Making Pickle Relish

whole cucumber. I used Armenian cukes because that is what I had

Cut in half

Remove the seeds

cut into chunks and put in the food processor (or cut finely by hand)

The result

Add salt to bring out the water and let sit for at least an hour

The other ingredients-sweet onion, red onion, green peppers, ripe (yellow and red in this case) and garlic

Like the cukes put through a food processor or chop very fine by hand

this has been salted and is sitting and waiting for as much liquid as possible to be expressed

after sitting for an hour I pressed out the excess liquid in this colander

The brine-salt, sugar (no more than a cup) vinegar and pickling spices

washing jars

Jars being loaded into the canner to be boiled/sterilized

Finished product

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.

Freezing Asparagus

It's asparagus season here at the farm and this is the first year that our first 6 beds are producing 100%. And boy are they producing! We are cutting a lot more than we can sell (that will likely change this week as the Oxford farmers market will resume being held weekly instead of monthly. Between that, the store and the Farm Share Initiative I am sure in the coming weeks we will unload pretty much everything we harvest. But that has noty been the case the past 3 days. this means we are building up an aging supply of asparagus so instead of selling stalks I feel are too old I decided it is high time to put up some asparagus for the winter today and that is what I did with around 10 pounds of green and purple asparagus.

below are pictures of what I did.



Asparagus all ready to be blanched. What I have done is trimmed the ends to remove any tough fibrous parts and even things up. If the stalks are too long to fit in the pot of boiling water (which means they will not fit into the freezer bag) I cut the stalk in half.

Asparagus blanching in boiling water for 1 minute

After blanching the asparagus goes straight into very cold water. Ice water best, but a couple of changes of cold tap water will work. What you are doing is shocking the asparagus, getting as much heat as possible out of the stalks and stopping the cooking process.

I get as much excess water off the spears by using a salad spinner

Than they are packed into freezer bags (do not use "Storage Bags", they do not work to prevent freezer burn but freezer bags are pretty good) and almost ready to go into the freezer. I still have to open up a corner of the bag and suck all the air out so they are close to vacuumed pack. this step is important as it cuts down on freezer burn a lot. To do this, open the bag a bit, insert a straw and suck as much air out as you can than close the bag and put into the deep freeze.

Buy stuff

You may have noticed that there are ads on this blog. These are there in order to generate money to make it somewhat worth my while to keep updating the blog. There are two kinds of ads Google Adsense which I very little control over (though I was able to block all Monsanto ads from showing up on this blog, much to the dismay of the people at Google who tell me how to best get people to click on the ads here and have written me many many notes telling me I am not a great capitalist because I block certain corporations from appearing here. Too bad, I have standards that are not negotiable)

I also have products from Amazon that I am selling through this site. These, unlike the Google Adsense, I have full control over which items will appear on this blog. And today I updated my offerings to include non book items for the first time.

There are now 3 non book items
Food Inc-this is a must see film if you do any eating at all in this modern world. For the savvy locavore there will not be much new (though I was still shocked by a lot of this film because you so seldom see graphic images of our industrial food stream). This movie was nominated for a 2010 Academy Award, BTW

Zyliss Salad Spinner-if you are getting into eating locally or just love salads your kitchen is not complete without a salad spinner. I use mine many times a day. It is a Zyliss spinner that is at least 12 years old and still going strong. It is not like the model listed here as mine has a pull string (which they do not seem to make any longer-Amazon does list the pull string type as out of stock and not getting any more)

Excalibur Food Dehydrator-this is the BMW of dehydrators. This model is their largest and will do around a 1/2 bushel of food. I use mine heavily and love the results. I highly recommend this product

A note on some of the the books
The Organic Farmer's Business Handbook is excellent, I have a copy and have learned much. If you are a farmer and want to be truly profitable get this book and make a better living you need this book in your library. I give this a hearty thumbs up

The New Organic Grower Another excellent book, a classic on how to set up and run a small diversified organic farm. Eliot Coleman is a master market gardener and a really good writer. this book, more than any other got us up and running and we still refer to it a lot. If you are a market gardener or serious organic gardener this book should be in your library

How to freeze Zucchini

I found several large zucchinis this week so I decided that was a sign that it is time to freeze some zukes for winter use. I did not freeze any zukes last year and that was a mistake as I like to use them in pasta sauces throughout the year, including the 7 or 8 months we do not grow zucchini.

