Flying Tomato Farms

I’ll have organically-grown tomatoes!  I only have about fifteen pounds, so get there early if you want some.  I’ve got a basket of red ones and a basket of yellow and orange ones.  Price is two bucks a pound–which, by the way, is the same price as conventionally-grown supermarket tomatoes, last I checked.

I’ll also have sweet bell peppers, a couple bags of broccoli, a baggie of okra, a bag of Australian Crescent fingerling potatoes, and cucumbers.

We had a big truck farmer come last week with oodles of fresh local sweet corn, plus buckets full of potatoes, summer squash, jalapeno peppers, cukes, and other good stuff.  They said they’d be back again this week.  Since I’m not growing sweet corn (I always purchase seed and then realize I don’t have room to grow it), I plan on getting at least 3 dozen ears and processing it for freezing.

Garry and Barb from Lip Smakin’ Jellies are sure to be there, and Laurel the tie-die lady with the fabulous laugh has been coming regularly, too.

We’ve been getting new vendors every week–who knows what other wonderful local foods and crafts will be there?  You’ll have to come to find out!

Vermillion Area Farmers Market

Clay County Fairgrounds, Corner of Cherry & High Streets

Every Thursday from 3-7pm

Get some local Goodness!

It was so hot today, I don’t know what I was thinking digging out a thirty-foot row of fingerling potatoes. But they needed to come out, and I needed to put in some fall beets. So I went at it, and got one of the rows of Australian Crescent Fingerlings out.

At one point, I was so sweaty (and looking down at where I was digging–bending and picking out the potatoes), that my glasses filled entirely with the sweat that was pouring off me. It was like salt-water diving for potatoes–kind of blurry and slow-moving with the humidity and heat.

When I got them all out, I considered for a moment my options: I could leave the row open for a day or two to let it “mellow,” which is really a fancy word for not wanting to keep working in the heat. But the soil would have dried out, and the baby toads were already moving in.

I would assume that toads have a well-developed sense of smell, or some other sensory apparatus for detecting freshly-turned soil (or moisture), because as soon as I got down the row aways, they started gathering in the moist loam. I realized that if I didn’t finish working the soil and re-plant right away, I’d be cultivating on top of a bunch of toads.

I have skewered a toad or two before with my hand cultivator, and it’s awful. So, not wanting to re-create the experience, and wanting to get another crop in, I finished the job and planted a double row of yellow and striped beets, with a little chard to finish out the second row (that keeps the planting all in one genus and species for rotation purposes).

I don’t know that beets are the best crop to follow potatoes, but that’s what needed to go in, and in my experience, beets are a bit more forgiving than carrots, which I also need to get in–the next row over is carrots as well, so I didn’t want to double up a crop so close together. The fact that broccoli is still producing side-shoots on the other side made it a bad place for any brassica.

I was laughing as I was putting in the rows in order to seed the beets–the toads kept on coming–bouncing into my furrows and glorying in the fresh, moist soil. Then I set about the work I’d originally come to do: harvest for a special summer pickle.

My friend Amy brought this pint of incredibly good pickled mixed vegetables to a brunch at my house last summer, and I called her to get a recipe. I had everything I remembered eating out of that jar in my garden, and then some.

Special Summer Pickle

Here’s what went into the jars:

Spices: dill seed, powdered ginger, peppercorns, dried lemon peel, mustard seed, a bay leaf and a few dried hot red peppers, plus a clove of elephant garlic.

Veggies: Purple Dragon carrots, green cherry tomatoes, red onions, sweet peppers, summer squash, chunks of young cucumbers, hungarian hot peppers, yellow beans, cauliflower, reconstituted dried tomatoes from last year’s garden, small okra pods.

The Brine: 9 cups water, 9 cups vinegar (a third of which was cider vinegar), one cup pickling salt, 1/3 cup brown sugar.

All the veggies yielded a canner full (7 quarts) of pickled product, plus I made a couple pints of just spiced green cherry tomatoes, onions, green beans, and squash chunks to use up the excess produce.

I don’t know how it’ll taste (and won’t for at least two months and maybe longer), but it looks gorgeous! I’m exhausted now from all the heat and work, but I thought I’d better post this. If this pickle tastes as good as it looks, I don’t want to forget how I crafted it!

[P.S.--a little more info on the process. Pack the jars with the clean, prepared spices & veggies. Heat the brine to boiling. Fill veggie-packed quart jars with the hot brine, leaving 1/2" headroom. Use a knife blade pushed down along the inside edges of the jar to release trapped air bubbles.

