Nitty Gritty Farm News July 29th

From the Farmers…………
Wow! A Nitty Gritty Dirt Farm first – an up-north cabin weekend retreat for all farm interns and farm owners - hosted by intern Laura at her family’s cabin in Wisconsin. The cabin kitchen was filled with basil and cilantro, cukes and zukes, peppers and the broccoli we all brought along with a few liquid beverages and we enjoyed boating, tubing, swimming, the hot tub, Bananagrams and Quelf. It is great to have a crew that enjoys playing together as much as working hard together.
We came back from the weekend with Robin sick with some kind of sinus infection – better now, and Steph a little under the weather. But the farm work goes on and so do we.
Drying Tower of Buckets

We retied the staked tomatoes, mowed down the green beans (and now the yellow beans), built an addition on the turkey pen giving them a greatly enlarged outdoor area onto which we later added a top as the young turkeys quickly learned to roost on the high top of the fence panels at night and then hop to the outside world come daylight. Since no one likes chasing down little turkeys, a top was in order.
On Tuesday with a greatly expanded crew – thanks Sean, Matt and Emilie for helping out – we moved the five (not-so) little pigs from their baby quarters to their new pen (built on Monday) under the lean-to of the barn where the lambs used to be. We had taken six more lambs to Braham to our butcher on Monday so the smaller lambs were moved in with the remaining few older lambs in a farther out pen, thus making their old pen available for the pigs. We learned about the idea of using pigs as cultivators - ‘piggerators’ Joel Salatin of Polyface farm and “Omnivore’s Dilemma” fame calls them.
Our hope is that our five pigs will root up all of the old manure and packed bedding left by several years of sheep living under the barn lean-to so that we can just load it up and transfer this rich compost to the fields. In just two days, they have already made a pretty good start. They are also very interested in the lambs that are in the pen just to the south of them and Reba the cow just to the west of them. Reba and the lambs are not quite so sure about the pigs.
It is exciting harvesting as we move toward August. All of the midsummer veggies are ripening. The buckets of purple, golden and deep green peppers, wheelbarrows of red onions, and a table full of bright white garlic makes us as thrilled as we hope you will be.
All of us here have been canning and freezing like crazy – Dilly beans, pressure-canned yellow beans, Brown Sugar Dill Pickles, Kimchee, Short Brine Dill Pickles, frozen broccoli and ice cubed herbs. We encourage you to cut up, blanch and freeze any of your share veggies that are more than you can use up right away. They are wonderful to add to a soup or stew come winter.
onions
We look forward to meeting or re-connecting with you at our MIDSUMMER ABUNDANCE FESTIVAL this Sunday – 3:00 – 5:30 pm. We’ll be cooking up a bunch of fresh veggies in stir fry, serving beer, wine and ice tea, drum circle drumming (bring your own drum or use one of ours), hayrides around the farm, cut your own flower bouquets from our rows of field flowers, and enjoy lots of good conversation around good food, good community, and good farming.
Until then …………… Robin


What’s in your Share this Week?
Mars Red Onion
Eureka Yellow Beans
Garlic
Raider, Sweet Slice and Homemade Pickles Cucumbers
Zephyr, Slick Pic, Raven, Elite, Horn of Plenty, Lita Summer Squash
Yukon Gold Potatoes
Red Russian Kale
Joi Choi Bok Choy
Conchos Jalapeno Peppers (dark green )
Gypsy Pepper (yellow elongated)
Islander Pepper (purple bell)
Scarlet Nantes Carrots
Orange Thyme

Nitty Gritty Farm News July 22, 2010

From the Farmers………….
“These are the beans that never end……..they just go on and on my friend …….somebody started picking them not knowing what they was……….and they’ll continue picking them forever just because …..THESE ARE THE BEAN THAT NEVER END!!!!!!!!........they just go on and on………..”
This is Stephanie’s new NGDF theme song – sung to raise spirits, as sweaty and dirty and mosquito bitten our whole crew picked and picked green beans last week and now this week the yellow Eureka beans. We do hope you are enjoying every savory moment of these amazing beans that never seem to end. Here at the farm, we’ve all been canning dilly beans, freezing beans and pressure canning mixed green and yellow beans in this abundant season. If any of you are interested in a few more beans to put in your jars or freezer – we didn’t finish picking the yellow beans – there is almost a whole row left – at least 8 five gallon buckets worth - so give us a call if you want to come to the farm Thursday afternoon or evening, Friday all day or Sunday evening to pick for yourself what is still in the field.

