First Farmer in the Field in Benson County

As winter receeds and snow melts, farmers across Benson County ready equipment and feel the need to scratch the itch to get to work.  But one farmer has already tilled and will plant today.  On the first of May 2013, gardendwellers FARM tilled, raked, and are ready for seeding on the 2nd.

Headlines like that will get you attention where we live.  All over the county farmers are receiving deliveries of seed, preparing their equipment and waiting, waiting, and waiting for the fields to dry so they can till and plant their already late crops.  Being the first in the field is an advantage.  It's an advantage over your neighbors and kind of like being the one to have the first ripe tomato of the season, a reason for glory and local heroism.  Well maybe just a little good natured ribbing.

Yes, its true.  We tilled yesterday.  While snow still lay on our fields and run-off filled the eastern half of our planting beds, the soil inside the high tunnel was warm and dry.  The site we chose for the high tunnel is high in organic matter and fluffs up nicely when tilled.  It's been warm in there for at least three weeks with good soil temperatures but the night time temps have kept us from planting our most important crop, basil.  The basil really doesn't like night time temps below 45 or so.  The high tunnel will only provide about 8 degrees of additional heat and an extra row cover over sensitive seedlings an additional one or two.  We had night time temperatures in the mid to low 20's at night up until now so we have been waiting for a little more warmth before seeding. 

Now, I know, all of you 'regular' farmers out there are saying "sure, but they're not really farmers".  I tend to disagree.  A farmer - according to the USDA's FSA is someone who grows a crop for sale.  We do that.  Our crops, although unconventional, are crops.  We tend them in the same way any other farmer would.  We till, plow, rake, seed, cultivate and harvest.  Oh, and we sell - we sell a lot.  Our harvest comes all summer long instead of just in August or September. Our equipment is smaller. We apply for farm programs and follow the markets just like 'regular' farmers.  The commodities market, yes there is one for herbs, helps us determine what to charge for our product.  We are a farm, in every respect.  We're even getting a few laying hens next week!

So here we are, waiting for 55 days, the time it takes from seed to harvest on basil, before we can begin our harvest season in earnest.  In the meantime, we're glad to see the snow receed on the outdoor fields and our mulched perennial herbs are appearing more and more every day.   Once the sun hits them, it won't be long before the chives, sage, Greek oregano, thyme, tarragon, and savory are up and growing well.  As soon as the field is tillable the parsley will get seeded.

In looking back at our log books we have seeded basil in the high tunnel as early as April 18th in 2010 and as late as May 6th in 2011.  The parsley is usually long since planted so for us this will be late.  Hopefully the warm weather will speed it up a bit.

I look forward to seeing all of our farmer friends as they begin to work the soil around our farm.  Your big tractors are a welcome sight.  Here's hoping for a good harvest this year for us all!

What to do when it snows, AGAIN...

March came in like a lion and what do you do on Lion days when you're gardendwellers FARM?  You cook!

During our last snowstorm, about a week ago, I busied myself with making home made soup and bread.  I made my favorite stand by, Venison Mushroom Barley.  Since the weather man insists on predicting snow for tomorrow and cold weather this weekend, I thought it might be a good time to share my recipe.

First, I have to say that I've made this soup so often that the recipe is kind of more like a 'guideline' than a cast in stone commandment.  But here goes:

First, choose some good venison.  I use a roast and then cut it into one inch chunks.  After years of processing our own deer, the guys have learned that I prefer to have some packages of chunks to use in soup and stew and stir fry so now I always have bags ready for just such an occasion.  I thaw the meat then put it into our own marinade.  This is Barry's own made up by  him recipe and I most likely shouldn't share it but I'm going to: one tablespoon Lowry's Seasoning Salt, one tablespoon Steak dust - any brand, one teaspoon mesquite seasoning and a few jiggers of Worcestershire sauce in about one cup of water or enough water to cover the meat.  Let that marinade in the fridge overnight or for 6 hours or so.

Then, brown the meat. 

