Market plans, 10/31

This Saturday will be our final market of 2009. It will be the last harvest of some items, like root vegetables, for which we've been staggering our harvests to reach our planned ending point of late October. Other items could keep going, like greens, but the continued wet and cloudy conditions have kept them from regrowing fast enough to maintain a weekly harvest any longer. The quality and quantity are starting to drop, and we have been slowly bringing less to each market.

In addition, as would be expected, the income from each market slowly drops as customers fall away and products become more scarce. We think that after this week, our market income would no longer justify the time and effort of coming. We could probably string out another week or two with small items like decorative sorghum heads, cedar wreaths, and so on, but it just isn't worth it. We're looking forward to not having our lives planned around Friday and Saturday, and to having those two days a week back for other work.

I'll write up a few more recap posts down the road; I'd like to put together a slideshow of our market stands throughout the year. But for now, we'll look forward to seeing our customers this last time and thanking all of them for their support and interest.

NEW THIS WEEK:
A sense of closure.

ALSO AVAILABLE:
Mustard & collard greens, kale, mizuna, lettuce mix, daikon & other radishes, fresh-ground cornmeal, herbs, and more. Not sure if we'll get around to sunchokes or not; it's awfully muddy. There will be a lot of lettuce this week, as we'll do a larger final harvest on plants we don't intend to hold for ourselves.

DONE FOR NOW:
Soup beans are done; we're keeping the rest for ourselves. Folks seemed to enjoy them, and we'll be doing more next year. Turnips and beets are about done; we'll see if there are any more decent ones to be scrounged.

COMING SOON:
Plans to take one day a week off (other than essential chores) for the winter season. With no market, that still nets us an extra day of farm work in addition to some relaxation.

Slow Food dinner review

Better late than never, Slow Food Katy Trail has posted an official recap and review of our farm dinner held back in September. It has some nice photos, and a complimentary writeup for which we're grateful. We're already looking forward to holding the event again next year, and will have some interesting debates on the featured cuisine (German? Italian? Filipino?).

Fall farm Filipino food

I've written before about maintaining my family's Filipino traditions (such as here, here, and here), as both my parents were raised there, but I'd let the food slide this summer. This was partly due to seasonal factors; most of the meat and produce we use to make Filipino food (such as carrots and cabbage) isn't around then; it's always been a fall and winter cuisine for us. Well, here we are in late October, and my taste buds were itching to get back to this comfort zone. So here's a nice meal we had recently (clockwise from upper left):

Adobo nuts: Pecans and almonds baked in a glaze of soy sauce, black pepper, farm garlic, and brown sugar.

Cabbage slaw: Farm cabbage, bell pepper, cilantro, onion, garlic. Dressing included sesame oil, olive oil, rice vinegar, honey, soy sauce, lemon juice, salt.

Lumpia (spring rolls): Wrapper of farm eggs, plus corn starch, flour, and water. Filling of farm sunchokes, bok choi, peppers, cilantro, mint, carrots, leeks. Dipping sauces of (a) rice vinegar, farm garlic & hot pepper, and (b) soy sauce, brown sugar, rice vinegar, flour, and farm garlic. My wrapper-making skills are rusty, so we used the incomplete fragments as bases for the filling. Sunchokes make an excellent water chestnut substitute.

Filipino meals are always one of the less farm-based cuisines we make, due to the need for items like soy sauce and vinegar, but still all the produce and any meat are ours. We truly love being able to prepare and enjoy so many different cuisines and possibilities with the produce and meat we raise, with only occasional trips to the grocery store. Let no one tell you local food systems are boring or limited.

Goat family reunion

We recently held a family reunion of sorts. Our goat herd was founded in spring 2008, and around this time last year we hosted a Boer buck from Goatsbeard Farm for a few weeks to allow breeding with our two does. As expected, Garlic bred successfully, while Gloria wanted no part of it (she's never been pregnant in her four years). Five months later, the first two kids to be born on-farm arrived, and having been growing fat and happy all summer.

Now it's time to start the cycle over again, as goats come into heat during the fall, for short periods of a few days about every three weeks or so. We waited out Garlic's first few cycles, as we want to kid later in spring when the weather is warmer, aiming for a late October breeding. By Friday evening, she was showing signs of heat, so as soon as we got back from market Saturday we ran over to Goatsbeard and borrowed their Boer buck, Squire, for a few days' visit.

Of course, this gave him the chance to meet his offspring from last year's fling (not that he really knows the difference). In the photo above, Squire is the large fellow stargazing in the background, with (from left to right) kid #2, kid #1, Garlic, and Gloria completing the picture. #1 in particular takes after his father, though Joanna prefers the solid-colored head on #2.

The major difference between father and sons relates to essential equipment, as both kids were castrated young, due to their destiny as meat. Intact bucks smell and taste awful. These two, on the other hand, will be fat and tender when butchering time comes very soon.

Garlic was happily receptive to Squire's presence, and they had two days together before her cycle ended and she lost interest. Hopefully they were successful; it's very hard to judge a goat pregnancy. If she comes back into heat in three weeks, we'll have to try again, but if she doesn't show signs either way we'll have to wait and see whether things develop. A lot is riding on this, as breeding is necessary not just for next year's meat supply, but for next year's milk production. We're also hoping for at least one doe kid this time, whom we can raise as another breeder and not just meat.