Tuesday was chicken butchering day – 47 broilers moved from Godzilla birds into the refrigerator – and soon to be in the kitchens of some of you. (Two more groups of broilers are still growing.) We hope you enjoy eating them as much as we do. Dale made an amazing lunch today of barbequed (homemade 2009 BBQ sauce) on one chicken, and a dry rub on the other chicken (both fresh) for our noon meal, along with a huge fresh salad of romaine, snap peas, carrots, onions, turnips, peppers, broccoli and more – all fresh moments before from the fields. It is absolutely what sustains us here – both body and mind – good food well prepared and presented and totally celebrated. We hope that all of you are also fully enjoying preparing new and old favorite recipes with your NGDF veggies.

Gigi suggested that I talk a little about resources for recipes. Here at the farm we tend to bring in a huge pile of everything that is ready to be harvested – look at it and then decide what to prepare from it. We are lucky in that every day we are fixing a noon meal for at least eight very hungry farmers – and so we can make a wide variety of dishes – and know that there will seldom be left-overs. However, we are also challenged in that two of our crew are gluten free, two are vegetarians and four are big meat eaters. We try to have every noon meal accommodate every diet – no small task even with all of our fresh food. We also try to have our meal use at least 85% farm produced food (like meat, veggies, eggs and dairy products), and another 10% farm processed (like bread we make but don’t produce the flour or beer and wine we make ourselves from all or part outside resources) with only 5% of every meal food produced off the farm (like quinoa/corn pasta or lentils, spices, or butter).

We love hearing from shareholders about how you use the food we grow for you – from some of the recipes you’ve tried from ‘Eating Local’ to your Gin and Tonics muddled with lime basil. By the way – intern Kristen created a cucumber and lime basil juice with gin drink tonight – pretty good over ice. One of the sites recommended by a shareholder is foodieview.com. The upper right corner has a quick search area where you just type in the ingredients you have. I also know that if you just type in a list of the veggies you got in your share and then select a category of food and google it you get an amazing variety of recipes. For example type: Napa Cabbage, cucumber, dill, turnip recipes Asian. Search.

There are so many good cookbooks out there it’s hard to choose. Though I don’t often cook directly from cookbooks – I do get ides and inspiration from them. Gigi says I cook to the picture (instead of the ingredient list) – and that is true since so often I need to substitute for ingredients I don’t’ have to those I do – like using kohlrabi instead of Jicama. But - I do have a few favorites. Even though we are one of the featured farms I think Eating Local is a wonderful cookbook. I also love Deborah Madison’s Local Flavors. And the Smith and Hawken Gardener’s Community Cookbook is one I refer to often. It is where I got the wonderful Chocolate Zucchini cake that is our farm birthday cake of choice. We also use the Joy of Pickling, The Ball Blue book canning and freezing guide, Putting Food By for processing foods. The Moosewood Cookbook and the Enchanted Broccoli Forest, From Asparagus to Zucchini, The Tassajara Cookbook and the Tassajara Bread Book are also some of my favorites. I love cookbooks and have a six foot book shelf of them. Our newest sections are recipe books on cheesemaking, winemaking and beer brewing – as well as all the artisan bread cookbooks. You can also find a great resource of recipes at your local library. But I think for sheer convenience – on line recipes are it.

It has been a long, hard week at the farm – early starts all week and very late finishes – and long hot, hard days in between. . As I write, I know we are all exhausted – we finished butchering the chickens at 10:30 last night, then celebrated until 11:30 and started again this morning at 7:00 with animal chores – and then packing the chickens for delivery – and then on to those beans that never end……. And we’ll begin tomorrow morning at 6:00 am with harvesting, prepping, packing – and then getting those fresh veggies to you!!!

Don’t forget – August 1 – at 3:00 pm (please not before 3:00!!! – since Gigi and I will just be getting back from a church retreat and need some time to get ready for you) we invite you to come to our SUMMER ABUNDANCE FESTIVAL. We’ll be set for hay rides, music (we invite you to bring your ashiko or djembe drum to play in our drum circle), lots of great stir fried veggies, some homebrew beer on tap and a few bottles of our newest homemade wine, – and fun, interesting, like-minded folks to become your new best friends. Please let us know if you plan to come – but also just come if it works out that you can and you didn’t let us know. We love having you visit the farm – so we can meet face to face – and you can see your food growing, meet your meat, and get to know your farmers and farm crew.

