Tours, Turnips, and Cow Kisses

This week I got to plant the potatoes I'd cut up on my last visit.  The plan was to plant all 350 pounds of them, but you know what they say about the best laid plans.  Ben and I managed to get the 100 pounds of Red Pontiacs into the ground.  Ordinarily, the pieces would get buried about 2" deep and dug up at harvest.  John and Ben experimented last year with covering the pieces with rolled out straw bales.  It made harvest time much easier, since all they had to do was reroll the bales and pick up the potatoes.  The experiment was deemed successful, and is being repeated.

John gave me an edible tour of the garden, pointing out what's emerging, what's being choked out by weeds that never died over the winter (we never got a freeze here), and what he planted as an experiment in past years.  As we walked around, he plucked various leaves for me to taste.  It is, by far, the best way to tour a garden.  There was lovage that tasted like celery, and salad burnet that tasted like cucumbers.  My mind immediately went to thoughts of a Greek-style pesto.  Since the plan is for the farm to get an inspectable kitchen for pestos and salsas, those thoughts may come to fruition at some point.  My favourite salad snacks of the day were sorrel, which was refreshingly lemony, and African Blue Basil.  I could have munched on the sorrel all day, and I desperately wanted to make a bouquet of the basil to carry around with me at all times.

It was intense and yet mellow, soothing and yet stimulating.  It flowers constantly at this time of year.  Unlike other basils, it doesn't go to seed or die back, so it can only be reproduced by cutting.

Another thing that had gone to flower over the winter was baby turnips.  When they flower, they're done growing, so these had to be harvested.

Normally, they would grow more quickly and develop bigger roots before being picked, but the weather's been quite unusual lately, so these are quite small.

I got to prep several buckets full of them to go to Bistro Bethem, where chef/owner Blake Bethem is apparently quite fond of them.  Sophie came by for a little quality control inspection.

After giving me her approval, she returned to the heated mat in the greenhouse that was keeping her warm on an chilly morning.

After I finished with the turnips, I went to check on the greenhouse.  I can't stop fretting like a mother hen over every little seed I've planted.  I inspect each flat and wonder why some have sprouted but others have not, and marvel over how much they've grown since the previous week.  It was fascinating to see how basil and zucchini that were planted on the same day have both sprouted, but to vastly different degrees.

The basil in the foreground is less than an inch high and is completely dwarfed by the neighbouring zucchini.  More peppers have started appearing, but they're still quite small because of their winter growth.  This habanero wasn't even as big as my thumbnail.

On my way over to the dairy pastures, I spotted this little figure.

He had been completely hidden by crazy weeds on my previous visits, or maybe I just wasn't yet ready to make his acquaintance.  Having been introduced, I went on to see the cattle.  There were lots of calves who observed me from a short distance while I became friends with #485.  (No, they don't have names.  John jokes that the males should all be named Brisket, as there is no use for them on a dairy farm.)  She sniffed me a bit before kissing my hands and arms, with a quick little peck on the cheek.  If you've never been kissed by a cow, you're really missing out on one of life's sweetest little treasures.

Potatoes. Why Did It Have To Be Potatoes?

My task this week was to cut 350 pounds of seed potatoes up for planting.  John has been kind enough to give me tasks that take my bad back into account, so I was comfortably situated at a rescued restaurant counter.  Even so, being confronted with all those potatoes gave me flashbacks to every soup kitchen I ever worked in.  "Hey, new girl, start peeling that pile of potatoes.  We'll tell you when you're finished."  At least this time, I didn't have to peel them.

Seed potatoes look just like the regular potatoes you get at the store.  A lot of people throw out their potatoes when the eyes sprout.  Next time yours look like this, cut them up so there's an eye on each piece and plant them.

After about 5 hours of work with a pocketknife, I was done.  Finally.  This is what 350 pounds of potatoes looks like.

After all that cutting, it was time to visit the greenhouse.  I didn't take any pictures last week, but there wasn't much to see.  All the gazillion dozens of tomato seeds I'd planted had yet to sprout, leaving me fretting that I had done something wrong.  I was quite relived to see them growing quite happily this week.

Last week, I planted a more varieties of tomatoes than I could count.  Most of them were seeds John got from trading online with other growers.  (Check out Tomatoville if you want in on the action.)  All told, he estimates there are more than 40 varieties working their way through the dirt and into the sun.  He's also growing more than 100 varieties of peppers.  (Traders should go to ChiliGrower or The Hot Pepper.)  They're not producing much yet, but some of the winter ones have struggled valiantly and managed to produce some tiny peppers.  Here's a Cleo's Dragon Habanero, your requisite pepper porn for the week.

That little beauty is about the size of the tip of my thumb.  John described it as very sweet up front, but then building to a very surprisingly hot level in the finish.

Out in the field, I met Ben.  He's worked for John for the past few seasons.  He spent the day busily weed whacking down the overwintered patches of greens to make way for new plantings.  There's already a nice bed of lettuces growing.