Afix warmed-in-a-saucepan caps to jars, and tighten bands 1/4 turn past where it starts to catch. Put jars in water bath canner and process at about 185 degrees (a simmer, not a full boil) for 15 minutes. Remove jars, cool overnight--you should hear that little satisfying "ping" when each jar seals. Remove bands the next morning--with a good, strong seal you should be able to pick up the jar by its non-banded cap and not have it open. Refrigerate any jars with bad seals.]

Flying Tomato Farms News
A newsletter for members of Flying Tomato Farms C.S.A.
Vol. 4, Issue 12

GARDEN NEWS:
Not too much to report on the garden news front this week. I’ve planted a couple fall crops—fennel, daikon radish, and rutabaga. Those crops get water daily, but the rest of the crops are doing pretty well with the rain we’ve had.

Lots of little melons on the vines in the cantaloupe patch—although one of the vines suddenly died! Probably a vine borer got in there. The rest of the patch looks good and strong, so we should have a few melons sometime in August.

While I said I hoped to get one or two tomatoes in deliveries this week, it turns out the early tomatoes are ripening like crazy. The indeterminate plants are not terribly healthy, though, and do not look to be producing much more fruit besides this first heavy set. That’s OK—there are plenty more heirloom tomato plants out there to take up the slack. I blame these first few plants’ lack of health on the over-abundance of water early in the season, combined with their early planting date that may have set the stage for disease. I won’t plant tomatoes back in that spot for a couple years after those plants come out.

I had planned on delivering Yukon Gold potatoes from Vito at Red Rooster Farms this week, but he called yesterday to report that he was baling hay and couldn’t get them to me on time. However, you should be getting a 2lb. bag of potatoes in next week’s deliveries—plus more deliveries of fingerling potatoes, which are slower to mature, a little later in the season.

THIS WEEK’S DELIVERY:
Cucumbers, a fresh dill head, sweet peppers, cauliflower, tomatoes, and onions.

Wow, those cukes are producing a lot of fruit! I am picking about 10 fruits every day now, and still the second planting has not started producing—but they do have flowers. Don’t worry, I won’t fill the whole bag with cukes!

Try tossing your sliced cucumbers with plain yogurt, a little mayonnaise or salad dressing (I like Vegenaise), and some of the fresh dill seed, crushed with the flat of a knife blade. Add salt and pepper to taste.
Adapted from: MACSAC. From Asparagus to Zucchini 3rd Edition, Jones Books, 2004.

Another salad to try:
Scandanavian-Style Cucumber Salad
1 large cucumber, peeled and sliced
salt
1 onion, peeled and thinly sliced
2 TB white wine vinegar
1 tsp sugar
1 TB mustard seed
2 TB crushed fresh dill seed
freshly-ground pepper

Put the cucumber slices in a sieve or colander and sprinkle with salt. Set a weight on top and leave for 30 minutes to remove excess moisture. Then squeeze the slices and pat dry with towels.

Put the cucumber in a bowl with the onion, vinegar, sugar, mustard and dill seeds, and pepper. Stir well. Marinate at least two hours before serving.
Adapted from: Rose Elliot’s The Complete Vegetarian Cuisine, Pantheon Books, 1996.

If you have or come up with a great cucumber recipe that you think others would enjoy, please e-mail it to me at the address below. We’ll be eating cukes for quite awhile, so I’ll need some help finding good recipes!

Sweet peppers, onions, and tomatoes mean one thing to me—fresh tomato pasta sauce! Fry up some of the peppers and onion slices with some olive oil, rosemary, oregano or marjoram, salt, and pepper, then turn off the heat, add a splash of red wine, and a bunch of fresh tomatoes cut into chunks. Stir well and serve over pasta or chill and mound on slices of French bread.

The tomatoes are a selection of early varieties—some are completely ripe and some nearly so. The red ones are Oregon Spring and Stupice, both heirlooms and both tending to have a touch of green on their shoulders when ripe. Judge ripeness by how soft they feel in your hand. The yellow tomatoes are Taxi—not quite old enough to be an heirloom, but not a hybrid. The orange tomatoes are a hybrid called Orange Blossom. Do not store ripening tomatoes on your windowsill—they can sunscald. Put them in a bowl on your table or counter instead. Don’t refrigerate un-cut tomatoes either—it kills their flavor.