And so, just like our recent planting of garlic, the breeding of Garlic is already getting next year's season underway.

All thumbs

Thursday afternoon, I sliced a chunk off the tip of my left thumb while chopping leeks (I initially titled this post "giving leeks the finger" but thought better of it. Joanna suggested "leeky fingers"). Predictably, it's been rather painful and has limited my work, particularly in the first 30 hours or so before it finally clotted over. The potato-leek soup was tasty.

We've had to adjust quite a few of our activities in response. Joanna needed to go with me to my weekly milking job at Goatsbeard Farm Thursday night, as I can do many of the chores there one-handed, but not all. She also ended up having to do most of Friday's market harvest and washing, partially because I didn't dare get the injury wet or dirty. I stayed inside and ran the bean sheller, among other one-handed jobs.

Market on Saturday was also interesting, as not being able to use my left hand meant I couldn't easily handle produce bags or bundles of cash. It was a cold day, but the large ball of gauze wrapped around my thumb meant I couldn't get any normal gloves on (rubber, cloth, or leather), so I ended up wearing one of our giant Forestry Supply mittens, which are bright orange, fuzzy, and very roomy. This kept my hand out of trouble, safely insulating it from the produce and providing a constant reminder to me not to whack it on anything. It wasn't exactly subtle, either, so I ended up explaining my boneheadedness quite regularly (a suitable punishment).

The only real purpose of describing all this is to help reinforce the point of how delicately balanced a full-time farm really is. It doesn't take much, just a moment of inattention during cooking, to suddenly throw a week or more of work out of balance. We have to re-evaluate everything we were planning for this coming week in order to protect my finger enough so that it will heal quickly and cleanly. A week of lost work now is better than a month later on if I let this get infected or poorly healed.

I'm just glad I didn't do this in the middle of summer; late fall is a transition time in which we do have some flexibility in our schedule. Even a week earlier, this would have endangered our ability to get garlic planted in our narrow window of dry weather. Now, with a full week of rain forecast, is about the best convalescent time I could hope for. We have multiple indoor tasks to get started on, such as cleaning and organizing the garage/workshop, updating records, and putting up applesauce from the piles in our back room, all of which I can contribute to with one working thumb.

Market plans, 10/24

Two weeks of excitement over the cornmeal & beans means we're bringing even more this week, in an effort to make the cornmeal last beyond 9:30. I did the final corn census on Thursday, counting 70 ears of Hickory King and 50 of Texas gourdseed. Figuring that we need 9 months worth of corn for ourselves, that's 30 weeks x 2 ears/week = 60 ears. So that leaves 60 ears left to shell and grind for the next two weeks of market. This is more than we originally thought we'd have, so we're very pleased. And we've been getting more good reviews on the product.

We've decided that Halloween will very likely be our last market. We have about two more weeks of greens, radishes, lettuce, and the rest of the produce left to harvest, and after that there won't be enough product to make coming to market worthwhile. It pulls two days a week out of our lives, and the income will drop to where that's really not worth it. So get what you want while you can through October.

NEW THIS WEEK

More corn. We really do intend to bring some sweet potatoes this week, honest.

ALSO AVAILABLE

Mustard greens, collard greens, kale, daikon radishes, mixed fall radishes, beets, turnips, lettuce heads, lettuce mix, sunchokes, herbs, fresh-ground cornmeal, and dried soup beans.

One note on the sunchokes: we've been finding more worms than we expected in these, so we're being more careful in judging them for market. Our apologies if you got a worm; please tell us if it bothered you and we'll replace or refund you.

DONE FOR NOW

Green tomatoes are finished.

COMING SOON

Saturday mornings that don't begin at 5am (at least for us).

Planting garlic

As the growing season winds down, we're already getting started on next year. This is the season for garlic planting, beginning the long, slow period of growth until it's finally harvested next summer. We're once more expanding our plantings, this time adding a block of beds in the main field as well as our usual amount in the market garden.

Garlic planting starts with fertility. We use goat manure, produced by some friends' herd just north of us. They've been raising goats for over 20 years, mucking out their barn every spring, and leaving a huge and always-growing pile of old/rotted manure ready for us to mine. The pile is out of reach behind a barn, so we use a cycle of wheelbarrows, Joanna regularly filling each one as I shuttle them back and forth between the pile and up a plank to be dumped into the truck. Back at our place, the process is reversed as we offload into the wheelbarrow and cart the manure to each destination bed.

Each market garden bed got two barrow-loads, which are then worked into the soil with a hoe and rake. We'll be doing this not just for garlic, but for much of the garden and field. This old, rotted manure is fantastic stuff and well-worth the effort. It's clean, comes from a known source, and is free except for labor. We'd much rather expend energy than money; as I've often said, we run on home-grown fuel.

