Beans, Beets, Cucumber, Garlic, Onion, Peppers, Hot pepper, Potatoes, Purple scallions, Squash, Tomatoes, Purple basil

Your guest author this week is the farmer’s wife. Yup, there’s trouble on the farm. Not only am I writing the newsletter, I’ve actually been out in the fields for a purpose other than picking berries. In fact, I know where the bean patch is. And that’s because I spent much of last weekend weeding it. Most of you don’t really know me very well, but let me promise you that this is shocking news. 

What would cause such aberrant behavior? Well, it’s a direct result of the excruciating pain that Thomas has been experiencing for the last six weeks, which has resulted in many a farm task going undone.  He had a herniated disk – L5S1 to be exact (not sure what that actually means, but low down in his back), that was causing shooting pain down his leg to his somewhat numb foot.  Sitting was impossible, standing far from pleasant – only lying flat on the kitchen floor seemed to bring regular relief. Needless to say, this has not been conducive to accomplishing farm chores. 

Well, he just couldn’t take it any more, so this morning he had surgery (microdiskectomy to be precise). And modern medicine really can be amazing – by late this afternoon he was home and completely free of the excruciating nerve pain. The big challenge ahead is keeping him from working too hard in the near term – resting is not really his forte. 

I am going to need assistance with restraining him, and that’s where you members can help. Weeds are taking over the farm! The plants are drowning – O.K., you can’t do anything about that. But you can help with the weeds. And it can be good clean dirty fun. While I’m not really known for my weeding ability, I am known for my party organizing. So, it seemed to make sense to build on my skills and combine weeding with a party – what could be more fun? So, please join us this Saturday afternoon (anytime after 1pm) for an Alleged Farm first – Weed Fest 2008, an opportunity to fight back against the weed offensive and to join other members in a potluck dinner following an afternoon of good, hard, dirty work. Bring a dish to share and we’ll supply drinks. 

Now, when I say dirty, I mean really dirty.  I don’t need to tell you all that it has been a wet summer, but it’s hard to really understand the amount of mud that this translates into on a farm. Whatever you wear (and I strongly recommend pants and sturdy shoes), be sure that you don’t mind it being covered in mud. And think about bringing a change of clothes or at least a towel or tarp to protect your car seats on the ride home. Also, please leave your dogs at home. 

If the weather looks too wet on Saturday, we will re-schedule for Sunday morning (10am) with a potluck lunch. If you will be joining us for this ridiculously fun event – please give us a call at 692-9065 or send an email to Thomas@TheAllegedFarm.com so we can plan for weeding tasks and drinks. I do have this grand vision of 100+ of our members sweeping across the farm and wiping out the scourge of weeds – and I’m not even the one on serious pain medication – but I do think it’s possible! So, please join us this weekend for Weed Fest 2008. 

August 7 2008

Beans, Cabbage, Carrots, Cucumbers, Garlic, Onions, Peppers, Potatoes, Squash, Tomatoes, Basil, Cilantro, Dill

  Here’s a bag of standard summer vegetables. Nothing weird or unrecognizable or unheard of.  True, a few of the tomatoes are odd colors (there are even some white tomatoes in a couple of shares) and there are round zucchini.  But I doubt that sort of thing even gets your attention at this point.  Whatever the color or shape, it is still a familiar vegetable at heart. 

I mean to suggest neither that these familiar crops are better than some of the odder things we grow nor that you are unable to handle the occasional kohlrabi or dandelion green.  Nor, on the other hand, do I mean to derogate these vegetables by suggesting they are common.  I like growing radicchio and parsley root, husk cherries and tatsoi, lemon grass and celeriac.  But I am no vegetable snob, turning my nose up at the hoi polloi’s produce.  I get as much pleasure from harvesting a nice long carrot or hefty onion as I do from picking a bunch of Chinese broccoli. 