Until next week………….. Robin


What’s in your share this week – (at least as best we know at 10:00 pm on Wednesday evening)

‘Eureka’ yellow beans
‘Scarlet Queen Red Stems’ and ‘Hakurei’ turnips and greens
‘The Blues’ Napa Cabbage
‘Raider’, ‘Sweet Slice’, and ‘Homemade Pickles’ cucumbers
‘Zephyr’, ‘Lita’, ‘Raven’, ‘Elite’, ‘Slick Pic’, ‘Horn of Plenty’ summer Squash
‘Cimarron’ red Romaine, ‘Freckles’ speckled romaine
‘Northern Lights’ Swiss Chard
‘Bulls Blood’ Beets and greens
‘Genovese’ Basil, ‘Lime’ basil, ‘Dukat’ dill, ‘Zatar’ marjoram

Nitty Gritty Farm News

From the Farmers …………….
I wish I could have been writing this column yesterday instead of today – because yesterday I was feeling so good about everything at the farm.
We’ve had another great week – so much accomplished. From Monday, with our crew we tilled, composted and planted a new planting of spinach, radicchio, holy basil and bok choy and mulched it all with hay mulch. We tied up the next layer of our tomatoes, dug, mowed and disked rows of potatoes, picked a million (actually 14 buckets) of shelling peas, shelled them and put them into our freezer, and weeded monster weeds from the black turtle beans. On Monday morning we loaded and delivered the six biggest lambs to the butcher. And then, of course there is the harvest.
We started early this morning – right after animal chores – picking beans. Beans cannot be picked if they are wet as they get nasty brownish spots on them called ‘rust’. Anticipating the bad weather, we started early, picking seventeen, five gallon buckets of green beans before the storm hit. Watching the sky get darker and darker, as the first raindrops fell, then more and more, we grabbed our full bucket and ran to the packing hoop house. We then grabbed rain coats and headed back out to the cucumber patch where we picked three, five gallon pails of pickling cukes for our crew and five buckets of slicers for your share boxes, along with a big bunch of dill and a few heads of garlic. Dale was the only one who got completely soaked in the downpour as he brought in the garlic. Kathryn got just a little wet and the rest of us made it to the house with our pickling necessities just in time.
As the rain poured down and the wind blew, we made pickles. Today we decided on Sandwich Stackers and Short Brine Dills. I think the final count is twenty seven quarts. Dale is still tending the last two canning kettles as I write.
As the sun came back out, we went back out and harvested cabbage and garlic and I walked around the fields surveying the damage caused by three inches of hard driving rain in less than an hour.

It could be worse. The sweet corn, popcorn and buckwheat are almost completely knocked over. Many of the pepper plants are laying flat on their sides, some completely broken off. A lot of the flowers that I’d been hoping to include in your shares tomorrow are broken or laying in the mud – as is the head lettuce.
But – on the bright side – the staked tomatoes look great as do the melons, beans and squash, and anything mulched with hay. Many of the veggie rows are covered with mud but most of the crops look as though it will recover. Many of the cabbage heads ready to harvest split with the sudden influx of rain.
Once again, it is a summer of challenges to farming. Sometimes I think it is amazing that anything grows at all with all the idiosyncrasies of the weather.

On Friday morning, Gigi and I are planning another whirlwind road trip to Iowa to pick up our new cow Reba. We just heard yesterday that all the necessary veterinarian paperwork to go across the state line is ready and we can get her when we are ready. So we’ll trade vans with Gigi’s parents, hook up the stock trailer and head back to Cedar Rapids. Everyone here is pretty excited about getting a cow.
All the other livestock is doing well. The biggest broilers are definitely turning into Godzilla birds and we are planning to butcher them next Tuesday. The medium broilers are getting to their most ugly stage, when their feathers don’t cover their skin, and the tiny broilers are still cute. The turkeys are really cute but in their desire to roost, they keep getting out of their hoop house. The five little pigs are really growing. They really enjoy getting the whey from our cheese making as well as piles of veggie seconds. Soon we will be moving them to a new pen.
The sheep – ewes and rams – decided to move themselves this morning. During a lull in the rain, I brought a bucket of cucumber ends out to the pigs, and found 18 sheep grazing the lawn and sampling the Brussels sprouts and cabbage. With the help of an empty bucket, they all happily followed me into a new pasture.
Until next week……………..Robin




What’s in your share this week:

