Falling into fall with alphabet soup

Where has the summer gone?

These days I wake up and shiver my way into a hot shower, before layering my body with fleece upon fleece upon fleece (and wool socks). As we load the truck and start harvesting, the intensifying sun slowly melts away the chill and warms our faces.

August has been interesting. After a hot, dry July (drought-like, really), August has been anything but. And the vegetables keep on keepin' on. I'm realizing now that despite the rainy weather we've had, August has been an exceptionally busy and exciting month.

With all this excitement going on, what to talk about first? The Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA) Summer Conference that I went to a couple weeks ago? The field tomatoes that are still holding on despite the downpours? The frogs and toads that hop across our fields, the roads, and even our harvest bins like its a revival of the ten plagues? The harvest of five beds of garlic that lay curing in the barn until the harvest of over 3310 pounds of onions (which took their place)? The work-day we had with a group of teenage farm-enthusiasts from the area? Or maybe the workshop I went to in Boston that combined lessons in food preservation (canning) with a Torah study?

All of the above.

But I'm going to save the NOFA conference and the Jewish food workshop for a separate post, so I can synthesize my notes and thoughts into something cohesive. The rest will unfold as I go through the fruit and vegetable alphabet. (How farm-nerdy.)

Apples: They're here. Well, not here, since we don't have an orchard. But on fruit farms nearby, the apple harvest is upon us. Seeing those first boxes of apples arrive for our fruit share members made me remember that I absolutely positively love fall. And that I absolutely positively love apples.
Beans: Green beans are tasty when pickled in vinegar, but even more so when lacto-fermented for a couple weeks. I've spent two afternoons doing some serious food preservation at the farm-house, and fermenting green beans was one of the "putting-by" experiments. (And a delicious one at that.) All these pickling, canning, and fermenting experiments will surely get me to experiment more on my own in the future. The idea of fermenting has always scared me a little bit, but in reality you can't conjure up anything too horrible (and if you do, just get rid of it and start fresh).
Corn: I made my favorite corn dish again this year, from Bryant Terry's Vegan Soul Food. It's a coconut-ginger creamed corn, which I spiced up with a bit of jalapeño. With the sweet corn we get from a nearby farm, and the sweet onions we've been harvesting at the farm (but no more! the bed has sadly been picked clean), this dish was incredible. If you love coconut, ginger, and corn, you must try this dish.
Dandelions: I just learned (either from a book or from the herbal medicine workshop at the NOFA conference) that a tincture of dandelions in apple cider vinegar can provide a hearty helping of calcium. I am hoping to get around to making some to use in everything from salad dressings to hot drinks.
Eggplant: It may have been an excellent year for onions, but it has been a pitiful eggplant harvest. Something is keeping the eggplants from flowering and producing. Sure, we've harvested some, but for two beds you'd expect a lot more than a bucket or two of fruit. The farmer believes it's a soil issue, which hopefully will be clarified for us when we do soil tests this fall.
Fennel: After my grandma showed me just how incredible a veggie stir-fry can be with a little fennel in it, I have been in love with this vegetable. I've been cooking it up with sweet onions, tofu, other veggies, and a sweet mango-curry sauce I got at the supermarket. Scrumptious.
Garlic: Today is the first day we distributed the garlic heads to CSA members! It took a lot of human-power (and a little tractor-power) to get all those hundreds and hundreds of bulbs out of the ground. Then, as they cured in the barn, we clipped the leaves off of each and every one and piled them into mesh bags. There's nothing like fresh garlic.
Howden Pumpkins: You know it's almost fall when the pumpkins are beginning to turn orange! We have a few pumpkins in the field near the tomatoes, and we've spotted more than a little orange. We don't grow winter squash on the farm, for lack of space, but the farm kids have been keeping their eye on the monstrous acorn squash plant growing out of the family compost heap. Fun fact: The Howden pumpkin was developed at Howden Farm in nearby Sheffield, MA.
I'm skipping I.
Jalapeños: gotta love 'em.