There is much to be said for the more popular crops.  In most cases there are good reasons they are more popular.  We had the radio on in the packing room and the station played an obscure Procul Harum song—by obscure I mean not one of the two Procul Harum songs anyone but a fanatic has ever heard.  It sounded like those two songs, but a lot worse.  It was a useful reminder that whatever one thinks of modern marketed culture, sometimes things—songs or vegetables—deserve their reputation.  Tomatoes, for instance.  I have met one or two sane people who object to tomatoes, but for the vast majority of us the tomato’s (by which I mean the real, vine ripened summer tomato) renown comes as no surprise.

Unfortunately, what does come as a surprise is how few ripe tomatoes we still have.  I keep thinking that this week they will really start to produce and then not much happens.  Not much except more rain and more disease.  So at this point I won’t, in this (I hope) nonstandard summer, promise that you will see huge quantities of tomatoes.  But I remain vaguely optimistic.

Beans also merit praise.  At least, good ones do.  Unfortunately, too many farmers wait too long to pick their beans and then those beans take too long to get to eaters.  They are limp and seedy and fibrous and you have to overcook them to have any chance of getting them down.  It is hard to love a bean like that (unless you are a farmer, in which case you love the fact that you get a bigger yield from bigger beans).  But then it is hard to love cheap ice cream too. 

I have to confess (all right, I don’t have to, but I do it anyway) that I have gotten slightly sick of eating plain carrots.  It is one of the hazards of farming.  You end up snacking on a lot of raw vegetables and sometimes you grow tired of them.  I could happily go a long time without chomping up another carrot.  I have not, however, lost my taste for shredded carrot in all sorts of dishes such as cole slaw, and I am particularly fond of carrot salad—of shredded raw carrot with a strong, mustardy vinaigrette perhaps with a pinch of ground cumin and a little paprika.

Perhaps because I do not snack on them out in the field or in the packing room, I have not grown tired of onions.  Life without onions would be a sad, sad thing.  Raw, fried, grilled, baked, cooked down to mush, pickled, made into chutney or jam, it does not matter.  The only onions I have any reservations at all about are those huge bland ones you can “eat just like an apple.”  Why would you eat an onion just like an apple?  Has anyone ever done this?  Why not just have an apple?  Onions are not supposed to be bland, and it takes a real marketing genius to turn such an obvious shortcoming into a selling point.  It ranks up there with the no heat jalapeno, which as far as I can tell is just a very small green pepper.  It allows people who do not like spicy food to eat “spicy” food.  I am not sure I understand the point.

But then I doubt most modern marketing gurus have me in mind as they craft new products and sales pitches.  I am too cheap, too grouchy, too poorly paid, too rural and way too old.  I guess I could feel sore about that.  But it is kind of nice to belong to an extraneous demographic.  I don’t have to waste my time watching the special cable channel, reading the lifestyle magazine, eating the cereal.  It leaves me with a lot of free time to grow vegetables.

I am going to need all that time soon.  By the end of the month I will have one worker, and he will be away on a Mediterranean cruise (it is what all farm workers do on their time off).  So if you happen to know of people looking for a farm job through the middle of November, please send them my way.  In addition to hourly pay, they get to snack on as many carrots as they can.  Or onions.

July 31 2008

Beans, Chard, Cucumbers, Garlic, Lettuce, Onion, Hot pepper (Anaheim or Ancho), Potatoes, Squash, Basil

I am attempting to rein in my natural gloominess, but I have not gotten a lot of help this past week, what with the pounding from four storms Saturday night and the advice from a neurosurgeon last Thursday that I have an operation on my herniated disk.  Massive amounts of precipitation (including a little hail during the two middle storms) and surgery don’t make for a great farming season.

We still have a lot of vegetables out in the fields (and lots of garlic drying in the barn), but at some point I have to plant still more vegetables to get us through the season, and we have to beat back the weeds, which have gone into their midsummer overdrive and are rapidly engulfing a number of crops.  Between pain and rain I have yet to find the time to prepare beds for and plant fall carrots and beets, a third round of green beans, two of the three varieties of shell beans, another succession of herbs or any fall greens.  And with the soil fully saturated we cannot get a tractor into the fields, let alone cultivate any beds.  Even hoes don’t work in mud.  So we are reduced to hand weeding, which is a tough way to try to keep ten acres of vegetables clear.  To make things more fun, the dirt splashed up onto the crops and the humid conditions create all sorts of opportunities for diseases, one of which is running wild through the early planting of red tomatoes.  To top it off, some time on Saturday a flash flood went through one of the greenhouses, removing large portions of a couple of beds of newly transplanted lettuce and escarole. 

