A Few Notes on This Year’s Tomato Varieties

All varieties are indeterminate and heirloom and/or open pollinated unless otherwise noted.
Red Zebra (Seed Savers Exchange): This has been a pretty productive variety–baseball-sized fruits, very pretty.  They’re not particularly flavorful though.  Grow again? No.  This is one of those varieties that will draw people to a market table with its looks, but in my book, [...]

Hooray for COOL!

MSNBC reports that Country of Origin Labeling will now be required on most all fresh foods.
This is a real boon for local markets–letting consumers know just exactly how far their meat and produce has traveled, so they can make changes in their purchasing habits to include more items grown and produced closer to home.
The COOL [...]

Zen and the Art of Recovery

Since my neck injury became intolerable in the middle of last week, I have been slowly developing ways to cope with the pain and get a few necessary things done while recuperating.
It has become a sort of Zen process.  I take a task, and that is the only task I have to do.  This blog [...]

Why San Marzanos are the best sauce tomato…

So many people are stuck on Roma, Roma VF**, and other Roma-type tomatoes for making sauce. Most of the Roma tomato plants you’ll find at greenhouses are determinate hybrids–they’re a bush-type plant, and they ripen most of their fruit all at once.
They’re good, but they’re a little “wet” for making the chore as fast and [...]

Ahhhh…Assam

When I lived in Madison, Wisconsin, I worked for a small independent coffeehouse called Eureka Joe’s, located on Monroe Street.  I also worked at Vermont Valley Farm, an organic Community Supported Agriculture farm, located near Blue Mounds.
On mornings I worked at the farm, I stopped by the shop on the way out, and I was [...]

Crash!

I am typing this very slowly, and in between several breaks to lie down.  I’ve had a fairly serious neck injury–not broken or anything, but terribly painful and frustrating.
A couple weeks ago, I put my neck out with the constant loading and unloading of blocks and manure, and not thinking it terribly serious, I waited [...]

Flying Solo: Single Women in Midlife

Carol M. Anderson and Susan Stewart with Sona Dimidjian.  New York: Norton Books, 1994.
I haven’t done a book review in some time, but this non-fiction piece, found a few days ago at Main Street Books 2.0, deserves a mention.  Though it’s almost fifteen years old, Flying Solo is plenty timely in its treatment of the [...]

The Projects Keep Expanding

It all started with the plan to expand the old raised herb bed on the south side of the house.  Besides one last load of block and a bit more soil, that’s mostly complete.  I’ll be getting another load of manure today.
In the process of the project, I realized that perhaps the small bed in [...]

Sweet Ironies & Winter Squash

I figure by the time I finish up deliveries for this year’s CSA members, I will have made over twelve hundred deliveries total in the four years I have been involved in Community Supported Agriculture.  That’s not much for the big farms, who might deliver that many shares over the course of a few weeks, [...]

Bulbs!

…and fifty other projects, all at the same time.
In a brilliant piece of marketing, Brecks always sends out their pre-season sale catalog right at the time all the spring bulbs are blooming.  They also send a “spend twenty-five bucks, get twenty five bucks free” coupon that is hard to resist.

I don’t resist it.  Every spring, [...]