Month: August 2014

The light has turned this last week and we have started to process of bring in fall produce to cure. Onions and winter squash are our big fall crops aside from potatoes and these first two both have to cure in the dry heat of the greenhouse for a few weeks before we can share them with you. Plants, like us and keenly aware of the change in season and prepare themselves for winter in one way or the other. Onions are a biennial crop that grow to size one year and produce seed the next, continuing the process of reproduction that is the plants ultimate goal, one that we interrupt by eating them. We all know onions have layers and each layer is attached to a leaf. Our goal as farmers is to have onions with lots of strong leaves which will translate into thick layers and big bulbs. As the light changes the leaves begin to loose their vigor and the neck that separates the leaves from the bulb becomes soft. The top of the onion then flops over. This is the sign to us that the onion is no longer growing and the leaves are beginning to die back while the layers of the onion start to harden. This is called dormancy and for the plant its a process of storing energy for the winter so that the onion can make flowers and seed in the spring. For us it’s the process of transforming a soft, fragile summer plant into a storable winter food.

Our winter squash plants still look great and there is a lot of fruit out there. In the next couple weeks we expect the foliage to begin to die back and the squash will be ready for harvest and curing in the greenhouse. The dry heat of the greenhouse will pull some of the moisture from the fruit and concentrate the sugars, making squash that is bland when we harvest it into sweet satisfaction in a couple weeks. Unlike onions squash is an annual and goes from a seed to producing new seed in one season. This plant’s reproductive strategy is to produce a sweet fruit that mammals of all sizes will eat, exposing the seeds that rodents can then bring into their winter storage areas underground. Like us, rodents can be forgetful or greedy and some of these stored seeds, buried in the ground will still be around in the spring, sprouting into new plants.

 

Pork

We still have Pork available. Fed on grain from Maine Beer Company in Freeport and all the cull vegetables they could handle all of them look great. Pigs are sold as whole or half and processed into cuts as you like them (all bacon is currently not possible). If you have freezer space and would like to enjoy high quality farm-raised pork this fall and winter talk to us about the details at pick-up.

Frozen Blueberries

We will have frozen berries for sale at pick-up for the next few weeks. They are $25.50 for a 5lb. box…

What’s in the Share…

Tomatoes

Carrots

Cukes

Lettuce

Cabbage

melon

Fennel

Chard

What’s in Upic…

Cherry Toms

Flowers

Blueberry season has come to an end for us. It was a great success and like all new things, the steep learning curve was exciting and laid the groundwork for what we hope will be a great crop for years to come.  After hand raking this year’s plot a neighbor came with a machine rake and cleaned out the berries from the really weedy areas. This last fruit we drove up to Ellsworth last week and had cleaned and frozen on a large processing line that can deal with the “duff” from the weeds much more efficiently than we can on our small winnowing machine. These berries are coming back this week frozen and we will have them for sale in 5 pound boxes at CSA pickup.

Pork

We have a great group of pigs this year. Fed on grain from Maine Beer Company in Freeport and all the cull vegetables they could handle all of them look great. Order forms for our first round of farm raised pork will be available this week. Pigs are sold as whole or half and processed into cuts as you like them (all bacon is currently not possible).  If you have freezer space and would like to enjoy high quality farm-raised pork this fall and winter talk to us about the details at pick-up.

Sweet Summer

We will be harvesting our first round of cantaloupe this week.  From the few we have sampled in the field it looks like a summer of regular rain has been good for this crop.  The only thing that rivals the taste of this fruit is the fragrance. Wow.

 

What’s in the Share…

Lettuce

Arulgula

Carrots

Peppers

Eggplant

Cucumbers

Melon

Tomatoes

 

Transitions are what we are all about here on the farm every year . Whether its the productivity of a day, measured in how well we move from one task to the next, or the timing of a greenhouse seeding that gives a harvestable crop just as another is fading. It’s that place between that makes or breaks us.   I am energized by these transitions, complete one thing, starting another. We have been feeling a little bit of fall in the air this week.  In between the walls of humidity and the cold fronts pushing the storms, there has been that crisp, dry air that rules the days of September and October.  Summer flew by this year but with my favorite season just ahead, I won’t really miss these hot days until February.

