One quick announcement and then a few random thoughts while working on the farm.
From now until whenever the frost kills them we will be periodically giving out hot peppers depending on their availability. For on-farm pick-up if we have some available there will be a bin of them on the herb/sign-up table. For drop site members we’d appreciate knowing 1 – do you want hot peppers and 2 – how hot do you want them? We’ve had comments on end of year surveys that we gave out too many hot peppers (but there is always someone with too many and someone with too few of everything we grow). So this year we are experimenting with making the boxes a little bit customized by giving hot peppers to only those who want them and giving the level of heat that they would consider edible. Our default will be to include only jalapeno level hot peppers. If that is acceptable then you do not need to respond. It you don’t want any hot peppers please let us know and we will mark your box accordingly. If you want hotter than jalapeno peppers please send an email with your level of heat from 1 being hotter than jalapeno to 5 being Carolina Reaper level. Please be honest with yourself. We have a limited supply of the hottest peppers so if you aren’t going to eat them let some other crazy person do so.
Now on to some random farm topics!
I’ve had a couple of questions this week regarding the storage of vegetables so I thought I’d take some time to address vegetable storage. The two greatest threats when storing vegetables are dehydration and rotting. If there is too much humidity the vegetable can rot. If not enough humidity the vegetable will dehydrate. Much like Goldilocks and the three bears, not to dry, not too wet, just right. But each type of vegetable has a different need for humidity. One vegetable’s just right may be another vegetable’s too wet. And they each have their preferences for temperature. What can we possibly do?
The first step is to read this newsletter from 2013. It lists many of the veggies we grow and their ideal storage temperature and humidity. Once you know these you only have to buy five different refrigerators so that each veggie can have its ideal storage temp and humidity! Obviously that is a joke. Four fridges and a root cellar are plenty.
But for those who prefer not to purchase the correct number of fridges there are techniques to store the veggies so that one fridge is enough. Or more precisely a fridge and a root cellar. But if you don’t have a root cellar there are ways to get around it. The above linked newsletter spells out some of these techniques.
Now for those of you too lazy to click on the link I will give you one piece of advice. Remove any leaves from your produce prior to storing. Take the tops off the carrots. Remove the fennel fronds. Cut the leave off the kohlrabi. Remove the beet greens and store them separately. The reason is that the leaves continue to transpire after the plant is harvested but the roots are no longer able to bring water into the plant; the roots aren’t rooted. So the water that comes out of the leaves is drawn out of the rest of the plant and this causes the plant to become rubbery or squishy.
If your telling us to remove these leaves why the heck do you send them with the leaves on farmer Chris? Great question! One answer could be that the leaves act as packing peanuts and protect the rest of the vegetables. This isn’t the main reason but it does certainly help with the delivery totes. A better answer can be found in an earlier newsletter from this season where I talked about making pesto. All these leafy parts of the vegetables can be used to make pesto! And finally some people use these parts to make vegetable stock. There are so many good uses for kohlrabi leaves!
Onto another topic recently asked: Hey Farmer Chris, when I was a small child we used to buy sweet corn from the farmer down the street. His corn was always huge. Why isn’t your sweet corn huge? Good question. The main reason is you have grown bigger. What was once large to you is now just normal size. Didn’t you feel when you first walked into your elementary school that it was huge? But then when you visited it later in your senior high school years everything seemed small. Same thing here. Small hands. Big corn. Big hands. Small corn.
Ok, maybe there is another reason since when you go to the state fair your hands haven’t shrunken yet the corn there seems to be larger than is considered normal. The factors that control the size of the corn are variety, water and fertilizer — or more specifically nitrogen. Lets focus just on the last factor — nitrogen. Corn is a big consumer of nitrogen. It wants lots of nitrogen to grow as large as possible. Chemical nitrogen is fairly cheap thanks to the Haber process (please refer to your freshman Chemistry lecture notes or your local Chemical Engineer for further information regarding the Haber process). Prior to having this cheap source of nitrogen farmers used organic nitrogen mostly from animal waste (bat guano, cow manure, etc.) to feed their crops. Now with the Haber process farmers can get cheap nitrogen and feed their corn to its hearts content!
However, we organic farmers don’t have this luxury. We can’t use synthetic ammonia. We still use the old fashion forms of nitrogen — animal waste — or nitrogen fixing cover crops — legumes. At Fresh Earth Farms we use both cover crops and a commercial, organic fertilizer made from composted turkey litter. This nitrogen is not cheap. Plus it takes time to become available to plants — bacteria have to convert it to available nitrogen that plants can use. So to be economical we probably don’t give our corn the amount of nitrogen it would prefer and not at the rate it could handle. So the plants grow a little slower and a little smaller as do the ears. But I feel the taste is unsurpassed compared to the chemically raised sweet corn. And I would rather have smaller amounts of tastier corn.
Enough time wasting. What will we have this week?
We will have lots of sweet corn, lots of beans, lots of cucumbers, lots of summer squash, lots of carrots, more onions, tomatoes, some tomatillos, some cherry tomatoes, some eggplants, some cabbage, some kohlrabi, some beets, some salad mix, cilantro, basil and jalapeno peppers.
We also have fruit and flowers this week.
Produce Usage Ideas
One of my favorite salads this time of year comes from our good friend and felon Martha Stewart. (Maybe that’s a low blow). Anyway, her Tomato-Beet salad is delicious probably because it uses beets, tomatoes, cherry tomatoes and feta cheese. All delicious on their own. If you don’t like beets you might still enjoy this recipe. Give it s try but be sure to have beet loving friends nearby to eat you leftovers.
Another tasty dish is cauliflower-potato curry from the cookbook Asparagus to Zucchini. I probably should have put this in last week’s newsletter but those members on our Facebook Forum got it when I posted it last week! Lots of good ideas to be found there!
Another great use of this week’s vegetables is salsa! Here is a great recipe for salsa verde. We don’t have a lot of tomatillos yet but keep this in mind for future reference!
Finally for those who have tired of the same old way of making green beans like me, I tried something new this week (actually I did it before but it felt new since it was the first time cooking beans this summer). It comes from this recipe for garlic beans. I was hoping to have garlic this week but we haven’t gotten far enough along on the harvest to include it. Anyway, the beans turn out crisp-tender and delicious. I highly recommend giving it a try.
That is all for now. As always, do not hesitate to send in questions, comments, suggestions, jokes, brain teasers, etc. To get people excited to send in stuff here is a brain teaser from last season (which kind of fits in with this week’s theme) with a slight change. See if you can spot it.
Say you have 100 pounds of tomatoes you are trying to dehydrate and the tomatoes are 99% water when you start the dehydration process. How much would your tomatoes weigh when they are down to 98% water?