The Nitty Gritty Dirt

August 24, 2011

From the Farmers

It is watermelon season!   We grow five different kinds of watermelons at the farm, hoping that all of them will be ready to harvest at about the same time.  Three of the varieties, Sunshine, New Orchid, and Starlight are round with dark and light green stripes.  They are all superb ice box melons, crisp and sweet, regardless of inside color.  My personal favorite is the yellow Sunshine. Picnic and Mickey Lee are two old time varieties that have stood the test of time, sweet and tasty.  We hope you enjoy getting your fill of watermelon these next couple of weeks. 

The cantaloupes and honeydews are getting fewer and fewer.  We’ll keep adding the last of these melons as long as we have them, but there won’t be enough for everyone so we will try to rotate which drop sites get them until there are no more.

Sweet Corn is back this week with Delectable, a wonderful, tender bi-color yellow and white sweet corn.  And the tomatoes have begun to produce in earnest, with the Taxi’s and Orange Blossoms leading the harvest.  Soon will follow big red Paragon’s, Pink Beauty’s, Green Zebras, and red and yellow pears.  We’ve begun eating tomatoes with nearly every meal – including breakfast.

Gigi and Robin returned from the Boundary Waters Canoe Area late on Tuesday following five wonderful days on Seagull Lake with our dogs Bracken and Birch.  We relaxed, ate great meals of farm food (bacon, eggs, veggies) drank homemade wine, read some, knit some, played games, paddled, swam, had craft night in the tent during the rain one night and came home renewed.  While we were gone, our amazing interns took care of all the farm critters, built new doors for the greenhouses and the horse tack hoop house, put trim  and new steps on the Su Casa (the intern kitchen/lounge building) and even kept us on track with our organic pest management by spraying the cabbage, cauliflower, and eggplants to keep away the potato bugs and cabbage loopers.

It was great getting back home at this abundant time of year and not feel any need to play catch up, but simply step back into the rhythm of a working farm. It is amazing however, how much the broiler chicks have grown in just five days! 

Until next week………….

What’s In Your Share this Week

Watermelon: one of the following Starlight (red), New Orchid (orange),

Sunshine (yellow), Picnic (solid green outside, red in), or Mickey Lee (deep pink)

Cucumbers: Raider, Fanfare, Sweet Slice, Diva

Potatoes: Norland

Onions: Sierra Blanca

Sweet Corn: Delectable

Swiss Chard: Fordhook Giant

Tomatoes: Taxi (yellow), Orange Blossom (orange)

Sweet Peppers: Gypsy (yellow) or Snapper (green bell) or Lipstick (red heart),

Islander (purple) or Sweet Chocolate (brown)

Hot Peppers: Serrano del Sol (thin green), El Jefe Jalapeno (fat green)

Eggplant: Dancer (pink), Classic (purple), Galine (purple), Thai Green (long green),

Orient Charm (long pink), Orient Express (long purple), Kermit (round green)

Summer Squash: Sunburst, Cavelle, Slick Pick, Bennings Green Tint, President,

Cash Flow, Horn of Plenty

Herbs:  Genovese Basil, Purple Basil, Sage, Dill

The Nitty Gritty Dirt

Two things are really good this August:  honey and melons.  Honey and melons have a very close connection; it takes bees the makers of honey to fertilize melon vines to produce big and plentiful melons.  Our bees seem to have been working like crazy this season so, on Monday, we took off three full shallow supers of honey, each about 60 pounds from our bee hives.  We extracted (removing the honey from the frames)it on Tuesday, (see the pictures on this blog) and we have 33 quarts of beautiful golden honey to share at the farm.  That’s lots of good eating! 

If you come to the fall farm festival, you too will have an opportunity to share in some of the farm’s honey harvest.  And because the bees are working so diligently, so too is the melon harvest a good one.  It takes a lot of trips back and forth from each cantaloupe, honeydew or watermelon flower to pollinate it so that it will produce an outstanding melon. 

This year, the melons are big and plentiful.  Now if the weather will just stay warm and dry for a couple of weeks, the melons should be near perfect.  The cantaloupes and honeydews are hitting their peak this week and next and the watermelons are just beginning to ripen.  We’ve been enjoying a few of the early watermelons for midday refreshment at the farm.

