Commonground

The whole Blue Bell Farm crew was up at the Commonground Country Fair this weekend!  We attended workshops on solar heating, soil chemistry, tree felling, poultry health and more!  Saw some beautiful blue ribbon veggies in the exhibition hall,...and thought that we should have entered some Blue Bell produce to the competition.  We also volunteered at the info booth, parking cars and a late night kitchen shift.  Blue Bell purchased a new weeding tool that is sure to make life easier (in theory, we'll do a full report soon enough) and we got the fair special on some technical manuals. We ran into a number of good friends who we always seem to see at the fair, and said hello to the fellow Journey Persons.  There were amazing crafters, and an array of delicious veggies at the farmers market.  Of course, I forgot to pack the camera, so I have no pictures to show for it.  But rest assured, it was beautiful as always.  Minus a misty saturday morning I suppose, but that kept things moving nice and slow.  It's easy to get overwhelmed at such an event, but I think we all got fired up for the last push of work into the fall season.  It was good to be back on the farm today to affirm for ourselves that we too were growing delicious, beautiful veggies.  But also a reminder that for all those pretty things on display there was a tremendous amount of hard work going on behind the scenes.

Best thing I saw at the fair?  A donkey jumping competition.


Whatcha Eatin?

Edamame Appetizer

Bring a few cups of water to a boil
Drop in Edamame pods
Simmer 5-8 min
Pour through colander to retrieve pods
Sprinkle with salt
Squeeze pods to pop the seeds right into your mouth!

Potato Leek Soup
from The Enchanted Broccoli Forest by Mollie Katzen

3 fist sized potatoes
3 cups cleaned, chopped leek
1 stalk celery, chopped
1 large carrot, chopped
4 Tbs. Butter
3/4 tsp. salt
1/2 C stock or water
3 cups milk
optional: snippets of fresh herbs, thyme, chives, marjoram, basil

Scrub potatoes and cut them into 1 inch chunks.  Place them in a saucepan with the leeks, celery, carrot and butter.  Add salt.  Cook the vegetables, stirring over medium heat, until the butter is melted and all the particles are coated (5 min)

Add the stock or water, bring to a boil, then cover and reduce heat to a simmer.  Cook until the potatoes are soft (20-30min).  Check the moisture level occasionally.  You may need to add a little extra tock or water if it gets too low.

When the potatoes are tender, remove the pan from the heat and puree it's contents in the milk (use a blender, or food processor itted with the steel blade).  Make sure the mixture is utterly smooth.  Return it to the sacuepan.

Add optional herbs (or not). grin in some black pepper.  Taste to see if it wants more salt.

Heat the soup gently, covered until just hot.  Try not to let it boil.  Serve right away.

(we have made a chunky version of this where we forgo the blender, it can be a bit scary blending hot liquids...)

Tomato Soup
specifically "Variation on a Cream of Tomato III"
also from The Enchanted Broccoli Forest by Mollie Katzen

Sick of fresh tomatoes?  Chop em up for a soup!  Tomato soup can be as simple, or as complex as you want, this recipe is somewhere in the middle, and uses your potatoes too.

1 Tbs. butter
1 cup chopped onion
1 cup thinly sliced potatoes
2 cloves crushed garlic
1/2 tsp. salt
1 stalk chopped celery
1/2 tsp. dill weed
1/2 tsp. dried basil
1/4 tsp. thyme
2 1/2 cups pureed, cooked tomatoes
1 tsp. honey
1 1/2 cups milk

Place butter, onion, potatoes, garlic, salt and celery in a large saucepan.  Cover and cook over very low heat, stirring occasionally, until potatoes are tender.  If necessary, add a little water or stock to avoid sticking.

Add all remaining ingredients, except milk (have the milk out so it can come to room temperature).  Cover and simmer about 30 min).

Add milk just before serving, heat gently.

Tater Diggin

The ground has been a bit dusty, that's just fine for digging up potatoes.  Most of the tops have died (or I mowed them) and we need to get them out of the ground and into the cooler.  Rob shows his prowess  at lifting two tater buckets.  (psst. there's only 1 potato in each...)  But, to be fair, by this point we had been hand digging potatoes with a spading fork for quite a while.

The bed just in front of him has lettuce seedlings and lines of drip irrigation.

I dig taters and I dig the tunes.  (WMPG!)

Also in the Solanaceae family, but much more charismatic.  Here is the collection of tomatoes we harvested.

Inside the hoophouse, the vines are going crazy!  I won't show you the ones outside, they look nasty and near dead now.  Sungolds on the left are reaching for the peak, and thinking about coming down the other side.  They are still very productive, so they can stick around for another week or two.  But sometime soon there are vines which will need to be cut to make way for winter salad greens.