Organic standards state that manure can only be added to soil 90-120 days before harvest, depending on whether the crop touches the group (like corn vs. radishes), so doing most of our fertility management in the fall gives plenty of time to stay within that regulation and allow the resident soil biota to digest and distribute the stuff. Working it into the soil also helps minimize rain effects that might wash manure out of the beds, as does always using mulch and/or cover crop to hold soil in place. These practices are mandated by NOP, but are also just smart farming.

When the manure is worked in (bottom bed, below), each bed is trenched with a hoe into four linear rows (middle bed), and garlic cloves pushed into the bottom of the trenches at 6" spacing. Every year we move toward saving more of our own garlic for replanting, this year a majority of garlic planted is our own, and the quality was easily equal to our purchased stock. We're very happy with that, and it saves us a significant amount of money while helping adapt our garlic to our specific growing conditions. Overall, around 120 cloves go into each of the 8 market garden beds, and around 160 into each field bed, each of which ought to become a nice head next summer. The projected yield here would be around 1900 heads, minus any losses or problem heads. After the garlic is planted, we pull soil back over the trenches, then add a thick layer of straw mulch (top bed).

This year, the weather made things interesting. It's been wet enough to make hauling manure and working soil difficult, so we've been eyeing conditions to get the best chance. With a dry, warm forecast for last Sunday-Tuesday, we took our chance and started hauling manure on Monday, bringing in four truckloads to cover all 8 market garden beds and 6 larger field beds, and working most of it into the soil. Though we expected Tuesday to be another sunny, dry day, conditions changed overnight and we rose to impending thunder and rain, which washed out any plans of planting for the morning. We didn't end up starting planting until later afternoon, and worked until dark to get most of the market garden planted. Wednesday I had to be away in town on various appointments and errands, so Joanna worked to prepare the rest of the field beds, and when I got home after 3 we got right to and once again worked until dark, knowing that heavy rain was in the forecast for Thursday. We were able to get all but one market garden bed and two field beds planted by last night. Today, as I write this, the steady rain eliminates any chance of further garlic work until sometime next week at least.

Rain is a problem for multiple reasons, least of which is comfort. It's difficult and problematic to work wet soil, as that compacts and destroys the soil's natural texture. Too much rain can cause rot, or wash out some manure. And we can't easily plant garlic in the rain, because not all heads and cloves are planted at once, and any reserved stock would get wet, ruining its quality. But we managed to get most of it in, covered, and planted.

So a majority of our crop is in, and we hope to have another few days of dry weather to get the rest in. Garlic can be planted through November, but we like ours to have a good start and mid-October works well for us. So we don't want to delay longer than we have to. Hopefully it doesn't rain too much more, or there's a real threat of the cloves rotting before they can properly get started.

Fall's here

We've had many frosts now, including a fairly hard freeze Saturday night that left solid ice on the goat's water by morning. This has taken care of all summer produce, so that we're down to fall greens, radishes, and other hardy items. Walking out to the field on clear mornings to milk and tend to goats & geese has been beautiful, as the sun just hits the building colors on the west ridgeline and all the prairie and pasture grasses are tinged with ice crystals. The photo above doesn't do it justice.

Our maples this year have developed the best colors we've seen this side of New England, this one in particular at the corner of our market garden:

In early evening, as the sun has just set and the sky is darkening, this tree almost literally glows with color. Most of our maples are this brilliant, and the oaks are starting to catch up. It's a thrilling time to walk the woods.

This is definitely the time we feel our seasonal work changing as well. Market harvest now only takes about half a day, and we spend more and more time cleaning up beds and preparing them for winter. Pulling out frost-killed okra, beans, tomatoes, and more. Cleaning up sorghum & corn stalks. Mulching beds and/or seeding winter cover. Collecting irrigation hose and storing it. Each time a bed is finished, there's a nice sense of finality in knowing we won't have to touch it again until spring.

We're getting closer and closer to starting the winter tasks of logging, fence-building, and other infrastructure work. My fingers are itching to get the chainsaw out and start cracking, but we likely won't start until November. There's just too much cleanup to do, and until we stop going to market, still not enough time. But we can feel the end of growing season coming, and look forward to the change. And I always look forward to the months when I can work comfortably in long, warm clothing. Fall and winter are my favorite seasons, in Missouri or any other state I've lived in.

CFM Fall Roundup - highlights

Every fall, the Columbia Farmers Market holds a small conference/get-together for its vendors, featuring speakers, workshops, and locally-sourced food. This year's was last Saturday from 1pm to around 8pm, and I think it was the best yet. I thought I'd share some of the highlights from the day.

I attended a talk by a researcher in meat science at MU, who did a nice job presenting a variety of research and information of use to small meat producers. One item I hadn't thought about related to the need for proper freezer storage, as you can easily accelerate freezer burn with a small/bad freezer or through constant opening of the freezer, something many small producers/sellers may do. She also did a good job of pointing out a series of potential Federal rule changes regarding meat production, labelling, and marketing that small producers will want to comment on. There seems to be a lot of debate right now regarding just what words like "natural", "free-range", and so on mean. Most consumers would be mildly horrified to learn what is allowed under many of the sustainable-sounding labels. For example, "natural" only means that artificial substances aren't used on the meat. It doesn't restrict antibiotic or hormone use, since those are not synthetic. The Feds are considering some proposed rule changes that would weaken these terms even further. The speaker wasn't familiar with poultry issues, but all this sounded very similar to me to the rules in which "free range poultry" really just means the birds aren't in cages and have a small door to a small yard from an otherwise typically huge and nasty barn.