Kale: Kale is one of my favorite vegetable to harvest. The leaves just snap right off and in no time at all you've filled your bin. Today, however, in our post-Irene sogginess, it was a little trickier. In fact, as I stepped into a bed of curly Winterbor kale, my boot actually got stuck. I had to hold onto my bin for leverage as I pulled  myself out of two inches of muck, made soggy by the 5.5 inches of rain we got during the storm. Even though a portion of our field is under a couple inches of water, many other farms have it much worse. Catastrophically worse, even, and my heart goes out to all the farmers who have lost thousands of dollars worth of crops...
Lettuce: We usually harvest over 120 pounds of lettuce mix and about 80-100 heads of lettuce each week. On Friday we planted three small beds of lettuce. Over the course of the season, we've planted lettuce every couple weeks to ensure that we have enough each week. These last couple weeks it's been feeling a little tight, but I'm not sure how much of that is because of the weather.
Mayonnaise: It's most definitely not a vegetable, but at break-time everyday the "house special" is a rice cake or cracker with mayonnaise, basil, tomato, cucumber, hot pepper, onion, and cheese. I usually have the veggies with hummus or olive spread in the mayo's place. I've never worked anywhere before with such a delicious, nutritious, and generous break-time snack.
N: no N.
Onions: Remember all the onion starts we planted in mid-April? Four months later, they're all out of the ground. The sweet onions were the first to go, and since they didn't need to be cured, we've been distributing them to members for the last few weeks. A week ago today, we harvested the other three beds of onions: the storage onions. In all, it came to about 3310 pounds of onions, which are now laying on the floor of the barn to cure. There were two beds of a variety called Copra, which is a white storage onion, and one bed called Red Zepplin, which is a red storage onion.
Peppers: Like the eggplants, the peppers aren't doing as well this year either. The plants are producing a lot of fruit, but much of the fruit is rotting on the plant, well before it turns red. As we harvest ripe peppers, we have to remove the rotting ones that are filling with decomposing juices and other lovely surprises. Yuck.
Q: What vegetable starts with q?
Root vegetables: We grow lots of carrots, and we buy potatoes from a nearby organic farm. Both of these crops are washed in a funny-looking contraption plainly named a "root washer." It consists of a rotating barrel-like structure that has spray jets to wash the roots as they turn. Today was the first day I set up and used the washer by myself, and at first it was like a scene from an I Love Lucy episode as the the potatoes fell out of the washer faster than I could put them back in and the washer sprayed me with as much water as it did the potatoes.
Swiss Chard: Apparently, you can plant a bed of swiss chard and harvest from it all season long. I never knew that before this season! We have two beds of swiss chard, which continue to provide new growth to harvest week after week.
Tomatoes: There's a lot of them. We've been heavily harvesting field tomatoes for the last couple weeks, which is good timing since our greenhouse tomatoes are pretty tuckered out. We've started to rip out some of the least healthy plants in greenhouses 1 and 2.
U-pick: Members pick their own flower bouquets, cherry tomatoes, husk cherries, tomatillos, green beans, and herbs from the herb garden. Anybody want to go u-pick apple-picking with me sometime this fall?
Vetch: It's what's for dinner. No, just kidding. It's a cover crop. Rye and vetch will be planted in a section of the field which will not be used next year. Oats and peas will be planted in beds that will be used.
Watermelon: The melons are in, although now they're even more watery from all the rain. We don't sell or distribute the few melons that grow in the fields, and we've been enjoying them at break-time. In the cookbook I mentioned above, Bryant Terry has a good-looking recipe for pickled watermelon rinds, which I would love to test out this summer.
X marks the spot for cruciferous vegetables, whose flowers form the shape of an x. Brussels sprouts, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, and kale are all cruciferous vegetables. Yesterday we cut the tops off the Brussels sprout stalks to encourage them to focus energy on the lateral buds we know as the sprouts, instead of continuing to grow upwards. I took some of these tender leaves home with me and cooked them up with a little water, salt, and pepper. They were pretty darn good, but I can't wait for the real thing!
Yellow squash: See zucchini.
Zucchini: I've never been a huge fan, and now I'm definitely sick of it. Maybe I'll make another batch of zucchini pickles, though, because those were pretty tasty. A few weeks ago I co-made a chocolate zucchini cake, and it was heavenly. I guess I'll eat some more zucchini if it's hidden in chocolate...

