News and blog
Hello everyone!
Where to begin?!
The weather's been up and down and backwards and around again... but things are growing moderately well. It's very heartening to see the little ones burgeoning into larger and larger versions of themselves. Cabbages, cauliflower, lots of kohlrabi, brussels sprouts!!! and more!
Closer and closer to pouncing on our new 8 acre field across the street... just waiting for the weather to permit the irrigation dudes to lay the piping. We can hardly wait!
New equipment to make Lydia and myself into six people instead of the amazing four people we are (speaking in terms of efficiency)!
And finally... Some of you may have noticed a strage be-flowered green entity in your bags recently. I won't assume ALL of you are as ignorant as this bewildered yankee... but some must be curious as to a. what this is and b. what in the world to do with it!
Broccoli Raab
A. WHAT IS THIS?!?!?
Rapini (also known as Broccoli Rabe (or Raap), Broccoli Rabe, Broccoletti, Broccoli di Rape, Cime di Rapa, Rappi, Friarielli (in Naples), and Grelos) is a common vegetable in the cuisines of Southern Italy (in particular Bari and Sicily), Galicia, China, and Portugal . The plant is a member of the Brassiceae tribe of the Brassicaceae, whose taxonomy is very difficult.[1] Rapini is classified scientifically as Brassica rapa subspecies rapa,[2] in the same subspecies as the turnip, but has had various other designations, including Brassica rapa ruvo, Brassica rapa rapifera, Brassica ruvo, Brassica campestris ruvo.
Rapini has many spiked leaves that surround a green bud which looks very similar to a small head of broccoli. There may be small yellow flowers blooming from the buds, which are edible.
The flavor of rapini has been described as nutty, bitter, pungent, and "an acquired taste". The Italian cultivar is similar to, but much more bitter than the Chinese. The Chinese cultivar is of a lighter green color, not at all bitter or pungent, and more tender.
Rapini is a source of vitamins A, C, and K, as well as potassium, calcium, and iron.[3]
The vegetable probably descends from a wild herb, a relative of the turnip, that grew either in China or the Mediterranean region. It is similar in shape to the Chinese Brassica oleracea cultivar called kai-lan.
Rapini is now grown throughout the world. Rapini is available all year long, but its peak season is fall to spring in the Northern Hemisphere.
B. WHAT SHALL I DO WITH IT?!?
Here's some ideas!!
RAPINI (also known as Broccoli Raab)
Rapini & Garbanzo Pita Pizzas
2 large garlic cloves, sliced thin
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
a 19-ounce can garbanzos, rinsed and drained
1/2 cup water
1 pound rapini tips, rinsed and roughly chopped, eat the leaves and tender stems!
1/2 teaspoon dried hot red pepper flakes
three 6-inch whole wheat or other pita breads, halved horizontally to form 6 rounds
1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese (about 2 ounces)
Preheat oven to 400F.
In a large heavy skillet cook garlic in oil over moderate heat, stirring, until pale golden. Transfer garlic and 1 tablespoon oil to a food processor. Add chick-peas, 1/4 cup water, and salt and pepper to taste and blend mixture until smooth.
Heat oil remaining in skillet over moderately high heat until hot but not smoking and cook
rapini until wilted. Add remaining 1/4 cup water and pepper flakes and simmer, covered partially, until the greens are crisp-tender and almost all liquid is evaporated, about 2 minutes.
Spread rough sides of pita with chick-pea purée and top with rapini and Parmesan.
Arrange pita pizzas on a large baking sheet and bake in middle of oven 10 minutes, or until edges are golden.
Serves 6 as an entrée or 10 to 12 as an hors d'oeuvre.
Broccoli Rabe with Orechetti Pasta and Sausage
1 bunch Broccoli Rabe
1 Lb or so of your favorite sausage (no casings, or remove from casings), I use hot Italian
4 cloves garlic, or more if you wish
Orechetti Pasta (Italian for little ears) Penne and Farfalle work well too if you can not find.
1/4 to 1/2 cup chicken stock
Brown sausage in large skillet (best in bite size crumbles). While sausage is browning, clean Broccoli Rabe and remove only the thick tougher ends of stalks. Chop rabe into bite sized pieces. Drain sausage and set aside. Start your water for the pasta and cook according to directions for aldente pasta. In same large skillet as sausage sauté chopped garlic cloves in a bit of olive oil for a couple of minutes (do not clean pan as remaining fat from sausage will add more flavor). Add Broccoli Rabe and some chicken broth to pan and cook until greens have wilted. Add sausage and heat through. Toss with cooked pasta and enjoy. Watch the salt on this as some sausages will have a lot of it and could potentially make this dish to salty if more salt is added. Keep the salt added to pasta water to a minimum.