Here is how I freeze zukes.

You will need the following:
A large pan with lid for the boiling water
Slotted spoon
A large bowl or pot for cold water
Salad spinner
A cookie sheet
chest or upright freezer
Plastic freezer bags

Take any large (up to 18 inches) zucchini and cut it lengthwise. Scoop out the seeds and than cut it into pieces. I usually cut it into 1" cubes but other shapes work too. While you are cutting up the squash put a lidded pot of water on high heat and bring to a boil. When the zukes are deseeded and cut up and the water is boiling put about 1 cup (2 or 3 handfuls, depending on the size of you hands. Larger hands need fewer handfuls) of the zukes into the water and blanch for 1 minute. Remove from water using the slotted spoon and plunge into cold water. You can add ice to the water. I don't, instead I replace the water as soon as it gets warm with cold water from the tap (if it has been hot-above 95F- for several weeks than I will use ice as the well water will not be cold enough). A couple of changes of water will get the squash cool enough for our purposes. When cool, load into a salad spinner and spin dry and put on a cookie sheet. Repeat this until all the squash is blanched, cooled and on the cookie sheet(s). Put cookie sheet(s) into the freezer for at least 10 hours.

Frozen zucchini in the freezer ready to be bagged

When squash is frozen remove from coolie sheet(s) and put into labeled/dated plastic freezer bags, put the full bags back into the freezer and you are done

Holiday Farm Share

I see it has been a while since I last posted. Let's blame the holidays for that. And since I am still not quite in a writing mood I am posting the Holiday Farm Share email for all to enjoy

Greetings farm Share Members,

I hope everyone had a happy Christmas (she says, making the assumption we are all of christian backgrounds here). Eugene and I did next to nothing Christmas day. we took a walk around the farm with the dogs, ate pistachio's and had pastured lamb from the Filbruns for dinner (along with butternut squash, salad and fingerling potatoes, all of which we grew). we don't generally exchange gifts but my sister and I do give enough money between us to Heifer International to buy a water buffalo for some family somewhere in the tropics.

The farm has been quiet but because of the freeze & thaw action and high winds we have lost some crops. We took a huge hit on the winter squash. The store front building froze up and the squash did too. We were not expecting this as last year we spent $300 a month to heat the building so nothing froze out there last year. This year because we are cheap, we decided not to heat the building. So when it went below zero so did everything that was not in a fridge (those all stayed just at freezing which is fine for all the produce we have in them at the moment) froze. things like onions and garlic can take being frozen with no problems (as long as they are left undisturbed) but winter squash not so much. The small squashes seem to be fine but the Butternut we lost. So we have some squash for the rest of the season but not as much as I was counting on. I am really glad none of us are in the position of depending on the Boulder Belt Eco-Farm to feed us through the winter because this would have been a very serious loss. We also lost the napa cabbage (I am glad as I do not really like the stuff, it is a poor seller and yet Eugene keeps planting it-it will make a nice green manure crop though). high winds ripped the row covers off almost the entire bed and that was that for the Napa. We also lost a 1/4 bed of arugula for the same reason. But where the covers stayed on the crops seem to be in as good of shape as they can be this time of year.

What has happened is after 2 winters here (this is our 3rd) we still have not figured out where to store the winter food. The house is way too warm, the barn can get too cold and freeze things worse than the store and there are rodent issues now that we have lost another mousing cat this fall and only have the ornamental cat who is useless when it comes to hunting. the store can be heated but only at great cost at present.

We need to seriously rethink how we heat this farm-gas and electric are getting too expensive and are also the causes of wars and great pollution, etc.. We have been talking about getting an outdoor wood boiler to at least heat the store and barn and this would also heat any greenhouses we might build. If we can it will also heat the house. These boilers can easily heat something like 40K square feet of space. But such things are expensive and we are still addressing roofing and window issues (which are also expensive) and there is the mortgage that takes a nice chuck of change out of the monthly budget. but we are working our way towards being a much greener farm. We would also love to put up a wind mill/generator and a solar array. Eventually we want to be 100% off the grid.

