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This is the last week of the season. If you come out next week we will put you to work cleaning up the farm!
What will we have this week?
Lots of things! We have potatoes, winter squash, onions, garlic, shallots, leeks, peppers, spicy salad mix (mesclun), kale, bok choy, cabbage, a few carrots, daikon radishes, a few turnips, lemongrass, BS, and some other things I can’t recall.
The mesclun is a bit on the larger, stronger flavored side. It might be better used for cooking. See the recipe of the week section below for a recipe idea.
The bok choy is a small mini bok choy we tried direct seeding for the first time this season. I like the looks of it. I just wish it germinated better so we could give even more out. We’ll try again next fall and hopefully be a bit more successful!
It is a ‘Shroom week. No other shares besides ‘Shrooms.
Farm News
In farming, the concept of many hand make light work is very apropos. Now not all farm tasks require a lot of labor but there are certain ones where the more people we have the faster the job gets done. The end of the season tasks are where we find a lot of these types of situations.
I was reminded of this when we started taking down the tomato cages. It seems like taking down cages wouldn’t be all that time consuming. You untie the string holding the cross member to the t-posts. Pull out the cross member. Then move the cages to their winter resting place. Finally you pull out the t-posts. It seems like each part of the task would only take a minute or two. So why does it take so long to disassemble and store the tomato cages?
The reason is pretty simple. We have over 300 cages. Taking each one down and moving it to the storage area isn’t a lot of time individually. But doing the math, as you can see, if a given task dealing with a tomato cage takes one minute, the total amount of time for doing that thing with all the tomato cages takes five hours! So we can add a small incremental time change to something and either increase or decrease the time required by literally hours! I don’t think those who don’t work with repetitive tasks quite comprehend how much time small additions require.
Then when we look at the space situation, each tomato cage is a cylinder 20″ in diameter and five feet tall (always good to mix your units when describing objects). Trying to carry them from where we grew the tomatoes to where we store them is difficult. We can carry at most four at a time. So that means we have approximately 80 trips from grow location to storage location. If each round trip takes two minutes the total amount of time walking back and forth is over two and a half hours.
So farmer Chris, why don’t you just pile them all in the back of the pick-up truck and drive them over? Good question! We tried that when we first started using tomato cages and discovered we could fit around 12 cages into the back of the truck. The time it took to load and unload these 12 cages resulted in more time than simply walking them over. The distance isn’t that far so it is just easier to walk them than to load, drive and unload.
Then of course there is the space required to store 300+ tomato cages. We don’t have the indoor space to hold all of them. We don’t want to put them somewhere we’d have to move them again to use that space for something else. So we have an outdoor space we dedicate for their winter hibernation. Storing them outdoors isn’t ideal but they’ve lasted 15 years so far using this approach.
Anyway, we started taking down the cages two weeks ago and still have about five hours of work left to do. Of course we haven’t just been taking down the cages these last two weeks. We still have other tasks like harvesting, washing, packing, delivering, etc. But when Friday rolls around and all the other tasks are done for the week we work on the larger, more time consuming tasks — tomato cage disassembly being one of them.
Recipe of the week
The spicy salad mix is a bit larger and stronger flavored than we prefer to give out for salads. I would recommend using it in a cooked dish — but of course you can still use it fresh if you prefer. Here is one recipe we are going to try tonight. I hope it works out! https://easygfrecipes.com/winter-spring-mix-salad-mesclun-recipe/
You can also try this recipe with either the kale or the spicy salad mix. I think either would be delicious!
Kale Feta Cranberry Salad
Ingredients
- 1 bunch kale chopped/shredded
- 8 oz feta cheese crumbled
- ½ c dried cranberries
- ½ c sliced almonds
- 1 medium apple sliced into bite-size pieces
Dressing
- ½ c olive oil
- ¼ c lemon juice
- 1 clove garlic minced or crushed
- 2 tsp dijon mustard
- ⅛ tsp black pepper
- ½ tsp kosher salt
Instructions
- Wash, stem and chop kale leaves into bite-sized pieces. Add to large bowl.
- Add feta, cranberries, sliced almonds and apple slices to kale.
- Whisk together olive oil, lemon juice, garlic, mustard, salt and pepper.
- Pour dressing over salad and toss to combine.
Notes
Here is a recipe one of our members suggested for when we had arugula. Who’d like to try it with the mesclun? https://www.onceuponachef.com/recipes/arugula-apples-manchego-in-cider-vinaigrette.html
If you are wondering what to do with lemongrass, give this recipe a try. It comes highly recommended from another farm member.
Joke of the Week
Why did the tomato blush?
It saw the salad dressing.
As always, do not hesitate to send in questions, comments, suggestions, recipe ideas, share orders or anything else you thing I’d find interesting or amusing.