This dish also works well with vegetarian substitutions for a yummy vegan alternative, make sure to increase the olive oil accordingly… Yummy!
I found a one-page article about it in Cook's Illustrated (Jan/Feb 1999) that told me more about rapini than a shelf of vegetable cookbooks. Here's some thoughts and recipes from Anne Yamanaka who wrote the article:
After trying several ways of blanching the greens, she decided the best was boiling 1 bunch of rapini in 3 quarts of salted water. Here's the official recipe:
Blanched Rapini (Broccoli Raab)
adapted from Cook's Illustrated
Using a salad spinner makes easy work of drying the cooled blanched rapini.
1 pound rapini (broccoli rabe), washed, cut into 1-inch pieces
2 teaspoons salt
Bring 3 quarts water to boil in large saucepan. Stir in rapini greens and salt and cook until wilted and tender, about 2 1/2 minutes. Drain and set aside.
Cool empty saucepan by rinsing under cold running water. Fill cooled saucepan with cold water and submerge greens to stop the cooking process. Drain again; squeeze well to dry and proceed with one of the following recipes.
Rapini with garlic and red pepper flakes
2 T extra virgin olive oil
3 medium garlic cloves
1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes
1 recipe blanched rapini greens (above)
Heat oil, garlic and red pepper flakes in medium skillet over medium heat until garlic begins to sizzle, about 3 to 4 minutes. Increase heat to medium high, add blanched rapini greens, and cook, stirring to coat with oil, until heated through, about 1 minute. Season to taste with salt, serve immediately.
Rapini with Sun Dried Tomatoes and Pine Nuts
Follow recipe for Rapini with Garlic and Red Pepper Flakes, adding 1/4 cup oil-packed sun-dried tomatoes, cut into thin strips, along with garlic and red pepper flakes. Add 3 Tablespoons toasted pine nuts to skillet along with rapini greens.
Rapini with Asian Flavors
Mix 1 Tablespoon soy sauce, 1 1/2 teaspoons rice wine vinegar, 1 teaspoon toasted sesame oil, and 1 teaspoon sugar in small bowl; set aside. Follow recipe for Rapini with Garlic and Red Pepper Flakes, substituting vegetable oil for the olive oil and adding 1/2 teaspoon finely grated ginger along with garlic and red pepper flakes. Add reserved soy sauce mixture to skillet along with rapini.
Hello All!
We've been having some considerably more favorable weather... Still cold, but more temperated. We got about 200 pounds of potatoes planted this last week, around the raining spells and we're working on prepping new fields.
We were very lucky to have our sister organic garden donate some of their lovely produce so that we could give our rows some much needed rest. We hope you enjoyed the bounty! Things are looking great and we're excited to see what this next month brings. Stay tuned for a delicious recipe from Mary for your sour oranges. I'll post it in the next few days!
For information about the sour orange, its history and popular uses visit:
http://users.kymp.net/citruspages/souroranges.html
Here are a few recipes I rustled up for ya'll! Let us know how they turn out if you try them!!!
Sour Orange/Mojo Sauce
1/3 cup olive oil
6 to 8 cloves garlic, thinly sliced or minced
2/3 cup sour orange juice or lime juice
(or equal portions orange juice and lime juice)
1/2 tsp ground cumin
Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
Heat the olive oil in a deep saucepan over medium heat. Add the garlic and cook until fragrant and lightly toasted. Don't let it brown or it will be acrid tasting, just about 30 seconds should do it.
Add the sour orange juice, cumin and salt and pepper. STAND BACK; the sauce may sputter. Bring to a rolling boil. Taste and correct seasoning, if needed
Cool before serving. Mojo is best when served within a couple of hours of making, but it will keep for several days, well capped in a jar or bottle, in the refrigerator.
Sour Orange Pie
Ingredients:
- 1 cup granulated sugar, divided
- 5 tablespoons cornstarch
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1 cup water
- 2 teaspoons grated sour orange peel, or 1 teaspoon each grated lemon and orange peel
- 1 1/2 cups fresh sour orange juice, strained, or 1 cup orange juice and 1/2 cup lemon juice
- 4 egg yolks, beaten
- 2 tablespoons butter
- 9-inch baked pastry shell, homemade or purchased
- .
- Meringue:
- 4 egg whites
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
- 1/2 cup granulated sugar
In a saucepan combine 1/2 cup of the granulated sugar, the cornstarch and the salt. Add the water, grated peel and juice, and whisk until smooth. Bring the mixture to the boil over medium-low heat, stirring constantly until it begins to thicken. Remove from the heat.
