When will we accept new memberships?

I have received a few emails from people who want to get the 2009 prices and enrollment form. We apologize for our tardiness. We had heard horror stories of price increases for agriculture supplies and seeds that range from 20-50%. Our 2009 catalogs are trickling in and the rumours are indeed true. We are taking stock of our expenditures, and evaluating any ways that we can manage our property more efficiently. We want to keep our prices as low as we can and maintain a happily functioning farm.

We anticipate opening our membership in the next few weeks. A new entry will be posted here as soon as we open the memberships. It is my understanding that if you subscribe to the RSS feed, you will be notified when I post something here. I am not sure, though, how that works, so if you do, please post a comment. I will be checking the site often.

Have a safe and happy winter.

Still busy: Field clean up, hair cuts, and more fermentation.

Shiela has been working on getting things growing in the greenhouse, and when it is not raining, she had been working on taking out the last little bits of plastic. We have all the irrigation tape out and have only two beds of plastic mulch left, and then we can put our fields to bed for the winter. The window of fall planting only has a few weeks left, and it is looking like we will get all of our stuff in. Hooray! We might even get our saffron crocuses planted!

Yesterday I finally took the time to get the address for Locks of Love. I love growing and harvesting so much that I even grow and "harvest" my hair. In case you aren't familiar with Locks of Love, it is a non-profit organization that uses donated human hair to make wigs for children who have lost their hair to disease or treatments like chemotherapy. They need at least 10 inches of hair in order to do whatever to make a wig, and it takes six pony tails to make one wig. I watched the video on how to cut and package the ponytail on the Locks of Love website. Then I handed Shiela a pair of scissors. Ethan was ready with his scissors in case we needed some back up. Now, I am 12" of hair lighter and feel like I have helped someone just a little...

The other thing I am working on besides trying to get our fields ready for winter is fermenting the leftovers from our season. I tried to lactoferment hot peppers, but I forgot to add salt and a white yeast mold grew thickly on the top before I could say "whoops." I will have to try again. I have a bunch of cabbage ready to be turned into saurkraut. I got it at the farmer's market when they still had an organic produce vendor. (Our cabbages still haven't headed. I am quite convinced that they don't like growing under plastic. In future years, we will grow them the old fashioned way, and mulch them with straw.) We made a batch of kimchee with the unclaimed chinese cabbages and those itty bitty garlics that we are always left with. I fermented it on my counter for as long as I could stand it. The smell became very strong, as it bubbled out of its wide mouthed jar and all over the flat casserole that I placed the jar in as an afterthought - good idea. The smell actually woke me up in the middle of the night. I understand why it is traditional to bury that stuff... Tastes good though. Our experiments with mead making are progressing at mead making pace (slowly) and I am not sure that any of the three batches will turn out drinkable. The samples that we have tried thus far have had an odd metallic taste, and we think that the iron in our water (I used our well water.) is the main culprit. Time will tell. My first attempt at ginger beer was going well for a while. I was expecting some major fermention with the "bug" and it just never happened. I think the ambient temperature in our house was just too low. I will try that again too. Luckily I only had about $2 invested in it. I feel like my fermentation trials are teetering on the brink of success. I want to get good enough at it to preserve foods without using all the water and heat that is needed in canning. I will keep trying things and report updates as they come.

Recipes for Week 22.

Vegetarian Cabbage Rolls:
These go well with some sort of yogurt based sauce or tomato chutney.
Cook 1 cup of rice in 2 cups of salted water until it is fully cooked. Meanwhile chop 1 medium onion, and saute it in some olive oil. Wash one head of cabbage (any type with large leaves will do), and steam 12 large leaves to soften them so you can roll them.
Once your rice is cooked add it to the pan with your sauteed onions. Stir in 2 tsp. curry powder, 1/4 tsp salt, 1 beaten egg, 8 tbsp. shredded cheddar cheese, and 1/2 cup of chopped cashews. Spread this mixture on one side of your cabbage leaves and roll tthem up. Bake them in the oven for 20 minutes or until you are sure the egg is thoroughly cooked and the cheese is melted.

Do you have any recipes to share? Post them in the comments.

The milk never ends...