Okay, on that meandering note here is what you guys are getting this week. Some of you are picking up today and some on Monday. Either way, the shares will be ready for you anytime after 2pm. They will be in the store and just go and grab your share (one bag). Oh, and don't forget to bring back your old farm share bags (and any other clean plastic or paper grocery bags sitting around your home taking up space and needing to be reused)

Lettuce-a 1/2 pound bag of mixed small lettuce heads
Carrots-1 pound of sweet and crisp carrots
Winter squash-You get a variety-expect 3 to 4 squashes in your share
Leeks-two kinds, you get a bunch of the skinny Lincoln leeks you have had all season and 1 or 2 King Sieg leeks which are the big, winter leeks and I think more flavorful
Garlic-a bulb of each kind we grow, German white, Shvilisi and Persian Star
Celeriac-2 celeriac this week
Apples-3 pound bag of Dr Matthew's Apples-these are crisp and sweet
Onions-red onions this week. These have been nice but a bit on the hot side

Next farm share pick-up will be January 10th and the last will be Jan 24th. After that we will start back up April 7th. I do need to know if you are interested (or not) in the main season Farm Share program ASAP so I can get things planned out.

Several members have expressed an interest in having a Farm Share Potluck dinner here at the farm. One suggestions was to do it inauguration evening which I believe is Wed Jan 21st. But we can do this about any evening. I will offer our farm to host the event and now we need a date and time. Dinners are a dynamite way for us to build community around the farm with which we all have an interest, i.e. we can all meet and get to know each other.

And on that note, we are now signing up new members for our Farm Share program. The Shares Start April 7th or 9th (we will have two pick-up days-Tuesdays and Thursdays). Cost and all the other details can be found on our Farm Share Page

Imagine if we can do such a good job on this Farm Share thing in the dead of winter imagine how good we are when the farm is producing at full speed.

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.

Cleaning Red Turnips

People often comment on how beautiful our produce is but it did not start out that way. What you see at the farmers market or on the sales floor of our store is the result of many hours of wet muddy work on my part (Eugene does some post harvest/cleaning of produce but I do most of it-like 85%). The produce generally comes in muddy.

Some things, like these red turnips are dirtier than other things like tomatoes or peppers which hardly ever need washing


I had 6 crates of red turnips to clean and what you see here is a crate of turnips yet to be cleaned up, a compost crate over stuffed with turnip greens that were not usable and next to the pears in the corner turnip greens that were sellable being put aside to be cleaned after the turnips got washed.


Some turnips that have had their greens removed and have been tossed in the wash water.
The wash tub late had about 10x as many roots as are shown in this photo.



The finished product. A crate of beautiful, clean turnips ready to go in the fridge for storage so we can sell them for several weeks. They will store beautifully in the fridge for about 3 to 4 months but we will likely sell them out well before that.

The Canning Jar Ordeal

I want to make and can some rhubarb/raspberry jam today. I have the fruit, sugar, pectin, lids. But what I do not have in abundance is 1/2 pint and pint jars. I have a lot of quart jars from an auction I went to about 10 years ago where Eugene and I bought something like 35 cases of canning jars in various sizes, brands and ages for $5 (and made $10 on the deal selling the zinc lids to people who wanted the lids only and not all the jars that filled the bed of the pick-up truck we had at the time). At the time, I thought I had a life time supply of jars. I was wrong. Over the years I have broken some, free-cycled some and sold a lot of them full of things like tomato juice, apple sauce and jams and jellies.

So now I am really really short on 1/2 pint and pint jars. You are probably saying Lucy, go out and buy a couple of cases of small jars and be done with it. I wish I could. Last night after the Tuesday farmers market in Oxford we went searching for such jars at Wal-Mart, K-Mart and Kroger's. Not one of these places had small jars. They all have wide mouth quarts and Wal-mart also had small mouth quarts but that is not what I need. This really bummed me out.