It could have been worse.  We found just about every seedling down at the far end of the house (along with the topsoil) and got them back in the ground.  They should do well enough in spite of the deluge (which did have the good effect, at least, of watering the greenhouse really well).  

Come to think of it, most of the problems on the farm could have been worse.  Yes, we had four storms and way too much rain, but just down the road the corn fields are shredded by hail while we only had minor damage. [TC1]  There are crops—parsnips, carrots, beans, some of the carrots--that desperately need weeding , but others—onions, beets, potatoes, chard—are in pretty good shape.  And maybe if whatever is attacking the tomatoes causes some of the foliage to drop off, the fruit will finally start to ripen.  There’s even a chance that the back specialist I saw today, who bothered to spend more than two minutes with me, has come up with a nonsurgical way to get my back to work and get me back to work.

         But enough with the optimism.  Let’s talk about vegetables.  Obviously we have not encountered a serious shortage yet.  Well, except for tomatoes.  I cannot really explain what is going on with the tomatoes, which we should have in far greater quantities by now.  All I know is that other farmers are having the same problem.  All I can do is keep spraying them to keep the diseases in check (we alternate between a copper/sulfur mix and a biological formulation called Serenade) and hope all the fruit on the vines ripens soon.

In the meantime, you can console yourself with potatoes.  Last year we had a terrible yield.  This year’s won’t set any records, but is far better, and with another 29 rows still out there, we should be more than set for the season.  And they come already peeled.  That’s what happens when you have to dig new potatoes in wet ground and keep them in the barrel washer a few extra minutes to get the lumps of dirt off.  My only advice is that you eat them soon.  While potatoes are usually a storage crop, new potatoes (potatoes dug while the plants are still alive and before the tubers have set their skins and settled into comfortable dormancy) are not.  So heat up that olive oil and chop that garlic.  Or make a bean, potato and (small amounts of) tomato salad.

As for your chard, you really do want to sauté it with olive oil and garlic (lots of garlic).  Believe me.  I am sure there are other ways to prepare it, but they just don’t taste as good.  There is a legitimate argument about whether or not to steam the chard ad squeeze out the moisture before sautéing it.  My experience suggests that doing so is a good idea, but it also suggests that it is a whole extra step in what is otherwise an incredibly simple dish.  It is unquestionably worth doing if you plan to use the chard as a filling or topping (otherwise it is just too wet).  The other point of debate is whether or not to remove the stems.  I happen to like a bit of stem with the leaves, but some people object to the texture.  You could always cook the stems separately.  There’s a nice Italian recipe for a chard stem gratin.

If you are not sure what to do with a lot of cucumbers, you could peel and seed a few and put them in the blender with some yogurt, lime juice and mint and whip up a tasty cold soup.  Which might be even tastier if you added a peeled, seeded roasted Anaheim (long and pale green) or Ancho (blunt and dark green) pepper.

Black currants probably would not taste good in that soup.  But they taste good in a lot of things (jams, pies, crisps, sorbets, ice cream).  Unfortunately, we just don’t have time to pick them.  If you are interested in getting some you could come out to the farm this weekend and pick your own.  Just let me know if you are thinking of doing so (Thomas@theallegedfarm.com) and we can arrange a time.

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 [TC1]

July 24 2008

Beans, Cabbage, Cucumber, Dandelion, Garlic, Lettuce, Red pearl onions, Pepper, Squash

 

 

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July 17 2008

Chioggia beets, Bok choi, Garlic, Kohlrabi, Lettuce, Sugar snap peas, Anaheim pepper, Scallions, Squash, Basil

         I got some extra strength pain medication from the doctor today.  Having taken a pill, I find, much to my excitement, that I can bear to sit long enough to write a few sentences. 