If anyone would like to participate in our milk orders through the winter, you are welcome to. We will be hosting milk pick ups on Thursday evenings from 4:30-6:30 each week. If you are interested in purchasing Apple Valley Creamery milk the order is due to Amy by Monday at sundown. You can email your request to amleber@comcast.net.
In case you didn't know Apple Valley doesn't use RbST, and their cows are grass fed. (So those of you who are looking to increase your omega-3 can do that with this milk.) They still sell some of their milk to Land O'Lakes, but wish to retail all of their milk. They don't get paid enough from Land O'Lakes to support the two families who run the Creamery without increasing the herd size. The current trends in food production are that farms must get big or go out of business. The milk you buy from them keeps them farming.

We have made it to the end of our growing season...

First, thank you everyone, for participating in our CSA this season. I was wonderful to get to know you all a little better. We appreciated sharing our successes (and miserable attempts) with you. (Of course, we wish there had been more successes this year.) A giant thank you goes to all those who came to our farm to help us do chores. We would not have been nearly as successful without your help.
We hope that you had a good time coming to our farm this year, and consider coming back next year. We haven't thought much about how many members we would like to have next year, or what the prices will be yet. If you are interested in us holding a space for you next spring please let us know. We will reserve a share for you until April 15. After that, if you don't send a deposit or get in touch with us, we'll let someone else have your share.
Everyone have a safe and happy winter. We'll be here playing in our greenhouse, and planning the perfect garden for 2009. I can't wait to see how it all unfolds.

Thursday's Pick up will be on Wednesday

Because Thursday is trick or treat night in this area, we are moving pickups for that night to Wednesday instead. If you are unable to make it Wednesday night, please let us know and we can arrange for you to come another time.

Recipes for Week 21.

I thought I'd take a minute to open a thread in case anyone wants tp post a great recipe or menu combination that worked for them this week or last. Just post it as a comment. Some tme I will post a recipe for cabbage rolls that will be great with next week's chinese cabbage.

We have a big day ahead tomorrow...

Tomorrow night the low is predicted to dip down to freezing in Harrisburg. Since our thermometers usually read a few degrees colder than Harrisburg, we anticipate our first hard freeze. We spent today picking peppers that we had covered with a polyspun fabric designed to keep frost off of crops. We also pulled out all the celery to ensure that it didn't freeze. The eggplants were stripped and tomorrow we will strip the pea patch of anything edible. The peas that we have now are frost bitten but still a nice side dish. They were covered, but it blew off during the night on Friday and they got frosty. A hard freeze will make them all crack and get mushy. We will put the polyspun fiber on the baby lettuces, and the chard in an effort to stretch their usefulness one more week. The rest of our crops like chinese cabbage, turnips, and radishes should survive hard freezes. We will do all that we can to make the last week of our CSA the greatest last week we have ever had. We want to end with a bang...and then fiddle around with our greenhouse production through the winter...

Frosty mornings...

Brrrr. It was cold this morning. I am very glad that Andy and his dad finished up putting insulation in our house yesterday. (It was 49F in our great room on Sunday morning. There is nothing like seeing your breath at the breakfast table.) Our peas froze on the vines. We are picking them anyway, though they are limp and floppy. Our lettuce did manage to survive the freeze. Our basil in the field has been toast since the first frost, but the basil in the greenhouse was doing well until last night. It is a pile of mush now too. Our nasturtiums froze, which was a bummer because I was going to give them out in the salad mix this week. The baby lettuces are hanging in there (except for the amaranth leaves, which are all curled over from being nipped by frost. The celery has weathered the cold fine. The broccoli raab has hung in there (I think), and should be sweeter for its efforts. The cabbages are fine, and some may head up in time for next week. The turnips are little, but the tops are delicious. Radishes are coming along, and some will be available for you this week and probably next. We dug the sweet potatoes this morning after we were sure that they were not going to get any larger. We decided that the white fleshed ones are really hard to be pleased with. If you plant them early, they grow one 6lb potato. If you plant them later, they grow one 1/2lb potato. We were hoping for a greater quantity of spuds of a managable size. We will probably grow them again, so we might hit the golden mean next time. And if not, save them for dinner parties. They store amazingly well.

The raised bed in our greenhouse is built and about six more wheelbarrow loads of dirt might get us enough to start planting things in it.

Look out! Shiela has broken out her knitwear.

