Well the first week went well. I don’t think too many people forgot to get their produce. Hopefully the few that did were out of town anyway.
It seems our egg supplier has gone out of business. I’m not sure when that happened. I heard from them earlier this month so this comes as a complete surprise. I’ll continue to try to determine if they are still around. In the mean time, if they show up on Tuesday with eggs we will send them out. If they don’t, I’ll figure out how to handle the money paid for the eggs. Stay tuned and I am very sorry for this unfortunate situation. Maybe it is just a glitch that will resolve itself (I’m not optimistic).
Farm News
This week I was reminded of the lyrics to the song Big Yellow Taxi. Some of you may be old enough to recall the original version by Canadian singer-song writer Joni Mitchell. Some of you Gen-xers probably think of it as a Counting Crows song. And of course you young’uns are wondering what the heck I’m talking about. The specific lyric that came to mind this week was the one that goes, “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone”. In this case the “it” that was “gone” was the electricity on Friday (and as I mentioned in the above announcements, our egg supplier).
It is days like Friday that we wish we were off the grid. Sure we have solar panels but to get the financial incentive to install them we had to hook them up to the grid. And when the grid is down, the solar panels shut down as well. It is a safety issue. You can imagine if the line workers were trying to fix the line and the solar panels were generating the juice it could be problematic. So the panels sense the line voltage and shut down if there isn’t any and so we no longer have the benefit of solar panels until the main power comes back.
So what do we lose by losing power? The two main issues are our refrigeration and — probably more importantly at the time — the well pump. As long as the service outage was short the cooler can keep the veggies cool during the outage. And as long as the transplants are well watered, they can survive the outage again as long as it doesn’t last a day or more. Our plan on Friday was to transplant a bunch of plants. We typically water the plants really well just before planting so they are easier to pull from their seeding flat and they go into the ground with ample moisture to get them off to a fast start (the water wheel planter also puts down a bunch of water so this second part isn’t as critical as it used to be).
Since we were planning on planting later in the day and the plants were wet enough first thing in the morning and we had other things on the agenda we didn’t water the plants and planned to do so right before planting. We were also irrigating some of our crops since we have had little to no rain in the last month or so.
When we lost power of course the main well pump shut down and stopped our irrigating. No biggie. But also our other well pump near the greenhouse where our baby plants were awaiting their trip to their new home was also without power — and we had no idea when the power would come back. So we had to figure out a way to water the plants before we transplanted them (and to keep them alive if the outage was for a substantial amount of time). Where would we get the water? I guess in this case the “it” that was “gone” was our access to water. Which reminds me. Water is also something we drink to stay hydrated and once it was no longer available we suddenly became quite thirsty.
Now fortuitously, our plan that day included harvesting and washing some veggies so we filled two 150 gallon wash tanks with fresh water first thing in the morning. Yay! This gave us the necessary water to keep the plants alive! However, getting it from the wash area to the greenhouse was a pain. We had to carry it one watering can at a time. It took many trips. But sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and carry water the old fashion way. I was relieved when the power came on later that day. I was fearful we’d have to open the cooler to get the produce out for Friday afternoon pick-up thus letting out all the cold air. And with the temperature in the 90s it wouldn’t be long before the cooler couldn’t be called a cooler anymore.
What will we have this week?
Since everyone loved the bok choy — at least the few people who sent in a email comment — we’re going to do it all again! So lots of bok choy (plan on bok choy next week as well). By the way, some of the bok choy looked a bit crusty around the edges. I believe, but can’t be 100% certain, that this is due to the week of overly hot weather. Bok choy likes it cool. So if your bok choy is a little toasty on the edges just cut off the crusty part and enjoy the rest. What else will we have? We’ll also have lettuce, kale, chard, green onions, green garlic, garlic scapes*, a few summer squash (there looks to be a lot of baby squash on the plants so I expect next week could be quite productive), a few radishes, some snap peas, some snow peas, a few shelling peas, some basil and parsley.
*Over the many years I’ve explained numerous times what garlic scapes are. Might as well tell you again: they are the top part of a hardneck garlic plant. It is an ancient form of a flower. We remove the scapes from the garlic plants so the plant puts more energy into growing the garlic bulb. As a side benefit we get to eat the scapes! They are much like green garlic in that they are a bit milder than garlic bulbs. They can be used in place of garlic. We have a few recipes on our web site and I’m sure there are plenty of other ideas found using the google machine.
We like to put garlic scapes through the food processor to grind them up then throw in a block of cream cheese to make a delicious spread. Using sour cream instead provides a nice dip! You can also roast them or add them to any dish that needs a nice garlic note. We’ve used them as edible shish kebob spears though they need to be a bit over-mature and tough for this to work. The potential uses of garlic scapes are only limited by your imagination. If you have other ideas on how to use scapes please send them my way or post them on our Facebook forum. By the way, garlic scapes store in the fridge for a very long time. The tips and cut end may dehydrate over time but just cut them off and use the rest. We’ve found scapes lost in our fridge that were more than a month old and they still tasted delicious!
We’ll have ShroomShare this week. Maybe EggShare (but again I’m not optimistic). No Coffee or Flowers (yet).
Since I mentioned the above “recipe” for garlic scape cream cheese I’m going to call that my “Recipe of the Week”.
This Week’s Joke of the Week
The recipe said to crush the garlic
So I told it, “You’ll never amount to anything!”
As always, feel free to send in questions, comments, suggestions, recipes or other