I cannot help noticing, however, that one of the side effects of this potent wonder drug is that I am occasionally confused about which hand is attached to which arm.  This is, I admit, is a small price to pay for pain relief, and I do not mean to sound less than overbrimming with gratitude to the pharmaceutical industry for all it does on our behalf.  I only bring it up at all because it may have some bearing on my ability to compose a remotely lucid newsletter.

         But I am sure it will be fine.  I mean, what are the chances of me actually getting my hands mixed up?  No doubt I am just ; seyyse owuv wry huwx ygi q;wc lvj s;bd eh lsiiq.

         Just to be safe, however, I will once again confine my comments to useful information such as how to pronounce Chioggia.  As many of you may already know, it is kee oh gee ya, not chi oh ghee ya (and no, I was not getting my hands mixed up when I typed that).  I spent years mispronouncing it until my aunt, who lives in Rome (the one in Italy), corrected me.  Admittedly, getting the name right has not had any noticeable effect, positive or negative, on the beets’ flavor.  But good manners would seem to dictate that one make the effort at the very least to call a thing one is about to eat by its proper name.

         Whatever you choose to call them, you will find that these beets have an attractive bull’s eye pattern inside.  You will also, however, discover that this fades away when you boil them and you end up with pink beets.  If that distresses you then you can try roasting them (though I find the pattern still fades) or just eat the beets raw.  Seriously.  I recognize that what with the narcotics in my system I am an unreliable witness, but you do not have to cook beets.  Slice them thinly (very thinly; a mandoline helps) and dress them with olive oil, a good amount of vinegar and salt, perhaps a splash of soy sauce, and let them sit in the dressing for a while.  Or mix the slices with a generous amount of salt and leave for at least 12 hours.  Rinse off the beets, add some sliced onion, dill, a garlic clove, and cover with vinegar.  Let the beets sit in the vinegar for a couple of hours before you serve them.

         I won’t offer any pronunciation tips for Anaheim, but I will tell you that your pepper may be mildly hot and that it is tastiest charred and peeled.  Put it over a flame and turn it slowly as the skin blisters.  Once it is all charred, wrap it up for a few minutes in a towel or paper towel then wipe off the skin.  You could dice it and add it (along with sliced scallions) to a beet salad or to a dish of cold grilled squash or puree it with garlic, olive oil, a little lime juice and some basil.

         I know I already did my snap pea rant last week, but I am on drugs so I get to do it again.  Don’t overcook the peas.  And if you are thinking about doing so anyway despite my exhortation, keep in mind that I might just be loopy enough on this medicine to turn up in your kitchen and snatch them away from you before you ruin them.  For which, no doubt, you will thank me once you discover how much better they are only barely cooked.

         If you want to cook your peas correctly but are not sure what I mean, you can come to the farm this Sunday and I will show you.  As you may recall, Sunday is one of our official farm visit days and you are invited to come out between 10 and 2 to tour the fields, meet the pigs, weed the onions, pick some currants.  We will provide drinks and snacks (maybe even the fabled Kings’ doughnuts)—as well, of course, as the fields, pigs, weeds and currants.  Please feel free to bring a picnic and your friends (but not your dogs).  The forecast promises a hot and humid day.  While not perfect for farm work, it should be ideal ice cream eating weather and we will be happy to give you easy directions to The Ice Cream Man, where you can enjoy a richly deserved reward for all that weeding you have done.  I particularly recommend the maple walnut hot fudge sundae.  I hope you can make it out to the farm.

         In order to increase the chance of that happening, here are directions from Albany.  Take 787 North to Route 7 East.  Go over the river (on the Collar City Bridge) and at the second light off the bridge go left on Route 40 North.  You will stay on 40 for about 17 miles until you come to Meeting House Road (which is 5.6 miles past the Schaghticoke Fairgrounds).  Go right on Meeting House.  After 1.5 miles you will come to a fork.  Take the left fork (which is straight ahead) onto the dirt road and continue over the hill to the next intersection.  The farm is at the intersection (dark blue house, farm sign in the front yard).  If you need further clarification or directions from a different starting point, send me an e-mail (Thomas@theallegedfarm.com).

