We rang out the summer at the farmers’ market with a really lovely morning. I don’t remember what was going on here, but Lynn is looking a little under siege. You can’t ever call our market EXTREMELY busy, but it’s steady, and we get a few mini-rushes most days, where customers start to queue up. It’s always fun on food’s front line!
After rinsing harvest bins for the regular Friday harvest, instead of spreading them around to dry as usual, I stacked ‘em high to represent the house-of-cards global economy—I was trying to illustrate a point! What on Earth? Well, a few days ago, I became sadly hooked on the US presidential election action, especially on the endlessly fascinating PALIN. I slipped off the wagon and started obsessively sneaking in quick peeks at CNN through the day, and actually WATCHING in the late evening. This is so not in sync with the natural flow of…tiny farming. It’s been a couple of years now since I actively stopped consuming news: no TV, newspapers, Web, radio, just no news, except what came by word-of-mouth. (No-news really does wonders for your head…) Suddenly, I was back in, in an intense but luckily limited-to-presidential-politics way. Or so I thought. Earlier this week—overnight, it seemed—the ENTIRE U.S. ECONOMY STARTED TO MELT DOWN, and now the election thing has gotten SO MUCH CRAZIER. Wow. Anyhow, after I’d stacked the bins, Lynn and Libby tried to rapidly destabilize the economy by throwing potatoes at it—guess my model wasn’t too realistic, ’cause it wasn’t easy to knock down… We went on to a great harvest day, beautiful fall weather, a fine time to be in the field!
Last seen simply soaring up above 7′ (2m), the Jerusalem artichoke recently exploded with flowers. Last year, flowers appeared on some plants, and I read that flowering chokes isn’t that common. You couldn’t tell from here… The plants continue to thrive, weathering pretty heavy wind recently with only a bit of a lean. I haven’t dug around to see what the tuber harvest may be like, but I expect it’ll be massive…
It’s interesting to see what everyone here helping in the field choose to harvest. Smaller selections always surprise me, I’d be, “A little of EVERYTHING, thanks!” Lynn, who’s off till Friday, went for herbs—sage, parsley, rosemary—a couple of zucchini, a couple of peppers, and some broccoli shoots… Where are the carrots, beets (with beet greens!), onions, green onions, potatoes, parsnip, carrots, spinach, baby lettuce, beans, basil, tomatoes, garlic, kale, eggplant,…FLOWERS?! UPDATE: Lynn pointed out that there was OTHER STUFF hidden underneath the herbs…
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.
Tonight is the first real frost watch of the year. I covered a bunch of beds for a couple of nights last week, but the chance of frost seemed slim, with the overnight forecast around 35°F (<2°C). Today, they say it’s supposed to go down to 33°F (0.5°C), with clear skies and no wind, perfect frost conditions. Under cover: peppers, eggplant, summer squash, beans, cucumber (a really late experimental planting), basil, sweet potato (above). It’s floating row cover is the usual Agribon AG-19, in 14′ ((4.3m) widths. Let’s see how it goes…!
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