While the meat is browning, chop up carrots, onions, and celery.  I like to chop about a cup to cup and a half of each with the exception of carrots which Barry doesn't like cooked so I chop just enough of those to add some color - you could do a cup or so.  I put these veggies in my soup pot with a big daub of butter (about two tablespoons) and let them saute until slightly tender.

Then I chop up two containers of mushrooms.  I just use the button or shitake mushrooms but when I can and when I have them, I use the winecap mushrooms we grow here on the farm.

Then I chop up some garlic.  I like garlic so normally I use at least three cloves but for this batch I had to use up the last of the North Star Organic farm garlic from last year - pretty sad that its all gone but looking forward to buying more this summer.  You can see the variety I like best is Fire.

I add the mushrooms and the garlic to the sauteing veggies and let them cook another 2 to 3 minutes more then add the stock - one box of each beef and chicken...

Then I add the winter savory.  You'd think as an herb farm I'd have this fabulous spice rack and spice cupboard - but its not true.  I keep a lot of my dried herbs in resealable plastic bags.  That way I can keep them as whole as possible until I use them and the added benefit is that you can just kind of crush the bag to remove them from the stems and then reach in to the bottom of the bag to get the herb leaves.

Winter savory has a little peppery flavor that goes well with the venison and veggies and it also has that strong, warm, comfort food feel to it.  Again, I don't measure, I just add a lot because I know we like it.  If I had to guess I'd say about two tablespoons of the dried winter savory.

I stir that all up then add the meat back in and finally I add a little salt and the barley.  About a cup of dry barley goes in because I like barley.

Here comes the best part.  Let all this sit and simmer for an hour or more.  It fills the house with this great smell and you'll find the whole family sneaking in for a nibble every once in a while.

While that simmers I bake off the bread that has been rising all day.  That also made the house smell great.

I made two baguettes as I like a crusty bread with soup.

That's it!  My favorite winter time, stuck in the house cause its snowing outside activity.  Enough to be shared with everyone!  It always amazes me when I can eat venison that tastes this good that some hunters make their whole deer into sausage - what a waste! 

So this weekend, if we get more snow and you end up inside - do a little cooking.  It's good for the heart.

February Funk

I’ve had it in the back of my mind that I needed to get blogging more lately and last week I had a meeting with someone and she said “Oh, I read your blog”.  I guess that spurred me into the realization that I don’t just do this to waste a little time on my typing skills and have a few moments of retrospect, there really are people out there who read our blog. 

So here I am, in the middle of the February Funk trying to think of something upbeat and exciting to write about gardendwellers FARM.  We do have little rosemary seeds in their trays and we’re anxiously awaiting some form of life to show itself but even this puts us in a little funk as usually we have been getting our rosemary as plugs and this year it seems our ‘supplier cannot provide them’.  We have had some of the best looking rosemary from plugs and when we’ve tried seed in the past we have had nowhere near the same quality. 

Planning for this upcoming year has been fun as we are adding lemon balm back into the mix.  After years of growing it and having no one buy it – last year we actually had requests so back into the rotation it goes.  We ordered a few more fruit trees for the orchard and we’ll be trialing some basil and cilantro seeds for Prairie Road Organic Seed Company http://www.prairieroadorganic.co/Prairie_Road_Organic_Seed/Welcome.html  this summer and we’re excited about that as well.  The new labels with the new farm address have been ordered and should be here soon and Barry is going to MN later this month and will bring back a load of containers for the grocery store herbs. 

All of this garden fun aside, its been hell here the last few weeks.  Winter has really gotten into our bones and the February Funk seems to be here to stay for a little while.  Sixty below wind chills recently shredded the high tunnel of a fellow producer in Antler, ND so we know all too well what wind and extreme cold does to plastic and every day I watch the high tunnel and hold my breath. 

 Another plastic that has me in the doldrums is my mittens.  Let me explain.

I’ve had this great pair of mittens my best friend made me over 15 years ago.  I use them every day.  They are warm and snug,  just the right size and comfortable.  In this very cold spell we’ve been having its typical for us to gather in the shop around the wood stove in between doing chores outside.  I had been out for an extra-long time with the barn dog and my hands and mittens were really cold.  I took them off and without thinking laid them on the wood stove.  You guessed it – they immediately melted.  Yes folks, its true, fleece is made out of recycled milk cartons and plastic.  Now my favorite mittens are stiff, hard and mostly bare of any material that would keep me warm.