 

10 July 2008

Endive (escarole or radicchio), Garlic, Kohlrabi, Lettuce, Sugar snap peas, Squash, Basil, Cilantro, Nanking cherries or white currants

            Unfortunately (for me, anyway) my sciatica rules out me sitting down long enough to craft—if that is really the apt word—one of my usual newsletters.  Perhaps I should figure out how to type while lying next to the desk, not that lying down feels a whole lot better just at the moment.  Fortunately I feel considerably better when farming so even though you won’t get the standard two pages of irrelevant blather and vague cooking tips, you do get some produce.

            Actually, I lied.  You will get some vague cooking tips.  Such as this.  Do not overcook the peas.  Even if you like mushy peas, don’t do it.  It is just a waste of some fresh snap peas.  Boil them in well salted water just long enough to turn them bright green and the tiniest bit tender and then either eat them right away or put them in cold water (otherwise they keep cooking).

            Or this.  Cut your squash end to end into two or three slices, brush them with olive oil and grill them until slightly charred and tender.  Put the slices in a dish and top with a clove or two of minced garlic, chopped basil, a little more oil, vinegar, salt and pepper and perhaps a little hot pepper.  Stick the squash in the refrigerator for at least a couple of hours.  You can eat the squash straight.  I also like it in a sandwich.    And for those of you who got round squash (which are supposed to be that way) and are wondering which way to slice them, it does not matter.

            Or this, which is actually an anti-cooking tip.  You can cook kohlrabi, but I do not recommend it.  It is perfectly fine cooked, but one of the main pleasures of kohlrabi is its crunchiness, and it won’t be crunchy if you cook it.  So just peel the kohlrabi, slice it and eat it (you are allowed to sprinkle it with salt and a little vinegar or lemon juice).

            If you have not used the basil on the squash you could put it in a blender with the cilantro, a garlic clove, lime juice and some olive oil, puree it and make a nice green sauce that you could use with all manner of things, such as grilled squash or slices of raw kohlrabi.

            And finally, how to deal with the punnet of odd berries.  Or should I say odd and odder?  White currants (actually, pinkish) are a variation of red currants, which are not that odd.  The white ones are slightly sweeter, but still tart.  Nanking cherries (bright red), on the other hand, are not particularly common in this country, though I am led to believe they are quite popular in the Russian far east.  They taste quite like pie cherries (and have a pit too).  Whichever fruit you have can be eaten straight, which is what my younger son, a keen berry eater, would recommend.  Or you could put them in a pot with some water and sugar and simmer them until the fruit is very soft, then strain the pulp through a fine sieve and you will have yet another tasty sauce.  Not one, admittedly, that goes well with grilled squash or kohlrabi, but it tastes a hell of a lot better on ice cream or yogurt than the green sauce.              

 

3 July 2008

THE ALLEGED FARM NEWS

Endive (escarole or radicchio), Green garlic, Lettuce, Scallions, Squash, Cilantro, Dill

            A couple of years ago I decided to stop complaining about the weather.  In the newsletter, that is.  I will still do it in person when warranted (which is to say, most of the time), especially if anyone is foolish enough to ask me how the farm is doing.  But I decided to stop doing it in writing for a number of reasons.

            For a start, the longer I farm, the less the weather irritates me.  This has nothing to do with any improvement in the weather.  Indeed, I have a sense that the weather is getting worse: more violent, with greater swings to the extremes.  I do not, for instance, recall hail playing such a prominent role, and hail larger than BBs only ever occurred out on the Great Plains, where some touchy weather god clearly has a bone to pick with Midwesterners.  So it is not lack of cause.  I have simply achieved in fourteen years of farming a greater degree of fatalism, allowing me to recognize that there is no point in expecting the weather to do me any favors.  Bad things will happen and my job is to deal with the consequences, not lament my fortune.

