Heirloom Harvest

Calling All Pickle Experts

We're going to add pickling cucumbers, which differ from slicing or salad cucumbers in being shorter—about three to four inches long. Some CSA members asked for them last season, and I feel it would be to the advantage of the rest of the members to have them .

What I would really like to do is have somebody teach a canning class to interested CSA members. Canning and preserving vegetables is a forgotten basic skill that many of our parents and grandparents knew growing up. This is the best way to go year 'round with the farm, having the value of the farm last all year. If you can help, with recipes or the willingness to do a canning class, email the editor of this blog at whit@pobox.com, or email me at JMitc1014@aol.com.

Soup is SO ON

Your Editor here. I just made a soup tonight that seemed to go very well, and it might be really useful at harvest time. I thought I would write it down right away, and maybe prime the pump so we could get more recipes, especially in areas like vegan recipes.

Chicken-Turkey Winter Soup

Ingredients

1 chicken carcass

1 turkey breast carcass

1 onion

1 parsnip

3 carrots

1/2 big rutabaga

3 ribs celery

3 cloves garlic

1 lemon

1 handful egg noodles

fresh parsley to taste

Start by putting the chicken in a sizeable saucepan -- I used the largest saucepan I have, a RevereWare saucepan that holds about 8 quarts. And I just covered the carcass -- the idea here is to get intense broth. I simmered the carcass for about two hours, let the pot cool and put it in the fridge. I left it sit for a while, then lifted out the carcass, picked off the meat, and skimmed the fat off the broth.

I set the meat aside, and warmed the broth to a simmer. I squeezed in the juice of the lemon. I cut up and dropped in the vegetables, and let it simmer vigorously for about 75 minutes -- basically until the rutabaga was a nice sunset orange and the parsnips were falling-apart tender. I chopped the chicken coarsely, cut what meat off the turkey I could get, chopped it coarsely and dropped it in. Then I dropped the noodles, and let the noodles get just tender, which was a little more than 5 minutes. Then I dropped in the parsley, and then I served the soup by itself. I wished like heck I had a good peasant bread, but you can't plan ahead for everything.

As I say, we're meat eaters, but I know a lot of you all are not, and we would certainly welcome recipes for vegetarians of all disciplines and any other receipe that helps people use the farm vegetables to their best ability. (BTW, I think the onion that went in tonight was our last of the 2004 produce. Thanks again, John!)

About the Blog

This is your editor speaking. Usually, I'm just writing up my conversations with John about what he's up to, but this post is straight from me. You'll see these from time to time, and I'll always note what's from me and what's from him. If this works out, then we might invest in a slightly more expensive account where we can add authors and improve the process some. Then he could write directly when he wants to, and I could, and others could to, and we could zip the process along without having quite so many obstacles.

Until then, feel free to use the "comments" feature to put in comments, which I see at least one person already is, so that's great. And feel free also to email me, whit@pobox.com, about the blog itself, or content you'd like to post. That includes recipes, pictures relevant to the farm (pictures you take there, pictures you take of your food you get from there, and so forth). I'm going to do my best to get that content up in a useful, meaningful fashion, although there are some limitations due to the fact that the farm blog right now is running on the account for my blog. (For example, I can't just select the option to "show photo albums" on this blog because then you all would have my Australia photos right there with the farm album, and none of us needs that, right?)

The hardest thing for me is going to be writing in John's voice, to the best of my ability, because I have my own voice and editing has never been my strong point. Speak up if I get out of line with his or your words.

So: Welcome. If only Proserpina hadn't eaten those pomegranate seeds, right? Yeesh. Spring has to be here someday. Let's hope for sooner rather than later. Send in the radishes! There ought to be radishes! Send in the radishes!

The Food Spectrum (and, don't be overwhelmed!)

In addition to the six main plantings of broccoli that are planned regularly throughout the season for 2005, I am adding one of purple broccoli. Unusual colors are something I'm going to continue to experiment with. Be sure to let me know what you think.

Something I’m finding out is these unusual colors and varieties seem to be heartier and more vigorous than other varieties. It turned out to be that way with yellow, orange and purple tomatoes, all of which are heirloom varieties.

I don't want people to think that there will be fewer red tomatoes though. Some people did feel that, on balance, they wanted more red tomatoes last season; however, that's more an indication of how successful the non-red tomatoes were, rather than a planned outcome on my part. I have reduced by a few plantings the colored tomato plantings, which may make for a better balance between the reds and the others. People received anywhere between 8 and 22 pounds of tomatoes a week during the tomato season, and I got the sense that many people felt the quantity was too much. As a CSA farmer, I keep in mind that surveys have shown that one of the top ten reasons people leave a CSA is because there is too much food.

Just remember, any food you don't want, leave it and it will go to charity.

Helping Out

We now have a contract where we’re going to grow all the organic transplants for the Worcester Urban Gardener program and for the urban farm that operates in Worcester.  We're going to do about 60 or 70 flats for them – eggplants, peppers, tomatoes, and some brassicas.

No Snow Crash

The snow has hindered the start of some of my around-farm projects, though we are still weeks away from the start of greenhouse growing. The tractor I use for plowing (see photo, which you can click to see bigger) is in the shop, and that's made it difficult to get down there right now. The other day I had to shovel a 50-foot snowdrift off the side of the greenhouse. I have to keep an eye on the snow piling up around the greenhouse because it it's left unattended, an excessive snowload could collapse the greenhouse.

Farming in winter?

January isn’t a month you spend a lot of out in the dirt, obviously, but it does have its own chores and tasks just as the cultivation months do.

Right now, I’m putting together the seed order. I take a lot of seed catalogs and spread them out on a big table in the living room. The first thing I do is I go through them, looking at what’s new and what’s changed. I have to look for all the vegetable varieties I want to keep for next year and find out which are no longer carried by any seed company at all. At the same time, I have some varieties in mind I’d like to grow because I saw them somewhere like Russo’s (they sell good stuff, but not necessarily organic, at their Watertown location) and I think they might appeal to the farm’s members.

I buy most of the farm’s seeds from Johnny’s Selected Seeds. I am spreading out from that to more suppliers, though.

Right now, what I intend to add next year are jack-o-lantern pumpkins, fava beans and soybeans (the kind you can eat fresh after they’ve been steamed). You may have had this kind of soybean at gourmet restaurants or from other farms; they’re called edamame. We’ll have cooking instructions for them up here (and a lot of other things, too) if we decide to grow them this year.

Some vegetables won’t come back next year. The garden peach tomatoes, the pale yellow ones with the soft skin, for instance, weren’t popular enough. They’re a little insipid. We’ve been there and done that.

We've got a limited number of memberships available for 2005 still, and in particular the Thursday pickup day is nearly full, so please don't delay sending in your renewal. Also, now is the time to let friends and neghbors know about us, so that if they want a membersjhip, they aren't disappointed. Go to the website at http://www.heirloomharvestcsa.com/ to get the forms or more information if you need it.