Whatcha Eatin?

Well, we're eating kale chips, and steamed beets with cheddar.
see 7/3/12 and 7/8/12 for those recipes.  Also, the boxes have items for last week's recipe for crispy kale salad.

Contemplating an asian vegetable soup with some of that Thai Basil, or maybe a miso soup.  Next week we should have Bok Choi which is great with miso.  Searching for the good recipe now...

Farm community

Hey, Rob is back!  After some traveling to places 'away,' Rob hopped right back into the farm work.  Trimming garlic tops on a rainy morning was perfect greenhouse work.  WMPG radio provided the tunes as we consolidated the garlic from several benches to handy bags.

We also fired up the old wheel hoe to disturb the little weeds, and incorporate some dolomitic limestone.  We'll be trying spinach yet again.  We're hoping that the lime from this spring, and then another dose now will get the pH where the spinach will thrive.  I can't wait to take a soil test this fall. No studying required! (tee hee) Just digging up appropriate representative samples of the field.  

After running errands around town, lots of starting, stopping, and leaving the lights on while I wrote things down, the old battery in the farm truck said it was tired.   What do you know, a passing CSA member came to the rescue!  Now that is the community supporting agriculture.  Thank you! 

And here is the usual view at the end of the day in the cooler.  Anything that really needs to be harvested gets put in here during the week before I get a chance to distribute.  Also now that I have extra cooler space, I'm sharing it with Green Spark.  That's their pile of delicious cantaloupes, there.  Alas, I planted fewer melons, so after the porcupines came in, I had no melons to store.
  The CSA boxes get pre-chilled here too!  It's a convenient place to keep them, and the cool boxes should provide the cool, moist veggies with a happy environment for a bit longer during transit to the dropoff.  There is a bit more finish work I would like to do in the cooler, but that can wait till winter.    

Fall?

It's been cooler at night, can fall be on the way?  Not thinking about it, not thinking about it, not thinking about it...  Hey, there are still delicious summer tomatoes!

More here in a bit.


Whatcha Eatin?

Baked Tortilla Espanola

It's like a potato and onion fritatta.

1/2 C extra-virgin olive oil (can use less)
2 large baking potatoes, peeled and thinly sliced. (or the equivalent in unique sized CSA taters)
1 medium onion, thinly sliced (1 Cup)
5 garlic cloves, finely chopped (1/4 Cup)
Coarse salt and freshly ground pepper
5 large eggs
1/2 cup coarsely chopped fresh flat leaf parsley
1 Tablespoon fresh thyme

Preheat oven to 400. Heat oil in an 8-inch, oven safe skillet over medium heat.  Add potatoes, onion and garlic and stir well.  Gently press into an even layer with a spatula.  Reduce heat to medium low, cover and cook for 10 min.  Stir, season with salt and pepper and press again.  Cover and cook for 10 minues.  Drain in a colander reserving oil.

Whisk together eggs, parsley, and thyme.  Season with salt and pepper.  Stir in potato mixture.  Heat 2 Tablespoon reserved oil in the skillet over medium heat.  Pour in egg mixture and gently press into an even layer.  Reduce heat to medium low.  Cook uncovered for 2 minutes.
Bake until set, about 5-10 min (watch it!).
Invert onto a serving platter if you're feeling fancy, or serve from the pan.

Cooler Complete

Hey, no updates for a while?
Yep.  I was working late nights to finish this:

The walk-in cooler is working!  The vast majority of the work is done.  It even looks mostly like my sketchup model...  Just a little cleanup needed.  And I need to dye my hair to match Mr. Clean White Shirt. (clearly not a farmer)

This is the heart and soul of the cooler.  The CoolBot, and air conditioner.  (I'm voting for the CoolBot with the soul, and the AC unit as heart, but I'm open to suggestion.)

The CoolBot tells the air conditioner to run, even when it is below 60 inside.  So, temperatures can get into refrigerator territory with just a standard air conditioner.  Never mind the oozy foam and dangly wires.  I'll pretty those up too before I write a full build report.

I inaugurated the walk-in with my cooler of eggs and cucumbers.  It looks a little lonely there now, but potatoes and CSA boxes will soon take up residence.

To think, just two nights ago I was finishing the roof...

...And then realized I could not get down.  Thank goodness for nearby trees for shimmying.  (and not having to go up on the roof for a while)

Meanwhile, out on the farm.  Weeds are creeping in.  I've been spending too much time building and not enough time weeding.  Rob!  Where for art thou? (He's been on vacation, but back soon!)

I did get more storage onions out of the ground. (These are the big ones!)  They're curing in the hoophouse now under a few layers of row cover.

The cayenne peppers are ready now too.  Wow, my tongue is burning just looking at that thing.  They'll be dried to use for red pepper flakes.