            I suppose too to some minor extent I worry less about the weather as I get better at farming.  Along with grim acceptance, fourteen years of farming have also taught me a few things about how to cope with the climate—about when and where to plant certain crops, about how to get the most out of my greenhouses early in the season when the weather causes the most problems, about which varieties can tough it out.  I have learned to wait until March to start my seedlings, to keep a row cover on the summer squash as long as possible, to ignore the local custom of planting peas on Good Friday (when, in any event, the soil often has yet to thaw), to stay out of the most poorly drained sections of the farm as long as possible.  But I should not overstate this.  While I have gotten better at farming I often still feel like a hopeless neophyte.  And anyway, the basic lesson I have learned is not to grow anything outside and I still have not figured out how to put that into practice.  Or rather, how to afford to put it into practice.  I would love to install a retractable dome over the farm but I cannot seem to fit it in the budget.

            Mostly, though, I stopped complaining about the weather because my readers found it depressing.  Apparently people want a little good news from their farmer.  This expectation seems somewhat misplaced given the native fatalism of farmers, and especially so given this farmer’s disposition.  I don’t do good news well.  Even when I attempt to be cheery and upbeat (it does happen from time to time) most people still think I am depressed.  It could have something to do with people taking me too seriously.  Or maybe not seriously enough.  Or both.  Or perhaps I am depressed.  Who would not be with weather like this?

            Not that the weather the past two months has been notably worse than anything I have encountered before.  May always does its best to undo the promise of April and we have had other wet Junes.  Other hail too, some of it much worse.  Combine hail with a fifty mile an hour wind and it looks like someone went after your farm with a giant shotgun.  You need generations of training in fatalism to shrug off that kind of damage. 

            We have suffered no catastrophic storms, but the accumulated effects of all the cold and rain have caused enough problems the make this a frustrating season.  The cold nights, which lasted well into June, have slowed the crops’ growth considerably.  The first planting of broccoli, in response to the cold, is making sad little heads, and many of the eggplants, pining for a Mediterranean climate, look worse than when we set them out a month ago.  As for the daily rain, it has mostly played havoc with our ability to get our work done.  You cannot plow, disk, till, cultivate, hoe or seed wet soil.  We have been waiting several weeks for a chance to hill the potatoes and there’s no point spraying the winter squash to ward off striped cucumber beetles if the spray (a fine kaolin powder) will wash off a few hours later.  I have not been able to get in any cover crops or finish preparing beds for shell beans.  The carrots desperately need weeding. 

            Not that I am complaining.  This is just what it is like when you farm.  You make plans, buy seeds, imagine the bounty, and then—assuming you have not found a way to pay for that retractable dome—you go outside and things go wrong.  In a few weeks we will have a drought and I will have a whole new list of problems. 

So it goes.  I have never had a year when every crop thrived, nor one when every crop suffered.  Apparently this is not the year for eggplant, but we have some healthy rows of potatoes and an onion patch that shows real promise.  Some day soon the squash plants will start to produce at their usual pace (and, I hope, produce fruit without hail damage) and soon after that we will start to wish we had fewer squash.

There’s no question I would have liked better weather to start the season, and no question better weather would have meant better crops.  No question either that one might, based on weather history, have expected warmer June nights and fewer thunderstorms.  But weather history (perhaps much like other history) is at best an uncertain guide.  The farmer who mistakes the average recorded conditions for a promise will suffer perpetual disappointment, at least until he develops a protective layer of fatalism—or, if he has figured out how to afford it, an actual protective layer over his farm. 

In any event, it is not the weather that causes the biggest problems.  It is the farmer.  Whatever previous observations might suggest, he could undoubtedly work harder, time tasks better, manage workers more efficiently, fix machines more promptly and spend a lot less time wandering around the fields muttering to himself about wet soil and cold nights.  If I really felt like complaining about something in the newsletter I would complain about him.  But that would just be depressing, and anyway after fourteen years of farming I have pretty well learned to give up expecting more from him