Weird...but true!

Cloves of garlic getting tucked in.

It is so weird: It's May 18th and we are just starting to plant!  Even weirder: We're starting with garlic!  Most years we would be almost done with seeding the gardens.  This year, between the Winter-that-wouldn't-go-away and the Spring-that-wouldn't-come we've just barely started.  It took seemingly forever for the gardens to dry out and warm up, then we had a cold, rainy spell.  If you follow our Facebook page, you know last week we had a day when tractors got stuck in the field a couple of times.

And garlic!  We usually plant garlic in the Fall, but last Fall we were a little distracted by jobs, life, harvest, breeding goats, etcetera and missed our opportunity to purchase seed bulbs.  The last few seasons we had saved our own garlic to replant, but a poor harvest and disease left nothing.  Fortunately, we were able to purchase some lovely garlic through Lindenberg Seeds this Spring.  I spent an afternoon two days ago breaking up the heads into the cloves on ten pounds of garlic!  When Farmer Man finally managed to get most of the cultivation done, we were waiting for a decent day (like today), when both of us were home and we got busy!

We and our CSA members can all breath a sigh of relief now that the garlic is in.  We, personally, love garlic and the taste of naturally grown, farm fresh garlic is head-and-shoulders above the store bought stuff!  CSA members have come to love garlic scapes, too!  Have you had them?  The scapes are the flowering stems of garlic; raw, they have a lovely mild, green garlic taste.  Cooked they taste something like asparagus.  We think they are best raw and make an awesome pesto, a great addition to salads or a delightful topping on pizza or pasta.  And they are in the ground, with more rain in the forecast.

Some peas, chard, some beets, some carrots, some onions and some lettuces are also in the ground as of today.  So, a good start has been made!  Rain tomorrow, then we're going to spend a day planting potatoes.  Shortly, we'll get back to successive plantings of many of the vegetables.  Corn and many of the winter squash will go in when the soil is just a little warmer.  Beans and summer squash can go in anytime now.  In the meantime, the sun room is bursting with seedlings of tomatoes, peppers, watermelon, cantaloupe, ground cherry and tomatillos.  They will go into the ground in June - we're never in any hurry because we can easily still have frosts for the next two to three weeks.

It feels good to get a start made!  Were you working in the garden this May long weekend?

CSA The First Tuesday of September!

We're calling this Mondo Tuesday - 'cause everyone is getting some summer squash that is mondo!  The weather seems to be making the zucchini and other members of the group very happy and they're growing like crazy.  Hard to believe that we harvested them thoroughly for Friday and Saturday's Global Market and, a few days later, can find armfuls of large ones again!

As the season marches on, the first of the Winter Squash appears in the boxes this week!  Winter squash, as apposed to summer squash, has an inedible skin.  They are best roasted or baked, although we sometimes steam chunks as a side vegetables and the seeds can be roasted.  Many are as good as pumpkin in pies, muffins and cookies and, of course, they make awesome soup.  We're sharing the first of the garlic today - if you haven't had freshly harvested, local garlic before be prepared for a bit of a flavour surprise!  Way more 'punch' than what you may be used to from the stores.  This garlic is not at all considered cured and ready for storage, but you're all going to use it promptly anyway, right?  Tomatillos are available on the trading table, they're coming but not sure if we'll ever have enough to put them into a share.

Cucumbers are doing quite well.  Amanda and Ed have come up with a few Armenian cucumbers, long, thin pale green cucumbers with distinct ridges.  These are quite different and delightful, with nice cucumber flavour and a dense texture. We closed our eyes and just dropped them in some boxes - don't know how else to split them up! Everyone has some good old slicing cucumbers!  This Thai cucumber salad sounds lovely!  Evelyn and Menno will be making a stop today, too - with some tomatoes!

And...what we all need:  a Zucchini recipe round-up!  Yee Haw!  Tons of great ideas and links!

Everyone is getting the very popular Winter squash spaghetti squash: some have the classic, oval greenish beige version.  Some of you have a round version, with a green and gold 'netted' skin, a variety called 'Little Wonder'.  They taste and cook up the same!  Bake and then pull out the flesh - it's like spaghetti!  It's a very unique winter squash for having flesh that comes out like pasta!  Some people like it with a pasta sauce or salsa, some like it with butter and maple syrup or brown sugar!

The FULL SHARES have a vegetable marrow - which looks rather like the common spaghetti squash.  Marrows have a 'V' carved in them.  This is a classic English vegetable but not well known in other cultures.  On it's own, it's a rather bland, mild green flavour.  It's claim to fame is the way it takes on flavours fantastically: in a stew or saute it will pick up the flavour of your spicing and herbs!  The way I'm accustomed to it is stuffed and baked:  my Grandmother's (and Mother's) recipe involved stuffing marrow with sausage meat.  This is the entree for dinner: just serve slices out!  It reheats beautifully if there is leftovers!  You can stuff them with anything you might use to stuff a pepper, tomato or even a turkey.  PART SHARES have a Japanese Kabocha - a sweet, fine-textured winter squash excellent as a vegetable but also very good in pies and other desserts.