Sat through a talk on food safety from the local Health Department, which wasn't particularly illuminating. I'll be diplomatic here and say that they mean well, but don't necessarily know a lot about the practicalities of farming or even the reality of what "safe" means. It's not really their fault, our whole food system is set up on a screwy premise that if you follow certain regulated practices, the food will be safe, even though we don't have clear definitions of what "safe" actually means in a scientific sense. This is a topic for another post, but we're seeing more and more pressure coming from all levels of goverment to "make food safe" through all sorts of new restrictions, regulations, requirements, and other red-tape hoops that don't really address the actual problems or propose useful solutions. I'd rather we set a clear and scientifically-based standard for what "safe" actually means (X bacterial count on a swab test, for example) and let the individual producers and sellers figure out the best way to get there for their operation. A lot more effective and cheaper than trying to force our farm into a Dole-shaped hole or vice-versa. I'll get back to this another day.

The highlight of the day was a talk from guest speaker Dan Nagengast, Executive Director of the Kansas Rural Center, a farmer married to Lynn Byczynski, who produces the fantastic monthly magazine Growing For Market. In a wide-ranging talk, he covered lots of issues in market farming, discussed his recent trip to Japan as part of an exchange program between Japanese and Kansan small farmers, and presented some interesting data from studies on Kansas' agricultural history. This last bit is something I want to talk more, based on the hasty notes I scribbled as he talked.

Dan presented some numbers from 10 eastern Kansas counties, based on agricultural census date from 1910 through 2002. In 1910, these counties had about 130,000 acres in vegetable production. By 2002, that was down to 6,647. In 1910, these counties had over 140,000 apple trees. By 1959, they were virtually gone. These numbers were presented to counteract the persistent argument that local foods aren't practical, that they can't feed the country, that only modern agribusiness can meet our needs. In answer, the same study looked at the modern Kansas population and its total vegetable consumption, and calculated that it would take around 66,000 acres for Kansas to be vegetable-independent. In other words, ten times what we have now, but 50% of what we had in 1910.

From what I've seen and read, these sorts of numbers are true all over the country. In the space of a few generations, we've gone from a country with a solid ability to feed itself regionally with a robust network of independent farmers, to a country where even breadbasket states import most of their food from elsewhere while taking large subsidies to prop up what's left of agriculture. As I've said before, there's no agricultural or climate reason we can't become food-independent again. We've just chosen not to be, and that's a shame.

Overall, the event was informative and enjoyable, with good time for vendors to meet and talk outside the normal constraints of market. Thanks to all who made it happen.

Market plans, October 17

Last week's inaugural sales of cornmeal and soup beans went fantastically. Folks were very interested and both products sold out quickly (in fairness, we didn't bring that much). We're a bit concerned about the corn for this market, as much of our stock had to be harvested a bit early due to heavy rains, and has since been hanging in the house near our wood stove to accelerate its drying. We won't know until we do some test grinds on Friday whether we'll have much ready for market this week. Soup beans should again be available. I'm really hoping to get some returning customers' feedback on these two products, to judge whether it's worth it for both us and them.

Also, the greens amounts may be a bit lower, due to this cold, cloudy week. No sun means slower regrowth, and we won't know until we've finished harvesting Friday afternoon how much we'll really have. Definitely some, but they may run out before the end of market.

NEW THIS WEEK

We tentatively expect to bring a small amount of sweet potatoes, both white and red.

ALSO AVAILABLE

Mustard greens, collard greens, kale, daikon radishes, mixed fall radishes, beets, turnips, green tomatoes, lettuce heads, lettuce mix, sunchokes, herbs, fresh-ground cornmeal, and dried soup beans.

DONE FOR NOW

Okra and peppers are now finished.

COMING SOON

If we have time, we'd like to start arranging and bringing some decorative items like sorghum & corn stalks, sorghum and/or cedar wreaths, and so on. We've been bringing some beautiful purple amaranth heads with no customer interest, so we're not sure decorative stuff is really worth our while. But as we get closer to Halloween and the holidays, maybe interest will pick up.

Fresh peanuts

Of all the unusual and/or specialty crops we've experimented with, peanuts are way out there in terms of viability. There's a reason peanuts are generally grown in the Deep South; they need a long, hot growing season, and are one of those rare foods that still carry a real regional link in a modern homogenized America. Still, we found several references to people being able to grow them as far north as Virginia (thank you, Barbara Kingsolver) and decided that anything Virginia could do, Missouri could do. So we ordered a small packet from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, planted one 15' row this spring and hoped for the best.