With an electric mixer, beat together the remaining 1/2 cup of granulated sugar and the egg yolks until thicken and light in color. Beat in 1/2 cup of the hot juice mixture, then add all of the yolk mixture to the contents of the saucepan, stirring constantly. Stir over medium-low heat until thickened, but do not let the mixture boil. Remove from heat, stir in butter, and pour the filling into the pie shell. Let cool. Preheat the oven to 350°.
Meanwhile, make the meringue topping. Beat the egg whites and vanilla to soft peaks. Gradually beat in the sugar, beating until stiff peaks form and all the sugar has dissolved. Spread the meringue over the filling, touching the edge of the pie shell.
Bake for 15 minutes, until the meringue is golden brown and thoroughly cooked. Cool thoroughly before serving.
Hello everybody! Swifty here to give you a mini update on the goings on at the farm.
We've been up to our belly buttons in water for a while. Lydia's been hoping to get on the tractor, but every time we think we're almost dry enough to brave the big wheels on the field, it rains... again... and we have to take a "rain check". We've planted a lot in the last few weeks and hopefully the ridiculous downpours we've had haven't washed them away. The following is a list of the seeds we've started-either in flats to be transplanted or direct seeded:
shell peas
carrots
cabbage
kohlrabi
onions
Brussels sprouts
shallots
broccoli
pink radishes
purple radishes
fennel
cauliflower
arugula
cress
red Russian kale
golden frill mustard
homi z mustard
lettuce
Hopefully you can anticipate all these delicious veggies in your bags in the near future. Some of these crops i.e. radishes and kale.. are 20 day crops, but some taken a little longer to mature. We've also almost run out of room in the main garden and are going to be expanding into some new fields very soon!
BAG PICK-UP POLICY REMINDER
Because of the number of members we have, and the innumerable variables and possibilities for error and confusion as a result of our numbers, we wanted to remind everyone of the bag pick up policy. If you are not able to pick up your bag on your designated pick up day/location, we will keep your bag in the refrigerators at the farm for 24 hours following your pick up. After that time, your bag may be assimilated back into the farm machine to make up another bag for the next pick up.
COMPOST CONTRIBUTIONS
Although we already have a lot of fun things to compost with at the farm, I thought you all might be interested in putting your household's compost to use back at the farm (that is if you're not composting for your own garden). We will be accepting compost donations at the market pickups and at the farm. I will also keep you abreast of our composting techniques and inform you of any radical, world changing, organic composting techniques we decide to adopt. Putting deliciousness back into the earth we garden from is one of the most important aspects of sustainable farming and we are learning as much as we can about a variety of composting techniques.
STAY TUNED FOR MORE NEWS FROM OPO!!
WE APPRECIATE YOUR PARTICIPATION IN THE FARM'S ADVENTURES!!
Hello all! We've had a great first part of this week. We're really enjoying having all these lovely wwoofers here. We said goodbye to Joseph on Sunday and sent him on his way further south to enrich more lives with his great attitude and awesome work ethic.
We've been planting like crazy and are super excited to feel the bags getting heavier and see the fields getting greener after this cold. Although we love the rain, we're hoping for some respite because we can't run the tractor when it's wet and we need to get the ground ready for more veggies! We spread some major manure this week, by hand! Or rather by bucket and rake, but our spreader will be fixed soon and we'll be able to turn that titilating task back over to it.
We've got some awesome pictures of the staff and volunteers coming and some killer shots of some mighty attractive vegetables! Stay tuned in!
:) Swift
Hello all! We have some very exciting things happening at Orchard Pond! As we attempt a speedy recovery from our recent, freakish cold spell, we've been working especially hard to replenish the fields and replace the crops we lost; we've also covered a good deal of the field with frost cloth. We have added four new wwoofers this week! Many hands make some big results!!
As a result of the cold, quite a few of our more delicate fronded friends met their demise. You may have noticed a bit of repetition in the contents of your bags for the last few weeks. If you have, then you are well acquainted with the hardiest of our plants. Our root veggies, collards and kale are the only things that survived with any flare. Now that we've warmed up a little, it's good to see them growing again. They took a little nap through that cold snap. We've got some excellent produce in the ground right now and we're starting peppers, tomatoes and onions in flats in our green house! We've got some garlic in the ground and looking good, some strawberries thriving, lots of cauliflower, broccoli, kohlrabi and cabbage. We've also started some snap peas which miraculously survived the cold even though they had germinated before the freeze(s). We've just direct seeded carrots, radishes, onions, arugula, mustard, kale and cress. In an attempt to encourage as much growth as possible, we've covered a good deal of the crops with a frost cloth which, when it's not protecting from frost, acts almost as a mini-green house for the plants. We're crossing our fingers that it's just the boost the young plants need to burst forth.