 

  I know I could go upstairs and just pick out one of the many pairs of wool mittens I have made in the past and keep in the cupboard for just such an occasion but I’m sure that part of what kept me warm in my favorite mittens was the love sewn in by my best friend. 

The electric bill came the other day and put Barry into spasms.  Following the spasms came the mad dash around the house to turn off everything electric that wasn’t absolutely necessary and the scramble to add more layers of clothes as he turned down the heat.   I kept my office door shut so he wouldn’t notice under the desk. 

The cold winter has brought extra pounds on our bodies, short tempers and low spirits. 

We’ve been doing the best we can to get outside even in the wind and snow and forty below.  Of course we have the new barn dog and that makes trips outside necessary at least every four hours during the day.  Poor baby.  Her outings have been much briefer than she would prefer due to the cold.  She LOVES the snow.  She was built for it, stocky and thick with a heavy coat that keeps out all kinds of cold and sheds the snow like crazy. 

 

 

 

She and Ida have been attending obedience school in Minot on Wednesday nights.  Just another way we have been trying to get out of the house for activity.  The class is taught by an old school friend of mine Carrie Bush - http://www.ambushkennels.com/ .  Carrie is a great teacher and so far the barn dog Millie is doing better in class than we thought she might and Ida, the trained dog who is three successes short of her excellent rally title is the one who just can’t seem to pay attention. 

To hold back the Funk I’ve been trying to complete all the ‘art’ projects I had lined up for this winter.  The Paverpol fish are now complete and I have to say I’m pleased, although I was hoping to have enough Paverpol to do three fish and only got two.

We also made the decorations out of barbed wire that I’ve been dying to try.  The tree didn’t come out like I planned but its OK and you can still tell it’s a tree and the cone flower came out good enough to give it to my friend Lorrie for her birthday so we’ll count that one as a success.  You know you’re desperate for something to do when you and your hubby spend the afternoon bending old rusty barbed wire into shapes. 

The new quilt to snuggling on the couch is not done.  It has been attempted and put away too many times to count.  Our old quilt, sewn for us by my mother when we first married almost 30 years ago, has given up the fight and let dry rot and use tatter it to pieces.  Ida still thinks it’s ‘the bomb’ but every time Barry and I try to snuggle we hear the all familiar sound of fabric running for its life and giving up the race at the end of the seam. 

After finally getting the top all sewn together (and mind you this is not complicated quilt pattern, just 9 inch squares sewn in rows) I put the top and back into the wash to pre-shrink before sewing them together.  I felt I was on a roll so I went right into ironing them only to find that many of the squares had raveled away so much that some of the seams were at the breaking point.  It got put away that day.  My friend Janet at Simple Threads in Bottineau, http://www.simplethreads.net/  gave me some suggestions on how to fix it so yesterday Barry and I set out to finish the darn thing.  We fixed all the raveled seams and ironed it all nice and flat, laid the top, bottom and stuffing out on the floor and got everything all even and smooth.  Barry helped hold the weight of the blanket as I sewed the final edge seam and then we went to turn it right side out only to find we had put the pieces together in the wrong order and the back was on the inside and stuffing was on the outside.  More than a few choice words were said, I think a few door slams were involved and definitely a trip outside with the barn dog to cool off ensued.  G_d bless my wonderful hubby though who cooled off faster than I did and had it all taken apart and laid out in the right order by the time I returned.  We’ll attempt the final stiches today, Lord grant us patience….

 

After the quilt is done its time to move onto the rocks…ahh yes rocks.  How bad do you think I’ll mess up the rocks?

