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
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