Went home and looked around the kitchen to see if I had any small jars and did find 4 pint jars not being used and a couple of 1/2 pint jars with old food in them that are now empty. Later this morning I will go out to the barn and look through the wall of jars and see if there are any 1/2 pint jars out there that I missed. I also will make popovers for breakfast in order to use up the last of some raspberry jam in a pint jar. Hopefully I will find 14 or so small jars and will be able to do this jam project this morning.

Incidentally, if you are a local reader of this blog and have any canning jars you do not want i will gladly take them off you hands. I can use any size, any make.

New Books to Peruse and Buy

It's late summer and high time we all start to do something about putting food up for winter and saving our seeds for next season. This warm weather will give way to cold frosty conditions in the next few months.

I could and have written page upon page on the subjects of putting up food, seed saving and how to eat local in the off season but instead I invite you to check out the new titles I have selected. If you think they would be of use to you than order what you saw on this blog and I get a percentage of the sale. It's that easy to support this small contrary farmer and her blog.

Canning Tomato Juice

After yesterday's tomato juice disaster (okay, perhaps not a disaster) I got the cleaned up Victorio out again, put if back together, got a bushel of various tomatoes out of the store (anything that looked like it would not last the day) and got to work making tomatoes into juice. After an hour of vigorous grinding, I had 3+ gallons of juice in a 5 gallon pot. Soon it was simmering away and around noon I seasoned it with homemade garlic powder, kosher salt, rice wine vinegar and Worcester sauce. let the tomato juice and the seasoning marry for about 2 hours than got the canner out, cleaned up jars and lids, sterilized them, filled the jars with juice and now the first batch is boiling away. In another 15 minutes they will be done and I can sterilize the second round of jars, lids and rings and I should be done with 14 quarts of homemade and delicious tomato juice by around 6:30pm.

New Windows are In Place

windows today. The plan was to get about 1/2 of the windows installed but as I write this they are finishing up installing all but one window (one was damaged and was sent back to Our buddy Mark showed up late last night in order to help Eugene put in our new pellaPella when we picked them up at Lowe's. It will be here in a week or two), pretty slick.

While they took out the old nasty very untight old windows, I spent my time cleaning up some of the many onions we have curing, cleaning dried dill that has been sitting in a dehydrator for a couple of weeks waiting for me to do something with it (dill is a very tedious herb to clean so I avoided doing so for a long time). Now I have around 1/2 pound of dried dill in a freezer. I doubt I will dry any more of it, I have enough to sell and use for the rest of the year.

Waited on a few customers while I was cleaning the dill. Sold some tomatoes, strawberries and green beans.

Than I decided it was time to process tomatoes so I got the Victorio out and put it together, brought in a crate of tomatoes and got to work putting them through the Victorio. After 15 minutes the thing jammed and than fell off the table and tomatoes, tomato juice and tomato waste flew everywhere. I angerly tossed the contraption into the sink (avoiding the thawing turkey) and grabbed a mop to mop up all the tomato crap all over the floor, chair, crate (that was still half full of maters) and table. Took the crate of tomatoes outside and hosed everything down (which meant I found a rotting tomato) and got the crate and fruit really clean.

Now the house is a mess. The boys used some sort of expandable foam that looks a whole lot like marshmallow fluff and that has gotten all over the place (mostly where it needs to be). I have not gone upstairs yet (I think I will avoid doing so until bed time as I heard a lot of crashing up there) but I assume it is messier than the kitchen.

The good news is everything is in place and now all that needs to be done is the finish work, which will start next weekend. Oh yeah and one window is MIA and still needs to be done start to finish.

I gotta say the new windows are marvelous and already are keeping the heat from pouring in the house (and I am certain will keep the cold out of the house). They have an R value of 25 which is far better than the walls that surround them. I don't know what the R value of the old windows was but probably well below an R15. We will be using a lot less energy this winter to keep the house warm and that is a good thing on a lot of levels. For one, it is a very green thing to do and to me, that alone, is worth the $2100 or so this project has cost so far. I am sure by the end of this winter the windows will be close to paying for themselves, certainly over the next 5 years they will in fuel savings alone.

