing. After eating breakfast (reheated frozen pancakes I had made a few days ago). Took a short walk around the farm and marveled at the hoar frost on everything (it got cold last night, winter seems to be here, maybe). And I saw my first buzzard of the year. Normally the buzzards do not arrive until mid Feb but this has not been a normal winter.

Went back in the house and I decided to call the Safe Auto insurance people about our property damage since they had not called us back in a week. At 9:30am I called up "Austin" and actually got "Austin on the phone and told him that nothing had been done about our property damage and when was an appraiser coming out. he had no idea why no one had looked at the damage and said he would call me back. Surprise, surprise he did indeed call back about 3 minutes later and informed that the appraiser he had hired to look at the damage only did vehicles and not property damage so he had to find another company to look at out crumpled sign just sitting there in the front lawn. So he had to call me back again and did so 15 minutes later and said he had found another company and they should contact me tomorrow. So getting the sign replaced is in the works.

After dealing with safe Auto I attempted to do the Sudoku puzzle in the Dayton Daily News and failed (but I did solve it yesterday along with the crossword and the word jumble. I do not do the word find, never really liked that puzzle) and read that it is Betty White's Birthday, she's old, can't remember how old-85 or something.

I played around on-line for a bit reading email and looking at favorite website forums (I love posting on forums). Found that the Baker Creek Seed forum is still off line. I hope it is nothing too serious has happened to them, they have been down for 2 days now.

At 11am we turned on the price is Right. I love The Price Is Right and will be unhappy when Bob Barker retires this spring. I don't know who could replace him, though my money is on Adam Sandler, yes Adam Sandler who is a producer of TPIR. I have been watching this show since it was Truth or Consequences (really a different show but also hosted by Bob Barker).

After TPIR I ate lunch (left over Mac and Cheese with Italian sausage from pasture pork and some broccoli from the hoophouse) and than checked email and than talked for 2.5 hours with Rick, the guy we sometimes buy organic/sustainable produce from in the summer. We talked about produce and Monsatan buying up all the seeds and good OP varieties of peppers and onions to replace varieties now owned by Monsantan. We ended the call with me not coming to a decision of what I might or might not need from him this summer. Simply because I honestly do not know yet. It depends on how well business goes at the farm store this coming season. I assume even if I do nothing about advertising and marketing we will do better sales than last year. But doing some advertising in the local Eaton paper and the DDN I think will help out our bottom line dramatically.

After talking to Rick I got to thinking about dinner and decided to make pasta with a tomato based sauce that will use up the rest of the Italian sausages I have. And along with that we will have bread sticks so I put together a whole wheat yeast dough that I spiked with some fresh garlic that I ran through the rasp I generally use for hard cheese.

And while I was doing my stuff Eugene has spent a great deal of the day getting ready to do the taxes. Right now he is going through receipts and folders and getting things into perfect order. Unlike past years, I was really good about putting things where they ought to be so he is cruising through this and has had few tense moment. most of the tension is coming from faded receipts where we have to guess what it is for. But because I wrote most of this kind of information down elsewhere we have been able to figure everything out so far.

Now I must attend to my bread sticks and spag sauce.

Busy Winter Day

For a Monday in January it has been a fairly busy day.

We were contacted by a professor at Miami University about some of his student coming out to interview us about what we do for a living and maybe later on putting in a day or two of work out here. This is something we have done for years-been a repository of sustainable farming knowledge for students at MU and at Earlham College. I graduated with a degree in anthropology from Miami and Eugene got his BA from Earlham and so we help out students and teachers from our Alma maters as well as teach the next generation a bit about sustainable/organic farming and why this is so important . And it is something I really enjoy, college kids are fun, especially the hippy, Birkenstock, dreadlock wearing, treehuggung types.

I also finished up one batch of garlic powder and started another. It is taking forever to dry garlic this year and the whole garlic is beginning to go bad about 2 months earlier than average. processing and cleaning garlic took up about 3 to 4 hours of my day.

In the middle of the garlic project I got a phone call from Allstate asking about the property damage that occurred Saturday morning. they wanted a police report that we did not have and said they would be out to look at things and assess the damage sometime soon (tomorrow? Wednesday? who knows?). I hope soon so we can clean up the mess/fix one sign. At any rate, I gave the guy the name of the deputy sheriff who was on the scene and that seemed to be enough for the insurance adjuster.

Oh and got a call from the periodontal people reminding me I have an appointment with pain Wednesday at 4pm. I go in to have a tooth scraped and a tooth implanted. this will be expensive (about $3,000) and quite painful. The last time I used this guy for a huge bout of periodontal disease (I had the mouth of a 75 year old at age 35 and had to get everything scraped but my front teeth) I had to go in for 2 separate surgeries and than visit monthly for 6 months (it was supposed to take 12 to 18 months for me to heal but I did it in 6 months-This is what eating nutritious fresh organically grown food can do for a body).

