Vermillion Area Farmers Market Starts this Thursday!

The Vermillion Area Farmers Market opens for the season this Thursday, May 15 from 3-7pm at the Clay County Fair Grounds–corner of Cherry and High Streets in Vermillion.

Despite the cool spring weather, some fresh, local veggies will be available, as well as other local goods.

Hope to see you there!

Buy Fresh, Buy Local–in Vermillion!

I was looking at my incoming links and saw that Erin Heidelberger of Prairie Roots weblog referenced the interview she did with me wherein I mentioned this Buy Fresh, Buy Local campaign.

So, I checked out her post about these local food meetings around eastern SD, and remembered that I’d just heard about where and when Vermillion’s would be (I got two postcards about the one in Sioux Falls–the one in Vermillion I heard about third hand–what???).

Anyhow–if you’re interested in a collective local food branding/marketing venture in the Vermillion area–our meeting will be at the Buffalo Run Winery, 7pm, May 29.

See you there!

CSA Newsletter: Volume 4, Issue 1

Flying Tomato Farms News

A newsletter for members of Flying Tomato Farms C.S.A.

Vol. 4, Issue 1

GARDEN NEWS:

Welcome! It has been a chilly spring. Despite having started planting on schedule in the final week of March, none of those early-planted crops are yet ready for harvest. However, I do think that the green leaf lettuce will be ready for next week’s deliveries.

I will tell you what is in the garden so far, so that you’ll know what to look forward to: peas, spinach, fingerling potatoes, several kinds of lettuce, cilantro, turnips, carrots, beets, cress, red onions, yellow onions, broccoli, leeks, garlic, arugula, rapini, parsley, and yes—even a few tomatoes (those are well-protected). Soon I’ll be transplanting cauliflower (a first!), more tomatoes, eggplant, peppers (hot and sweet), basil and lemon basil—and there are a lot more crops to direct seed as well.

To quell the frustration of everything growing so slowly, I’ve been working on setting up more permanent beds throughout the gardens, bringing in loads of composted horse manure, and planning the rest of the spring planting schedule (as well as trying to figure out where everything will go). Though the chilly weather has slowed growth—it’s pretty pleasant to work in at least!

THIS WEEK’S DELIVERY:

The first couple weeks of deliveries promise to be a bit light, as the temperatures catch up with the season. This week, you’ll see green onions (scallions), asparagus, and nettles.

I’ve been thinking of delivering stinging nettle tops for a couple of seasons now—my partner, Harry, and I eat them like crazy in the early spring. They grow wild in fields and at the edges of woods, and if you’ve ever wandered into a patch with shorts on, you know how they feel on bare skin. Some traditional medicines recommend flogging bare arthritic joints with nettles—Yikes!

Do not handle nettles with your bare hands or you will get stung! I dump my bag or colander of greens into the kitchen sink and cover them with cold water—swishing them around with a spoon. When they’re ready to go in the pot or pan, I lift them with tongs or a couple forks.

Nettles are very nutritious—high in vitamins and minerals. You can stir-fry them until wilted, steam them, or even make a bright green tea out of them.

My favorite simple nettle recipe:

3 or 4 green onions (or a clove of garlic)

1 TB olive oil

½ bag nettle tops, washed

soy sauce

Chop onions, separating the white and light green from green parts. Heat olive oil in a large skillet on medium-high, then add white/light green parts onions (or garlic). Saute for about thirty seconds, then start adding bunches of nettles, letting the batches wilt a bit in the pan before adding more (if there’s just a little of the wash water clinging to the leaves, it helps them wilt faster).

When you’ve added all the nettles to the pan, sprinkle with soy sauce, and cook the nettles until they are all wilted. (You do not have to cook them until they’re mush—but they should at least be wilted.) Garnish with the green onion tops, if desired.

Serve them as is, or with a dash of dark sesame oil if you have it—or a grind of black pepper. I also like a little dash of cider vinegar sometimes. This recipe works equally well for all kinds of greens—mature spinach, chard, lamb’s quarter, rapini, kale, collards.

The asparagus comes both from the patch on our farm and the patch at the old From the Ground Up Garden Center off north University Road (and handily on the way to and from our place). I am ordering 100 crowns of asparagus to plant at the farm this year, as well as hoping to get more perennial crops like rhubarb, strawberries, and raspberries going.