Some of the overwintered greens are still worth something before they're whacked into oblivion.  This patch of brassica and arugula has gone to blossom.  Since the blossoms are both beautiful and edible, don't be surprised if you see them garnishing your plate at Bistro Bethem.

Ben was also sorting through some hops seedlings that had overwintered.  Not all of them will make it, but there was enough to make a good start.  Eventually they'll be trellised along some teepee-shaped chains so they can stretch themselves to the sun.  Hops are beautiful when they're flowering, so I can't wait to see them grow.

Those are all Cascade, but there will be Centennial and Crystal as well.

All of this activity was, of course, supervised by the farm's manager, Sophie.  She was feeling quite lazy this week, but managed to plant herself in the middle of all the activity with a great vantage point to our hard work.  She really understands the fundamentals of good management.

Speaking of great vantage points, this was my view for the day.

The farm has over 500 cattle.  The dairy ones, like these, are Holsteins.

The meat ones are primarily Angus, with some Hereford blood mixed in.  Thirty years ago, there were about 100 dairy farms in Spotsylvania County.  Today, there are just 4.  The milk was once processed here in Fredericksburg, 26 miles from the farm.  Later, it had to go to Charlottesville, about twice as far.  Now, it has to go all the way to Norfolk, more than 150 miles away.  There, it gets mixed in with milk from all over the place and processed.  As much as I try to buy local, I've discovered there's really no such thing as local milk around here.  (There is, but it's totally illegal to buy it, and the government gets downright cranky about it.)  I have yet to see John mention the dairy side of the farm without hearing, "the dairy industry is ridiculously over-regulated."  I'm still learning the full extent of what that means.  But don't worry--you'll be learning it right along with me.

Putting My Money Where My Mouth Is

I try very hard to "eat fresh, eat local."  It's a really big deal to me.  So this year, I decided to take it a step further and actually work on a farm.

My friend John Biscoe tired of his desk jockey job a few years ago, so he returned to his farming roots.  He grows produce on the family homestead, land his ancestors started farming 150 years ago.  Most of the 900 acres is devoted to dairy production, and the hay fields that support it, in the hands of his older brothers.  John works as much as 10 acres for produce, selling to restaurants, farmers markets, and CSA customers.  Not long after he returned to farming, I spotted his name on the menu at Bistro Bethem, my favourite local restaurant.  This made me very happy.

He also sells to FoodE, which takes its local sourcing very seriously, and a company that distributes his microgreens to restaurants throughout the D.C. area.

It's early in the season, but things are already underway in the greenhouse.  This week, I planted seeds.  Lots of them.  Like, more than I could count.  I stopped counting the tomatoes when I hit 72 dozen, then moved on to chervil and fennel.  They're both quite trendy on all the cooking shows right now, so I'm hoping they'll do well at the markets this summer.  While those seeds are germinating, they'll be under the close supervision of the farm manager, Sophie.

Right now, microgreens are what's keeping John busy.  They're all the rage in restaurants, including my lunch today at Bistro Bethem.

I adore beets, especially with goat cheese, so this salad was right up my alley.  But it gave me a special thrill to know that it came from a local farm, especially since it's where I get to play in the dirt.

John keeps busy in the off-season with peppers.  Dried, he can fit quite a lot into a flat-rate box, and pepper afficiondos are willing to pay good money for crazy, hot, and/or new.  While they'll be sold primarily in the winter months, they're already underway in the greehouse.

Some of them are a good deal farther along than those seedlings.  He's been watching one plant for months, watching a still-green pepper sit on the plant since at least October, waiting for it to turn its promised yellow.  And finally....

Whoops.

I'm only working there once a week, and I asked to be paid in produce.  I'll experiment with whatever's in season that week, approaching it the way an Iron Chef approaches that week's secret ingredient.  This week's take included watercress, which I hadn't had in far too long.

It made a fantastic soup from a recipe I've been dying to try.  And yes, it should've been pureed more smoothly, but my immersion blender chose that particular moment to die.  It was still delicious.

I also brought home a bunch of microgreens, which are destined for salads tonight and this weekend, some radishes and onions, and some pea shoots.  The pea shoots went into a salad loosely based on this Jamie Oliver recipe.  Alas, I was too busy eating it to take a picture.  You'll just have to imagine how delicious it was.

Which brings me back to my point about "eat fresh, eat local."  You really can't beat the taste of vegetables that were pulled out of the ground very recently (in this case, just hours earlier).  They will always taste better than a hothouse tomato trucked in from the other coast, stored in a warehouse for who-knows-how-long, and then set on a shelf in the store for another indeterminate period.  I'm not pushing arguments about biodiversity, farm policy, or globalisation.  Not today, anyway.  It's as simple as this:  if it's fresh, and it's local, it just plain tastes better.