North Star Orchard

Tiny onion plants, their first leaves just beginning to unfold, are arriving to nursery school. Meanwhile the matronly short stake tomatoes, sitting around a card table playing bridge, talk about their grandchildren and watch over the sprouting kale and spinach. The beets make eyes at each other, thinking of marriage and starting their families.

Yesterday, we were discussing the barely unfolding Winter Garden when farm helper Laura began this comparison of the veggies in the garden to the stages of life. It began an illustration in my mind of all of my beloved friends, some homo sapien and some plantae. This is truly the beauty of gardening, to watch the unfolding of life in a day by day experience. Surely we all enjoy the beauty of spring flowers with their promise of new life. We gardeners have the honor to watch every day as the seeds we sow push their primary leaves through the soil and begin the process of becoming mature plants. It is almost like having a family of thousands!

Sometimes, as in human interaction, the seeds we sow do not do as well as we had expected. The spinach I planted two weeks ago only came up half as well as I felt it should have. And I know how many hungry people LOVE spinach! Just like in my family life, when things don’t come to fruition it’s time to take a step back and think of a new plan to try for next time. So yesterday as we prepared to seed spinach again, we tried three different types of sowing methods in order to determine which would be most effective for successive plantings.

Strangely similar, after months of being frustrated with trying to teach toddlers to pick up their toys, I have recently found that the incentive of a penny for each area tidied is proving effective in our house. Hurray! I’m sure that, like everything with children, this will not be effective forever, but it works for now and that is enough. Just like those stubborn little spinach seeds, providing the right frequency and methods will prove to yield more desirable results – I hope!

What to do when the plants that you have been tending all summer with regulated water and pest control begin to curl up and die despite your best efforts? I fear it may be time to say goodbye to some of our brassica crops. Surely we will have plenty of cabbage and broccoli, but after weeks of brutally hot temperatures followed by weeks of downpours, some of the cauliflower and brussel sprouts are simply collapsing. It makes me frustrated and sad to see some of these friends melt away before their time, but I can’t help but think that these are lessons for life.

Sometimes letting go is all there is to do. It’s been years since I’ve lost a loved one, but watching my Big Granny fade was just that way. I spent time with her every week watching strong, stubborn coal miner’s wife slowly fade into nothing but a memory. In the end there was nothing to do except to let Mother Nature take her back. So as we lose crops due to disease or weather-related issues, I try to take my grains of salt and remember that we come from the earth and will return to it. It is my life to enjoy this brief moment; to plant seeds and harvest their crops and in the process grow a little myself.

You know the story; Shakespeare lines up yet another mixed up tale of love and judgment, in which somehow in the middle of the confusion all ends up “right”, or at least dead.

For the first few weeks of growth, I thought that our delicious yellow beans were called Merchant of Venice and thought, “Hmm. Interesting. I wonder why they chose that for the name.” But I was wrong, instead we have Marvel of Venice beans. A name much more fitting because although they do not contain a secret potion for wooing a lover, they are lovely and abundant!

Venice is a city known for its amazing water navigation systems, for its beauty, for its extravagance. You might expect a bean named to be it’s marvel would have gothic scroll work on the leaves or tiny cathedrals on its flowers. But alas, no. But if you’ve eaten these beans you know why they are named such. Such flavor, such freshness!

I’m proud to say that we picked last Monday nine baskets of beans! I think that’s a record, at least for this year, from these bean vines. We are also trying a new trellising system in that looked like a giant harp before the beans covered it. Rather than the plastic netting we usually have, we put up a tight zig zag of sisal twine for the beans to grow up. The hope is that when they beans are done we can cut loose the twine and put the whole “wall” of beans into the compost. Anyone who has grown pole beans (or any vine) knows how tightly they can coil themselves around whatever they grow up. It can take hours to unwrap their tiny curls!

I loved watching them grow up and up the twine. As the wind blew across, it made a sort of slow moving wave, like someone slowly playing the harp. We could almost hear music! Just kidding! Wouldn’t it be great though if vegetables were also musical? Carrot clarinets anyone?

I hope you have gotten to enjoy some Marvel of Venice beans. If so, I think you’ll agree that even Portia, Shylock, and Antonio would have enjoyed these buttery, prolific legumes!

A Field Full for Fall

It is amazing how quickly all the available spaces in the garden are filling up with broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, and the like.

Hundreds of seeds sown into soil blocks in the greenhouse looked like trays of chocolates in Willy Wonka’s factory. And now, as they are maturing into young seedlings, they stand proudly in their tidy rows, filling up dozens of beds we haven’t used yet this year – and dozens more that have held lettuces, beets, and carrots. It’s funny to find bits of carrots and parts of dill plants as we make our furrows for planting these fall wonders.

The cruciferous or brassica family includes mustards, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kohlrabi, kale, collards, pac choi, and many others.