Green Cabbage – Primax
Cucumbers – Raider and Sweet Slice
Summer Squash – Elite, Raven, Slick Pick, Lita, Zephyr
Green Beans – Derby
Broccoli - Packman
Garlic
Herbs – Basil, Marjoram, Cilantro, Dill

Nitty Gritty Farm News

From the Farmer……

We have a cow! Well we will be having a cow. Following quite a bit of research into the ‘perfect’ breed of cow for our farm – [small, docile, and easy to handle; produces good meat; and produces a useable quantity of good tasting milk] – we took a whirlwind road trip to the Cedar Rapids, Iowa area to look at a couple herds of Dexter Cattle. Why cows, you might ask, aren’t you happy with the goats? Yes and no. We love the goats – especially, I, Robin love the goats – but the goats produce milk that is essentially naturally homogenized – the fat globules are very small and mixed with the milk so the cream does not rise to the top of the milk. Thus we cannot skim cream for our coffee or for making ice cream – two BIG priorities for our farm. And – goat milk gets goaty after only a few days making it unappealing for drinking. We thought that adding a small cow producing a small (2-3 gallons per day) quantity of milk would be a good choice. So…….. we chose a small, calm, dun colored Dexter cow named Reba to add to our farm.

Reba the newest member of Nitty Gritty Dirt Farm

Reba is ten years old and is bred to have a calf this August. We plan to let her feed her calf and we will get half of her milk and the calf will get half – just like we do with the goats. We are quite excited – about all the possibilities of having a cow. Gigi will be making another trip to Iowa to pick up Reba next week.

The Gate for the new Cow Pen.


Pulling posts to redo the pen.

It has been a stinker for weather to work in this week – with the high heat and humidity it has been pretty miserable. We’ve tried to begin work very early in the morning and then take off a few hours in the afternoon to go swimming at the Fish Lake beach, and then put in a few more hours in the cooler evening. But even with that it is sweaty, dirty, energy-sapping weather. I keep saying that I don’t like July – because of this weather – but then we get to the food. Broccoli, zucchini, turnips and kohlrabi, Chinese and green cabbage, baby carrots and basil, cilantro, thyme and marjoram to prepare for meals!

Weeding melon rows

The harvest is really coming in – and we are so excited about cooking it that even though it is 90 degrees we still prep huge pans of stir fry and grilled chicken and giant gorgeous salads for our noon farm dinners. We are entering the abundant season – get ready!

Building the Cow Pen

This week at the farm, we did a lot of animal work – a bigger pen and automatic waterer for the rapidly growing little pigs, a new hoop house for the teenage turkeys, a redo for the beginner hoop house for the 50 new broiler chicks that arrived Tuesday morning, an enlarged pen for the big broilers - adding a big outdoor grassy section, enlarged the mid-aged broiler and Auracana chick pen, moved the ewes and rams to a new pasture, made a new cow pen for Reba - and weighed and sorted the lambs into the ready to butcher size and the need to grow a little more size. Wow – I’m tired just going back through that list. Most of the time the animals chores just tuck into the beginning and end of our work day in the fields – but every once in a while we need a whole day just to catch up on the changing needs of our critters. Oh yes, we also prepped and constructed new frames and put an extra deep super (box of frames for honey) on each of the six bee hives.

We also did more weeding and mulching and planting. We tore out the old Mei Qing Choi plants and plastic mulch, tilled and tilled, hauled many wheelbarrow loads of last year’s compost, tilled some more and then planted a succession planting of Joi Choi Bok Choi and Fennel – and then immediately mulched it all with the old hay left after the lambs ate the leafy stuff out of the stemmy stuff. It looks beautiful and ready to withstand either too much rain or not enough. We also weeded between the rows of tomatoes and mulched with old sheep hay and just this morning tilled and weeded between the cantaloupe and watermelon rows and seeded in rye which as it grows will inhibit the weeds and make a nice bed for the melons to grow on.

………until next week ………Robin

What’s In Your Share


Sugar Daddy Sugar Snap Peas
Kohlibri (purple) kohlrabi, Winner (white) kohlrabi
The Blues Chinese Cabbage
Summer Squash: Raven (dark green), Elite (med green), Slick Pick (yellow), Zephyr (yellow/green), Lita (gray)
Packman Broccoli
Herbs: Lime Basil, Genovese Basil, Ararat Basil
Cilantro
Lettuce: Green Bib and/or Freckles Romaine

This week, because both the Broccoli and Summer Squash are just starting, it is possible that there won't be enough for all drop sites to get both. So, if you only get one this week, you will get the other next week.