Tomatoes This Tuesday

We are moving into peak tomatoes this week and have a unusually large number of tomatoes seconds flats for sale today.  If you are thinking about making sauce or salsa this is your day.  Even if you are not going to pick-up your share today, come by and pick up a flat, 10 pounds for $10.

The End of Blueberries

It has been a quick season this year as the berries have slipped quickly from ripe to gone. We will be raking this week but have stopped taking new orders. All in all this new foray into our own native perennial crop was a success and we hope to add it to our annual list of offerings from this farm.

 Italiano Mindset

Eggplant, basil, tomatoes, arugula, and fennel in the share this week. Put them together and you have a trip to Italy courtesy of your local farm.  Any of these items go well with olive oil, lemon and fresh pepper. Fennel is usally the tough sell amongst these summer favorites.  Try shaving a little on top of your salad or temper and sweeten the anise flavor by roasting slices in butter.  We love to cut it into 1/4″ slices, dipping in egg and covering with breadcrumbs before roasting in ample olive oil until the fennel is soft and the breadcrumbs very brown.

What’s in the Share…

Kale/Chard

Lettuce

Arugula

Basil

Eggplant

Tomatoes

Scallions

Broccoli

Fennel

Carrots

Peppers

 

What’s in Upic

Flowers

Herbs

 

 

Blueberries are the big story this week.  Over the past day or two we pulled several hundred pounds from the plot we are leasing here at the farm.  Learning as we go, there is nothing like jumping into something new to keep our observation skills sharp, examining every part of the process, and making a finished product we are proud of.

Blueberries are different from the annuals we grow in the fields (understatement of the season).  This wild, native, perennial crop has been thriving on this farm for thousands of years and everything about it’s harvest and management is a learning experience.  The berry plants grow in clusters throughout the field, each plant covering several hundred square feet and sending up thousands of fruiting stems.   So one single plant is like a tree, with its trunk underground leaving only the tips of the branches for us to see above.

Our first day raking, we moved in lines, as this seems not only efficient, but what we are accustomed to in our production fields.   Raking in lines brought us through dense patches of fruit into other areas with dense patches of weeds.  During the cleaning process (it took a long time) we quickly learned there has to be a better way.   Our second harvest was very different. Walking onto the barren we sought out the single plants (called clones) with the best density of berries and just raked there, filling buckets at twice the rate of our first experience with really beautiful fruit.

After raking we have a mixture of berries, leaves, stems and weeds in our buckets. This mixture goes into a machine that helps us clean all of this unwanted flotsam from the fruit.  We are very lucky to have a neighbor with a machine we can rent.  Three or four people spend several hours running rough berries in one end and filling finished quarts on the other. While the machine has blowers and tilted conveyors to help this process, everything still has to move by on a slow belt for us to pull out the unripe, smashed and stemmy fruit before it goes into quarts.  Our harvest time to cleaning time ratio has been somewhere between 1 to 3 or 4, meaning we have been spending many hours squinting at berries as they go slowly by.

How to Order

We hope to rake this week and next, filling your orders placed be email, at pick-up, or online. Quarts are $8.50 and flats of 8 quarts are $64 (a quart is 1.7 lbs).  Orders for pick up on Tuesdays will be taken until noon on Mondays and orders for pick up on Fridays will be taken until noon on Thursdays.

Greens Take a Break

We have limited greens this week as we have fallen between a few successions on lettuce and kale. Hopefully this will allow all of you to clean out the fridge and get ready for our next plantings.

What’s in the Share….

Peppers

Chard

Carrots

Eggplant

Cucumbers

Tomatoes

Basil

What’s in Upic….

Beans

Flowers

Cherry Tomatoes  -in the greenhouse tunnel beyond the beans…