Sunday, July 29, 2007

2/3 of Our Kids


Here's another post that's only nebulously farm related.

This is Reghan, on her fifth birthday (7/19/07), with 2 year old Conlan. Standing on the coffee table. Reg's sporting her new Ramones (she says "Ree-mones") t-shirt. And sort of looking a lot like Johnny.

Friday, July 27, 2007

Zach + Kanye

This just needed to be posted. It's sort of farm-related and it features a friend of ours. Cover your ears for the profane parts, if that sort of thing bothers you.

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Garlic Harvest...A Retrospective


I spent a lot of time last winter wondering to myself how on earth I was going to get a full quarter-acre of garlic out of the ground this season. Certainly, I wasn't going to be pulling it by hand, the way I did the eighth-acre last year and the 150 bulbs the previous year.

A grower I know in Iowa, Larry Cleverley, he unearths his garlic with an old Ford-Ferguson potato plow. I could try that. No luck finding one, however.

A grower I know in Fond du Lac, Bruce Braun, harvests his with a subsoiler. I found lots of those. Looked at them several times at a few local implements. Never bought one, though.

So there I was, staring at a quarter acre of a dozen varieties of garlic the day my garlic needed to come out of the ground. Holding a spading fork. It worked OK. Next year, though...a plow or something will make it that much easier. My back was killing me. Remind me to buy one before garlic harvest time in '08, n'kay?

Most of the garlic I grew this season was hardneck. 99.993%. Someday, I hope to have maybe 3 hardnecks and at least one softneck that I stick to each year. Enough of this dozen varieties nonsense.


Among the hardnecks, I grew more Killarney Red than anything else. It's a flavorful rocambole. Not mild by any means, but not strong. Textbook garlic flavor, I'd say. Another rocambole I grew a lot of was Chesnok Red. A real beauty, and a little stronger in flavor than Killarney. But again, not overpowering. My third rocambole was Korean Red. This one was interesting, because for some reason, a good percentage of my Korean Red crop this season exhibited softneck traits -- most notably, no topset and a SOFT neck. Weird. Still, this variety is excellent, though a bit on the hot side. But not so hot that you'd think you were eating crappy supermarket garlic or anything like that.


The other hardencks I grew were procelains. Music, which is an Italian heirloom as I understand it, has 4 to 6 large and very easy-to-peel cloves that taste exactly how you'd expect really good garlic to taste. Sort of mild, incredibly flavorful garlic. I think my favorite garlic is German Extra Hardy. It's slightly stronger than Music, and it's also really easy to peel and work with. Giant Siberian is my other porcelain. That one is a tad hot and generally pretty huge.

Some of the others I'm growing out to trial are Spanish Roja, a very popular rocambole; Georgian Fire and Georgian Crystal, one is hot and one is not; Romanian Red, which was quite a tall plant; a Mystery Cultivar, that probably just turned out to be German Extra Hardy; and two softnecks -- Inchelium Red and Tochliavri.

All in all, the harvest took 3 days with me finally forgoing the fork altogether and just pulling the damn things out of the ground, and my dad doing the bunching, tying and labeling. I hung 'em.

In a few weeks (or less), we begin the process of cleaning them for sale. I actually get kind of anal retentive (or perhaps it's OCD) and break out a few toothbrushes to get each bulb nearly sparkly clean.

Back when I still did farmers markets, I had a customer stop by my stand, pick up a bulb of garlic and tell me that it looked too pretty to eat. She thought I'd perhaps gotten it too clean. I told her "but it's food, it's supposed to be clean."

She looked at me as though she'd never thought of garlic that way before. Then proceeded to buy about a dozen heads.

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

It Begins.


Tomato Season. Today. July 24, the year of the lawdy lawd 2007.

This time of year is the reason I started a farm. Sure, I like growing baby leeks and onions and garlic and all that other stuff. But tomatoes. Heirloom tomatoes. This is what I really love.

The tomato you see in the photo above is a Black Cherry. This season I planted over 200 plants of that variety, primarily to grow them out for seed for a company in Maine called Fedco. But I suspect they will make appearances in mix quart cases and on their own in some respects. Especially once I am assured I have at least 1 pound of seed saved from them. Which will take a lot of tomatoes...tiny seeds in those buggers.

They are among my favorites, and not just in comparison to other cherries. However, I would take a single Black Cherry over a case of SunGolds any day.

So anyway. This day officially begins Tomato Season 2007.

Tomato Ordering Season 2007 can't be far behind.