A little painting, a little fencing, quite a bit of pulling up and rolling of reusable plastic mulch, and quite a few more jars of pickles made filled up our week.  We are sad to say goodbye to intern Emily who leaves to go back to college.  She will be making the delivery route on Thursday (Vincent, Homestead Pickin’ Parlor, and Midwest) and then catching a bus that will take her back to Indiana.  

Gigi and Robin will be heading up north after packing up the share boxes and sending everyone off.  We’ll be spending four days in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area.  Intern Holly will be taking care of the farm with help from Liz and several neighbors who will be stopping by to help out.  We are really looking forward to paddling and camping and cooking our good farm food far from home. 

Until next week………..

What’s in your share this week:

Honeydew (Diplomat) or Cantaloupe (Sarah’s Choice, Burpee Hybrid, Pulsar)

Summer Squash (Lita, Spineless Beauty, Sunburst, President, Cash Flow, Cavelli)

Carrots (Forto)

Beets (Red Ace, Merlin)

Cucumber (Raider, Diva)

Eggplant (Dancer, Galine, Thai Green, Orient Express, Classic)

Radish (Diakon – Summer Cross)

Peppers Sweet (Carmen, Islander, Gypsy)

Peppers Hot (El Jefe Jalapeno, Serrano Del Sol Serrano)

Onions (Sierra Blanca)

Tomato (Taxi yellow, Orange Blossom orange)

Basil (Lime, Thai)

Dill

The Nitty Gitty Dirt

Smaller beets peeled and ready for canning

From the Farmers – August 11

It’s pickling night at Nitty Gritty Dirt Farm!   Dilled Sandwich Stackers, Short Brined Dill Pickles, Bread & Butter Pickles, Pickled Beets, and Dilly Beans!  We’re pickling all the beets too small or gopher bitten for shares, the final hurrah of the Green Beans and the Pickling Cukes planted especially for the farm interns and farmers.  The smell of vinegar and garlic, and dill and onions permeates the whole house.  We’ve set up the propane camp stove on the porch so we can have 4 big kettles cooking and processing all at the same time.  This is the first big canning day at the farm, but hopefully there will be more as the tomatoes begin ripening.

We are so thankful for the beautiful weather.  It is an absolute joy to work when the weather is perfect – even when the job is not fun – like pulling up cabbages and broccoli and tearing plastic mulch out of the fields.  We’ve also been getting some fencing done – as soon as the early sweet corn (look for it in your share) is done, we’ll be moving the sheep into the field to clean up all the small ears and stalks.  This is great way to clean up the field, put some weight on the ewes prior to fall breeding, and get a head start on putting up the winter pens for the sheep.  

Speaking of sheep, with the fall like weather – these cool nights, we knew it was time to get the rams away from the ewes.  Sheep are seasonal breeders (like deer and goats) and it is possible that with the abrupt drop in temperature, some ewes might begin cycling.  A couple of years ago, we procrastinated too long to get the rams out and had a group of ewes lambing a full month before we planned.   We are not doing that again!!!   So today, after lunch,  with our whole crew helping, we  squeezed up the group, separated the rams, let the ewes back out to pasture, loaded the rams into the stock trailer and moved them up to the pen they will share with Nitro, our buck goat.   Whew!   That’s done! Now we can relax about that.

This year, we’ve been trying harder to clean up the fields as the crops are harvested and done.  This way, all the cleanup does not fall on the interns and farmers who are still here in October.  Emily’s last day is next Thursday (if you see her at your drop site, wish her well as she returns to college) and Holly will be leaving the first part of September returning to school at Carleton.   Susie is also preparing for what’s next and interviewing out East for a couple chunks of time in August, sooooo .. we are trying to set our smaller fall crew up to enjoy the late summer part of our season instead of being overwhelmed with the cleanup after the crops are done. 

