Quick thoughts

So much accomplished in the past couple of weeks.  Another four new beds built and brought under production.  Germinating corn.  Windblown weather station.  Territorial Red Wing Black Birds.  Tomato plants coming back to life.  The arrival of the Colorado Potato Beetle.  The arrival of  Assassin Beetles.  The onions beginning to set their bulbs.  The days getting shorter...

I have enjoyed the feedback that I have received thus far. Feel free to provide critiques as well – I was interested to hear that some of the Red Leaf Lettuce fom the June 22nd harvest did not last long. This particular variety "New Red Fire" is new for the farm this year. I thought it tasted great, but had some trouble producing it. I’ll try it again in the fall to see if the cool weather makes a difference.

There are hundreds of varities of lettuce and all have very different characteristics - tolerate heat, tolerate cold, short shelf life, exceptional flavour, brittle leaves... 

The Red Leaf this week is a variety I grew last year - "Red Sails".  You will notice it has brittle ribs, which render it commercially unappealing for shipping purposes.  This variety is often grown  for the local restaurant market for it's exceptional lettuce flavour, the cripsness of the leaf, and its fine color.

The Greens have not been easy to produce this year, partly due (I suspect) to the wide fluctuations in temperature over the past three months (remember early May?). I had hoped to offer more choices on a weekly basis. The most recent setback was a 25’ long bed – three rows of spinach and 1 row of four different radish varieties. It produced two very fine bunches of spinach and a couple of radishes.

For the Culinarily adventurous, I have some Chrysanthemum Flowers (Shinginku) for the next harvest or two. Let me know if you want some. These are somewhat bitter, and so would be best with a main dish or a peppery salad.

Thyme and Dill are available. Let me know what quantities you want and I will include it in your basket. Sage is on the way, I expect to harvest a small quantity by mid to late July. The Basil is growing slowly. Not sure when it will be ready. So much to look forward to…so much to do in the meantime.

I am still a bit concerned about getting the quantities right. PLEASE – let me know if I am providing too much or too little. I can alter the quantities either way a bit to accommodate your needs. This feedback will also help my planning for next year.

A new "Curious Food" post is on the way.  Check it out in the next week or so.

Bob

Beets with yogurt

The yogurt nicely balances the sweetness of the beets in this salad.  The last time we made it, we replaced the garlic clove with scapes and the lemon juice with lime juice.  This recipe is adapted from New Persian Cooking: A Fresh Approach to the Classic Cuisine of Iran by Jila Dana-Haeri and Shahrzad Ghorashian.

Danish kale soup

Bob says: an instant hit!


We found this savoury one-bowl meal in Greene on Greens by Bert Greene. You could use this week’s garlic scapes instead of the garlic clove.  Start with a pinch of cinnamon - the flavour is subtle.

Moroccan Grated Carrot Salad

Whitsend’s first carrots of the season are coming soon! This recipe, from Claudia Roden's The Book of Jewish Food, looks especially nice when you combine carrots of different colours.

Pasta with lentils and kale

Recipe from 2011

What to do with this week's kale?  This recipe is a good starting point.  To make life easier, cook the lentils the day before, or use canned lentils or some other kind of canned beans instead (drained and rinsed). This recipe is derived from Moosewood Restaurant Cooking for Health.

“Farmer! There’s a worm in my squash, a fly in my peas, and a weed in my salad!”


New life on an old line. It happens. At Elmtree, the other interns and I giggled that this was the customer’s assurance that the food was pesticide and herbicide free. However, that kind of response to a complaint would not be very customer friendly.

Shortly after harvest, all produce is either swished or submerged into ice-cold well water. The main reasons are to knock off any additional soil; and to take the “ground heat” out of the produce - allowing it to last longer during transit and storage in your fridge. It is at this stage that we can separate clover leaves, etc. from the cut and come again greens. However, some will get through. I found a very fine example of well-fed, carefully watered, wholesome sprig of ragweed masquerading as Shinginku. Fortunately, I found this before it made it into my salad.

Bugs in the food are treated somewhat differently. We put a couple drops of organic vinegar into the water before submerging the produce – a trick I learned during my internship. This causes bugs to fall off or let go of the leaf they are riding on, and they usually fall to the bottom of the tank or float off. So finding six (or more) legged creatures in your greens should not be too commonplace. Let me know if you find otherwise.

So please remember that we do our part to keep your food free of little annoyances, and bear in mind that there is far worse than finding a “fly in your soup”.