And the chicks are still doing their chick thing.  The once broody hens are ready to get out of there!

The dad is a Buff Orpington, so we are thinking that the one on the left came from a Buff hen, or a RI Red hen, and the one on the right could be from one of the Australorps, or Gold Laced Wyandotte.  I have to review Storey's guide to see which are sex-linked trait.  Nice critters. 

Whatcha Eatin?

We've been making lots of tomato sauce and salsa recently.  Those tomatoes just disappear if you chop them up with jalapenos, white onion and cilantro. Oh, and a bag of chips.

Leeks!  They're in the box this past week.  They're a bit milder than onions, great in soups and on the grill. But they don't caramelize like onions, so don't fry them.  Potato Leek Soup is a classic, and there are plenty of others.  Store these puppies in the fridge in a plastic bag.  If you forget about them and they start to look funky, just peel off the outer layers till you get back to the beautiful white and green portions.  When preparing Leeks, just slice off the last bit of roots, and then up a the top where the leaves start separating from the tight part of the stalk.  The lighter part is most tender for grilling, but all of it is good in soup.  You may notice that our leeks are almost comically long, I'm not exactly sure how that happened, but I'm doing some research on it.

Grilled Leeks
(from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison)

Slice trimmed leeks in half lengthwise and rinse well.  Steam them, cut side down, until barely tender, then brush with olive oil and season with salt.  Grill on both sides until light grill marks appear, turning as necessary.  Serve with extra virgin olive oil mixed with finely chopped parsley or chervil spooned over the leeks.  Mustard Vinaigrette on the side.




Crispy Kale Salad with Lime Dressing

This lovely number is from one of our CSA members.  Can't wait to try it!

http://www.bonappetit.com/recipes/2012/09/crispy-kale-salad-with-lime-dressing#ixzz25Z54gYjw

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 tablespoons (packed) palm sugar or light brown sugar
• 1/4 cup fresh lime juice
• 3 tablespoons fish sauce (such as nam pla or nuoc nam)
• 1 teaspoon minced garlic
• 1/2 red Thai chile or 1/4 red jalapeño, seeded, thinly sliced
• 24 small Tuscan kale leaves (about 5 inches) or 5-inch-long pieces torn from large stemmed leaves
• 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
• Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 3 cups (loosely packed) mixed tender herbs (such as cilantro, mint, and basil)
• 3 cups mixed shaved vegetables (such as carrots, beets, and radishes)
• 2 cups pea tendrils, watercress, or baby arugula
• 2 cups thinly sliced stemmed Tuscan kale leaves (from 1 bunch)
• 1 cup thinly sliced cucumber

• Ingredient Info:

  Fish sauce is available at Asian markets and in the Asian foods section of most supermarkets. Find Tuscan kale, also called black kale, Lacinato kale, or cavolo nero, at farmers' markets and some supermarkets.  (Blue Bell generally has a variety of Siberian kale in its mix which works similar to Lacinato)
  
  

Preparation

• Microwave sugar and 2 Tbsp. water on high in a medium microwave-safe bowl until sugar is dissolved, about 30 seconds. Let cool. Whisk in next 4 ingredients for dressing. Set aside.
• Arrange racks in upper and lower thirds of oven; preheat to 250°. Brush tops of kale leaves with oil; season with salt and pepper. Arrange in a single layer on 2 large baking sheets. Bake, rotating sheets top to bottom halfway through, until kale is crisp, about 30 minutes. Transfer leaves from baking sheets to a wire rack; let cool.
• Mix herbs and remaining 4 ingredients with 6 Tbsp. dressing in a large bowl. Divide salad among plates; top with crispy kale leaves and drizzle remaining dressing over.

Old Tools and New Chickens

It's been a sunny and warm week!  Excellent weather to get lots of stuff done.  One item was an inherited chunk of metal of dubious use.  Thanks mom!  What the heck is this?

It came with handles, and after finding the right bolts, and fabricating a few other cross pieces, here we go!

It's a Kentucky wheel hoe, that was apparently my grandfathers, then in use by my uncle, and now I'm tilling the soil with it.  Neat!

And the machine in action, probably 80 years after it was built.

Meanwhile, over at the cooler-in-progress,  I got foam board installed on all the walls.

And the AC unit is roughly in place.  No earthquakes please...
It just needs insulation for the interior roof, and a roof roof.  This is a rather odd order of building a shed, but it's an odd building to begin with.

Back in the field, porcupines have taken out my melons.  Grrr!  They first, ate melons, so I covered them with row cover.  Then they dug under the row cover,  so I buried the edges.  Then they realized it was flimsy stuff all along and chewed right through.  The arms race may not be successful for melons this year.  Next step, a big fence.  Or perhaps robot guards with giant pincushions to trap em.