And that's that! Hope everyone is enjoying the last days of August.

Peace,
Danielle

My Garden, Part II

Yesterday I left out some of the juicy adventures I've been having in my garden. Here they are, with photos!

 First week of August. It looks a little greener than it did in June!

Today I ate my third sungold cherry tomato. It was heavenly. The basil is just about big enough to start harvesting a little bit at a time. I have a big bag of basil in my kitchen right now though that was left over from a CSA distribution. Until I turn it into pesto, no more basil for me.

To my surprise, one of the heirloom tomatoes (Green Zebra, one of my favorite varieties) withered away and died this week. I was surprised because this was one of the plants from our plant sale, and not one I propagated myself or dug up in the fields. In retrospect however, I was taking the plants that nobody wanted to buy, and this plant was probably weak from the start. In the tomato plant's place, I moved over a partly shaded White Russian Kale to fill the void and give the kale plant the space it needs. A beginning from an end.

 Poor green zebra tomato plant. I harvested the green tomatoes when I pulled up the plant, but accidentally threw them in the compost yesterday! Ho hum. Does anyone know what could have caused the wilt? The bok choy that you see to the right of the tomato plant was harvested a few days ago, and was incredibly tender and tasty!

 All is not lost. There are still tomatoes. :)

After fertilizing the plants with alfalfa meal three weeks ago, they "popped" and started doing their thing (even the ones that had been stunted from being root-bound for so long before planting). A week earlier, I had been tempted to rip out the two lemon cucumber plants that (pre-fertilizer) had been standing up straight in all their stunted, yellow-leaved legginess. Every time I looked at them I was reminded of the fact that they were too root-bound when I planted them and that I should have planted them deeper in the soil. Since giving them the extra nutrient boost, they've exploded in size. I've eaten two delightfully sweet cucumbers and look forward to many more.

 Lemon cucumber plant. The fruits grow to be softball-sized yellow cucumbers with a crunchy skin and sweet flesh. 

Ants are walking all over my okra like it's the Appalachian Trail. What are they doing? Who knows. I thought at first they were eating the flower buds, but recently I've noticed some teeny tiny pests (like a smaller, duller looking flea beetle) that are covering the buds, and the ants seem very interested in this. I read that ants are attracted to okra because of the plant's high oil content. This past weekend I sprayed the plants with a garlic solution (homemade, and who knows if it was even garlicky enough) but no one (ant or beetle) seemed to mind. Regardless, today was a Very Special Day for okra, because I harvested three pods!

 This photograph was shot looking down on the okra plant, so you can see the new leaves, buds, and ANTS. Despite their presence on the plants, only a couple of buds on the most infested plants seem like they've been harmed.

 Okra plant, standing tall. In the middle of the photograph, towards the left, you can see a flower just about to open. Okra flowers are stunning, much like another member of its botanical family: hibiscus. Okra flowers are creamy white and purple. Members of the mallow family (malvaceae) also include marshmallow, cotton, durian, and kenaf.

Today's okra harvest -- first pick of the season! I cooked these cuties up with some sweet corn, sweet onion, garlic, olive oil, and salt. It was the first ear of corn I've eaten for the season, too. Not home-grown, but still local and delicious. 

Even in a ten by ten garden plot, there's plant drama.

  

My plan for the weekend: Weed, weed, weed. Give everyone a little helping of alfalfa meal. Stake that last tomato plant I've been neglecting. (I should have done this weeks ago!) Put up another trellis on the rest of the tomato plants to contain the new growth. (I'm using a pliant tape-like material to tie the plants to the stake; it supposedly has a little give to it as the plants grow.) Figure out how to contain the husk cherries, which are starting to get bigger and will sooner or later take over half the garden if I don't give them a trellis of some sort. Eat some more sorrel leaves, which are currently my favorite snack as I stand next the garden, dreamily staring into space.