We really didn't pay much attention to the plants all year other than some weeding. It was so cool and wet that we somewhat wrote them off as a nice try, assuming these conditions couldn't possibly generate decent peanuts. We had initially intended to cover the plants with hooped plastic come fall, to extend their season longer, but Joanna did one test dig a while back and found nothing, so we decided not to waste any more time on them. Then, just before our first real frost, I decided to check once more before we really did lose the plants, and found this:

Lots of nicely formed peanuts, although not quite fully mature. Every plant I pulled had a thick cluster of nuts just beneath the soil. Peanuts are bizarre in that the seeds don't form as roots (like potatoes) or above ground (like most nuts) but on lots of little stalks that shoot off the main plant above ground, then burrow back into the ground all around the mother plant, forming peanuts at their ends. It looks like a science-fiction creation, but I couldn't argue as I excitedly dug up plant after plant loaded with what sure looked like decent peanuts to me. After washing most of the dirt off, we ended up with about 2lb:

Naturally, we needed to taste them, so we used the tried-and-true Southern way of preparing fresh, green peanuts: boiling. I remember eating these as a kid on family trips to relatives in Mississippi, scooped into large paper rolls like ice-cream cones. Another one of those regional specialties that are too easy to forget. Having never made them ourselves, we did some quick online research and settled on a ratio of 1lb peanuts to 1/4cup salt. For our test batch of 1/4lb, that translated to 1TBL salt. So we combined those into a pot of boiling water, let boil for a couple hours, then started shelling:

Oh heavens, were they tasty. The nuts' flesh was creamy, like mashed potatoes, with a good nut flavor and just the right level of salt. The 1/4lb batch shown above was gone in minutes, and we started casting glances at the remaining (now paltry-seeming) 1 3/4lb.

We don't think these will ever be economically viable for us to grow for market. If the 2lb yield on one 15' row is typical, we would get 4lb from a standard garden bed. In general, we expect our garden beds to produce $100 per crop, meaning that growing a bed of peanuts would mean charging $25/lb to meet the same income level we'd get from whatever crop the peanuts replaced. So the serving above would be about $7.50. Even at stadium prices, that's a bit high.

That being said, their taste is amazing and they're yet another thing we can grow for ourselves and enjoy. So I'm sure we'll plant more next year, and share some with visiting friends and farm volunteers. But hey, if you'd pay $7.50 for a cup of the best peanuts in Missouri, let us know...

Permament beds in the rain

Last Thursday's 24-hour heavy rain (over 5" for us) was a valuable test of our insistence on no-till, permanent bed growing even in the big field. Everything was truly soggy that day and the next, but we were still able to move around, harvest, and do what we needed to do. I talked to several folks at market who really couldn't even get into their fields before market, or who made an unholy mess of mud trying.

Here's what our field looked like during Friday morning's harvest in a cold, steady rain:

The soil's muddy, sure, but the permanent aisles left in grass mean that we can still walk and haul carts around without getting stuck. Spongy grass is much more forgiving than raw mud. Below, if you look closely, you can see a deep bootprint in an aisle between two narrow beds. Even where grass isn't present in an aisle, keeping the bed and aisle locations permanent means that such footprints never compress the soil in a growing area, so it really doesn't matter if we do make a mess walking in wet conditions. The soil on other side of that print will stay looser and healthier.
Finally, in the photo below you can see the benefit of any raised bed. These two former bean beds were sown in oats, and you can see the water collecting in the deeper aisle-channel between the beds. Without the raised structure and permanent grassy aisles, this water would be flowing across the field, likely eroding some soil, and certainly working to drown and/or damage whatever was planted there. The raised beds help keep the top of the root zone out of any water, allowing plants to survive even heavy rains.

So directly after 5" of rain, while it was still raining the next morning, we were able to do our full market harvest with very little trouble from mud or soil conditions. I think that's well worth the extra work it takes to maintain this system.

Broadway Brewery

Like a great many people, we've been eagerly awaiting a chance to try the new Broadway Brewery in downtown Columbia. Flat Branch has good beer, but they serve generic food made from generic ingredients, usually with way too much salt. For non-local readers, Broadway is being opened by several area farmers and local-foods advocates, and is aiming to source a very high percentage of their food within central Missouri in addition to brewing beer. Take a look at their website and initial menu, which should set the heart of any foodie racing. The mere fact that they don't even own a fryer tells you a lot about their goals. Note: the online menu isn't quite the same as the menu we got, but it gives you the idea.

We finally got our chance on Saturday, as we needed to run a series of errands after market, including some downtown. As it turns out, we had a very good market day, and so celebrated by circulating some of those dollars back into the local economy. Here's our review of the place:

Setup
They've done a truly fantastic job with the look of the place. It's the perfect blend of formal/tasteful with laid-back/pub. Lots of wood, neutral colors, dark enough to be comfortable but not cavernous. There was only one TV, a flat-screen against one wall, and it was off. Perfect. Nothing wrong with a pub with a TV for major sporting events, but I hate trying to enjoy conversation with lots of flickering going on all around me. Walking back toward the bathrooms, you get the expected but well-done plate glass windows into the brewing area. Overall I can't imagine a more attractive and well-balanced design for a high-end brewpub. A+.