Our new wwoofers are nestling quite comfortably into the flow of the farm.
Luke and Jedi (his dog, a charismatic schnocker) arrived last Tuesday from a small town near Indianapolis, Indiana. Luke has experience in South America as a conservationist and a field technician. Luke is going to school for wildlife management
Joseph arrived Sunday after an exciting trip couch surfing from New York. He's from Paris, France and has been an interesting and wonderful addition to our community. Joseph majored in cinema and began his travels after a radioactive bite from a travel bug.
Paula arrived next, also on Sunday. Paula is from Florida, but most recently came from Atlanta, GA. She's enjoying the quiet of our farm and the simplicity of life, even washing our clothes in buckets outside.
Ryan arrived Monday morning. He is also from Florida. He's a jack of many activities, including but not limited to, biking, frisbee golf and guitar. He's excited to continue and promote the organic way of life.
All the staff at Orchard Pond are very very happy to have the help. We've gotten about a month's worth of tasks done in the last week and hope that this effort shows awesome results in the months to come.
We'll keep you updated!
I'm sure some of you are unclear on the meaning of the term "blog". It is a rather fluid term that is a shortened version of "weblog." In my mind, it signifies a webpage that displays content of varying lengths in chronological order and invites readers to interact in the form of comments. Often, blog postings are categorized or tagged by topic so that users can navigate through related blog entries by the tags, such as "farming challenges" or "farmer's market." Blogs take many different forms from personal, public diaries to political commentary to blogs that are published by businesses themselves. This is the most popular form of content generation and information retrieval on the Internet today and the very website you are looking at right now, Small Farm Central, is a blog-style site. If you have heard of the term "Web 2.0", blogs are big part of the Web 2.0 movement.
Your farm should blog because it is an easy and time-effective way for you to get your story out to customers. Repeat customers come to you because of the relationship that they have with you and a blog is a perfect way for you to start and augment the real-world interaction that you have with the customer. Granted it does take some time, energy, and thought to produce effective blog posts that communicate the farm experience, but that post will easily be read 100s or 1000s of times over the life of your blog. That works out to be an extremely time-efficient way to build a consistent and faithful customer base. Customers that read your blog will be more understanding of blemishes or crop shortages because you can explain the exact cause of the problems. This becomes a story that they can take home with their produce and they will feel more connected to the farm and the food if they know some of the challenges that went into growing it.
The complaint I hear the most is that farmers don't have time to be writers as well as producers. Steve Sando of Rancho Gordo dedicates one afternoon every two weeks to writing six blog articles. He then releases one each Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday. There are other techniques of course too: get a trusted intern to write an article each week, find a very enthusiastic and involved customer who will volunteer to write a blog article every once and a while, or just commit to posting a short update once each week. There is no right way to write or schedule your blog, but post on a regular schedule and write with passion because passion is infectious.
At this point, if you are considering a farm blog, start reading a few established farm blogs and get some general advice on how to write blogs. I have discussed some aspects of blogging at Small Farm Central in Farm blogging isn't always literature, but this is and What I learned during an interview with Steve Sando of Rancho Gordo. Blogging will be a topic that I come back to over the next few months because I believe it is the core of any modern farm web marketing strategy.
Some farm blogs to get you started:
- Eat Well Farm Blog : recently discussing problems with the Med Fly and how they are certifying their packing shed as Med Fly-free.
- Life of Farm Blog : this blog is sponsored by the Mahindra tractor company. Perhaps the writer got a free tractor for writing the blog?
- Tiny Farm Blog : wonderful photos and at least a post a day.
- Rancho Gordo Blog : this popular blog receives 300-500 unique visitors a day (which is impressive for a farm website) and even helped the author secure a book deal.
Read about the process of writing a blog and more:
- Blogging Your Way Into a Business
- Business Blog Case Study: Stonyfield Farm
- Blogging for your customers versus blogging for your business
- How to Write Great Blog Content : Great advice from the #1 blogger.
Spend the next few weeks reading farm blogs and exploring some of the resources listed above. Then when you think you know enough about blogging to start, you will probably want to go back to Hosting Options to get your blog online. Not coincidentally, the Small Farm Central software contains all the features you need to get your blog (and farm website) up and running within a few days. I know that not very many farms are taking blogging seriously as a marketing tool, but I have a strong feeling that every serious farm will have a blog in five years.