My Garden

We're now harvesting hundreds of pounds of tomatoes each week, along with buckets full of summer squash, zucchini eggplant, carrots, cucumbers, and peppers. Add that to a couple hundred pounds of cabbage, some fennel, beets, broccoli, endive, kale, chard, scallions, onions, and purslane, and we've got quite a few farm-fresh veggies on our hands.

Compared to the farm's 4+ acres of organic vegetable production, my little garden is laughable. Its 10 foot by 10 foot perfect square is jam-packed with vegetable plants -- some of them experiments -- so who knows how they'll do. But much like the Little Red Hen who planted the wheat, harvested the wheat, ground the wheat, and made the wheat into bread all by herself, I've been taking care of this garden from the very beginning, and it's all -- for better or for worse -- mine.

I ripped up the sod on the lawn, I turned under the compost (which was acquired with the generous help of my co-workers), I raked it smooth, I sowed the seeds and planted the seedlings, I staked the tomatoes (more or less), I added the fertilizer, and wouldn't you know it -- I'm harvesting the vegetables!

The farmers were so kind to let me rip up a portion of their lawn so I could have a garden of my own. The following photographs show a little bit of the method to my madness:

In the beginning, there was sod. I measured out a ten by ten square plot, staked it, and started digging up the sod with my favorite farm tool: the digging fork. I started my garden rather late; this photograph was taken over Memorial Day weekend.

My enthusiasm for the garden was in constant flux as I dug up the sod. For all the sweat and effort I was putting into the digging, what I was really getting out of it (in the short-term, at least) was a perfect square of not-so-great dirt...

The digging fork, at rest.

 

I bought a package of  organic Clemson Sprineless okra seeds at a natural foods market in town. Here they are, germinating away, in the greenhouse. This photograph was taken in early June. 

The newly planted garden: more dirt than green. Here's a list of what's in it:

- 6 okra plants (sowed from seed in the greenhouse)

- 2 tomato plants left over from the seedling sales (sungold cherry tomato and green zebra)

- 2 volunteer tomato plants that I dug up from section 1. Last year's cherry tomatoes went crazy with the re-seeding, and these guys would have been pulled up to make room for this year's leeks and brassicas. I had no idea what kind of cherries they'd produce, but that was part of the fun.

- 3 volunteer husk cherry plants, which also re-seeded from last year. I dug them up like the cherries.

- 2 tomato plants I rooted from "suckers" pruned off of tomato plants in the greenhouse. I still have no idea what variety of tomatoes they'll grow, but they seem very healthy!

- 1 sorrel. yum.

- 2 lemon cucumber plants

- 1 zucchini

- 1 lacinato kale
- 3 pepper plants (1 mystery variety that lost its tag during the plant sale, 1 "lipstick" pepper plant, and 1 "King Arthur Bell" that I bought at Volante Farm)

Since this photograpg was taken I've added:

- 1 bok choy

- 3 Russian kale plants

- 3 lettuce starts

- 5 basil plants

- 12 red onion starts, which I found in the compost spreader we borrowed from a nearby farm. They're doing great. 

- 1 stunted sunflower, which has bloomed and is now looking a little sad.

I think this is a picture of one of the greenhouse "suckers" when it started producing fruit. These tomatoes are now huge but still green. Still not sure what kind of tomato plant it is. If only I could remember which plant I pruned it off of!

 

Lacinato kale. Scrumptious! 

Stay tuned for another post about what my garden looks like now-a-days. I'd love to say that I'm trying to build the suspense, but in truth I haven't yet uploaded the photos to my computer and I'm too excited to share the news about this little garden-that-could to wait. So far I've harvested one zucchini,  two lemon cucumbers, some kale, the bok choy, and a few leaves (here and there) of sorrel. Today, I ate my first two sungold cherry tomatoes! I definitely couldn't live off of this garden, but hey, it's a start.