Berries

It's raining today and likely tomorrow as well (and why not Saturday morning, after all we have a farmers market than and so far this season we have had maybe 2 rain free markets on Saturday). This means suddenly we are not busy today. Yesterday I spent a lot of the day harvesting 41 half pint boxes of raspberries while Eugene did weeding/hoeing and waiting on customers.

Today I processed some of those raspberries into jam. Some I will sell and some I will keep for use this winter.

I have a feeling the first raspberries are about over. I won't be able to pick them for a couple of days due to rain and the Japanese beetles are coming out enforce and they will do a lot of damage to the berries. I am sure when I can harvest again there will be some but it won't be like the past 7 days or so of 40+ boxes picked every 36 hours. That's a lot of picking. But raspberries are a great seller so well worth the effort.

In about 50 days the late summer/early fall raspberries should be ready to harvest. Until than we will have blackberries and strawberries.

Strawberry Jam

When I have time I like to read other locavore and farm blogs and today I had tome to go check out Val Taylor's Cincinnati Locavore blog and to my delight found a recipe for no-pectin strawberry preserves (click on the title of this post and you will be taken there).

We grow strawberries and at some point I will have a need to make strawberry preserves. Usually I am lazy (or because we grow day neutral berries I am making preserves in late summer or fall so have no natural pectin sources like green apples) and use commercial pectin but it has chemicals that I don't really want to ingest and I agree with Val that the commercial pectin makes the preserves rather solid. I was planning on making preserves using apple pectin though I will have to wait another week or so until the green apples are big enough to fuss with. I even went to the liquor store in Richmond, IN to get some pure grain alcohol (which they don't sell in Ohio for some reason) for the preserve making process. I need the moonshine to check the pectin, it does not go into the preserves themselves. No, I am not making high octane jam. I don't think alcohol and pectin will work together, than again... What I use the alcohol for is to check to see that the sugar to pectin ratio is correct. When I am prepping the apple pectin I have to mix ground apples with sugar and cook that for a bit, if I am remembering this correctly (I will consult with the Joy of Cooking before doing this so I do it correctly). Than I put a bit of the apple/sugar goo into an ounce of 100 proof alcohol and it will either jell or not. When it is correct than it is put with the strawberries and cooked and put into hot sterile jars and sealed.

But Val has a recipe that uses under ripe strawberries that she claims have enough pectin in them to set up the preserves. So check out her recipe. I know I'm going to try it when I have enough strawberries to make 6 to 8 pints of jam.

Food Issues

It looks bad for our food system. High petro prices is having a negative impact on how grains are farmed either conventionally or organically. the price for flour I buy, Kroger certified organic, has remained steady but I suspect in the next few days the price will go up 50% or so (if it hasn't already, I have not bought flour in about 10 days). This happened with King Arthur flour which I can no longer afford when there are cheaper options that are also certified organic.

I was in TSC buying dog food and looked at the price of chicken feed. It was going for 27¢ a pound if you got it 5 pound bags. It was lower for larger amounts. 27¢ per pound is what I was paying last year for certified organic chicken feed. This year it is well over 35¢ a pound and thus too expensive for us to buy to feed meat chickens. So, for the first time in 12 or so years, we will not be raising chickens for sale or for ourselves (we may still get 30 or so for our own freezer even though they will be expensive birds, we have not yet decided.). I will say local organic feed prices are not rising nearly as fast as conventional and likely would have stayed pretty steady had the Filbruns soybean crop not crapped out on them last year causing them to have to buy in semi loads of organic soy from other parts of the country. Dale told me the soy cost him $22K, double what it cost last year

If we were to raise birds, with the increase in feed, gas and likely processing, we would have to charge at least $7 a pound for a whole chicken. Though at $7 a pound we would profit just $150 for 7 weeks of work. Not our highest profit margin by any means and chickens are a lot more work than produce (which is a lot of work in and of itself).