Menu
The menu is fantastic. Definitely a step above generic pub fare, with both standards and creative options. Rare among restaurants, they have vegetarian options that foodie vegetarians would actually want to eat, not relying just on veggie burgers, tofu, and mushroom slabs on buns. And the meat options are heavily sourced from real farms, and also show creativity. It's an excellent job of balancing high-end-foodie with beer-matching comfort food. A.

Food
Joanna ordered the Watermelon salad (arugula, cubed watermelon, feta, and crispy onions dressed with balsamic glaze.) and the Potato pizza (cheddar cheese, thin sliced potato, and red onions. Garnished with chopped pistachios.). This latter was a major leap of faith on her part, as we have very high standards for our pizzas, making them at home the Italian way with ultra-thin crust, quality cheese, and fresh ingredients. It's very hard to get a pizza in America that doesn't use cheap cheese, too much salt, and/or bad crust. Potato pizza in particular is a specialty of hers.

She was very happy with both choices. The arugula was excellent, with a nice rich flavor but none of the spicy bitterness that so often develops when we try to grow the stuff. The pizza was good. White cheddar (THANK YOU), thin crust, not greasy, potatoes about right. The only knock was that the pizza had clearly been baked on a metal pan, not on a stone. If you've won Joanna on restaurant pizza, though, you're doing something right.

I ordered the Antipasto plate (whole roasted garlic, red pepper pesto, spicy olives, and baba ganoush. Served with goat cheese croutons and grilled pita.) and the Terra Bella Farms lamb burger (not on the website, but local lamb with tomato, lettuce, and so on). The tasting plate came with slices of pita and a few hefty chunks of (Uprise?) bread. The two spreads were very good and not over-spiced or -salted, and the olives were nice. The garlic was pretty crunchy, making me think it hadn't been roasted long enough, and the flavor was pretty bland. Compared to what I know our garlic tastes like roasted, I wasn't impressed. Otherwise the plate was excellent.

The lamb burger's bun was good and solid, a step up from the squishy white bun one normally expects. The burger itself was huge, probably a 1/2 pounder, definitely a bit much for me. The lamb flavor was good, but it tasted highly over-salted or -spiced. It reminded me of a batch of sausage I made a few years ago, in which I accidentally dumped half the spice container in and ended up with a wildly too-strong batch that dried your mouth out just eating it. This wasn't that bad, but did taste too strong. Not sure if that's from the kitchen or if the burgers come pre-spiced from the processor, but it did bug me a bit and make me very thirsty for the rest of the day.

So overall I'd give the food a solid B+ to A. Nothing wrong that isn't likely just a kitchen getting its feet under it, and still far better than all but a handful of Columbia restaurants.

Beer
They only had two of their own brews on tap, a wheat and a nut brown ale, so naturally we tried both. The wheat was tasty but a little bitter for our tastes, though I'm not sure if that's just how they want it or are still learning. I like wheat beer smoother. The nut brown ale, on the other hand, was fantastic. Rich, smooth, and far too easy to slide down the gullet. I could have had a lot more of that one. A.

Service
Seating, water, and initial service were all timely and courteous. Then the server and the kitchen won our hearts entirely by taking their time. I hate ordering an appetizer and lingering over its flavors, only to have the next plate of food plunked down while I'm still halfway through. Our server allowed us to finish completely, and even gave us a rest before bringing out the main course. I don't know if this was intentional, or even if it's really good practice overall since some people will want faster service, but we were thrilled to be allowed to relax and savor the food without being rushed. Well done, folks, though it doesn't hurt to feed the parking meter a bit extra before dining here. Only one demerit on the service; I wasn't asked how I wanted my burger cooked, and it came out redder than I care for. A minor point, but worth noting, especially for a burger that thick in which there was a LOT of red. A

Summary
Wow. This place will likely join Sycamore, Main Squeeze, and Uprise Bakery on our most frequented restaurant list. With the inevitable tweaks and improvements that will come with being open longer, I think they've got a bright future.

Market plans, October 10

As of this morning, we're intending to be at market tomorrow, with a wide array of product. We'll have just about everything we had last week, as seen above in our largest display of the year, plus some exciting new items (see below).

IMPORTANT

We'll be moving our location from the front of the market, where we've been all year. This is due to two factors; the market's slow shrinkage as some vendors finish for the season, and our need for electricity to run the corn grinder (see below). Look for us halfway down the north side, between Show Me Beef and the Market Oasis. I'm told this will be our location for the rest of the year.

NEW THIS WEEK

We'll bring the first small batch of dent corn, for grinding at market into fresh cornmeal. Most of our stock is still drying, as the wet year has kept it from curing in the field and we've had to shuck and hang it in the house. Starting the woodstove this coming week will help. But we'll have a few pounds of mostly Arikara White with a few early ears of Hickory King mixed in, all ready to grind fresh for a tasty batch of heirloom cornbread (recipe cards will be available). We'd love it if customers brought small jars or containers to save a bag for this; 1-2 cups are enough for a batch of cornbread.

We'll also bring the first batch of mixed dried soup beans. These are best used mostly on their own, where their excellent flavor can shine. We like to cook them up and make simple stews with a few other vegetables and greens, or even just to serve them salted on their own as a side or simple lunch.

