Harvested a few tiny (tennis ball to softball-sized, like, orange to grapefruit…little ones!) cauliflower from the last-planted section of brassicas that also has kale and broccoli. It’s still producing in home-consumption quantities, but with the exception of some strap kale, they entirely missed sizing up in time for CSA or the farmers’ market at the end of October. This is the normal. I usually take a chance on a final, extra-late planting—sometimes they make it, sometimes they don’t. Now, growth is so slow, the field is really just convenient live storage.

Not ideal storage, though. These plants are hardy, but the cold—many sub-zero nights—does take its toll on the parts you want to eat. Kale fares the best, broccoli is quickly savaged, and exposed heads of cauliflower get cold-burned to an unappetizing, mushy in spots, brown. BUT, with self-blanching varieties (this one is Minuteman), the leaves curl close to cover the heads, protecting them from sun discoloration (so our white cauliflower can be…snowy white), and this works fine against cold as well.

Then there’s the eating. The summer’s abundance of fresh-picked veggies has been over for a while, and every little taste of what remains becomes more of a treat as winter approaches, supplies dwindle, memories fade. The wheel keeps on turning…! :)

A week after arrival, the 25 Shaver Red Sex Link ready-to-lay layers are starting to lay. That’s good. We’re up to 7-8 eggs a day, and most are just shy of Small (on the official egg scale), but the numbers are improving daily. Much watching and counting…you can easily get kinda obsessed by it all. Getting up to speed!

Meanwhile, after three months without, fresh-daily eggs are back on our farm menu! Today, my first taste: 4-5 small eggs, scrambled with olive oil and salt, topped up with chunks of semi-dry Hungarian hot sausage from the farmers’ market. Pretty good!

A cool change with the much bigger farmers’ market we’re at this year is the easy access to lots more local food from other market vendors. We’re there every Saturday, and so are they! (Nothing better for really appreciating a farmers’ market than being both a seller and a buyer…).

The biggest change for me is, suddenly, there’s all sorts of LOCAL MEAT. There’s beef, bison, chicken, emu, rhea (ostrich-like), plus a cured-meat-and-sausage vendor, a butcher, and more (venison and elk, I think, and there must be pork in there as well). Still haven’t gone through it all, but I have started to taste my way through the beef. This week, I’m on to a second beef farm.

My sampling approach is simple: buy a steak cut (I prefer rib) and some ground, expensive and…less so. In the first taste test, the beef was certified organic and 100% grass-fed. Today’s, also certified, is fed a combination of grass (pasture in summer, hay in winter, of course) and corn silage, all grown on their farm.

The meal is pretty local: rib steak, grilled to medium-rare and lightly salted, topped with grilled garlic scapes, tossed in a salt, pepper and olive oil, and our all-lettuce mesclun, just cut, with a drizzle of olive oil and a splash of apple cider vinegar.

The scapes are from our market stand neighbors (it’s so sad not having our own fall-planted garlic in the garden this year!), happen to be organic, gotten on a trade for mesclun. The beef was purchased for full price (vendors give each other a 10% discount here, but I didn’t bother to identify myself just for the savings, I’m sure we’ll get to know each other over the summer…!).

All in all, totally tasty, and even easier to buy and cook than to write about! :)

If you love beet greens, you can practically taste this photo! Fresh-picked, sauteed just to wilting in olive oil and butter, with a smashed and chopped clove or two of garlic, salt and freshly ground black pepper. Heaped on a plate. Topped with a couple of poached farm eggs. It’s hard to imagine anything easier to cook and more perfect to eat.

The greens from the first planting of beets—Kestrel (above) and candy-striped Chioggia—are just sizing up. They can be harvested at any size, from quite tiny for eating raw in salads, to huge, for cooking. I’ve never grown beets just for the greens, they come from thinning the plants, which usually happens when the leaves are 4-6″ (10-15cm).

On Friday, we’ll thin the beets for Saturday’s market. For the beet greens with poached egg, our new 20-week-old hens arrive on Monday, ready to lay. Life makes sense. :)

Sprouts—the tinier tiny farming! After two Saturdays of buying them by the bag at the farmers’ market, I’m totally hooked! I want to grow sprouts, the nutritional claims are quite amazing, most of all, I really love the taste and crunch of EATING them (mostly, by the handful).

Until our first harvest, we’re dropping by our market to stroll around, chat, and buy food. It’s only been a couple of weeks, but I already have a routine with favorite stops, including one to get salad greens (first time in a few years that in-season salads aren’t homegrown), and one for SPROUTS!

I get the megamix, with a little of everything. Can’t even remember the whole list, but there’s something spicy, tastes like mustard, pea, kale, broccoli, I think, lots more.