Already I hear there is some rationing going on in the country. Wal-Mart/Sam's Club is limiting how much rice a person can buy. This will probably get worse. I am wondering if this will be an issue with local foods. People not being able to grow enough for what I think will be a sharply increased demand. though in all likelihood the non-locavores will be slow to realize that if they want to eat they are going to have to find local sources for their food and also will have to grow some of what they eat themselves.

I was thinking about this last night after reading a thread on the SSE forum about food and farming and famine (I have been reading a lot about this over the past 10 years or so and even more in the past month as the mainstream is beginning to realize that our agriculture system is broken and food is important, maybe as important as money) that my county, while rural and a big agricultural county, cannot feed itself because most the acreage is planted in commodity crops-corn, soy with a bit of wheat and other grains and livestock. There are very few produce farms and most of the produce land will be put into sweet corn. I can think of maybe 10 farms in the county producing (non commodity) food on any kind of commercial scale. I think (hope) there are more than that. The Eaton farmers market has mostly very small producers and the biggest "farm" grows nothing at all, they resell what they don't grow (and I suspect they will will be just about out of business after this season).

So how is Preble County gonna feed itself? We cannot eat corn and soy grown for the industrial trades like ethanol (which is the worst idea humans have come up with, perhaps ever.), There is a lot of cattle and hogs raise in PC. But a meat based diet just ain't healthy and a lot of that cattle is grain fed so soon enough will no longer be raised because the price of corn and soy are getting too high. A lot of people have deluded themselves into thinking that we have the best agriculture system in the history of the world but now the gild is off the lily and we can see that the Green Revolution Ag system so dependent on cheap oil has been feeding us bad food and also has been destabilizing the planet for 50 years now. Before the green revolution more people farmed and overall the diet was better (more whole foods and less processed food). In developing countries before they were told told to get modern with their farming people were in great poverty but the family system/culture was intact and people were able to feed and cloth themselves very well. now that they grow for the commodity system they are still desperately poor but because of money they are now taxed by the government, do not have enough to eat and the family system has been broken. But the the people in charge of business are making a lot of money off of the labor of these poor third worlders and of course we in the first world even if we are not rich and powerful get to drink cheap coffee and eat inexpensive bananas.

Change is here folks, cause by a combination of climate change, bad Ag. policies and most importantly greed. I suggest you learn as much as you can as quickly as you can about food, where it comes from, what is in it and how to make your own. if you continue to depend on the corporate tit to feed you will go hungry.

Feb. Winter Market Prep.

We have a farmers market this morning and that meant a 7 hour day harvesting and cleaning produce yesterday. I was surprised how much time it took the two of us to get things together considering all we harvested was leeks, mizuna, red mustard tat soi and spring mix.

The harvesting of greens was nice. It got sunny so the hoop houses warmed up to around 70F quickly. It got so warm I was working in a T-shirt and still pouring sweat. Kind of like working on a hot summer day (okay, a very warm spring day). We did the last major cutting of the spring mix. Eugene felt slow and puny because he is slow at greens harvesting and I am very fast. This is one of the farm, tasks where I am a lot better at it that he is and I think this bruises his ego a bit (but it strokes mine so we are all good and even.). So I ended up with two full plastic grocery bags of spring mix and he had 1/2 a bag. Together we got 15 bags of cleaned spring mix.

We also got 15 leeks from another hoop house. I believe I have mentioned how well leeks do in unheated hoop houses before. They are still doing fantastic and it was a joy to pull and clean them. They also have been very very tasty, perhaps the best leeks I have ever eaten (and I have been eating a lot the past month because we have them and they are sooo damn good). Pulling leeks is a muddy endeavour. You have to get over top of the leek in order to get a clean pull out of the ground. Otherwise, the greens want to beak off and if that happens the leek is ruined for market (but can be dug out of the ground for home use). For me to do this means having to put one foot in the bed (which is a big no no on our farm because walking in beds causes compaction, but sometimes you have to break a rule or two) so I pull straight up. Once the leek is out of the ground the dirt has to be shaken off the root ball and than the roots cut off. This means whomever is pulling leeks will get a lot of dirt on their body and I did. Normally I would not mind the dirt but I did not want to go back to the house, take off my mud covered boots and wash my hands and knife in order to go cut spring mix and not get the salad greens all muddy. But since we got such a haul from the leek hoop house (we also harvested kale, mizuna, tat soi and red mustard) we decided to take all that to the store before harvesting spring mix and that got me close enough to the house to go in and get somewhat cleaned up.