Both these and the corn are products that we could in theory keep all for ourselves as winter food, but we want to test the market and share these amazing items with customers. Both the beans and the corn have rich, authentic flavors that are nothing like the generic stuff in the store, and they're worth sharing. So we'll see how the beans go this week, and will probably keep bringing small batches for the rest of the market season.

As prices go, local stores sell "high-end" pre-packaged cornmeal of uncertain age for $2-3/lb. We've often found that such cornmeal is old and rancid, as whole-corn meal will naturally start to degrade eventually. Our fresh-ground stuff is worth at least $4/lb to us. 1 cup is about 1/2 lb, so you'll be spending anywhere from $2-$4 for enough to make cornbread, depending on whether you want to cut it with flour (taste is better if you don't).

Store bulk beans aren't even comparable; the nearest equivalent for our beans is Seed Savers Exchange's offerings of culinary beans for around $5/lb, and Joanna saw similar beans for $7.50/lb in Chicago. They're using economies of scale that we don't have, though, with large equipment on mono-crop fields, as opposed to our small-scale no-till integrated management, so it takes a bit more work for us to bring in the same crop. We'll be asking $10/lb for our beans, with the expectation that customers will buy them in small quantities as a special treat for a specific meal. For example, 1 cup weighs about 1/2lb, so you might pay $5 for something that will cook up to around 2-3 cups of beans, enough for two healthy servings. The one customer to whom I sold a batch earlier in the year as a test, returned two weeks later raving about how the taste was better than anything she'd ever had and how they were well worth the price. If we don't sell any, we'll happily eat the whole stock all winter and not buy any more imported "organic" beans from unknown origins.

ALSO AVAILABLE

Mustard greens, collard greens, kale, lettuce, hot radishes, sweet daikon radishes, turnips, beets, okra, herbs, and more.

DONE FOR NOW

Green beans, tomatillos, and bok choi are finished. The first two were done in by frost, and the latter remaining heads are too insect-damaged. The chickens and geese will love them. Okra will be done after this market.

COMING SOON

We expect to bring some sweet potatoes next week, but otherwise there really aren't any other products coming down the line, we're at the end of our season and coasting on what's already there. We hope to last at market through October; whether we go beyond that depends on sales and weather.

Dealing with illness

Running this place full-time pretty much requires Joanna and I to be active and working most of the time. This makes dealing with illness difficult, because there are many tasks and projects that just can't be put off when someone gets sick. We have to go to market or we don't make money. We have to harvest when items are ready or we don't have anything to sell (or items not good enough to sell). We have to plant when conditions are right, and so on.

When one person is sick, or out of town, or otherwise indisposed, it's generally manageable. But if both of us are sick, it gets really difficult, and we have to make some tough decisions. We've been facing those decisions recently.

When Joanna got home from her trip to a family wedding last week, she brought with her a nasty cold that almost immediately sidelined her from a lot of work. We were worried about last week's market, because I had a hint of soreness in my throat on Friday morning. That created a difficult decision: Do we miss a week of market sales and lose much of the produce and income, or do we risk spreading a cold to our customers? We realized that harvesting some items was necessary no matter what, and I felt fine for the remainder of the day on Friday and for market. By Saturday night, however, I was on the way down. The rest of this week, we've both been struggling with this harsh cold that is taking longer to move through than we're used to. The arrival of first frosts, and the impending hard frost this weekend, makes this even more difficult because there are lots of projects to get done before that happens even though we're both out of it. Joanna's currently on the way back up, but I've been in rough shape for days.

We're looking ahead to this weekend's market and the impending difficult choices. We don't want to make customers sick by harvesting, handling, and selling product while we're sick, but that Saturday market is our primary source of income and produce can't just be put back on the shelf until next week. It's even worse this week because we've been talking up October 10 for weeks as the date we'd start bringing things like soup beans and fresh-ground cornmeal. Those last items can be stored for later, but we're running out of market days and still have plenty of fresh greens, turnips, and more ready this week. We're going to have to decide whether we're well enough by Friday morning.

The real point here is not this one week's concern; it's the larger scope of running any small business like this in which the sales opportunities are limited and the owners' health is key. I'm sure it's true of many types of setups, but it really hits hard with small farms, and it's something for customers to keep in mind when they're used to the same familiar faces at market every weekend. It's one of the trade offs of being self-employed, and we hope this is a rare occurrence (it's the first time in three years we've both been sick enough at the same time to endanger market), but it's still a real problem when it arises.

Handling extra produce & garden waste

Like any vegetable farm, we produce a fair amount of waste plant material, whether from weeding, harvesting, spoiled products, or bringing products back from market. These can certainly be composted, and we do keep several piles going for such things, but we're just as likely to feed such things to our animals. The benefits here are that it's far easier than composting, generates excellent fertilizer, and cuts down on other feed costs, while helping provide food for us in the long run. Indeed, one of the core reasons we decided to build an animal population on the farm was to help close such loops.

The goats are especially fond of green material, such as root crop tops and pea shoots. Here, Joanna is feeding them handfuls of radish tops. We really ought to be careful what we feed to Garlic, our dairy goat, as lots of strong items like radishes can affect her milk's taste, but we have yet to notice that happening and so figure we haven't crossed the meaningful threshold there.

