One quick announcement then on to this past week’s challenge.
Three fifths of our crew are students who will be heading back to school in late August. Therefore we are on the lookout for a person or two to help with the never ending tasks of harvesting, washing and packing produce for our shares. If you are looking to get out of the house or wanting to quit that lousy job and experience the nostalgia known as farming please consider joining our team. Contact me if you are interested.
This Week’s Challenges
This week had many challenges but the biggest of them all was harvesting the garlic. It seems whenever it is time to harvest the garlic we have rain. There is nothing wrong with rain in general but when we harvest garlic it is easiest when there hasn’t been rain lately and the ground is pretty dry. Wet ground makes the bulbs muddy and tends to stain the bulb wrappers. It also makes it more likely the bulbs will get moldy or have some other ailment while curing in our patent pending curing chamber.
This year we were not going to have this challenge. The forecast was for a chance of rain this past weekend so we felt it was best to get the garlic harvested before the weekend. With all the other tasks we have to do in a week, including but not limited to harvesting, washing and packing for the week’s shares the only possible time to harvest the garlic was on Friday.
You may recall Friday; it was the day with the excessive heat warning. The day when the public health officials warned people to stay out of the heat, drink plenty of fluids if you go out and limit your physical activity. Since we don’t bale hay — an activity that always seems to occur on the hottest days — this seemed like the perfect day for a garlic harvest! We put out a call for victims, er, volunteers and four people surprisingly said, “Sure!” Since only four people volunteered it appears overall we have a pretty smart member class of 2020!
Anyway, we were more than grateful for the help. Garlic harvest is one of those tasks that gets easier the more people involved. We could literally use 30 to 40 people to harvest garlic if we could somehow trick them into it. I figured with that many people it would be done in an hour. As it was it took us all day. Us employees went from 8:30 until 3:30. Our volunteers each put in a few hours (and to make some of you feel bad for not helping be aware than one of our volunteers is many months pregnant!)
This year I spent the money to purchase a new tool to help us with this task. In the past we would dig the garlic with a shovel. It was time consuming and back breaking. But we were younger and dumber back then. Over time we hired people who were lazy and therefore forced us to come up with easier strategies to get the garlic out of the ground. Finally last season we needed to extract the garlic in a year that was quite wet and did not provide us a good opportunity to harvest the garlic. That plus a number of other reasons made last year’s garlic the worst on record here at Fresh Earth Farms.
This season we were determined to not repeat this tragedy. So I purchased an under cutter. An under cutter is one of those tools that is well served by it’s name. Much like a saw is good for sawing and a hammer is good for hammering an under cutter is good for undercutting. By attaching it to the three point hitch on the tractor and dragging it through the soil it under cuts the garlic thereby loosening the soil allowing us to simply pull it up with a gentle tug and put it into the harvest crate.
It took us a bit of experimentation earlier in the week to figure out how best to use it. We determined the one component necessary for its success that was not included with the under cutter we purchased was a heavyset individual that had good balance. We had determined we needed a couple hundred pounds on the under cutter to get it to dig into the ground deep enough to not cut the garlic in half. Having a heavyset individual stand on it while the tractor pulled it made it work as we hoped. Unfortunately we did not find a heavyset volunteer with good balance so we resorted to two average weight volunteers with good balance. This seemed to work equally well. And thankfully nobody lost a limb.
We plan to eliminate the need for a heavyset individual with good balance by building a platform on the under cutter on which to mount a water tank that we can fill to provide the necessary extra weight. This solution should reduce the risk of one of us losing a body part since most of us have no extra parts. In the more near future our hope is that we can use the under cutter to loosen the carrots when the time comes to harvest them. We believe we have the ability to go deep enough, we just need to give it a try. Let’s hope this is successful.
But back to the garlic. Once we harvest it our next task is to bunch it and hang it in our previously mentioned patent pending garlic curing chamber. The patent pending garlic curing chamber may look like a beaten up detached garage but it is so much more. It has nails hammered into the roof trusses that support the bundles of, er, wait. I’ve already said too much. Suffice it to say it is more than just a detached garage. We will leave the garlic in the curing chamber for a few weeks to cure. What does curing do? Mostly drys the bulbs so that they don’t spoil while in storage. By drying them sufficiently they will retain the delicious oils in the cloves but not have the external moisture that could cause rot.
Once the bulbs are cured we cut off the tops, grade them (large or not large), save the largest for planting this fall, and give the rest out to our members over the rest of the season. It has been a good garlic season so hopefully you all like garlic.
What will we have this week?
Sweet corn! This is an early sweet corn that tends to be on the smaller side but has a lot of delicious sweetness. We’ll also have onions, eggplant, tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, summer squash/zucchini (some of these may be on the larger size [good for zucchini noodles] since we missed our Friday harvest due to harvesting the garlic), cucumbers, string beans, kohlrabi, and a few other odds and ends.
Produce Usage Ideas
I have to say that our Facebook Group is quite active and seems to be a good place to find new ideas on how to use your produce. Here are a few samples:
Here is a list of 22 uses for zucchini! http://www.eatingwell.com/gallery/7827976/shredded-zucchini-recipes/
Who doesn’t like garlic and Parmesan? The only thing that makes this better is it uses eggplants! https://www.crunchycreamysweet.com/baked-eggplant/
Sticking with the Parmesan theme, how about Parmesan zucchini curly fries? https://www.healthy-holistic-living.com/baked-parmesan-zucchini-curly-fries-recipe/
Finally here is a recipe using zucchini and corn! https://pinchofyum.com/sweet-corn-zucchini-pie
Hopefully these will inspire you to continue to eat all the zucchini we give you. If you have recipe ideas you’d like to share but don’t do Facebook (I hear ya sister!) feel free to email them to me and I will put them in a future newsletter.
As always, this newsletter is entirely too long. So if you have any questions, comments, suggestions (MAKE THE NEWSLETTER SHORTER CHRIS!), jokes, brain teasers, etc. do not hesitate to send them my way!