Early this week, while Susie and Holly did some hedge trimming in an attempt to open up our weedy (yes they were mulched) onions to the sun, Liz and Emily ripped up the black plastic mulch left behind after the broccoli was pulled up and tossed to the sheep.  Both kind of nasty jobs.  We also had Sue, our faithful volunteer who comes to help every Wednesday, and Tim a former intern, back to help for a day this week.  We so appreciate these volunteers who both help out with the work and make us all more enthusiastic about our work.  We do love what we do, but sometimes after days of hot humid weather, dirty, dirty, dirty, and difficult work, we forget.   It’s good to be reminded why we do this.  And finally, thanks to everyone who attended our SUMMER ABUNDANCE FESTIVAL last Sunday.  It was a great time!    Please mark the first Sunday in October on your calendar – our END OF THE HARVEST and Final Festival of the Year.   Until next week………..

What’s in your share

Onions – Walla Walla

Garlic

Potatoes – Yukon Gold / Norkotah Russet

Beets – Merlin / Red Ace

Sweet Corn – Yellow Sugar Buns / Bicolor Ambrosia

Summer Squash – Lita, Sunburst, Cashflow, President, Horn or Plenty

Cucumbers – Diva, Raider, Fanfare

Melons – Sarah’s Choice cantaloupe / Diplomat Honeydew  (may not be in all shares)

Peppers Hot – El Jefe Jalapeno, Serrano Del Sol Serrano

Peppers Sweet – yellow Gypsy / ??

Radish – Summer Cross Diakon

Basil – Lime / Purple

The Nitty Gritty Dirt

From the Farmer  August 3^rd, 2011

It’s tough to work the farm when the power is out.  It is hard enough getting soaking wet in the rain on Monday, tying up tomato plants or making a new goat fence with the humidity over 100%, but having no access to water (the well pump is electric) and not being able to cook (can’t open the fridge or freezers or wash veggies) or even get a drink of water is really hard.  We called a rain day Monday afternoon and when the power went off and stayed off at 9:30 on Tuesday morning, we finally called the day, giving our interns another day off..  And while they did come back to finish the short section of fence in the evening, it certainly did not accomplish the long list of farm maintenance jobs that really need to be done.  We finally got the power back on today – Wednesday – about 10:00 am.   Thank goodness.   We had begun to think about contingency plans for generators to power our farm freezers full of meat and veggies to hold us and our crew through the year. 

The storm left us pretty intact.  Lots of plants blown, animal hoop houses damaged and one of the goat igloo’s blown half way across the farm and smashed in the horse pasture.  The broiler chicks took the worst of the wind and rain.  With the western exposure of their pen, the wind and rain blasted into their pen saturating them to the skin.   Of course as chickens do when scared or cold or wet, they piled up.  As soon as the storm abated, I checked on them, and pulled the piled up chicks off one another.  Only one dead, suffocated on the bottom.  The rest, soaking wet, and very unhappy looking are now fine, eating and drinking as if nothing had happened. 

Finally, beautiful weather today and we put in a long day of making a new fence for the laying hens, planting strawberries and the last of the flowers, seeding more turnips, radishes and cilantro, mowing the lawn, building a new hoop house for the sheep (their old one was smashed down in the storm), and harvesting the first half of your veggies for the shares this week.  By the end of the day – the long day – we are all sweaty and tired. 
And tomorrow starts really early – 5:30 am to get the rest of the veggies harvested and to unload the 200 bales of hay that will arrive at 8:00 am.  We had expected the hay to arrive on Tuesday, but because of the rain, it was delayed.  So now we have to add that to our busy harvest/delivery day.  Such is the nature of farming and dealing with the weather.

Until next week …………..

What’s In Your Share

Basil – Thai and Genovese 

Beets    - Red Ace

Broccoli – Blue Wind, Bay Meadows, Packman

Garlic

Onion – Sierra Blanca, Mars

Potatoes – Norland

Radish – Summer Cross Daikon

Summer Squash – Cash Flow, Lita, President, Spineless Beauty, 

   Slick Pick, Horn of Plenty, Sunburst, Cavelli

Cucumbers - Raider, Diva, Northern Pickling, Minature White

Swiss Chard – Fordhook Giant

Sweet Peppers - Islander and Gypsy

Hot Peppers - Jalapeno, Yellow Banana