Tue, Dec 06, 2011 · Filed under Autumn, Fieldwork
[From Dec. 5, 2011] It’s a wet December! After only a couple of days of rain, the ground is pretty well waterlogged, to the point where I can’t move the Kubota compact tractor without leaving deep furrows that’ll be totally compacted and eventually dry like concrete. So, before being rained out entirely three-quarters of the way through the job, it was slogging on 100′ round trips through boot-sucking muck, one forkload of hay at a time, to mulch garlic—not a big deal, there’s only a 100′ bed and a half to cover, but the EASIER plan was to use the tractor to push the big round bale to the garlic bed. Guess not. Lesson: Um, don’t wait! :)
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Wed, Nov 23, 2011 · Filed under Autumn, Cooking & Eating, Local food
Another in my series of possibly-not-so-appetizing photos of oh-so-delicious food. Local food. Ingredients either grown by me or gotten from those who did. I still find knowing where your food comes from endlessly satisfying, it doesn’t get old. Anyhow, without further ado, on to the one-pot, no-culinary-skills-required Beef and Eggplant Stew. More »
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Fri, Sep 02, 2011 · Filed under Cooking & Eating, Local food, Summer, Veggies
In the end, this is all about food and eating. Tonight, back to basics: heat applied to simple, locally grown ingredients, no culinary art or even a favorite recipe, just some mellow cooking. In the pot: grass-fed beef from a few miles down the road, plus, from our harvest, onions, carrots, potatoes, garlic, and green beans, well water, and a little store-bought salt and pepper. Simmered, covered for a while, for a couple of hours. The Yukon Gold potatoes, medium starchy, added thickness without melting away to mush. The beans, teaming up with the carrots, contributed a little veg lightness to the…stew. Dinner! (Fall must be in the air…)
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Thu, Sep 24, 2009 
Filed under Autumn, Planning, Seed starting, Veggies
There’s almost no describing how pleased this morning’s delivery made me. Pretty happy! In two sturdy cartons, by FedEx Ground, 80 lbs of certified organic Music garlic, looking so fine! :) This shipment comes from a farmer named Warren, who grows a huge amount of garlic about 200 miles (320 km) from here—I’ve chatted with him about garlic, read his garlic literature, bought garlic from him before, a quirky and fun garlic grower indeed! And you certainly can’t have enough garlic… Possibly the WORST part of this mildly crazy tiny farm transition (moving farms from last year to this) was not being able to plant garlic last fall. On EVERY LEVEL, good garlic is GREAT…and if AT ALL POSSIBLE (it’s easy to grow!), you must have it around at all times! This season’s spring-planted garlic experiment did work out OK, but there wasn’t much of it, in number or in size. Now, we get to go again… Cool!
(By the way, if you’re really into garlic, this is the, um, BEST GARLIC SITE EVER: Gourmet Garlic Gardens! It has everything…)
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Tue, Jul 07, 2009 · Filed under Farm lab (research!), Summer, Veggies
This first spring-planted garlic experiment is coming along just about as I imagined it would, from what I’d heard: slower and smaller. It’s 3-4 weeks behind where fall garlic usually is at this point, scapes are just emerging. Then again, everything has been growing slowly in the cool and cloudy weather we’ve been having. Plus, they only went in at the end of April, could’ve been a couple of weeks sooner. Earlier in, in better weather, maybe they’d go a little faster. Then, they’re SMALLER, and I don’t think anything would change that. At least half of the stems look pencil-thin. Well, like FAT pencils. In case it makes a difference, I snapped a shot of one that’s…bigger (below). Positive thinking! Anyhow, they’re planted in 3 rows x 35′, 6″ spacing, not mulched, been weeded a couple of times, and that’s about it for the spring-planted garlic so far!
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Fri, Jun 26, 2009 Filed under Fieldwork, Harvest, People, Summer, Veggies
It’s a harvest Friday, second for the farmers’ market, and first for CSA, but the load is still light. After picking snap peas, we spent the day doing other field work. In the photo, Libby, Jordan and Michelle are hand-weeding the small strip of spring-planted garlic, and we spent some labor-intensive time thinning a 400′ (122m) of carrots, and several beds of beets (the thinnings were the beet greens harvest). In late afternoon, time to cut greens: spinach and mesclun. Plus a little parsley.
Checking back over the last four years, at this time, we had broccoli once, radishes usually, baby Swiss chard a couple of times. And, of course, garlic scapes. And, a couple of years, no peas yet. So, all in all, with the slightly slower planting schedule in this start-up this garden, and all the cloudy weather, we’re doing pretty well!
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