The cauliflower is called “Snow Crown,” though the crowns aren’t quite as snowy as I’d like them to be. While this variety is what’s called “self-blanching,” I should have tied some of the leaves around the heads to get that perfect white curd.

Try sautéing onion, cauliflower florets, and peppers with a liberal dusting of curry powder (or your favorite selection of curry spices like coriander, turmeric, cumin, cinnamon, etc.), then adding fresh cut-up tomatoes toward the end. They will release their juices into the dish and make it just right to serve over brown rice or couscous. You can add a cup of chickpeas to the vegetables to make it more hearty, and a little vegetable broth if you want a thinner consistency.

I also sell produce at the Vermillion Area Farmers Market every Thursday from 3-7pm on the Clay County Fairgrounds, corner of Cherry & High Streets. We’ve been getting lots of new, great vendors (including SWEET CORN vendors), so please stop by and check it out! Get there early for the best selection.

Remember to
WASH YOUR VEGGIES!

Preserving Food? You Need this Book.

I own a few different books on canning, drying, freezing, and other food preservation techniques. But Putting Food By is the one that everyone interested in home canning and food preservation should own. The first edition was published in the year of my birth, 1973, and it has been fully revised and updated three times in the (gulp!) 35 years since then.

The authors, Ruth Hertzberg, Beatrice Vaughan, and Janet Greene, put years of research and experience into this book (consulting home economists, master food preservationists, extension agents, and the like throughout Canada and the United States), and it includes not only the “how,” but the “why” of safe food preservation techniques of all kinds.

While there are lots of “old time-y” recipes and methods (that have been tested and are safe), there is also information about how to use the more modern conveniences such as microwave ovens and how to reduce salt and/or sugar in recipes.

This book is where I find information on making pickles in a crock in my basement, and where I learn about the finer points of pressure processing mixed-ingredient soups, as well as meats and meat broths. It gives suggestions as to the best ways to preserve foods–some things freeze better than they can, and vice-versa, and some things retain their quality well if dried, while others are best pickled or root-cellared.

In short, this book is a veritable treasure-trove of valuable information and recipes, and it should be on the bookshelf of anyone interested in preserving the harvest. It is written in a lovely, friendly voice–like your old homemaker great-aunties passing on their wisdom and experience to you in book form.

I would recommend that if you are a beginner to home food preservation, also pick up a copy of the Ball Blue Book (handily packaged with PFB on Amazon’s site, linked to above) because it contains more diagrams that may be helpful to you in envisioning the processes described in Putting Food By (as well as containing additional yummy recipes).

A side-note about this text–I have found older editions in used bookstores, and I highly recommend them to food preservation geeks alongside a newer edition of PFB. I have found the older versions contain all kinds of obscure and wonderful recipes for preserving different fruits, vegetables, and meats that may not be as commonly eaten or used today.

One of my favorite “convenience” foods in progress:

Summer Veggies for Roasting

Every summer and fall, I chop up tons of peppers, tomatoes, summer squash, and eggplant in bite-sized pieces and roast them in a baking dish ’til done. Sometimes I add a little basil or rosemary, sometimes just the usual salt, pepper, and a drizzling of olive oil.

If I don’t have one of the ingredients (I don’t have eggplant yet), that’s fine too. The basis is really the peppers and tomatoes anyhow. You can also add a little onion or garlic, but just a little–those flavors get stronger in the freezer. Okra works, and snap beans do too.

Cauliflower or broccoli are not good bets because their flavors can overwhelm and get skunky. I don’t add potatoes because I usually use the mix with a starch-based recipe. If for some reason you don’t have tomatoes (oh! the horror!), a mix of just roasted peppers and summer squash is nice, too.

I pack the portioned-out roasted-then-cooled veggies in freezer bags or boxes and use them throughout the winter in pasta sauces, on homemade pizza, in soup, etc. I usually put about two cups in each bag and label if there’s anything non-standard (“with rosemary,” or “spicy!” if I used a lot of hot peppers).

When Starbucks announced on the first of July that it would close 600 stores, a cry of anguish went out from suburbia. “Where, oh where will we get our consistently over-priced & burnt-tasting lattes?” they moaned.