Geese like anything tender, and will gobble up greens that are too strong for the goats. Below, we've just thrown a pile of radish greens into their pasture.

The chickens are ideal for general kitchen scraps and lightly spoiled produce. Given that all the vegetables we eat come from the farm, and almost all the fruit comes from the farmers market, we have no problem taking down a daily bucket of scraps. They also get spoiled or leftover items like okra, zucchini, tomatoes, and more. Below, they're cleaning up a bucket of split tomatoes and leftover bok choi. Chickens will eat the seeds and flesh completely out of things like overgrown zucchini, taking what was a worthless hunk of vegetable and reducing it to a clean, hollow skin. And there's nothing like watching chickens running around with cherry tomatoes in their beaks.

The manure produced from all this is either deposited on pastures where it is quite beneficial, or deposited within the animal sheds, where it's naturally layered with straw and hay. This layer cake gets forked out now and then, becoming the base for excellent compost piles. We truly discard almost nothing, except for diseased or bug-ridden plants, which get burned to take care of the issue.

Early fall farm foods

I haven't done a food post in a while, but we've been eating very well this season, and not just on our Slow Food dinner. Late summer & early fall are probably the best times for farm food, as you get the full summer harvest plus the first fall items. With my mother visiting this past week, I'd been making lots of extra good food, and we sat down one evening to a buffet of leftovers that were just crying out for the photo above. So here's what we've been enjoying, clockwise from bottom left. Ingredients raised/produced on farm in italics:

Fresh green salad, with our tat soi, mizuna, beet greens, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, crumbled feta cheese, and oil & vinegar.

Cowpeas with shredded duck meat, topped with fresh salsa of tomatoes, tomatillos, onions, garlic, herbs, and spices.

Penne pasta with tomatoes, zucchini, garlic, herbs, and shredded cheese (some ours, some not).

Gumbo of cherry tomatoes, okra, green beans, zucchini, green peppers, onions, basil, parsley, paprika, and white wine.

Roasted potatoes, sweet potatoes, and turnips with herbs and olive oil.

None of these were particularly difficult or time-consuming to make, and all rely mostly on the produce, meat, and dairy we generate on-farm. Truly fresh ingredients make everything better, and even those without farms could make almost all of this easily from the farmers market.

First real frost

Saturday night/Sunday morning we received our first real frost. Above, you see heavy frost on some straw-mulched beds as the sun rises. We knew we were due when the clouds cleared early Saturday night, leaving the moon beaming down in a perfectly still evening with our thermometer in the upper 30s by midnight. We covered what we could, and Joanna went out several times during the night to check on things and to spray sensitive crops like beans and tomatoes with water (this actually helps them survive some frost, a trick also used by orchardists).

It seems that we didn't have any losses to this frost, somewhat surprisingly. We expected the Fin de Bagnol green beans to be killed or damaged, since we hadn't covered them and they certainly had ice on them at dawn, but it seems that Joanna's 5am spraying saved them. We had our tomatoes & peppers covered, and though the bed sheets protecting them were frozen this morning, the plants looked okay at dawn. Most other items are frost-tolerant (greens, beets, turnips, etc.) or tall enough to be above frost (okra, dent corn).

Still, this does mark a turning point in the season. We've already been working to put beds to sleep for the winter with cover crop and/or mulch, and this serves as a good reminder that those projects need to keep moving. We still have weeks of greens and root vegetables to bring to market, and plan to start with the dried corn and soup beans next week, along with sweet potatoes.

Market plans, October 3

This would be a great week to buy a mess of greens and make a nice soup. I made a delicious gumbo the other day of tomatoes, okra, green beans, zucchini, onions, mustard greens, collards, and more; the greens really add flavor and texture. These cool fall temperatures are perfect for such things. And there's always just the nice, easy, mess of sauteed greens as a side. Enjoy them while they're still at the peak of their quality.

NEW THIS WEEK:

We'll have some fall beets, though this planting hasn't been spectacular. If we have time, we'll dig some sunchokes, which are a sweet tuber that remind me of water chestnuts.

ALSO AVAILABLE:

Mustard greens, collard greens, kale, mizuna, lettuce mix, okra, green beans, turnips, radishes, herbs, and more. Might have some sweet peppers, and we'll evaluate the bok choi on Friday. This will be the last week for bok choi if we do bring any. The daikon radishes should be sweetening up with this recent cool weather, and we have lots of these in the ground. The turnips are nice right now; I love these roasted with potatoes & other root vegetables.

DONE FOR NOW:

Cherry tomatoes are definitely done; we just don't think their quality is up to our sale standards anymore. Same is true for tomatillos, which are starting to show more regular worm damage and whose yields are dropping anyway.

COMING SOON:

Next week we'll start selling sweet potatoes; our test digs revealed some very promising specimens. Next week is also our target to start offering fresh-ground cornmeal and dried beans, though the former is dependent on our ability to move to a market slot on the north side where we can get power for our grinder. We'll also start offering sorghum & cornstalks in various sizes & configurations, perfect for decorating your home for fall and Halloween.