First Market this Saturday

This Saturday we will be at market for the first week!

We expect to have the following available:
Radishes
Rhubarb
Baby Turnip Greens
Honey Caramels
Starts - Tomatoes, Peppers, and Squash

Many of the starts are heirloom varieties and several are on Slow Food's Ark of Taste! And, no, it's not to late to plant your garden. In the past we have put tomatoes in as late as early July (because we lost our first planting) and still got tomatoes!

Some of these items will be in pretty limited quantities, so visit us early. The market opens at 9:00.

As always, thanks for your support of our farm and local food!

Googling me?

What kind of Google searches have brought people to my blog?

Here are a handful of recent ones - these are not edited...

why do farmers have ducks on their farms?

• Um? Because farmers LOVE eating duck? At least my husband and I do. But as of now we have no ducks and no immediate plans for getting any...

beaver dam pepper

• We are growing these this year as one of our Ark of Taste Heirloom varieties. I just started the seed this weekend. 180 of them... They should be available at the plant sale if you'd like some...

Amish pie squash

• Another Ark of Taste variety. These things are HUGE! We should have some squash available at the plant sale but we will not know how they start until right before, as they get started much later.

random passage

• Huh? I have a lot of these I guess...

northeast ohio csa farms

• Our CSA is full but we are taking names for our waiting list, so contact us if you are interested.

e&r seed

• We get some of our seeds here. They are an Indiana Amish company - no phone! We were kind of hesitant first time we used them, but now we get some seed from them every year. They have a lot of open pollinated items...

is filtered honey heated

• I actually did a blog post on this last year... It turns out YES. To get unheated honey you need strained, not filtered honey.

farm jobs northeast ohio

• Sorry, no jobs or internships this year. Want to work for free???

Add sugar to the list...

Sugar. I love my sugar. I will admit it. People who say they don't like it, have to be lieing in my mind.

I use organic cane in my coffee and day to day uses, but come Christmas time, jelly time, and other high sugar use times I buy it in bulk. Costco sells 10 and 25 pound bags of beet sugar from Michigan. I figure it's local for sugar, and I buy it.

Those days may be about to end and with them the pints of jelly given out like water and the hundreds and hundreds of cookies I use as standard Christmas fare (my cookie boxes this year each held 4-6 dozen cookies and I did 12, even before I had any for all the Christmas events and my husbands cookie habit.)

Am I getting lazy? Figuring that it is easier to buy a $15 dollar gift then give a box of laborious cookies (which have $10 in ingredients anyway?) No. Nothing that easy...

After a preemptive strike from the EPA of changing the allowable Glyphosate residue (Round-up) in sugar beets by 5000 percent (you read that right five THOUSAND percent) the stage is cleared for GMO sugar beets.

They are going to be planted in the spring....

One of the problems with this is that beets are wind pollinated. Organic beet growers will need to be more then 3 miles (MILES) away from GMO sugar beets to ensure that their beets are not contaminated. Because containing any GMO genes (even accidental) means no organic certification. Plus Monsanto has a habit of suing people whose crops are contaminated by their genes, for usurping their intellectual property!

Then what about all the items I buy now looking for "sugar" instead of High Fructose Corn Syrup in the ingredient list. Breads, pasta sauces, jellies, sodas! ICE CREAM! Will I be forced to organic for all of these to avoid GMO, as now I buy organic corn products...

Then there is the issue of my bees. My poor bees. We feed them sugar water spring and fall to make up for the honey we rob from them. And WOW can bees eat sugar water, gallons a week. Natural beekeepers feed their bees sugar water instead of high fructose corn syrup (partially to avoid the GMO in HFCS) that the commerical beekeepers use. But now what? Feed the bees organic sugar? I guarantee you will not be able to afford the resulting honey. And some people have suggested that colony collapse disorder might be exacerbated by GMO foods, not to mention the increased herbicide (Glyphosate) load in the sugar which my delicate bees are now eating...

This is a brave new world we live in. One where most people seem to be keeping their eyes closed!

Honey caramels!

What is one to do with 13 gallons of honey?

Well some of it can be bottled and sold that way, but there is only so much honey people want at one time. So what to with the rest?

Why make caramels of course! It took a while to get the recipe right, but I think we have it! Basic pure ingredients, 75% honey only 25% sugar, and most importantly no corn syrup. Corn syrup (of which most contains at least some HFCS) is used in LOTS of candy recipes as it acts to help candies behave when being cooked. When not using it you need to add in lots of care and extra time. A batch of my honey caramel cooks for over two hours slowly rising in temperature, to creamy perfection!

Today and yesterday were the start of honey caramel production, it is a leap of faith for we have no idea how much we may sell at the one market left for us this year. ((Shameless plug, alert!!!)) We will defiantly be selling these at the Peninsula Holiday Market, where you can meet on November 17th! Hope to see you there!

OH! And Congratulations Micheal Symon! You make Cleveland proud!

Honey - learned something new...

We do NOT sell filtered honey, so if your bottle says that I am sorry. We sell raw STRAINED honey, which means we just pass it through a mesh which is not fine enough to remove pollen and since we do not heat it at all it remains a bit cloudy and has tiny air bubbles.

Perfectly clear honey and filtered honey is (usually) dead honey, heated so it flows and can pass through VERY fine filters, is pretty and perfectly clear, but the good and healthy enzymes are dead and none of the native pollen remains with all of it's benefits...

Sorry for the mislabeling, as we do run it through 3 different strainers (ending with a fine bag) I always thought we filtered it... You learn something new every day!

((I will be relabeling our honey this weekend.))