Market Menu for August 30

500 heirloom tomato plants are in full production this week. They are beauties. We will start offering tomatoes for canning this week

Our goal is a bushel of candy carrots every week until spring. We have a double electric fence around all the carrot patches to keep out the deer. It is kinda like guarding Fort Knox. Reed is the e-fence expert. He puts in the fence posts will the i-post driver.

This will likely be our last week of sweet corn. It is delicious.

Baby Zucchini available throughout the summer. Photo Credit: Reed Petersen

Reed took this colorful picture of our table of baby zucchini this last week. It was a patchwork quilt of green and gold. We will have hundreds of boxes of these delightful baby vegetables every week.

On Friday we carefully remove the squash blossoms from the zucchini. Squash blossoms remain a favorite at our market stand. Brian's post on 10 ways to use squash blossoms is the ultimate guide to this delicate taste of summer. You will never find these in the grocery store because they must be harvested and used fresh.


We will have the following items at the Farmers Market for Saturday, August 23, 2014 (New items are in Bold Print)

Baby Zucchini Squash with Salmon in Alfredo Rosa

Salmon is our favorite fish. We has some left over from the meal we had the evening before Jenna left for college. We combined the left over fish with Alfredo sauce, heirloom tomatoes and baby yellow zucchini. Add pasta to combionnation.

Market Menu for Saturday, August 23, 2014

Sweeeeeet Corn and Candy Carrots the twin pillars of our summer table. We had a few hundred ears last week that sold out quickly. We had a family that buy 6 dozen ears directly from the farm to do some freezing. The wife said they didn't find a single bug in the whole batch, which is pretty good for corn grown organically with no sprays. We move the corn to a different field every year, which keeps the insects guessing. This coupled with a very severe winter means no bugs, we also had no Colorado potato beetles this year.

Our goal is a bushel of candy carrots every week until spring. We have a double electric fence around all the carrot patches to keep out the deer. It is kinda like guarding Fort Knox. Reed is the e-fence expert. He puts in the fence posts will the i-post driver.

Beautiful heirloom tomatoes are ripening at an accelerating rate. We have all been waiting with great anticipation for the field grown, vine ripened, and delicious gems of August.  We will have about 50 pounds this week and more to come.

Baby Zucchini available throughout the summer. Photo Credit: Reed Petersen

Reed took this colorful picture of our table of baby zucchini this last week. It was a patchwork quilt of green and gold. We will have hundreds of boxes of these delightful baby vegetables every week.

On Friday we carefully remove the squash blossoms from the zucchini. Squash blossoms remain a favorite at our market stand. Brian's post on 10 ways to use squash blossoms is the ultimate guide to this delicate taste of summer. You will never find these in the grocery store because they must be harvested and used fresh.

The basil is really doing well and we have been offering the gallon bags for the same price as lettuce this week.  Here is a post on 10 ways to use fresh basil.

We will have the following items at the Farmers Market for Saturday, August 23, 2014 (New items are in Bold Print)

Green Beans, Patty Pan Squash and Rotini Pasta

Green beans and patty pan squash might seem like an unlikely combination but they are great when combined with pasta.

Here is the recipe...

A Rainy Day Playground

In honor of all the rain this week, here is a story from when we were young.

A haymow is a place in the barn where the hay is stored. Hay is well... hay. A mow is a cavern or open space in the barn. On a rainy day most any time of the year when I was growing up we would often seek refuge from the weather by playing in the attic of the barn called a haymow.

There were ooodles of things you could do. One of my favorite was...

Super Soil, Super Food - A Land Stewardship Project Guest Post

 I recently wrote a guest post for the Land Stewardship Project. Lisa and I took a course from them 12 years ago called Farm Beginnings. If you are looking to engage in farming at any level I would highly recommend it. We have maintained a relationship the Land Stewardship Project team over the last decade and appreciate the chance to give back to them for the investment they made in our farming endeavors. Brian will write occasional articles about our farm journey.

The post follows or you can find more information on their web site.

Market Menu for August 16, 2014

We are starting our late summer carrots this week. Yes, you guessed it. These are amazing CANDY CARROTS. We will have a bushel this week and every week. If you haven't tried these you don't know what real carrots taste like. Check it out.

Beautiful heirloom tomatoes are ripening at an accelerating rate. We have all been waiting with great anticipation for the field grown, vine ripened, and delicious gems of August. Well they are here, we will steadily build our tomato repertoire over the next few weeks. We planted some heirloom tomatoes about 8 weeks before the cherry tomatoes so we are leading with those for the season. The cheery cherries are also starting this week. 

Beautiful raspberries! Credit: Reed Petersen

Tomatillos are gaining momentum. We will have about 15 pounds this week and more to come.

Time to freeze or can beans. We will have 4 bushels of the amazing french fillet beans this week. See Brian's post on how to freeze beans.

Our second crop of baby red and Yukon gold potatoes is in full swing.

Squash blossoms remain a favorite at our market stand. Brian's post on 10 ways to use squash blossoms remains a perennial favorite.

The basil is really doing well and we will start to offer the gallon bags for the same price as lettuce this week.  Here is a post on 10 ways to use fresh basil.

We will have the following items at the Farmers Market for Saturday, August 16, 2014 (New items are in Bold Print)

Mentonymy

It has been a while since we have explored an uncommon vocabulary word. Mentonymy is a figure of speech in which a thing or concept is called not by its name but rather by the name of something associated in meaning with that thing or concept.

For example, "Wall Street" is used as a metonymously to describe the US financial and corporate sector and "Hollywood" is used as a metonym for the US film industry.

Let's look at some mentonymy examples from the farm.

Date Night Movie -The Hundred-Foot Journey

Lisa and I went to a movie for our date night this week. We don't usually pick that venue for date night as we find it is better to do something where we can talk. I also don't usually do movie reviews on our blog. But I'm going to make an exception for this one.

I had seen a trailer at another movie a month or so ago and this looked like something Lisa and I would both enjoy. Turns out it was an excellent movie. Great themes. Very uplifting. No profanity. No violence. No sex.

Here are five reasons you might like this movie...

Diversity on the Farm

We grow over 75 varieties of vegetables on our farm. From an agricultural stand point that is diversity at its finest. Is that the real diversity on our farm or does diversity run much deeper?

Lets explore true diversity on our farm.