How to Freeze French Fillet Green Beans

There is nothing more delicious than freshly frozen green beans on a frosty winter day (except maybe the fresh ones). I especially like the french fillet bean variety we use, which are long, pencil thin and never have any strings.

This post is about how to freeze these delicious morsels. It is really quite easy.

How to Make Your Community One of the Most Fertile Places in the World

In yesterday's post we said fertility from a home perspective is the ability to sustain life, to prosper, to achieve and to be a place of refuge. We can all work towards these goals in our families, but it is only when we make them part of the communities we live in that our communities become a "fertile place".

Here is a list of 10 things that make our communities a fertile place...

Home, One of the Most Fertile Places in the World

The idea of fertility is the ability to reproduce and sustain life. Being able to produce abundant growth or crops. The home on our farm has been a good place to grow children. Fertile places support strong families and grow strong children.

Here are 10 ideas for how your home can grow a strong family and strong children.

The Most Fertile Place in the World

When you think about the most fertile place in the world you might think of:

1. The Amazon Rain Forest.
2. The Mississippi river delta.
3. A virgin prairie.
4. The Garden of Eden

All would be a good guess and would make my top ten list.

But when I think about the most fertile place in the world I think of...

Focus on Being Your Farmer

You know the organization with the name and radio show called "Focus on the Family". Whether you agreed with everything they do or not, you at least know their focus. Farming is like that, you need to know your focus.

About 90 percent of farmers today have no idea who their customer is. Even the language they use supports this. Listen to the lingo, "Farmer Jim sells his commodity corn to the local elevator who piles it in a million bushel pile until it is loaded on trains and then barges to go to a bulk processing plant run by computers who belong to a faceless mega corporation. They turn his corn into feed stock for making plastic bags, or ethanol or one of 1000 other things." Farmer Jim is doing a great job for who? Who knows.

Our slogan is "We want to be your farmer!"

You mean you want to be everyone in the whole world's farmer? I wish that were possible, I would definitely do some things differently, but that is not what our slogan says. Let me explain...

Willing to be Weird...No Fear, Only Wonder

I have talked about being weird in our previous posts. A worldview of principled non-conformity is essential to advancing the leading edge of any field.

Agriculture is replete with farmers that conform to the status quo. They never achieve any more than their farmer buddies that drink coffee at the "round table" in the town cafe every morning. There is nothing wrong about that, except you will not stand out, you will never leave the boundaries of the tribe, you will not be weird!

Here are 10 principles for being weird, whether you are a farmer or not.

Market Menu July, 26, 2014

After a nice shower last night it was a nice morning to get our market prep started. The garlic is starting, finally, it is about three weeks later, than normal.

 

Jenna's guest post on chocolate mint hints, tips and recipes can be seen to the right.

We sold out an hour early on Walla Walla onions last week so we are going to bring another 100 lb mores this week. Reed won "best of show' at the Olmsted county fair this week with these same onions. They are beautiful, and have amazing mild flavor. For those that like things a little zippier, we have chipolini onnions and sweet red onions.

Time to freeze or can beans. We will have seven bushels of these amazing french filet beans.

We will have raspberries for freezing or jam this week too.

Reed has been diligently making charcoal from waste wood around the farm. We will have 50 pounds available. I wrote a series of posts this week for an explanation of why we are making charcoal and the exciting possibilities for the farm.

We will have the following items at the Farmers Market for Saturday, July 26, 2014 (New items are in Bold Print)

A Servant's Heart

Service is at the core of our farm and business philosophy.

Service permeates all that we do.

It gets a little personal, but here is our top ten list of how we serve:

Commitment to Quality

Quality on our vegetable farm starts with the soil.

When we moved to our farm about 12 years ago the farm had been farmed conventionally with corn and beans. Nothing unusual about that, the farm had not been abused, it wasn't over grown to weeds or highly eroded. I'm sure they had been using the typical agricultural chemicals, fertilizers and GMO corn and bean varieties. We had good soil types to work with. The soil types were, way better in fact than at our previous home where the top soil had been sold and all that was left was red clay (we rebuilt this soil with compost over 7 years and when we were done it was some of the best soil I have ever seen).

However, the soil on our new farm was "biologically DEAD". Maybe It would be more politically correct to say the soil was biologically suppressed, the biology was there it was just sleeping and had to be awakened.

So what to do?

Value to Our Customers

I think of customer value as the ability to delight our customers with everything we do.

The value proposition for great vegetables goes far beyond price.

Value embraces nutrition, flavor, convenience, purity and how our customers feel about their market experience, and more.

Let's explore some of the attributes of value...