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???

New seeder and starting...

Yesterday we recieved our Jang Seeder. This thing, while not cheap is amazing! It seems (based on rolling it around the living room!) to do a great job of percision seeding, just what we need! It is made of heavy steel and is a substantial thing! I need to take photos of ours but this is what it looks like... Now all we need is for it to stop raining for a few dats so we can start planting seeds!

Over the past week we have started thousands of little seeds in the march across our heat mat (to aid germination) before they go into trays. We are able to start about 360 seeds on one cookie sheet using 3/4"x3/4" soil blocks we make. Then one seed goes in each block and the whole tray goes on the heat mat. Problem is that trays are backing up, there is only room for 9 at a time on the heat mat and we still have thousands and thousands and thousands of seeds to start. So it is time to order a second heat mat!

But why would we need so many plants you may ask? Isn't 180 of one type pepper plant more then a small CSA needs? Arne't you growing lots of types of peppers? It is, and we are. But there may just be a late May PLANT SALE in our future... Lots of heirlooms, and some Ark of Taste varieties in there... Let us know if you would be intrested and help us gauge the demand...

Seed saving...

As we are leafing through the Seed Savers Exchange (SSE) Yearbook we are feeling some seed envy.

The book is 500 or so pages long, no pictures, just page after page of variety listings and the mysterious code that tells who has the seeds avilbale. OH WA H - Has - means that someone in Ohio with a last name strating in WA and a first name in H has the seed avilable for anyone (who is a member of SSE).

Seeing L.Q. on the end means that they have it in limited quanity and to get it you have to be a listed member (meaning you are offer seeds to others, which we are not this year) and M.R. means you have to promise to offer the seeds the next year (or in two years if it is bianneil.)

Anyway, the book is amazing to go through. Descriptions of item after item, antique apples, heirloom veggies of every description, and wondourous potatoes. More then once I gasped and yelled to my hubby "They have _____!" Fill in the blank. (I admit to being a seed nerd!)

But here is the the catch. None of the items are offered in commercial quanities. Of course not, the goal is to trade seeds for the purpose of seed saving, but that means I will need to save seeds. To be honest, my intrest in seed saving is not in the "easy" varities. The book has over 100 pages of tomatoes listed. I joked to my husband "I think the genetic diversity of our tomatoes are safe!" And honestly they appear to be.

No the things that intrest me are root crops. Turnips and beets and the like. To save the seeds we need to grow them year 1 and then in the fall dig up the roots, save the best of the roots all winter at 40 degrees and controled humidity and then in the spring replant it, at which point it will go to seed. All of this needs to be isolated by 1/2 to 1 mile from the closest adjacent variety of the same family. That is a lot more involved then the humble tomatoe or pepper.

So in 2008 we will save only a couple varieties for seed. The first will be rat tailed radishes, which I LOVE, and are avilable fewer places then they were just a few years ago. The second... I don't know, still decideing, maybe Gilfeather Turnips, an Ark of Taste variety.

But for now, until we have more time at the farm for fussy activities like seed saving, we will have to be satisfied (and so will our members) with varieties which are commercially avilable in large enough quantities, because the when you get something from SSE's yearbook you only get a few (20-30) seeds, which is not enough when you are talking turnips which we typically order in ounce multiples.

First seeds...

I went to our mailbox yeseterday and inside was a precious envelope from Seed savers exchange with our ARK of taste item seeds! I was so excited!

But alas, there is NOTHING I can do for anouther 6-8 weeks. And in the mean time we need to get our hoophouse up to start the seeds in. We have picked the one we want, and it should serve us for a good few years. We need to wait for final approval from the park to stick it up, which should come soon.

So far this year is looking great!

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!

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.

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!

ARK of Taste: Beet

I know I have been neglegtful of my blog! Sorry... We have been working on the website, and hope to have our variety list up this weekend. Here is anouther variety we hope to grow next year. We have yet to find a seed source for this yet, so fingers crossed! But even if we cannot get this we have 4 beet varieties on the list for this year, three heirlooms (Golden, bulls blood, chiogga) and one hybrid. We were so pleased with how well root crops grew last year, this year we want to do a ton more! (Plus, I suddednly discovered I like them!)

From Slow Food's Ark of taste:

Early Blood Turnip-rooted Beet (Beta vulgaris)
This is one of the oldest surviving varieties of table beet, having been introduced in America by 1820. One of the most popular beets of the 1800s in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states, it is an all-purpose variety, round root 4” - 4 ½” in diameter with 48 to 68 days to maturity from seed.
The beet has very dark, violet-red flesh with lighter zones. The leaves are dark with bright red petioles. The dark red flesh remains flavorful, tender and juicy even when the beets attain large size. It has a slight clove-like aroma and a wonderful sweetness, light like a carrot but without the intense sweetness of a carrot. Raw it has an apple-like slightly astringent flavor. Its complex taste starts with a cinnamon flavor and a hint of heat followed by a tartness and a rich earthy finish. Its flavor has also been described as sour and tangy. The beet is good both boiled and baked and the leaves are an excellent cooked green.
It is a superb winter storage variety, keeping well in root cellar storage for 8 months or more. Variable rate of maturity may make this beet less desirable for commercial harvest (and this may explain its disappearance from seed catalogs in the latter 20th century), however this characteristic is a plus for the small farmer and home gardener. It is a highly endangered variety.

Ark of Taste: Red Fig

This year we will be planting several items off of Slow Food's Ark of Taste. These are very special heirlooms and by purchasing seeds to these items we are encouraging them to be produced by commercial seed producers. Eventually we will save seeds from these varieties as well, but we do not plan much seed saving this year. (That will wait until we are farming full time.)

Here is a description of the Red Fig tomato from Slow Food, USA:

These 1.5” pear-shaped tomatoes have been grown in American gardens since the 18th century. They were traditionally dried and packed away for winter use in substitute of figs. They are also used fresh.

The Red Fig Tomato is named for a sugary delicacy that was made with this fruit and popular in the mid 1800s. To make the “figs,” boiling water was poured over the tomatoes to remove the skins and then the skinless tomatoes were placed in a stone jar with equal parts sugar to tomatoes. The resulting syrup was then removed from the jar and boiled and skimmed. The process was repeated over two days, with intervals of cooling. Finally, the tomatoes were dried in the sun for about a week at which point they were packed in small wooden boxes, with fine, white sugar between every layer. Tomatoes prepared in this manner were said to keep for years.

The tomato is currently available from only three seed companies in the United States.
Fresh Red Figs have a full tomato taste with very sweet skin. In addition to being a delicious plated solo act, they’re perfect for contemporary tomato jams and chutneys.

Sounds so yummy! I can hardly wait for summer....