Once the greens and leeks were harvested we turned our attention to cleaning everything we had just picked plus several items that have been put up for winter such as potatoes. We store potatoes with their dirt on and clean as needed as they do not store nearly as well cleaned up. Washing the potatoes was interesting. They are stored in a couple of dead fridges in the barn and are kept naturally, almost at freezing in those fridges. So when we poured the dirty spuds into the wash water it was like pouring several pounds of ice into the water. It was stinging, numbing cold washing the spuds. Not at all fun. But soon enough the potatoes were washed and bagged and put into coolers (or should I say warmers) to keep them from freezing at market

Than there were the rutabagas we harvested a month ago into a couple of buckets and than put the 'bagas dirt, leaves in buckets into the fridge. The fridge has been smelling like rotting cabbage/rutabaga for a while so it was high time to take a good look at the rutabagas and see what's what. And what I found was a whole lot of beautiful 'bagas and few that had been damaged by cold in the field and were slowly rotting away (I believe the stinking culprits). I helped their cause by depositing them into the compost bucket so they can continue to rot and eventually help enrich the soil in which they were grown. For the rest I trimmed the roots and cleaned dirt and got them ready for today.

The final step last night was going through all the onions, garlic and winter squash and tossing out the bad ones. We lost a lot of butternut squash (we will cut them open, remove the seeds for roasting and cook up all good squash parts and freeze the puree for spring summer use) but the delicata squash seemed in excellent shape. The red onions are in sprouting mode. We are saving most to use as onions sets and for seed production (we grow several heirloom onion vareties). But we still have quite a few left. the yellow onions will be in major sprouting mode in 2 to 3 weeks it looks like. the garlic is still doing fine.

After going through everything we than started in on the second to last step before we will be ready to go. putting everything in coolers so they will not freeze at market this morning. In summer we use coolers to keep things cold and in winter we use them to keep things warm. Without them we would lose a lot of produce. So yesterday evening we filled coolers with winter squashes, onions, garlic and potatoes. this morning the carrots, radishes, turnips, chicken and greens will go into coolers. Than everything will be loaded onto the van and we will be off to market by 8:30am this morning so we can be all set up by 9:30am.

Hopefully the locavores will be out enforce and we will sell out.

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.

Roasted Peppers and Tomatoes

Yesterday I believe I finished putting up tomatoes for the year. I did my 3rd 5 gallon pot of sauce which yielded 11 quarts. That will go with the other 20 or so quarts of tomato sauce. I also did some salsa (I do not remember how many jars) and tomato juice (IIRC I have 21 or so jars of that.) Next on the agenda is apple sauce.

I have also been freezing. Right now peppers are the main thing I am freezing as they are coming in. I like to have at least 8 well packed gallon freezer bags of chopped sweet ripe peppers and a couple of bags of roasted peppers to get through winter. So far I have 5 bags of peppers and none of the roasted variety. I am thinking Sunday may be a good day to start a fire in the Webber grill and roast and skin a bunch of peppers. They are so good roasted. They add a wonderful smokiness to any dish you add them to.

Last year I was lucky to get 5 gallon bags. It was a bad pepper year for us-too wet I suppose. Those 5 bags were gone by April meaning we rarely had peppers all spring and most of the summer. I rarely will buy peppers at the store as ripe peppers simply cost too much for my budget (but I understand why they cost so much-a lot can and does happen to a pepper between green stage and full ripe stage and about 1/2 to 2/3 will not be sellable at ripe stage). But because I grow peppers I am used to being able to use a lot of them every time I cook with them.

This year has been a good pepper year and I should have more than enough to get through winter and spring. I already have about as many frozen as all of last year and we are still picking lots and lots of peppers and I will be freezing quite a few more in the next 10 to 20 days.

