Tiny Farm Blog Organic micro-farming with two acres and some tools ~ a daily photo journal...

The first harvested dish of the year here usually comes from early lettuce, but not usually from lettuce still in plug sheets. With my ambitious timing, and the way colder than hoped for weather, transplanting to the greenhouse was delayed by a couple of weeks, and the lettuce seedlings stayed in trays and went crazy. Today, I started thinning them heavily for the move, and ended up with a healthy portion of baby leaf salad! This is a mix of Simpson Elite, Granada, and Two Stars. The colors are still indoors pale, the taste and texture delicate. With a simple olive oil and lemon juice, salt and pepper dressing…delicious! And still a couple more bowls to go…

Better than Christmas! The first half of the first big seed order, and my first book order in months, both arrived today. Seed every year comes almost entirely from three companies: William Dam, Veseys and Terra Edibles. The first two are both bigger, family run companies, one definitely slicker and more marketing-oriented, with a series of color catalogs through the year in addition to their main one, all kinds of enticing special offers involving free shipping, a call center with almost no waits, y’know, the works. The other is definitely more…”indie”, with a single annual catalog, a written commitment to untreated seed only, and a busy signal more likely than not right through the order season: keep calling till you get through. The third is a tiny company specializing in heirloom seed, grown in-house or directly sourced from small growers. The cool thing about all three is that you’re actually dealing wtih the owners, right to the top. Even in the case of the slickest one, when a seed potato order was a WEEK late last year, the prez himself called to apologize. And I’ve had great, informative chats with various people from all. It’s another small satisfaction, knowing to a degree from where and whom your seed arrives. The book situation is a little different: Amazon.com (Amazon.ca, in my case). It seems like a sprawling, faceless, digital megacorporation, and I long ago stopped keeping track of who bought out who, but as far as I know, it’s still…OK (like, not like Facebook). And it’s downright depressing/futile to browse a small-town bookstore if you’re looking for specific titles (of course, they can always order in, so I do it myself instead). Anyhow, the few titles (selected from a long list of must-reads): The Complete Vegetable & Herb Gardener: A Guide to Growing Your Garden Organically (based on a recommendation), The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (finally…eek! :), The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution (hmm, high hopes for this one, based largely on a Charlie Rose PBS (US public TV) interview with author Alice Waters; I WILL cook more, but we’ll see if this helps…), Micro Eco-Farming: Prospering from Backyard to Small Acreage in Partnership with the Earth (I have NO IDEA how this came to the long list, I forget, but I did mark it with a bunch of stars…). And then there’s the Linux Pocket Guide, ’cause with blogs and web sites, like tiny farms, it’s usually best to know your way around the territory… Off to start some rosemary really late, and read!

While a bit of a tradition of leftover turkey crepes were being cooked up for brunch this morning, I was eying the leftover boiled beets. It was something about shapes and the muted, earthy shades of purple, and maybe the bowl helped along the effect. Soothing. Mesmerizing. I couldn’t stop staring. Guess I’ve got veggies on my mind… These were beets from the basement, roughly cut up as you can see, a mix of red (probably Scarlet Supreme) and white-with-red-stripes Chioggia, which were colored by the red beet juice. Boiling this time round was easier, though baking is the favored way to cook ‘em. Anyhow, possessed by the beets, I brought them out into the light to take a picture, grabbed the first suitable surface to stick in the snow (a wooden bushel basket, upended), and took a pic. The color is sort of as I saw it, but you really had to be there for the full effect. Stare into the beets… Like I said, veggies on my mind! :)

Got the idea this morning to get something REALLY FRESH onto the Christmas dinner menu. A fat local turkey, plus squash, potatoes, carrots, beets and onions from storage (in addition to a ham and industrial veggies from the supermarket) didn’t seem quite enough. But what could I find? The bed of Brussels sprouts left standing when the snow hit was…still there, not fully buried, and possibly perfectly preserved in a frozen state. Remembering a harvesting lesson of the past, I headed up the field with short, stiff saw in hand and bagged three (once again, the saw did its stuff!). Unfortunately, between the snow and the leaves, the sprouts were too well-mulched and probably never really got frozen solid, or at least, froze and partially thawed a few times. Many were damaged and discolored, but some were definitely…fine (I tasted a few raw on the spot). In the end, between the rather unappetizing, damp mass in a bucket waiting outside the kitchen, and all the other cooking to do, this time around, the good sprouts never got sorted, and it’s on to the frozen compost heap for the lot. But there’s more out there for another try… This is not exactly part of the Professional Market Garden side of tiny farming, more like my personal garden-addicted behavior, but it’s all part of learning!

A different order of fieldwork: eating up the leftovers! A couple of rainbow trout left over from yesterday had to be used, so I coated them in cornmeal, pan-fried ‘em in olive oil and butter, with a sprinkling of salt and pepper, squeezed some lemon over, and took ‘em out to be picked at in the field. The trout was joined by leftover roasted potatoes from last night’s dinner harvest, and fresh flat leaf parsley. Fast, no fuss (my cooking skills are so far…basic!). The photo’s kinda funny. I set the plate down on a path to get the parsley, which is growing two feet away, snapped the shot, then noticed what all was in it: a little pigweed growing on the left, some mallow on the right, and grass all around, my weed friends looking on… Rain: another intense storm overnight finally gave us just over an inch (25mm), and then gave way to this beautiful, sunshiny day. Still, that’s only about 40mm in 40 days!