Asparagus can be steamed in a steamer, or in a large lidded frying pan with the spears laid across a couple of chopsticks and a little water in the bottom. The traditional accompaniments are a squeeze of lemon and a bit of melted butter—salt and pepper if you like. My son, who eats very few vegetables (and none of them cooked), loves raw asparagus. Just remember that, raw or cooked, eating asparagus will make your urine smell funky!

The green onions are a “gimme” crop—as a hardy perennial non-bulbing type they come up every year without muss or fuss, and they multiply themselves as well. The only thing I might have to do this year is to dig some out and start a new row with the thinnings. Butterflies, bees, and other beneficial insects love their white globe-shaped compound flower heads. Some of the onions in this week’s deliveries have small flower bulbs emerging—they are OK to eat, too.

You can eat green onions raw–some people like to keep a water glass full of green onions to snack on with a little salt from the shaker.

My preference for green onions is to cook with the white and light green parts as I would a regular onion, and reserve the green tops for raw use in salads and garnishes.

None of these vegetables have been washed—so please be sure to give them a cold water rinse directly before using. Washing before delivery lessens the life of the vegetables, so I will only wash the really dirty ones (root crops, usually) and rinse others in cold water if they need cooling down.

Remember to

WASH YOUR VEGGIES!

Oh. Yeah.

This was my third time out hunting.  Finally, after Friday’s rains and today’s heat, there they were.  I might have to go hunting again tomorrow!

Asparagus!

There’s about a pound here–the first picking of the year (minus the few spears I ate raw).

I picked up a bottle of white wine, a lemon, some good hard grating cheese.  There’s cream in the fridge, too, and a sweet onion to caramelize.  Something delicious this way comes….

No More Ethanol

I’ve decided to stop putting ethanol into my gas tank.

I’ll admit the reason I’ve been buying ethanol is that it’s ten cents cheaper than regular gas. Supposedly, ethanol is cleaner-burning, but when you factor in the energy needed to produce and transport it in the first place, there’s really not much that’s clean or green about it. And the reason it’s cheaper is not that it’s inexpensive to produce–it’s that there are subsidies keeping the price artificially low.

Another factor is the worsening global food crisis. Can you imagine standing in line for hours, hoping not only to be able to afford a little flour or rice or corn, but especially hoping that there’ll be some left for you and your family?

And can you imagine how you’d feel about a country that is so rich that it takes millions of acres of food and makes it into fuel for cars instead? A place where obesity is an epidemic, and where some restaurants pour bleach on their leftovers so no one can eat them?

Nope–no more ethanol.

Two Vermillions

Today is spring commencement at the university–a chilly, drizzly day for it, but it’ll be in the Dome anyhow.  All the local eateries have been prepping for the hoards of grads-plus-families–last night’s dinner and this afternoon’s brunches and lunches.  There will be toasts, there will be triumphs.

And then, it will be summer in Vermillion.

When I came here in 1993, I had no idea what I was in for.  I had purposefully come to South Dakota because I didn’t know anything about it.  At the end of that school year, while the rest of the gownies fled for the summer, I decided at the last minute, to nix my plans of heading back to Vermont, and try to settle in a little.

Since then, I’ve come to treasure summers in our small town.  There’s not quite as unpopulated as they used to be, but there is a definite difference in flavor between the school year and the break.  A little like the difference between dried basil and fresh.

And while I know that the university has a lot more to do with the survival of this town and many of the people who live here than some would like to admit, I can’t help but see the summer as the “True Vermillion.”

Time Out for Meatloaf

Have spent most of my day getting my summer online classes ready in the new courseware USD is switching to as of Monday. Amid the questions of whether or not I want to do the scheduling by weeks or by units, and how the heck to get certain features to work, I decided to do a little fridge cleaning (a.k.a. cooking) project.

It’s a skosh chilly outside today, so I closed the windows and doors, turned the oven on, and decided to make meatloaf–the ingredients were on hand, and the oven’s heat will keep the house cozy while I continue to mess with my classes.

Here’s what I used (all amounts approximate):

• Slightly over 2lbs. ground grassfed (very lean) local beef
• Three slices lean local bacon, crisped, crumbled, and fat reserved
• cup of (local) milk
• one (local) egg
• 3/4 cup dry breadcrumbs (from locally made bread)
• handful of Scottish oats
• small bunch green onions (from my garden), chopped
• about 1/3 cup gorgonzola cheese, crumbled
• assorted herbs and spices: marjoram, basil and hot pepper flakes (from last year’s garden), black pepper
• ketchup to top

I combined the oats and breadcrumbs in a big bowl and poured the milk over them. Then I whipped the egg in, added the gorgonzola and herbs and mashed it all together. Added the crumbled bacon plus a little drizzle of the fat, and the green onions.