I love the little, almost perfectly spherical seeds, especially the color variation from brick red to golden yellow to dusty purple. All these colors can exist within a single species and so as we plant them its like getting to know a class full of children. They are all the same age, around the same size, and love to grow! Each has its own personality though, and will have a few variations – sometimes three “seed leaves” develop and sometimes the edges of the leaves are tinted white. By the time it’s time to go into the field they are all essentially the same, but if you look closely you can see these distinguishing characteristics. Thank goodness we don’t have to remember their names!

In my own garden at home, I usually forget about sowing cruciferous seeds until September and by then it’s too late. Last week, my daughter Jaden and I planted short rows of each type of seed. We will transplant them as soon as they are big enough, probably in around 3 weeks. Today when we were harvesting corn we she said, “Mom! Come see this!” She was delighted to see that our seeds are growing well, each one a little different from the others.

We look forward to watching them grow and harvest them in October and make broccoli soup, cauliflower curry, and sauerkraut!

We often think of the smell, the texture, the color, and of course the taste of vegetables. But what about their sound? And if you had to describe that sound what words would you use? Here’s my attempt at relaying the sound of working with onions:

Do I hear a troupe of centipedes wearing rubber boots strolling through a dewy meadow?

Or rather a thousand tiny sailboats in a turtle marina all coming home for the night and as they dock the hulls briefly rub against the mooring?

I know, it’s a preschool class of teething field mice and they can’t resist easing their aching new incisors on a bit of rubber band left in the field from bunching chard.

Surely the leaves of this paramount veggie are important, but most often we see onions without them. During the spring and early summer we saw these grass-like leaves growing, and as we weeded the leaves rubbed against each other, sounding very much like tiny bits of rubber being chewed or squeaking against its self. All season the leaves have given food to the bulbing part and then as we harvest the onions, they are cut off and make a strangely soft and cool mat on which to rest our knees.

Since the leaves are long gone, composting back into the soil by the time we enjoy eating the onions, I thought I’d give you a auditory walk through this all encompassing allium. I raise my glass, or rather my water bottle, to the leaves of onions!

What do you do when you have too many cucumbers? Make pickles! This past Wednesday evening seven of us from the farm made 38 jars of pickles from some of the delicious Tasty Jade cucumbers.

I was late since I needed to go home and pick up all my canning supplies and my family. When we got there slicing had been under way for an hour and every bowl had been filled. I thought, “Wow! I sure hope we have enough jars to fit all these into!” And of course, as we made the Dill & Garlic plus the Bread & Butter brines and began to fill jars they did indeed (thankfully!) all fit.

We also decided to make a cucumber kim chee. These are still fermenting and I will be adding the spices very soon. I’ll jar them up on Saturday afternoon and I’ll guess it will bring our total to at least 50 jars!

It’s so wonderful to have an abundant harvest and also great friends to share the work with. From seed, to plant, to harvest, to preparing, and finally to eating. This is my favorite thing about working with food: there’s always something yummy to look forward to!

I’ve gotten a number of questions lately about how to keep various vegetables from wilting in the refrigerator. People are often surprised to find carrots wobbly and soft after several days in the fridge, not to mention the condition of lettuce or chard after the same period of time.

Remember – most vegetables are very high in water content. The chilly air in a refrigerator is very dry, and sucks moisture out of all produce (even beets will get wilted!).

However, since our vegetables are picked so fresh, they should keep a very long time for you in the refrigerator….IF you make sure to keep that moisture contained! For most items, that simply means putting them in a tightly-sealed plastic bag or sealed container and trying to make sure most of the air is removed.

Plastic bags can be used over and over again for various vegetables, and you’ll find that even our fresh lettuces will keep upwards of two weeks in this manner! Carrots stay crispy, chard stays puffy and brilliant, you get the idea!

This is truly the beginning of the summer squash season. Last week there were a few, but now every day we’re picking more and more of these summer-long delights. Last night we enjoyed some grilled zucchini and patty pan squash. Even Enid, our two year old, loved it! There are many recipes we love to use squash for: raw with dip or hummus, zucchini bread, stuffed patty pan, and at the end of the season when they are growing faster than we can keep up we make Zu-canoes!

To make a zu-canoe take a zucchini, top cut off and seeds scooped out. Fill it with breadcrumbs, tomatoes, peppers, and onions. Then bake till it’s tender. The best part of this way to use summer squash is the fact that it’s alright if the squash is as long as your arm or as big as your new born baby. (A friend actually brought us one when Jaden was born and we ate it for a week!)

A friend recently reminded me of a lesson she heard upon moving to a rural area. She asked a close neighbor if she worried about locking her car at night. The neighbor answered, “Only in August.” “August? Why only then?” she wondered. “If you don’t,” her neighbor replied, “You’ll go out to your car in the morning, ready to go to work, and find it filled with zucchinis!”

We promise we won’t bring summer squash to your house in the middle of the night. But we do hope that as well as pulling out the old recipes, you will learn new ways to enjoy:

Dunja – a flavorful, smooth skinned green zucchini
Costata Romanesco – a ribbed, green and white stripped zucchini
Soleil – a yellow variation of zucchini
Yellow Scallopini – a mottled green and yellow patty-pan type

Want to try a new idea for a crabcake-like flavor? As a native Marylander, no summer is complete without Old Bay seasoning. But it is not just for crabs; we add it to soup, corn on the cob, potato salad, and french fries. (And yes, we even like it on our ice cream.) During my 10-year stint as a vegetarian, I came upon this recipe and found that not only is it easy to make, but also that everyone in my family loves it!