Once I was done with the garlic I hopped on-line and was informed by WOOF that it is time to update my listing on their site. I have a listing there to attract interns/volunteers. I also emailed a friend to get the phone number of a new Italian restaurant in Germantown, OH that he went to last week and declared wonderful. But he found out the owner/chef cannot find any fresh greens especially arugula which is one of our specialties. We grow some of the best there is.

Now I am blogging and thinking about what to have for dinner, maybe cole slaw using the yummy cabbages we are growing. Tomorrow we go to pick up our raw milk allotment for the week.

Making Garlic Powder

Dried garlic awaiting the blender

In winter I make garlic powder. This a simple enough process, basically I dry fresh individual garlic cloves in a dehydrator and than pulverize the dried garlic in a blender and store the resulting powder in an air tight container with desiccant pouches to keep it from caking into a ball of garlic goo.

Garlic powder is by no means the most lucrative item we sell but I do use a lot of garlic powder myself and it is the best way to use up the garlic that has not sold by this time of year and is threatening to either sprout or rot.

In some ways I wish I had never opened the email from Whizbang productions (or maybe it was publishing, I can't remember) soliciting me to buy their book on how to make garlic powder. I did not buy the book but I did ask around on a couple of farming lists including one that had the author of the garlic powder book about how to go about making garlic powder and got enough information to go ahead and start drying garlic and grinding it into a fine powder. And now I am hooked on the stuff. The wan, tastes vaguely of garlic powder you can buy commercially at any grocery store for a couple of bucks for a big jar is not the same stuff. My home grown/home made garlic powder is powerful good. It is a rich golden color and has an assertive complex flavor. Just a bit will do for most things

I have changed how I do things a lot from my first batch about 6 or 7 years ago. I have gotten much more efficient over the years at cleaning the garlic for processing. And I have learned you never ever use a blender with a plastic carafe (the garlic impregnates the plastic with its' essence permanently as well as scrubs microchips off of the sides of the plastic carafe leaving one with a garlic plastic mix-yuck!). Always use stainless steel or glass and get one with a powerful motor. I found food processors (at least a Cuisinart) will not work at all because there is too much space in the bowl and you also have the plastic vs hard garlic issues that you get with a blender with a plastic carafe.

When I started doing garlic powder it would take me about 2 to 3 hours to separate and peel hundreds garlic cloves. Than I figured out in the 2nd or 3rd year you did not need to peel them before dehydrating and that alone save hours of work (I probably would have read this tip in the garlic powder book that I was too cheap to buy and could have saved myself a lot of work)

Right now the whole house smells like garlic as I have two dehydrators full of drying garlic. It's nice, like being in a bakery that is making garlic bread. I do not worry about vampires coming by when I am making garlic powder which I will be doing for the next month or so

Holiday Winter market

Did the December edition of the Oxford Farmers' Market Winter market and it was a fine one indeed!

Unlike last year, we had a lot of leafy green things to sell along with things that store well like winter squash, garlic, carrots. Plus the fact we are having a much warmer than normal late fall has meant we have lots of cold loving crops.

I wanted to take some pictures of the market to post but we were simply too busy selling for the two hours the market is open. We sold out of many items we brought and most everything else sold well. We opted to not open the store today because we don't have a whole lot of most things except garlic, dried herbs and some winter squash. It was an intense market.

And a fun market too, as we are now into Chanukah and it is of course the Christian Holiday season. So everyone was festive and happy. It did not hurt one bit that the weather was beautiful-sunny and around 50˚F. Unreasonably warm but a welcome thing if you are selling freezable produce outside in December. We got to see a lot of people got many hugs and even got some Solstice presents (I'd say Christmas presents but not everyone who gave us presents at market is Christian but we all celebrate the solstice and return of the sun). One woman who has been a long time customer told me my comments about Heifer International in the email newsletter I send out to anyone who signs up (this is more for local people) inspired her to donate to them. Need more people like her and that can be you by simply clicking on the box in the sidebar.

So we came home happy-we sold lots of food, meaning two things:1) we have some cash on hand and 2) we are not faced with what to do with too much kale, cabbage, broccoli, spring mix, etc., for a few days. What we have been doing with the bounty is eating a lot of greens every day which has got to be good for our bodies. I remember this time last year craving kale and chard and having to buy chard at the grocery. BTW Kroger has far and away higher quality produce than Wal-Mart, especially when it comes to kale. But if you have the choice of buying kale grown by Boulder Belt that is the far better choice. Kroger kale is edible but nothing to write home about the 2 times I bought Wal-Mart kale I ended up throwing out most of it as it was horrid. This year we have kale and Lucy is a happy camper.

I see my dough for snickerdoodles should chilled and so I end this entry on that note