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Save the Date! Pizza on the farm 9/4

7/28/2014

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We're excited to be hosting a NOFA-VT pizza social on the farm in about a month. Mark your calendars for September 4, from 5:30–7:30. We'll be doing a field tour, telling a little about our history, and enjoying some delicious, wood-fired pizza with toppings from the farm. This is a great opportunity for CSA delivery folks and market customers to come see where their veggies come from - everyone is welcome!

You can RSVP through NOFA-VT here (plus check out their other workshops and summer socials). They're requesting a $5 donation to cover the costs of the oven, and we'll also have a donation box available to help support our Farm Share fund.

We hope to see you there!
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Getting to 5 a Day

7/21/2014

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There may be arguments over what diet is best for human health, but everyone agrees that vegetables are a key part. Something we often hear from new CSA members is that they didn’t realize how much they weren’t eating vegetables until faced with a steady supply each week. (Our large share typically contains 6-8 veggies, which is pretty much one a day - with Federal guidelines suggesting 5 servings daily and many parties recommending more, it can be a wake-up call to realize how challenging it is to get even one or two servings!)

In our household, perhaps unsurprisingly, we tend to eat a lot of vegetables. One way, of course, is to just eat them straight - smashed potatoes, roasted broccoli or cauliflower, salads of all kinds. But I’ve also trained myself to pause throughout the meal preparation process and ask, "How can I get more veggies in this?" Herbs and garlic scapes in scrambled eggs or sauteed greens alongside eggs over-easy. Kale smoothies are a real thing (though I like spinach better) - frozen in popsicle molds, they’re a no-fail way to get some veggies in kids. Lettuce and herbs tucked into sandwiches and wraps, broccoli in mac ’n’ cheese, carrots grated into hamburgers, spinach chopped into pasta sauce. It is the rare soup not improved by a few handfuls of torn greens added at the end. We make a lot of one-pot sautes (like our recent beet greens and sausage recipe), and those are an endlessly flexible way to incorporate lots of vegetables into a main dish. Few recipes are so delicately balanced that you couldn't add another vegetable of some sort at some point. Finding some vegetable snacks you like is a help, as well. It all adds up!

(Check out our summer saute master recipe!)


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WTF is kohlrabi?

7/14/2014

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Kohlrabi is currently my favorite vegetable. It's in the cabbage family - in fact, along with broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, and kale, it is the same species as cabbage! It's been bred for a big fat round stem, which is the part most-used, though the leaves are edible, too. The outer skin gets peeled off, and the interior is crisp, juicy, and both sweet and a bit peppery. The flavor is similar to mild radishes, salad turnips, or the stem of a broccoli. Definitely a cabbage relative. (Sonora calls it a cabbage-apple.)

I've been hassling Jeremy for years to grow this plant, and this is the first year that he gave in. (He thought he didn't like it.) Turns out that it grows well, and - though many people don't know it - we've been sampling it at the market, and most folks are pretty excited once they find out how yummy it is.

We like it best raw - sliced into salads, alone or mixed with cabbage in a slaw, or just dipped in hummus or ranch dressing. However, we've heard good things about it cooked in fritters, roasted, grilled, and even boiled and mashed like a potato. In the fall we might add it to a dish of roasted veggies. If you have a favorite turnip or rutabaga recipe, it would probably sub pretty well. I'm planning to pickle some in the coming weeks.

If you've got a favorite kohlrabi recipe, let us know!

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Water, water

7/8/2014

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Jeremy and Sonora explore the pond
Tadpoles!
Frog in the pond
Trench and pipe for the tile drainage
Water, along with soil and sunshine, is one of the critical pieces of the farm mosiac. Plants need it, in the right amounts, at the right time. Too much can be as damaging as too little (which we learned dramatically after Irene), and, as a rule, it's easier to add water than to try and remove it. When we were searching for land, one of the challenges was to balance our needs – we wanted to avoid heavy clay soils, but many of the best soils in Addison county are river-bottom floodplain soils, and after our experience with Irene, we were pretty determined to avoid floodplains as well. We bought this land largely for the soil: a nice, sandy loam, not too gravelly or stony (though we've pulled out some good-sized boulders), enough reasonably flat to grow veggies on.

It's proven a good investment. The soil drains nicely, with the small exception of one little hollow in the upper field that bogs down in the spring. It has a good organic matter content, which we've been cultivating with compost and cover crops, and that helps it to hold moisture through dry times. For established crops, we've found that we rarely need to water, and up until this month, we just avoided the boggy section of the field.

But we know that things are changing, are likely to change more. Weather patterns are predicted to become more extreme – wetter in the wet times, drier when they're dry. In last year's spring, week upon week of rain, the boggy section spread over  much of the upper field, and springs like that may become the norm. We were grateful for our sandy soils then. Stretches of drought are likely as well, and our current irrigation set-up – a sap tank on the back of the pick-up with a hose, which we need especially for new seedlings in dry times – gets less reasonable each time we expand.

So, we're investing in some infrastructure in the name of resiliency and efficiency. Last year we began the process of putting in a pond, with the help of the NRCS. They finished it this spring, and we've been working on trenching and laying pipe to bring water to our lower field. From the pipehead, we'll lay drip tape or micro-emitters to distribute water to the plants when they need it. We've got a strong spring feeding the pond, and should have water enough for all our needs.

It's been a fun project with Sonora to watch the pond fill, then fill with life, this season. Within a week of water flowing in, the toads had arrived. Soon the pond was thick with toad eggs, then frogs. A few weeks ago the tadpoles began to hatch, and at our last visit they were beginning to grow legs. The tracks of various creatures lead to the water and away. The site is pretty raw still – because of the sandy soil, the pond is lined with black plastic, and we haven't done any landscaping or naturalizing yet – but we can see that in the future it will be a lovely focal point for the property.

On the other side, we've put in tile drainage under the boggy section of the upper field, and look forward to having a bit more good flat land to work with. It should help keep that field usable in wet years, and the pond should help us in dry ones. (Or, for that matter, in wet months and dry months, since the two can alternate drastically in a single season.)

In all, we hope it will make our farm better prepared for whatever climate awaits us in the future, and it will certainly be better than truck-watering!
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