We wanted to thank every one for a GREAT first season! We didn't even plan on selling this year but things went well enough that we had enough to provide for the community. Thanks again for the warm welcome and we look forward to seeing all our customers again this next spring. COME GROW WITH US!!
Read more...Welp, we've decided to call the ball and have chosen THIS Saturday (16OCT10) as our final market-stand for the 2010 season. Come by, say hi, and sign up for our winter newsletter so you can find out when we are gonna hold our first stand for the 2011 season next spring. We want to thank all the wonderful people we've met this year and look forward to seeing y'all next year as you come grow with us! But keep checking in on the blog cause as winter approaches, I'll have lots more time to get blog posts up where you'll be able to see the improvements we are making for 2011. I'll give you a hint, it involves livestock, and build-it urself greenhouses.
Read more...I planted buckwheat this year because I'd heard it was really easy to grow in virgin soils (it is) and it was a prolific producer of grain that could be turned into flour for use in breads and pancakes. I thought it'd be cool to be able to make bread using flour that you had grown yourself. For the ultimate in do-it-yourselfdom I wondered if it was possible to make your own yeast, that way you could make bread that was sourced entirely from stuff you made. I remember looking up 'homemade yeast' on the interwebs and finding some pages that talked about the white powdery stuff on the stems of wild raspberry being a wild yeast and how you could take a stem of that and stick it in a bowl of flour and water and a 'yeast starter' could be made that way. That sounded a little weird to me and I kinna stopped reading about it at that point. Then we heard a bit about baking bread with homemade yeast on the Splendid Table podcast and it sounded super-cool. Here's a link to that site which does an awesome job laying out how to make your own yeast, step-by-step.
So, October is the time for the planting of the garlic bulbs. You want to give them about 4-6 weeks in the ground before the first good frost and in Western PA, that's about..... NOW. So, thinking I was slick, a few months ago, I ordered A WHOLE POUND of Organic Heirloom Garlic Bulbs from High Mowing Organics and planned to do my exponential grow thing to that WHOLE POUND of garlic, (which it turns out is only like 4 bulbs, each of which contain 7-10 cloves, and it's those cloves that you individually plant and they become the new bulbs which you then harvest, separate, and re-plant etc..) where I plant all whopping 28-40 cloves this year, harvest approx. 25 bulbs (or 175 cloves) next year and re-plant those and some time around the year 2020 I have enough tasty heirloom garlic to sell to our loyal customers.
Sat down, did some brainstorming as to how I could reduce the time until I had marketable garlic, and the two winning ideas were #1. try and order more garlic online line and get it planted as soon as it gets here and hope there's enough time and/or #2. hijack one of them garlic freighters carrying garlic from China to here and sell it here. Both ideas had their own specific problems, #1 for instance, turns out there is/was a massive run on heirloom garlic bulbs this year and all of my normal suppliers were wiped and #2's problem was my ship boarding skills are a little rusty and my helicopter is in the shop.
Decided to go with idea #1 and adapted and overcame its problem set by using this new technological innovation called "The Google" to find new untouched garlic suppliers. Now, assuming the site I ordered from was not a hastily designed shell site for a "let us exploit the small farmers who failed to initially order enough garlic by stealing their online sale info whilst making them think they are slick ordering garlic in October" scam I should be golden.
So, given that we are approx. 9" low on rainfall across the state, the fall crops that we planted back in August are languishing a bit. As a result of this stunted growth we've decided to take this week off from the farm stand and give the crops a little time to digest this rain we've been getting. We should be back on 16OCT10 at the Veteran's Memorial location at Freeport Rd. and North Ave. with a bunch of fresh spinach, lettuce, beets, carrots, fennel, pumpkins and squash. See you then!
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