Talk to you later,

Bob

Petits pois à la française

Peas cooked with butter and lettuce is apparently a classic recipe, but it is a new one for us. Some versions call for whole lettuce leaves. This one, from Nigella Lawson’s Feast: Food that Celebrates Life, has chopped lettuce instead. Excellent with this week’s snow peas, green onions and Flashy Trout Back lettuce!

Pork chops with fancy parsley

Or “Pork chops piquante,” as Craig Claiborne calls it in The New York Times Cookbook. Since pork fat is the new healthy fat, we bought some chops recently for the first time in years. And this is how we cooked them. The fancy parsley topping adds some greenery and extra flavour to the dish.

Toscano kale salad

Recipe from 2011


We’ve seen several recipes around for Toscano kale salad. So here is a fast, easy salad we invented to use up kale and other stray vegetables. The ingredients given below reflect what we had on hand - you can use pretty much anything. Use only Toscano kale (dark, pebbly leaves with white stems), since Russian kale (red or purple stems) has to be cooked.

Favourite Caesar Salad with Tofu or Chicken

Recipe from 2011

Bob says: This recipe is an important fuel source on the farm. It powers the tiller, whipper snipper, hoe, trowel, shovel, broadfork, buckets, and my boots. I’d probably starve without it. A tasty timesaver. Off season, I use whichever organic leaves are freshest at Byward Fruit Market Co. In season, I use whichever leaves are ready for harvest – just to make sure that whatever I am harvesting is good enough to deliver. I call this Field Salad with tofu or eggs.

Vegetables in the kitchen

See the new Veg Notes page for some handy hints on preparing and storing different vegetables (especially leafy greens).

Hey Folks:


What a lot of work has been accomplished over the past five days.

Compost piles have been turned. Growing plants have been fed their share of the pile. New crops seeded. New beds made, older ones cultivated. In addition, many weeds fed back into the compost to be turned into food for next year’s crops.

A week ago, I was beginning to feel like this year was a lost cause. As I stepped into the field this morning, I looked around and wondered at the difference these past few days had made.

The next couple of harvests will be somewhat smaller than I had planned for, but many of the crops are coming along. The Carrots appear to be about three weeks away from their first harvest. The Beets and Turnips likewise. Not long after that, we should start seeing our first potatoes.

Most exciting is the appearance of our first Garlic Scapes – expect some of these in forthcoming harvests. I am also thrilled to see the Fennel starting to take shape.

If there is still a dark note in the field, I think that the Tomato plants have not done well at all. I really should not have been so optimistic about getting them started early. As well, the Switch Grass continues its relentless march on every bed, and I have no doubt that I will be pulling more of it by week’s end.

I have started planting Calaloo. This is a leaf vegetable from the Amaranth family. It is common in soups and stews in Caribbean cuisine. You may also find it as a baby leaf “green” (actually, the plant is a reddish color) in gourmet salad mixes. I chose it as an option for mid-summer produce as it is very heat tolerant, which Mache, Spinach, Cress, etc are not. I have no idea what it tastes like. Partly as I cannot afford the gourmet salad mixes. We will have to make our own and find out!

Speaking of heat tolerant, the Cress went to seed just as I was thinking it was time for its first harvest. Too much heat already. To better prepare for the next round, I have begun opening up what I refer to as the “cold bed”. Originally, I had planned to get this bed into production for July, but the weather seems to be unseasonably warm already. On Monday, I started pulling the straw mulch off it and pulling out whatever weeds had managed to get started.

This bed was designed for keeping produce cool. It is located between my raised early spring beds to the north, and the tomato beds to the south. Its lower elevation (in relation to the raised beds) and the shade from the Tomatoes should allow it to stay out of direct sun for much of the day. As well, the trunk hose (which leads from the well to the cistern) has been placed right down the middle of it. As it is often full of ice-cold well water, the hose should act as an additional source of cooling in the bed. In theory, this bed seems like an ingenious solution to getting cool weather crops to thrive in midsummer. As with everything I have experienced, the big question is “Will it actually work?”

I am picking July 7 as our open house. I intend to run two tours, each about an hour long. One starting at 10 am, the other commencing at 1 pm. It is open to all customers, family, and friends. If you know of anyone who is interested in purchasing a share, or just wants to learn more about small scale organic growing, pass the news along. I will have more details in the next couple of weeks.

Once again, check the “This week’s Harvest” page for a peek at what to expect for this Friday. All shares will be delivered.

Talk to you soon,

Bob