Windy day!

WOW! I know every region has the SAME saying, but you know what they say...

If you don't like the weather, just wait 20 minutes, it'll change!

And change it did! Yesterday was a drizzly, but warm day for Janurary at 50. All our snow melted, and made the feild a mucky mess.

This morning, 14 degrees, wind chill 7 below, and wind gusts up to 60 mph! BRRR!!!!

Ark of Taste: Garden List

The following is a list of varities we have already ordered from Slow Food's Ark of Taste: Hidatsa Red Bean, Lina Sisco's Bird Egg Bean, Amish Deer Tongue Lettuce, Tennis Ball (Black Seeded) Lettuce, Amish Pie Squash, Boston Marrow Squash, Sibely Squash, Moon & Stars (Van Doren) Watermelon, Amish Paste Tomato, German Pink Tomato, Red Fig Tomato, Beaver Dam Pepper,Bull Nose Bell Pepper, Jimmy Nardello's Sweet Italian Frying, Sheepnose Pimento Pepper, Aunt Molly's Ground Cherry

We are still sourcing some seeds, including a couple items from Italy's Ark of Taste.

We are so excited for all the yummy tastes that 2008 will bring!

Learning weekend...

This was a good weekend.

On Friday, my husband went to a hoophouse workshop. We are getting ready to purchase a 16x28 heated hoophouse for our starts (so, unlike last year, we don't have to bring them in and out of the barn twice a day!) so we wanted to make sure we were on the right track.

But the coolest piece of information we got was not about hoophouses but about about grafting. All your fruit trees are grafted, and most grape vines, and I guess in Japan lots of vegetables are to! What we can do is take an heirloom start and graft it onto a non-heirloom rootstock. This way we can get lots of the dieses reistance of the non-heirloom plant and still get the fruits of a heirloom. And since there is no genetic transfer or anything like that you can still save seed from the fruits. This is VERY cool stuff. I don't know if we will be able to try it this year, but we are definatly intrested in cool technologies like this.

On Saturday we sat in a panel for a lunch time discussion with farmers who are considering starting a CSA at a workshop sponsored by the Countryside Conservancy. And if any of them are reading this now, Thanks to everyone who said they read the blog, and liked it! That is SO nice to hear! And I will reiterate what we said yesterday as our primary advice... Start small and grow slowly.

Today is house cleaning and some more field planning!

Ark of Taste: Amish Pie Squash

Perhaps not as endangered as some of the other Ark of Taste items we are growing the Amish Pie Squash will be a fun experiment.

These will not be given to our CSA members as the squash can have skins as thick as 5 inches and weigh 60-75 pounds! Probably more then most people could handle. (Food safety regulations mean that we cannot legally cut one into pieces and sell the sections. Once you put a knife in a vegetable the state considers it the same as a steak, and you need all the licences, facilities, ect.)

The flesh of this heirloom is moist and sweet, making it great for pies or processing. It also freezes well but it is not considered a "good keeper," as squashes go. The seeds were collected (by Seed Savers who we obtained our seeds from) from an Amish grower in the mountains of Maryland.

This should be a fun addition to our garden. We are only planting a handful of these, but should have a few for sale in the fall. Please let us know if you are interested.

Is reality too real?

Last week Jamie Oliver slaughtered a chicken on his show in front of a studio audience and 4 million viewers. Will actions like this propel the ethical meat and humanly raised movements?

NY Times Article

Ark of Taste: Tennis Ball lettuce...

Another addition to our "Ark Garden" is Tennis Ball Lettuce.

A favorite of Jefferson at Monticello. Jefferson noted that "it does not require so much care and attention" as other types.

It became a favorite in the late 1800s and is the predecessor to Boston types. By 1904 116 seed houses were offering it. Today there are just a couple speciality suppliers.

I think I will skip a traditional preparation (mentioned in Heirloom Vegetable Gardening by William Woys Weaver) which is to pickle it in a salt brine...

Ark of Taste: Beaver Dam Pepper

Here is another of the Ark of Taste items we plan on growing this year...

From Slow Foods website: The Beaver Dam Pepper is a Hungarian heirloom pepper that was brought to Beaver Dam, Wisconsin in 1929 by the Joe Hussli family. The pepper’s first fruits mature 80 days after transplanting, at which point they ripen from lime-green to red. The crunchy fruits are mildly hot and when seeded, they hold an excellent flavor. Rated as 3 on a heat scale of 1-5, the Beaver Dam is great for making fresh batches of cool and tangy salsas.
This product is available from just a handful of mail order seed companies in the US and Canada, and its future is largely in the hands of these seed saving companies.

"Mildly hot" and "crunchy" sounds amazing! I wonder how think the skin is? Maybe they are a stuffing possibility... Hum. August will tell...

We are also trying to get our hands on a couple varieties off the Italian Ark of Taste list! It's just hard to verify they are the same when we do not speak the language!