Sunshine!

July 10th, 2009

We hope to see many of you on the farm tomorrow from 8-11 for a Work Party. Bring your hand tools and hoes, we hope to form a formation of weeders! Farm tour and lunch from 11-1230. Come for any or all of it!!

Here is what is ready this week:

NAPA CHINESE CABBAGE~ HAKEREI TURNIPS~CARROTS~BROCCOLI~SHELLING PEAS~SNOW PEAS~ROMAINE LETTUCE~BEET GREENS~PARSLEY~ DILL~ CILANTRO~GARLIC SCAPES

Another gigantic chinese cabbage for your stir frying pleasure. The turnips are best enjoyed raw, grated or diced into salad or served with hummus or dip. They are crispy and yummy! We have expanded our color palette in carrots this year to include pale yellow and purple roots. We think the flavor is just as good as the traditional orange. We grow three types of peas: shell, snap and snow. Shell peas need to be taken from their shells. Snap and snow are edible podded peas and can be enjoyed raw or cooked. We will most likely not have salad greens or lettuce next week. Our next planting has suffered from the wet fields and may be late in coming. Choice of herbs this week: cilantro, dill , parsley. Garlic scapes are the flower buds of garlic plants. We snip them to encourage the garlic plants to put more energy into the underground garlic bulbs. Prentice's parents chopped and sauteed theirs last week in a bit of butter and olive oil, cooking them for 5 minutes or so. Then they added a little basalmic vinegar and reduced that over the heat for a couple of minutes. Sounds like a Village Farm lunch dish today!!

Sunshine this morning on the farm. Sweet relief.
The series of pictures in this entry were taken by Prentice's mother, Sally. I know Prentice wanted to acknowledge all the family support we enjoy and are grateful for, so you may hear more from him at some point (if he ever sits down!) but for now, I will just say that this farm could not, would not, happen in its present form without the help of both of our families. Our three boys are so lucky to have four loving and involved grandparents, all within 45 minutes of Freedom. Whether it is fixing up old Tonka trucks for their sandbox, mowing our neglected lawn, hanging our laundry, documenting our farm and family with a camera, fixing us meals or playing with the children here or off the farm, our parents are what we call The Village Farm Varsity Support Team.

This is Amanda who has joined us from Indiana for the season. She is "pricking out" winter squash seedlings, removing the root balls from the trays in which they germinated. These young plants have been in the "waiting room" with thousands of others while the rains have been here.


This is our farm crew: Andy, Laura, Prentice and Amanda. Looking pretty jazzed to be wearing cotton as an outerlayer rather than a vinyl product.




Prentice is poking holes in the black plastic mulch into which the squash seedlings will be planted. We used black plastic for the first time last year. We avoided it as yet another petroleum product until our Extension Agent, Rick Kersbergen said "you use as much oil driving from here to Belfast as is in one roll of black plastic." The landfill issue isn't addressed by that fact, but we feel because strive to generate as little waste as possible, we would take the benefits of black plastic in exchange for having to throw it away.
~additional soil warmth
~weed suppression
~moisture retention

Compromises we hate to make. . .


Remember all that talk about staying out of wet gardens? Well, the winter squash garden got a little sloppy in the center. I don't know if Andy was playing in the mud or if this mess is genuine work mud. Not ideal to be in wet soils, but the seedlings had to go in. More compromises.





Now, this would have been the year to be in the frog and bog business, if there is such a thing. Joseph has a lot of frog and toad friends. Snakes and salamanders, too.

For now, that is all the news from here.

Best wishes to one and all.

Polly and all at Village Farm