Zucchini “Crab Cakes”
3 cups grated zucchini, water drained if necessary
1 cup bread crumbs
1 tsp salt
1 egg (optional)
1 Tbsp Old Bay

Mix together thoroughly. Heat a skillet to medium high. Make patties and place into pan. They will not hold form so do not make more than fit in a pan at one time. Toast both sides to medium brown.

A patch of carrots, a bed of arugula, a few rows of dill – many shades of green to make a garden that looks like a patchwork quilt. These past few days we’ve been hoeing and weeding like crazy and it seems like quilting to me. Anyone who has hand quilted knows how meditative each stitch can be, with many tiny bits coming together to make a beautiful masterpiece.

This year’s North Star garden has been quilted by many loving hands and is looking pretty good this afternoon. Seven of us spent the morning hoeing all the rows and hand weeding the beets and garlic. I’m sure it will take just a week for tiny weeds to start sprouting again, but it feels great to have worked hard together. It surely was hot, but it’s worth every stroke of the hoe to think of all the veggies that we’ll harvest in the next weeks and months.

As we were going down the rows we found that many of the seeds we planted did not germinate – and I’m learning the importance of irrigation. After the VERY wet spring it was hard to believe that the ground was so dry, but now we are putting down black irrigation tape with everything we plant. Now in our purple, yellow, and green patches of chard we’re adding black stripes like adding embroidery onto a patch of paisley in our quilt.

I’m looking forward to showing off the garden during our CSA member potluck later in June; it feels like sharing a bit of our lives from the last few weeks. We hope everyone who comes can appreciate all of the “stitches” we’ve sewn and enjoy the beauty of the colors of the living quilt.

CSA Member Elizabeth S. enjoyed playing with her food in 2010!
Here’s a short film of all the amazing creations she made with her weekly Veggie and Fruit CSA share.
Awesome!!

Most CSAs in this area offer vegetables, but there are also a few which offer meat, eggs, cheese, and fruit. I’ve even heard of a grain CSA, although that’s nowhere near us.

In the midst of CSA signups this spring, I received an email from a member stating that he’d like the “I Can Control Mother Nature” Share. Well, that statement gave me the chuckle I’m sure it was intended to give.

But what a concept, eh? The “I Can Control Mother Nature” Share would see us all getting exactly what we wanted when we wanted it. No worries about spring frosts, hail, or droughts. No concerns at all about biennial bearing issues. Taken to the extreme, it could mean getting Asian pears or heirloom tomatoes all year long….wow!

In many ways, that sounds like a mighty good idea. I can conceive of gorging myself on gage-type plums, nectarines, and Gold Rush apples day after day, year-in and year-out. For veggies, it would mean Swiss chard daily. I’m as addicted to each of those as I am to coffee.

My coffee addiction I can feed every day, usually with the same brand, although I do try new ones from time to time; they’re always Fair Trade certified and/or locally roasted. I’m currently SO into One Village Coffee, which I purchase at the Upper Merion Farmers’ Market, that I’m trying to figure the best way to source it over winter when market is done. I look forward to those two (or three) cups a day (morning and mid-afternoon) not only to feed my caffeine addiction, but as a comfort-food type of thing.

It’s kind of the same feeling I get when I eat some of those favorite fruits of mine, or eating my ‘green of the day’ (either kale, Swiss chard, arugula, mustard greens, or spinach). To me, they not only taste good, but they act as comfort foods to my soul. (Hey, better having mustard greens than Twinkies as a comfort food!)

But while the “I Can Control Mother Nature” Share sounds mighty appealing, I think I would tire of it. Part of the delight of eating locally-grown foods is the variety and the somewhat limited supply. It’s the surprise you get when the nectarine you just bit into is so gosh-darned sweet, juicy, and flavorful it hurts your brain….only to find out that the next one you bite into is even (impossibly!) better. It’s the first bite of a Hosui Asian pear of the year, when you realize that you absolutely forgot just how freakin’ good they are, because it’s been 10 months since you last had one. It’s digging into a plate of Swiss Chard that is so flavorful and addictive you’d swear the plant had been injected with MSG.

Sure, it would be great to be able to eat all of your favorites all of the time. But the ‘wow’ moments would wane. You wouldn’t experience that anticipation of waiting for the start of November because you know that’s when the Gold Rush apples would be coming on. Summer might not seem quite so fantastic if you could eat heirloom tomatoes and local sweet corn all year long. While I look forward to my routine two (or three!) cups of coffee a day, they don’t give me that sense of anticipation and sheer joy that eating seasonal food does.

As a farmer, I would certainly enjoy the “I Can Control Mother Nature” concept in many ways (the ability to turn off hail or hot weather would be a blessing). But as an eater, I’d like to keep things just the way they are!