Soon thereafter, a new website went online, called Save our Starbucks, or SOS (how cute) encouraging regular customers to…

tell the world your Starbucks story and how much you value your local location. Who knows, it may help keep it open…

Never mind that Starbucks, like other big chains, has almost certainly helped bring about the demise of locally-owned businesses, and never mind that Starbucks has resisted the Wobblies’ attempts to unionize its employees:

The Industrial Workers of the World, which has tried for years to organize Starbucks employees in some cities, said it is “deeply troubled that management’s numerous missteps are resulting in more serious hardships for baristas, bussers and shift supervisors.” [Allison 2 July 2008]

Hearteningly, a few of the comments on the “SOS” site, under “Recent posts from dedicated Starbucks’ customers are of a different flavor:

Where were all of you when Starbucks was predatorily opening stores located to take business away from your locally owned coffee shop? Save your communities, not a massive corporate chain.

I have worked as a barista in four different coffeehouses, 3 of them independents and one a chain (Steep & Brew, out of Madison, Wisconsin). My observations of that business is that the local coffee houses, while not always as consistent (at least they’re not consistently bad, like Starbucks!) in terms of product, are valuable neighborhood hubs and often showcase local arts and crafts, and hold community-based functions.

Chain coffee houses, for the most part, are an in-and-out experience, and are often frequented by folks who are only interested in getting the product and getting out. The management tends to be cutthroat, and the politics akin to your “local” McDonald’s (where I also did a brief stint at the tender age of fifteen).

While I’m sure that some Starbucks locations do function as a local hub for the community (and some Starbucks’ employees are friendly and personable and remember your favorite drink), the fact is that the parent company is not dedicated to your community the way a local java stop is. Their profits are heading out of your town, and their wages aren’t much better than the independents.

Save your “grassroots efforts” for people and organizations that care about your community–patronize and support your locally-owned, community based businesses and sustain your local economy.

Yesterday morning, while I was speedily harvesting a few last minute additions to my SD Blogophere picnic dish (plus the cukes, which always need picking), our neighbor Kathy stopped by and asked if I thought Harry would mind if she picked the chokecherries along the road.

Now Kathy furnishes me with all the horse manure I could want, and also does some helpful maintenance mowing along the roadsides for us, so I certainly wasn’t going to say no to her request. But it did get me wondering because for as long as I’ve lived here, I’d never harvested or processed chokecherries.

So when I finished down in the gardens, I stopped by where Kathy was picking and asked her for a recipe idea. She told me she juices and freezes them for making jelly in the winter, and suggested that I might want to pick too–she was only taking the low-hanging fruit. Since she’d mowed around the bush, I drove my truck in close beside it today, and stood in the bed on top of one of my coolers, and picked a couple gallons worth.

Chokecherries

I also looked at a few recipes on the internet, and one thing I’ve noticed about chokecherry recipes is that they call for a lot of sugar. So, I picked up a 10lb bag at the store for that and other canning and preserving purposes. I did freeze 4 3-cup bags of the whole cherries mixed with a cup of sugar apiece, and then I juiced the rest by cooking them with a little water until they popped.

Juicing the chokecherries

I tried to strain the juice in my food mill, but the seeds are too big, so I had to use a strainer and the back of a spoon. I’ve gotten three quarts so far, and I’m guessing I’ll get at least one more.

But the weird thing is that I tasted the juice, and it’s really good! I haven’t added any sugar at all, and it is fairly sweet, and has a deep, slight dusky cherry flavor. There’s a little edge of tartness, but nothing like I would have expected after reading all the other recipes. I plan on just drinking the juice instead of making jelly–I’m not that much of a sweet jelly fan.

I should note that you can’t eat the seeds of chokecherries–they have a form of cyanide in them like many other prunus species, and can make you sick if ingested in large quantities. But you can freeze them whole and juice them later.

Another project for today was pulling all the yellow onions out of their bed. You know it’s time when their tops have fallen over, and these did about a week or two ago. I loaded them up in a bucket and replanted the bed right away with rutabaga seed.

Tonight while the chokecherries were cooking, I went out and started cleaning the dirt and loose skins off the bucketful of golden bulbs. It took me back to when I worked at Vermont Valley Farm in Wisconsin. I remember spending much of an afternoon sitting on crates in the greenhouse with this guy named Andy, the floor littered with onion skins, and racks and racks of onions in all colors filling an entire wall of the building.

But I had a different helper for my much smaller pile–my favorite little neighbor girl, Gurdy, stopped by to see what I was up to. She’s about three, and she has been a regular visitor ever since she could walk. She grabbed an onion and started meticulously peeling the skin off and chatting. Then her dad called her, so I let her take the onion home.