 

 

A New Way of Thinking

Otherwise entitled ‘Why the Basil determines our season’

It’s October 24^th and by my calculations we’ve had 10 nights of freezing weather, not just frost, freeze.  We're also to a point where there are only a little over 10 short hours of sunlight a day. Monday I went out with the camera and snapped a few shots of what is still usable in the field.  You’ll have to excuse the fact that some of the photos are blurry, if you will remember – Monday was REALLY windy.  I promise – every photo on this page was taken Monday, October 22^nd 2012.

As you can see, the sage has taken on its winter color but all in all is still very usable.

The Thyme too is usable.  As I’ve written in our hints and tips before, Thyme is an evergreen and if you could find it under the snow in winter, you could still use it so it is not surprising that it’s still doing well.  It is a little short as we cut it way back in preparation for winter.  Next spring we want to be cutting fresh new growth from the Thyme and not having to pick out the woody older growth when we harvest so we cut it down to about an inch in the fall.

The Oregano’s and the Marjoram are showing a little red around the edge, signs that it has been cold, but they too are hanging in there just waiting for me to make spaghetti or gyro’s.

Greek Oregano

Italian Oregano

Marjoram

Fresh picked Rosemary went well in our venison steak sandwiches last night.

And this weekend when I am planning on having a guest in the house, I’m hoping to find a way to use some of this Cilantro.

A testiment to the fact that cilantro is a cold weather plant is below - this is a whole row of it next to a row of dill:

With the cold weather, there’s been a lot of soup being made at our house and the Parsley is always better fresh out of the field.  Chives go well in soup too and Winter Savory is my absolute favorite in potato soup!

Italian Flat Parsley

We mow down the Parsley each fall instead of pulling it out.  Then in the spring we just till it and the roots back into the soil.  It helps to add organic matter to the soil and Parsley is pretty disease and pest free so this is one kind of garden debris I don’t worry about leaving.  Although this year I did have Boy leave a couple standing for us to use.

Winter Savory

The Chives might be laying down on the job a little but still worthy of a good soup!

The stores already have Christmas items out and we’ve been having more hot chocolate at our house.  What goes good with holiday baking and hot chocolate?  Mint!  Our spearmint and peppermint are still green and full of flavor.

Spearmint

Our spearmint and Peppermint beds.

Don’t tell John at 10 North Main, but the Tarragon is still doing exceptionally well and looks wonderful!

 

Which leads me to the other title for this article.  This Tarragon looks spectacular (after more than 10 freezing nights) next to the very sad, very dead, rows of Genovese Basil we have yet to pull out to its left.  Basil loves loves loves the heat.  It begins to look sickly when nighttime temps go into the 40’s and one night in the 30’s practically makes it die right then and there.  Basil makes up the majority of our sales.  If we take Basil out of the equation, we may not make enough to cover costs of labor, transportation, packaging, etc.  Also, without the Basil, our grocery stores would rather go back to their ‘winter’ suppliers as ordering half of what they need from us and half from them is a hassle and quite frankly ticks off the other guys.  So, even though we still have a nice variety of herbs that look great, we just can’t continue to deliver to our customers once the Basil is done.

Also – now back to the real title – I post this topic to try and get people to understand that we CAN lengthen our season.  We are so trained to think that once that first killing frost has come, the garden is done for the year.  I think these photos prove it is not – and does not have to be.  I does require a change in eating habits and in gardening habits and a total revamping of thought.  What it takes is for us to switch from a ‘grow it’ mentality to a ‘harvest it’ mentality.

I wish the industry would quit calling it ‘fall planting’ as what it really is in our area is summer planting.  There will be some items that you need to plant in July or early August, still summer to me, to ensure they are large enough once the shorter days and cold weather hit.  The goal is to have them at just the right stage for picking before we begin to have temperatures too cold for them to grow and days so short they have very little sun.

By calling it ‘fall planted’ vegetables or a ‘fall planted’ garden, the industry does gardeners no favors either.  With those kinds of terms, most people wait until ‘fall’ to try and plant these things.  That might work in Tennessee but not in North Dakota.  So let’s all begin to think of it as late summer planting for early winter harvest.  We also have to stop thinking about it as ‘winter growing’, another term used by the industry.  Let’s not kid ourselves; the only things that grow in ND in the winter are the snow banks, men’s beards, and our eagerness for spring.  It’s not winter growing or winter gardening unless it is indoors.  It is winter harvesting, or fall harvesting.