Shiela is a chronic knitter. Every night she unwinds from the stresses of growing your food by knitting a few rounds. Since last fall, she has amassed a mountain of socks using a variety of natural and synthetic fibers, a couple of shawls, some fingerless gloves, hats, baby wear, and scarves - both wacky and mundane.
For the remainder of the season we will have a display of the hand knitted articles that you can purchase to warm you through the winter. There is still time to have gifts custom knitted for holiday presents. So if you know someone who goes wild for orange socks and Shiela has sold out, she can still knit you another pair.

Recipes for this week...

Each week we select our veggies for the week on Thursday after everyone has picked up their shares. Ethan tries to get all the hot peppers and green beans. This week I anticipate lots of green leafy things to eat. Our broccoli raab is growing like mad, and we will probaly experiment with a few more recipes for that.
I anticipate fermenting a few hot peppers to save them for this coming winter. I haven't fermented peppers yet, but the fermented cauliflower and leek relish that we cracked open earlier this week was superb. It was salty and pickled, but not as acidic and burning as vinegar pickles.
If any of you have some recommended way to prepare anything in this week's share, feel free to post it in the comments section. Each week I will create a new thread for posting recipes, and I will label the old one with the foods that were used in your recipes so they can be archived well and retrieved easily.

Does anyone want some kefir grains?

There is a surplus of kefir grains forming in Mechanicsburg. If you are interested in maintaining a culture of kefir yourself, let Amy know and she will put you in touch with the person who has a surplus of grains. It is quite easy to culture if you have milk and the grains. Kefir slightly resembles yogurt but is easier to make. If you like yogurt, but having trouble maintaining the environment necessary to culture it, you might fare better with kefir.

Broccoli Raab is yummy stuff. Really! Try it.

For years we have been trying to eat Broccoli Raab, and finally it is here. We grew it our first season, and were quite sucessful (as we were with many crops that season). Unfortunately that year, I didn't know that the stems are unpalatably bitter. I cooked up some Raab with the stems left in, and no one liked it. A few days after we pulled all the plants out, I learned to just eat the leaves and the little florets-no stems. Then Andy and I went to a fancy resaurant for our anniversary dinner and they had Raab there. I ordered a dinner that included it, and discovered that I was not the only one who did not know to remove those stems. I was dissappointed to say the least.
Last summer I anticipated the planting of more Raab to test some recipe ideas for the green reputed to have essences of nutmeg and a sweetness unparalleled by other greens. I planted thousands of tiny round seeds. They sprouted and grew. They were hairier than I remembered. I began to second guess that I had planted the proper seed in the right row. Luckily Shiela had started some in cells to see if that would yield a tastier product. What she got was a surprise. When she transplanted them to the field, the roots were big white stumps that almost totally filled the cells they were planted in. Our hairy broccoli raab was daikon! All the seed was mislabelled from our distributor. We couldn't have raab that year.
So this year is it. We harvested it, and tried some. Raab is all the things it is reputed to be and more. It is quite bug free (knock on wood). It is a cinch to prepare. The leaves pull off the stems quite easily those little florets are a nice change of texture. (I threw my rinsed leaves at a smoking hot pan coated in olive oil, stood back and waited until the spitting subsided, stirred it into a big clump of soggy green leaves, scooped it into a bowl, and drizzled red wine vinegar on it. It beat the pants off that vile pile of greens we had at the fancy french restaurant. It was tasty.) It is chock full of nutrients. I secretly hope that none of you choose it, so we can eat more of it. Next time I'll dry it better before I cook it, and add some garlic.

Marx in Soho at Shippensburg U!

This Howard Zinn one man performance has received excellent reviews, and now it is coming to our neighborhood. Bob Weick will play the part of Karl Marx on October 20, 2008 at the Memorial Auditorium on the Shippensburg University campus. The show begins at 6:30pm, and admission is free. I Googled this play and found wonderful reviews that you can read here. For more information contact Dr. Chad Kimmel at 717.477.1706 or cmkimm@ship.edu.

Does our farm need a blog?

Ahhhh. The trial of our farm's first blog. This could be a place for our members to swap recipes. I think it may be a good medium to update everyone on the progress of things here on the farm. Check back occaisionally to see what becomes of it... Do we have time to manage a blog? Who knows?