Yeah, those are my melons this porcupine is serving.

I take solace in my Jalapenos though.  Gorgeous!

And the storage onions we pulled out today.  After a bit of curing, these will last well into winter.

Golly I love how Sungolds look in the hoop house.

Ah yes, new chickens have been added to the flock to keep up with egg demand.  This weekend a neighbor had a small flock of layers he was parting with.  Hooray! I'll take em.  However, this is a feisty bunch.  After introducing them to their new accommodations, several of them tried to make a break for it.  I could not find one of them for a while, but later I found it trying to hot wire my truck!

Maybe I'll train it to change the oil.

Whatcha Eatin?

Potato Salad

Adapted from NY Times, somewhere around 2008.  You have a bunch of the ingredients in your box this week!

Dressing:
1 Tablespoon white wine vinegar or cider vinegar
1 Tablespoon lemon juice
salt to taste
1 teaspoon dijon mustard
1 garlic clove minced or pureed
1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil.  (low fat version: 1/4 C plain yogurt, 2 T olive oil)

Salad
~1.5 lbs potatoes
salt and pepper to taste
2-4 Tablespoons finely chopped onion, rinsed with cold water and drained.  (knocks down the raw onion flavor a tad)
2 Tablespoons chopped parsley

Dressing:
Whisk together all dressing ingredients except the olive oil/yogurt.  Then add the olive oil/yogurt.

The Potatoes:
Dice potatoes to 3/4" cubes.  Steam above 1" boiling water until tender, but not mushy, 10-12 min.  Remove potatoes from heat.  Toss with remaining ingredients and dressing while the potatoes are hot!  (then the taters pick up all the flavor).

Mojitos

You got a warm afternoon? just add Mojito.

5-10 mint leaves

1 Tablespoon Lime Juice

Lime Wedge

2 teaspoons sugar

1 oz Light Rum

Soda Water

Ice

Place the mint leaves, lime juice, sugar and rum in a glass and muddle. (smoosh the leaves with a blunt object to bruise the leaves and release the minty goodness to the rum).  Add ice and soda water.  Garnish with a lime wedge, and a pretty sprig of unmuddled mint.  You can even use the mint stem as a stir stick.

Chicken moving time

I got some good tractor practice this past week.  The big field where the chickens are located needed to be mowed.  Sign me up!  I had most of the field mowed with the old orange Kubota in two hours,... 20 minutes of which was spent getting the tractor unstuck from a mud hole...  Or rather, Austin came over and did a nifty bucket-lifting-the-front-end-and-putting-it-in-reverse move.  Thanks Austin!
The mowed field also let me move the chickens to new pasture easier.  The electro netting I use is generally fine to deal with, but it does get snagged on tall, woody plants.  Also, when moving chickens from one enclosure to the next there are a couple of feisty ones which hide out in the tall grass, and then explode out in the wrong direction when you try to herd them to the new enclosure.  It's a good raccoon survival instinct I suppose, but if they keep doing that, they'll have a stewpot to deal with!  Short grass = no exploding chickens.

Now, really, I should not be mowing at all.  The chickens should be doing most of it, and they'll move onto fresh grass that is not above their heads.  But if you're slow in moving the chickens to new pasture, the grass grows big, the chickens take a while to tramp it down/nibble on it, and then the next pasture area grows up too big.  So, mowing hits the reset button and I can try to get them moved along to new pasture more quickly this time.  Perhaps hoofed ruminants are in order!

Here are the chickens before moving to the new grassy area, and a nice sunset.

The chicks are being supervised by the broody buff orpington.

In non-chicken related news, I started digging up the potatoes this week.  The yields are not that great due to leaf hoppers and Colorado Potato Beetle, but it is still rewarding to dig through the soil and come up with a few handfuls of tubers.  We got some good root veggies seeded in the ground for this fall.  I'm still trying at beets darnit.  The soil seems a bit acidic for them, but they'll come along soon enough.  There are a few black radishes are in the ground, wait till you see those!

Whatcha Eatin?

You don't always have to cook kale!  This here is a cold recipe for the big leafy green.  Sorry CSA, no beets yet.

Kale Salad with Root Vegetables

-Large bunch of kale, chopped
-2 Tablespoons olive oil
-1/4 teaspoon salt
-grated carrots
-grated beets

Pour olive oil and salt over kale.  Massage the salt and oil into the kale for 2-3 minutes until the kale starts to soften and wilt.  Curious why you're doing this?  More info here.
Add the grated carrots and beets.

Dressing
-Juice of 1 lemon
-1 Tablespoon olive oil
-1 teaspoon honey
-Salt
-Pepper