So, in the boxes this week:

FULL SHARES:  3 lbs. Sangre potatoes, garlic, onions, spaghetti squash, vegetable marrow, cucumbers, small bunch of herb, Romanesque summer squash, zucchini, carrots, tomatoes.

PART SHARES:  3 lbs. Sangre potatoes, garlic, spaghetti squash, Kabocha squash, cucumbers, bunch of herb, Romanesque summer squash, zucchini, carrots, tomatoes.

SINGLE SHARES:  2 lbs. Sangre potatoes, garlic, carrots, spaghetti squash, cucumbers, Romanesque summer squash, zucchini, Swiss chard.

Harvesting and Curing Garlic

Fresh From the Field!

Almost Finished Cleaning and Trimming!

Although it's a lot of work, this is one of my favorite harvests!  We love, love, love garlic here at Aagaard Farms; our home-grown garlic is soooo superior to what's in the store!  It's a winner at our Farmers Markets, too - anyone who likes garlic and has tried it comes back for more!  Farmer Man has dug a row of our reliable, hardneck garlic called Music.  We've been taking little bits the last few weeks, for CSA and to sell by the head.  Now comes the time to harvest and cure for winter storage.  The huge pile, fresh from the field, has been reduced to a a partial table of heads.  We've cut the foliage off, then we trim the 'tassel' of roots, hand rub any dirt and any dry layers of the papery covering.  Then the heads will be left to sun dry for a few days, then we'll move it to a fresh, clean table while hand rubbing any more dry, papery husks and dirt.  A few more days in the sun and it should be ready to bag, to sell in larger quantities.  The curing is very important to ensure long-term storage.  The heads of garlic can contain soil-born bacteria and fungi that can cause rot in less-than-perfect storage conditions.  Sun drying or even just air drying (which takes longer) kills off any such pathogens, so the garlic will store all winter - if it lasts that long!  The forecasted weather conditions are perfect for curing for the next five days so off we go!  Are you growing garlic?  

Garlic Scapes: Get Them While You Can!

If you love garlic, you will love garlic scapes.  It's a short-lived delight, available for a couple of weeks early in Summer.  We always say it's what gets us through until the garlic bulbs are ready later in the summer!  Not familiar with scapes?  Lots of people aren't.  We took them to both the Friday Night Farmers Market and the Saturday Morning Market at Riverbank Discovery Centre this week.  A few people were delighted to see them; most asked what the 'curly' thing was!  Love introducing people to something new at the Farmers Market!

Garlic scapes are the flowering stocks of garlic plants.  They should be removed so that more energy goes into the formation of the bulb.  The upside to all that work is that they are delicious eating!  Milder than a garlic clove but stronger than garlic chives with a fresh, almost sweet flavor, this first cut will be very tender and awesome for fresh eating on salads, in a tuna salad, salsa and such.  They are also great for cooking, although they should be added later in the cooking as they are a little delicate.  Perfect for sautes, stir-fries, in omelettes; we diced them and put them on a pizza with shaved asparagus a few nights ago.  Yummy!  Later today, we're doing a garlic scape pesto from this recipe, which has almonds instead of pinenuts.  On the food blogs, they're pickling them!  Very useful for the garlic lover, but in another week they are all gone.  We'll have them at Tuesdays' Neighborhood Country Market, and the last cuts will be available at the Friday Night Farmers Market and Saturdays Farmers Market at Riverbank Discovery Centre.  Have you tried garlic scapes?

It's a Great Day: Kittens and Garlic Are Growing!

A Happy Easter Sunday to all!  We're finally having a day with the temperature hitting double digits (in Celsius)!  That should help get rid of the last of the snow!  We've been out for a wee stroll around the farm.  The garlic is up!  And we've had excellent germination.  We love our garlic for cooking, and we just can't bring enough to the Farmers Markets.  We planted almost double last fall - so good to see it coming so well.  A short row of 'fancy' garlics is about an inch taller than 'Music', our standard.  Those are showing a bit of frost damage on the tips but seem to be growing strongly.

Also had a peek at the kittens in our stroll.  They are growing well, too!  Starting to rather clumsily wander from their 'nest'.  They are soooo cute and a perfect experience for a lovely Easter Sunday!  We hope you all enjoy your day!