Sprouts aren’t new to me. As a kid, I remember my mother growing a jar of bean sprouts for a regular Asian-style stir fry-type dish she made, and I’ve bought usually alfalfa sprouts for sandwiches, but I never really NOTICED sprouts till now. They’re great. So, it’s figuring out the simplest way to grow a wide variety for a steady personal supply…

It’s a start. Whenever they reach 3-4″ (7.5-10cm), I trim back the onions to about 1″ (2.5cm), and now they’re thick enough to collect and EAT! I don’t have the greenhouse up yet, so didn’t start lettuce REALLY early, so it’s not a whole seedling trimmings salad like last year… But these baby greens are great: tender, with a delicate onion flavor and just a bit of bite. Taste-wise, they’re easily over-powered by stronger, heavier foods. We tried them on burgers and in a salad, but they’re best more on their own. My favorite: quite finely snipped and sprinkled on a boiled (farm) egg, with only salt and pepper. Tastes like the garden!

Biting into the barcode on an apple, dreaming of the first garden meal…  This is one of the many little quiet-before-it-all-goes-crazy times that happen through the season, a few things already going, just waiting for the moment that seems right to start seeding the rest. I’ve been steadily reducing the time indoors for seedlings, and this year, with the greenhouse not yet moved and set up, and the disking of the newly plowed land being hired out—you can’t count in a scheduled date until the machine is in the field!—I have to keep in mind that there may be a bit of an extra delay, beyond the weather. So, I’ve been carefully waiting… With transplant seedlings, give or take a week or two or even three can make a lot of difference, or very little at all—weather, weather, weather!—and there’s nothing concrete to go on, just…instinct(?!)…a FEELING about when it’s right to start… :)

In comparison with just about everything else, tiny farming is so…basic. A friend sent me a link to Graze with the only comment: “Remember our chat about healthy food + convenience?” So I clicked it. I don’t know what to say. After reading through the site, I was kinda, literally, almost speechless (the service is summed up in the home page snapshot above). The UK business is based on the British National Health Service’s 5-a-day campaign that says you should eat five servings of fruit and veggies daily. Graze aims to help.

This is seamlessly intense green marketing. Every base is covered. Probably my favorite piece on the whole site is their description of how precisely-sized servings are shipped to you: 

Our box is thin, strong & uses the least material possible. What’s more, it’s from a sustainable forest, biodegradable & 100% recyclable. We source our food locally wherever possible, and prepare everything in our own kitchen, keeping food miles to a minimum. We hate waste so we buy all our fresh produce on the day we send it, and any leftovers go to our local farm. And best of all, the postman delivers it, so we don’t need any vans or energy guzzling shops. We are always seeking ways to be even greener.

Fascinating! Puts direct-to-market tiny farming well in perspective! :)

Tiny farming tip: to be happier, healthier, and more productive, in and out of the garden, stop following the NEWS! I quit around three years ago, and never felt better. I got sucked back in last September by a tasty combo of Obama, Sarah Palin, and a side order of global economic meltdown. Who could resist? But now, the election’s long over, and CNN is still on in the background, like a radio… Until today. For some reason, I decided to actually watch for a while. Started with some Terror in India, a little Baghdad Shootout, then the main course, a special investigative report, America’s Killer Diet. Wow. Segment after segment of bizarre, surreal and mildly disturbing bits of bad food trivia. Healthy kid moves from Jamaica to the US, discovers junk food, and gains 30 lbs in his first year (concerned mom intervenes by actually COOKING). Secretary of Agriculture agrees that, if Americans tried to eat the recommended daily five servings of veg, there wouldn’t be enough to go around. Revealed: just about all of the food in America is really made out of CORN (and soy). Twinkies-maker says: “The core ingredients of Twinkies have been the same for decades: flour, sugar and water. Deconstructing the Twinkie is like trying to descontruct the universe.” Spokeswoman for an urban farming project in Chicago explains that, in her neighborhood, you can easily buy a gun, but you  CAN’T FIND  AN ORGANIC TOMATO. What’s THAT about? What does that even mean? Off goes the news! Again. Phew! :)

A phone call on the weekend lead to this, our first real restaurant sale. It was cool! A chef called looking for local, organic veggies for a special menu this week. They’d joined at the last minute a regional food festival, featuring local food in restaurants in several towns. I ran down what we had available and followed up with an emailed price and available quantity list. Today, we harvested and delivered: green beans (Jade), potatoes (Kennebec), beets (Golden Detroit, Scarlet Supreme), carrots (Nelson, Purple Haze, White Satin), and onions (Stuttgarter-type yellow cooking, yellow Spanish), in the 25lb (11kg) range for each. Pricing was the normal market unit price, no “wholesale” discount. It was great pulling up to the back of the building, delivering into the kitchen, checking out and describing each veg with the chef. The dinner plans: a “hearty fall soup” and a “steamed vegetable pasta with olive oil and herbs.” Market gardens and progressive local restaurants are a natural and quite common direct fit…as seen on TV (I’ve been known to watch the Food Channel)! I’ve had some minor dealings with restaurants in seasons past, but we’d never got round to a classic chef’s order and kitchen delivery. so it was interesting to go through the whole routine. We had lunch there afterwards, and the food was refreshingly good: bruchetta, flatbread pizza, sweet potato fries, salt and pepper rib tips, an asparagus sandwich (yeah, the asparagus aren’t exactly in season around here, but their special local food menu is a step in a cool direction…). Fun! Oh, and no frost last night.