Then I worked all this sloppy goodness into the slightly over 2lbs. of ground beef, and patted (not packed) it into a large loaf pan I’d greased lightly with what was left of the bacon fat in the frying pan.

(Meatloaf is usually made with a fairly fatty grind of beef–generally ground chuck. Since my beef was so lean, I had to add a little bacon fat and grease the pan to keep the thing from drying out. I don’t add salt–there’s salt aplenty in the cheese, bacon, and ketchup topping.)

Finally, I glazed the top with ketchup as is traditional with a homemade meatloaf, and slid it in the 350 degree oven, where it will cook for slightly over an hour.

This’ll make a lovely hot meal tonight, plus leftovers for a couple days of sandwiches as I enter the hectic crunch time of final grading for spring semester and course prep for summer semester.

Hitting it Hard

No posts for a couple days–here’s why: the weather has been great and I’ve been putting in long days in the gardens. I’m taking a break now after a big thunderstorm moved through.

Headed into town for a bit right after the storm passed and was surprised to see hailstones still in the grass at home. Thankfully, the hailed missed us out in the country this time.

Yesterday I did something a little gutsy–transplanted the first tomatoes. I say gutsy because I generally don’t risk tomato transplanting before the frost-free date–but the weather looks good as far out as the weather forecasters can see, and I couldn’t resist.

I put in a row of 24 of the determinate (early bush) varieties–8 each Taxi, Orange Blossom, and Oregon Spring–manured well and watered in with fish emulsion. I water in the hole I’m transplanting in so the roots have contact with moisture right away. Then, to be safe, I lined up all the concrete reinforcement wire cages over the top of the plants and covered them all with floating row cover–their own cozy little tunnel.

This protection was especially important considering I hadn’t hardened off the plants first–it’s as much protection from sunburn as it is from a chill. I did put three flats of tomatoes plants out after the storm today to harden off. They are a little leggy but not spindly–just taller than I’d like them to be.

Also got some broccoli and romaine lettuce transplants out yesterday and today, and started more romaine and basil seedlings inside as well. We are almost getting to the point where I could direct-seed basil, but I prefer the transplant rather than trying to thin out patches of heavy germination and have the row be patchy where the germination was lower.

It’s soggy out there now, but there’s still a few things that can be done. I need to mulch and mark off the asparagus–the guy who comes and mows out in the country mowed over those first few asparagus spears (argh!). But it’s our fault for not marking it well–I’ll have to fix that.

I also need to set up my Walls o Water for eggplant in the north central garden. I had thought it wasn’t really worth using those things–they’re a bit of a pain to set up–but the plants I protected with them last year did far better than the ones I didn’t.

Other than that–a bit of mowing and hoeing and mulching and another manure run have kept me busy the last couple of days. I didn’t get quite as much manure this time as a couple of the horses were being a little pushy. But, if you want manure, I guess you can’t complain about the animals that provided it.

I was glad to see this rain–my excuse to get some other things done (like final grading for my classes!) without feeling like I’m slacking off in the gardens. And we got enough of a deluge that I won’t have to water for a day or two.

Right now that watering of the entire garden (actually 5 gardens, if you think of them separately as I do) takes a little over an hour–I go out and do it with my first cup of coffee in the morning. Once things are a little more established, I won’t have to water everything every day unless it’s sweltering hot and windy.

It’ll get that way–but right now it’s nice to enjoy (finally!) the warmth of spring. Do I hear thunder again?

PS–One of these days I’ll remember to get my camera back out here and take some shots of the gardens’ progress.

It’s Time for Morels

This morning is a clear, warm, sunny one–and after a full day of soft spring rain on Friday, and a slightly chilly, but seasonable day yesterday, you know it’s time to get out in the woods with your mesh bags.

If you do hunt for these wild goodies–make sure to use a mesh bag to allow the spores from any fungi you collect to disperse.  Whatever you do, do not subject your ’shrooms to a plastic grocery bag, where they will sweat and collapse into a stinky mass.

Morels dry well too, so if you manage a sizable harvest, you can throw some into a dehydrator or simply dry them on a plate on top of the fridge.  Do not eat morels raw–you must cook them.

Along with any wild or cultivated asparagus you can source and a little butter, cream, and pasta (or arborio rice–do I hear risotto?), you’ll have a spring feast to remember.

Just don’t ask me where I’m hunting them.