Time for Planting

Before we know it the market season will be here, right now it is time for planting and to prepare for this growing season.  I have already gotten a few things in the ground and very soon (hopefully this coming week) I will be planting most of my cold weather crops.  Of course all this rain that we got yesterday does not help planting.  I know everything seemed pretty waterlogged yesterday.

 

It is a little hard to see from this picture but past my truck and the apple tree is my garden at home, in which I plant all my lettuce.  I have not planted my lettuce yet but will be very, very soon, or at least I hope, everything depends on the weather.

 

Greens in my hoop-house that will be planted outside, and will be cut and sold in bunches.

It is hard to believe that Valley City Farmers Market should be starting in less that 2 months.  I will post the exact date that is will be starting as soon as I find out.

Wishing Spring Were Here

It is right about this time every year that I start to get eager for the new planting season to be here.  I have got most of my seed orders together, of course every day I sit down to look them over, start looking at more things, and then start adding more to my orders.  Which is bad, I need to just send them in already! 

I already have some onions, leeks, strawberries, and herbs started inside under lights.  And within the next couple of weeks I will be starting some early peppers and tomatoes.  Also if I decide to grow eggplant I will have to start them.  I am not sure if I want to give the eggplant a shot again this year.  I have grown beautiful eggplant in the past, but the last couple of years I have had absolutely no luck, I may need a break from it for awhile.  It is still a toss up, because I have enough of seeds left over from previous years that I could give it a shot with out having to buy any seeds, but we will see.

Now that I am almost done with my seed orders I am going to have to get together a list of what I am planning on growing this year to post here.  In the meantime here are just some things that I have planned:

~ Yard Long Beans - Both red and green
~ Lots of Dragon Tongue Beans - Which everyone at the market seemed to love last year
~ I am debating on planting dry beans - kidney, garbanzo, and black
~ I have a good wide selection of winter squash and pumpkins picked out for this years planting
~ I am also debating on growing peanuts
~ I have some cool new varieties of kale, mustards, and collards that I am planning on growing
~ Lots and lots of herbs - I plan to have many types of herbs available both fresh and dried

Those are just some of the things that I am really excited about, like I said I will try to get the full list together very soon.

New Recipes Added

I just added a few new recipes to the recipe page.  All three recipes are ones that I used for Thanksgiving.

The new recipes are:
Sweet Potato Cornbread
Mashed Turnips and Potatoes with Bacon
Turnip, Carrot, Cabbage Slaw

So don't forget to check them out.  Here is a link to the Recipe Page.

Homemade Turkey Stock

A few days after Thanksgiving I made some homemade turkey stock.  If you have a pressure canner, it is really pretty simple, and does not really take as long to make as I thought it would.  I followed the instructions on the National Center for Home Food Preservation site.  You can check it out Here. 

Basically what I did was place the turkey carcass with most of the meat removed in a large pot covered it with water and added about 4 stems of my celery (cut up) and about 4 or 5 medium size carrots (cup up) to the pot.  I boiled it for about 1 hour, until the meat could easily be removed from the bones.  Then I removed the meat and added back into the pot with the broth.  Then filled the jars with broth along with the meat and veggies, and filled within 1" from the top.  Then pressure canned it for 25 minutes.  In the end I ended up with 12 pint jars of turkey broth.

 Homemade Turkey Broth

So the other day I used the first jar of turkey broth and made some rice.  Here is what I used:

1 pint jar of turkey broth (about 1 1/2 cups broth, I used the meat and veggies from in the broth also)

1 1/2 cups water

2 tbls. butter

2 cups white rice

4 or 5 medium size turnips (skinned and cut into cubes)

I mixed everything together in the pot and cooked it according to the package directions.  When it was done I added a little more butter and some salt, and I think it came out pretty good.

Thanksgiving

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving.  I always love Thanksgiving because I love being able to cook up a large variety of my vegetables all on one day for one meal.  For Thanksgiving I only cook up sides that contain my veggies.  The only thing that is not mine is the turkey.  So of course I had to take pictures of my Thanksgiving meal to share with everyone.

 Mashed Potatoes and Turnips

Turnip, Carrot, and Cabbage Slaw

Spaghetti Squash with garlic and butter

Sweet Corn

 

Dragon Tongue Beans

Pumpkin Bread Stuffing

Sweet Potato Cornbread

Salad with Lettuce, Kale and Mustard Greens.

Not the best picture of our turkey since my dad started cutting it before I got to take the picture, but I think it was a really good turkey.  I got the turkey from Plum Creek Farm in Valley City, and I will plan to get a turkey from them again next year.  Plum Creek Farm on Local Harvest

Our table decorated with gourds and winter squash.

The crazy thing is the turkey was done way earlier than I had expected so I did not get to cook up all the sides that I had intended to make.  I did not even get to use my beets and other winter squashes.  Oh well, for the four of us I think we had enough food.

I also forgot to take a picture but we also made some homemade pumpkin pie, made out of real pumpkin.

Mix Your Own Cherry Tomato Containers

I started something new this year with my cherry tomatoes, instead of just having the cherry tomatoes premixed in containers I decided to let customers choose which varieties of cherry tomatoes they wanted to fill their containers with.

 

We have over 15 different varieties of cherry tomatoes, and are available in many different colors and sizes.  We have red, orange, yellow, green, pink, purple, brown, and striped tomatoes.  Also available are pear tomatoes, which are shaped like a pear but are the size of a cherry tomato, we have yellow pear, red pear, ivory pear, and purple pear tomatoes.

Since we did not have a frost on Monday morning like they were saying we could, we should be able to have our cherry tomatoes available for at least one more week.  And if the first frost will hold off for awhile we may be able to keep picking them even longer.  It basically all comes down to the weather as far as how much longer we should have tomatoes for.

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Here are a few more pictures that I took the other day around the farm.

 

One of many many gourds that I will be picking very very soon.

 

A whole bunch of gourds.

 

Some may be hard to see but there were quite a few gourds in this one area.  The bigger green ones are bird house gourds.

Just to let everyone know pumpkins, winter squash and gourds are going to be coming to the market this next weekend, and I will be continuing to pick more over the next couple of weeks.

Special Guests at Market

Tomorrow my parents are going to be lucky enough to have two very special guests join them at market.
Mr. and Mrs. Pepper.