How to Roast a Pepper

Over a flaming wood fire (you can do this with charcoal but wood gives you a much better flavor and you won't have petrochemical residue left on the peppers from the fire starter. I guess a gas grill will work as well but again there is the flavor issue) put on as many peppers as you can fit. Let the flames blacken the peppers and split the skin. Turn every 15 to 30 seconds (this is fast cooking over high heat). When the peppers are black, flaky and ugly on all sides remove them and place in a paper bag to steam for a 5 to 15 minutes. Bring the bag of peppers inside to the kitchen sink. Take a pepper out of the bag and start removing the skin (which is charred). The skin should come right off. If it does not that means you did not cook the pepper quite long enough. Don't try to re-char it just take some extra time to get the skin off and next time take more time to roast the peppers. Cold running water will help in removal. Once the skin is off slice open the pepper and remove the seeds and the placenta (the thing the seeds are attached to at the top). Now, you can either use the roasted peppers right away or slice them into thin strips and place them on a cookie sheet and freeze them. Once frozen, pop the strips into a well market plastic freezer bag and store for winter use. These peppers can be used anywhere a smoky sweet flavor will work like fried potatoes, chili, macaroni and cheese, soups (I can see using these in a butternut squash soup).
Bon Apatite

Ah, Basil

Genovese basil just beginning to make flowers

Basil is one of my favorite market garden crops. This year we put in 250' linear feet which I can harvest 10 pounds at a time twice a week in high season. Harvesting 10 pounds is not as fun as it sounds.

Basil is one of our best selling crops. We sell it two ways, a small bag with approx an ounce of basil in each bag and the big bag with a 1/2 pound of basil for those smart folks who freeze pesto for winter use (something I need to do, I have a half pound of frozen pesto/garlic/oil (not really pesto but close) and I know from experience that is not enough to get us through winter/spring.

This year I grew two kinds-Genovese (regular basil) and Reuben, a beautiful red basil with no flavor. Fortunately, I grew very little Reuben compared to the wonderful green basil. Last year we discovered basil does well planted early in a hoophouse. We had a bunch of cucumbers damp off (die) so there was about 25' feet of space in one of the hoophouses so I started basil seedlings and got them transplanted in late April. By June 2006, we were harvesting. So, this year we repeated the basil experiment only this time it was planned and the basil got a whole 50' of space and was put in a bit earlier. It did not do quite as well as the unplanned early basil. Early on, the early stuff threatened to die outright (and some Reuben did die). It was a bit too cool for the basil. But soon enough it got warm enough and the daylight hours long enough and the early basil flourished. I just stopped harvesting it, because it has gotten pretty seedy. The main crop basil we planted outside of a hoophouse has flourished this summer. Though it too really wants to make flower tops, have sex and got to seed. That just means I have to cut it more often to keep the flower stalks at bay.

Now I am at the end of the basil season, plants want to make flowers/seeds and the temps at night are a bit cool for the uncovered basil. If I am lucky, I will get another 3 to 4 weeks of harvest before the plants are spent. Than I will pull them up and hang them in the barn to dry so I have dried basil all winter and spring to use and sell (there are some things that I feel dried basil is better than fresh, home made salad dressings and spaghetti sauce come to mind) before the fresh stuff next year is ready to cut.

Chipoltles

Last night I roasted peppers for dinner (also had a chicken we raised and grilled eggplants and pattypan squash). I put a couple of marconis, a Giant Chinese pepper, several Hungarian Hot wax and some red ripe Jalapenos in order to make chipoltle peppers (I think these need to be dried after roasting to be true chipoltles, I did not get that far with them). Long story short Eugene and i were eating our dinner and he asked "have you eaten one of the roasted jalapenos yet? I had just taken a small bite and it lit me up. roasting increases the heat factor...a lot. Those puppies where almost as hot as a habanero pepper. Yikes!

I was on fire for a good 15 minutes and could not eat. I stupidly drank water which made matter worse. I think today I will roast and freeze more Jalapenos as these would be good in chili sauce, curries and other hot dishes this winter.