Planting Garlic

We're late; a little late, anyway. In a perfect world, we would have planted the garlic at the beginning of the month, when the soil was a little warmer. But, that's life on a little farm; the potato harvest had to be finished, the tractor had to be changed over to the tiller and some maintenance done, then the garlic field had to be tilled. So, we're getting it done now! Will it ever be good to cross this one off the 'to-do' list! We needed an area where garlic and onions hadn't been planted for a few years; crop rotation, you know! We needed some room because we just haven't been able to keep up with the demand for our garlic, so we're planting almost double the amount this year. And, we are also going to plant some of the wee onions that we dug up during the onion harvest for tasty spring onions. We ordered our usual garlic, organic 'Magic' from Vesey's Seeds. What a treat when it all arrived already broken up into the cloves! And some absolutely gorgeous, monster cloves they were, too! We also ordered a couple of small parcels of organic specialty garlic from Botanus: French White Silverskin Softneck and Legacy Rocambole Hardneck. From CSA member Elaine, we received a bulb of Purple Mexican, so a nice variety for us to taste! Because we're a very cold climate, we're pushing in our cloves to 4 - 5 ", and we'll probably mulch the whole area with straw. I'm a little worried about soil erosion in the area we're planting, so the straw mulch will help. It's suppose to rain early next week, so that will be a good time to get down the straw. MMMmmm, all this talk about garlic, I think I'll roast some of this year's harvest for dinner tonight!

CSA for August 24, 2010

Well, another lousy weather day for CSA. What is up with that? Heavy rain Monday and into early Tuesday morning, then high winds with a real cold bite for most of the day Tuesday! It's hard to pick the pole beans when the trellising is swinging back and forth by about a foot! You reach for a nice, plump romano bean and suddenly it's gone! I spent most of the day dressed like it was November - three layers and a hood! I even had the notion to dig out my beloved fingerless gloves from winter storage!

But, nonetheless, we got it done. Had some nice volunteer help from Carrie, a lovely young lady we met early in the summer. Someone who's interested in local food and fresh food and contacted us by email to volunteer. She was interested in learning a bit about what we do and how we do it. Coming through Brandon after finishing her summer job at a camp in Clear Lake, she dropped by for a couple of hours and helped picked cucumbers and clean up winter squash. Thanks, Carrie!

For this CSA, Farmer Man made me share the garlic. We dug all our fall-planted garlic about a week ago, and have had it spread out on a table - in the sun, weather permitting. It's cured quite nicely and has done quite well for us this year. We love our garlic, so I must admit I am always unwilling to part with it! If you've only ever had store bought garlic, this may have a bit more kick than you are used to!!

We have a late seeding of lettuce just coming along. The greens are very young still and we didn't get a big harvest, but the greens are lovely! Hopefully, we'll get a better harvest next week. I've got some borage flowering nicely, and hope to add some flowers to the mesclun mix next week for some nice blue colour and a lovely, cucumber flavour! Not that we don't have enough cucumbers..........although the rains have encouraged some of the cukes to get a bit fat and round, which means they become pig food, because they just look to weird to sell or put into the CSA shares.

The winter squash are coming in very well this year. Don't forget that winter squash store quite well - keep them someplace cool, dry and dark and they can be good for months. The flesh also freezes very well! The Kabocha's are fabulous in recipes for pumpkin desserts like pies, cookies and breads. Cook the Kabocha by microwaving or baking, scrap the flesh out, measure the amount you'd need for, say, pumpkin pie, and freeze in freezer bags or containers! Ready to bake a pie this winter!

So, for the FULL SHARES: 8 lbs. 'Almira' white potatoes, large bag Romano green and yellow beans, a bunch of carrots, a mix of yellow cooking, Spanish white and red onions, small bag of mesclun mix, a couple of green peppers, cucumbers, head of garlic, an acorn winter squash, a delicata (or sweet potato) winter squash, a buttercup winter squash and an orange Kabocha winter squash.

For the PART SHARES: Small bag of either Sangria red, Almira white or Yukon Gold potatoes, large bag of 'Kentucky Blue' pole beans, a bunch of carrots, yellow and Spanish onions, small bag of mesclun mix, green pepper, cucumbers, head of garlic, an Acorn winter squash and a buttercup winter squash.

The Garlic IS Alive!

We fall plant garlic for bigger, better bulbs earlier.  We have to order it online in the fall because it is impossible to find in any garden centre or store around here.  We love the selection at Botanus and the value of Vesey's - and have used both as our fall source.  Garlic overwinters quite beautifully here, even in our extremely harsh climate.  We don't do anything to winter protect it, and we've planted it quite late - middle of October one year!  The earlier it comes up the better - we're always a little worried that Farmer Man will plow it under in his spring cultivation cycle if it's not showing.  No worries this year - Farmer Man can spot it no problem!  Can hardly wait for fresh garlic.......