To successfully have garden fresh items well after the first, second or even third killing frosts, you have to think of it as growing it earlier to harvest it later.  There are many things, including the herbs I’ve pictured here, spinach, mache’, kale, chard, carrots, rutabagas, beets, salsify and more that can take the frost and still be fine.  The key is to plant these items while there are plenty of warm days left.  Root crops can be left in the ground until the ground is frozen, this cooling and hardening off period actually makes them better tasting!  Some greens can literally freeze overnight, thaw with the sun and warmer temperatures of daytime and be ready to use again for lunch.

Carrots from our raised kitchen garden, just think – all these carrots from two six foot rows along the edges of our raised bed.  We like the little ones for fresh eating, the big ones for soup and the middle sized ones for salads.

So this year when the  seed catalogs arrive in our mailboxes, let’s start by making TWO lists.  One for seeds we will plant right away in the spring and the other list will be our ‘summer’ garden for ‘winter’ harvest!

Catching up

It's time to play catch up.  I know that I promised myself, and you, in May that I would write a blog post every week and I know that I haven't done that - not even close.  When you are trying to run an herb farm with wholesale deliveries, farmers markets to prepare for and sell at, CSA shareholders to tend to, weeding, watering, building in a new location AND another full time job on top of it - well,  let's just say it gets busy. 

So here's an update.  It has been Basil city - Basil CRAZY  - around here lately.  Poor Amber, our summer employee has thought she might never get out of the basil rows.  The first succession of Basil is getting tired.  It really didn't like those cool nights and heavy morning dews we had for a while and all of the picking has taken its toll.

Although it looks tall and wonderful - 24 inches tall now - a closer examination shows that there isn't a lot of the high quality stuff we sell left in there...

See the brown spots and the little holes - I call this ugly basil and I don't like picking it.

The second succession is looking good and although it didn't like the cold and dewey mornings either, we're still able to pick from it with success.  The third succession shown below went into a funk and didn't grow any when we had those really hot days - of course it would have helped if we had watered it a bit more, so it's not quite ready for picking.  We have begun to water it more and if Mother Nature holds off on sending in Jack Frost, hopefully we'll get to pick from it in a few weeks.

 

 

The Lemon Basil looks good - it always looks good.  It seems that 'Mrs. Burns' is a harder worker than 'Genovese' and takes the cool night weather better.  We could get by with just one planting of Lemon Basil but we always do at least two and that's more than plenty.

 

 

 

The first succession of Dill and Cilantro are also tired.  They've been pushed and pushed harder than any little plant should be.  You can see them starting to form seeds and flowers.  While we normally would just pull them out, we've had such a high amount of requests for pickling Dill, we've decided to let the Dill heads go and we'll try to fill some of those requests.

 

 

 



Barry has been pouring the water to our final succession of Dill and Cilantro trying to coax it into readiness. It seems reluctant but we're hoping by next week we'll have some fresh stuff for everyone.

Overall the whole field still looks pretty good.  With TDH's new toy, the PlotMaster, we've been able to keep all weeds in check and have less maintenance to do than we did in our last location - which only leaves more time to do other things, like pack for shareholders, contact new customers and work on completion of the wash/pack facility.  Which by the way, TDH put a window in there the other day - just my height - hooray!  The windows in our last wash/pack were too high for me to look out of!

That really tall stuff is the fennel - monstrous isn't it?

I'd like to say that I'll be better and next week I'll do a blog post again, but I hate to promise something I can't deliver.  Next week we're hoping to turn this...

Into this...

Minus the snow built up on the outside, TDH's large coat and of course with the solid end walls installed again.  That means busy, busy, busy.  Right now, I have to head out and pick Lemon Basil and Parsley for tomorrow's farmers market and Tarragon, Sage, and Mint for our shareholders.  All the while I'll be dreaming of the day when I can again say I have a clean house and a stocked pantry.
Chow!