I don’t know if she likes them, but I’ll bet she’ll eat this special one she cleaned herself.

Yellow Onions

Last on today’s project list was to start the pickle crock. I had been putting the word out and checking the Civic Council in hopes of finding a crock, and then Susan and Kathy, who come down to the farmers market pretty regularly, commented to me on how they’d just finished a jar of my pickles from last year and how much they’d liked them. I told them I was hoping to do the real, old fashioned kind of pickles this year, and it turned out Kathy had a couple of her grandmother’s old crocks.

We made an arrangement whereby I get to use the crocks for a few months in exchange for a few jars of the pickles that come out of them. Now that’s what I call a “crockful of community”!

Pickle Crock

I put the first few cukes in it today, along with the vinegar, spices, dill, and salt. It looks like the jar is floating there because it’s on a see-through plate that, with the weight of the jar full of water, helps keep the cukes below the brine-line. Usually, the crock is covered with a couple layers of cheesecloth to keep dust and bugs out–I took it off for the photo-op.

I see I’m not the first to post on yesterday’s events–though to be fair, I think I had the longest drive. Then I spent most of today mowing, harvesting, planting daikon radishes and rutabaga, and harvesting chokecherries, half of which I am cooking down for juice, the other half I packed away in the freezer.

About a half-dozen SD bloggers got together for food and conversation and a little bit of kayaking on Lake Herman in Madison, SD yesterday. Lovely day for it–and I was glad to be a little further north–it was certainly cooler there than it was here in the Verm.

Todd Epp gave a good introduction to the possibilities of Twitter, and while the politicos have their uses, I can’t help but think what a great tool it would be for getting out word on what’s at the farmers market each week. Cory Heidelberger talked about his learning experience at a blogging conference back East, and the possibilities for community blogs.

Also there, Cory’s wife Erin of Prairie Roots fame, and their daughter, editorial cartoonist Scott “South DaCola” Ehrisman, Bob Schwartz of Politics and Hypocrisy, and Jackie (sorry, couldn’t track down a last name!) of Sioux Falls Cartoonists.

This little blurry thing with the white stripe in the middle is a tiny swallowtail butterfly caterpillar.  He (or she) is so small, I can’t even get a good focus.  He’s maybe 1/4 inch long.

Little Feller

This is what this little feller will look like in a little over a week (he’s about two inches long):

Big Feller

If you like swallowtail butterflies, plant rue!

I got this plant (another late season weird-plant-saving mission to the greenhouse) three years ago.  That first year, there was one swallowtail caterpillar on it, and the little-then-big bugger just about ate the whole plant down to the nubbins.

But, I left it on there, and in subsequent years, the plant has gotten ever-bigger, and has hosted ever more swallowtail caterpillars.  There’s at least six or seven on there now–eating and growing everyday.

Reading through Organic Consumers Association “Organic Bytes” newsletter this morning, I came upon this link to a half-hour video on suburban farming–otherwise known as turning-your-lawn-into-a-food-source gardening.

What’s interesting about this particular video is that it diverges slightly from the ideas of permaculture in that it takes into account our mobile population. So many folks who are renting, and who are not planning on staying in one spot for more than a year or two (say, while they’re going to college), don’t grow gardens because they don’t want to “lose” all their work when their lease expires (though I am one who left gardens at every place I ever rented).

This video suggests ways that renters can grow at least some of their own food for the short term. Granted, the set-up in the video looks to be a plan for a couple years’ time (and how many landlords will let you have chickens?), but it shows how food production is possible in small spaces in suburban settings.

I’ve been excited about this concept for some time (though with my own place, I can use more of the permaculture designs) while I slowly get my plan together for turning at least half of my front yard into a mixed vegetable, herb, and flower garden underneath the two heirloom apple trees I put in a couple years ago.

It also gets me thinking more about the guerrilla gardening projects I have in mind for various neglected spots in town. Not so much for growing food–but when I see these little weedy berms that look unclaimed and neglected I can’t help but picture myself, under cover of darkness, weeding them out and transplanting a few dividings of hardy flowers and herbs from my gardens.

Those little “guerrilla gardens” would at least provide some bee and butterfly forage and habitat. I know that land is owned by someone–but would they really rather have the crabgrass collecting bits of plastic trash, or something that is beautiful and, as far as they know, self-maintained?