Summer work schedule

Here's how typical days & weeks run on the farm during the summer:

MOST DAYS
I get up between 6-6:30, Joanna shortly thereafter. We both do morning chores; I make the rounds of poultry and goats to feed, water, and milk; Joanna checks on our plant starts both indoors and in our small hoophouse. We usually don't have breakfast until 7:30-8, then do whatever work is on tap for the morning.

We stop for lunch anywhere from 12-2, depending on weather, work, and employee presence. Early afternoons we try to take a short nap, and do some indoor tasks like laundry, office work, cleaning, cooking, food preservation, etc.

By mid-afternoons we often go back out to work if it's not too hot, or at least do shadier/less intensive work like weeding. Dinner is wildly variable, anywhere from 5-9pm depending on work. Sometimes we'll try to get it out of the way early, especially if we spent part of the afternoon cooking ahead, other times it just has to wait until after dark. We definitely try to get back in the fields doing harder work (like hoeing) by 6, when shade is starting to spread over the field (from the tall ridge to our west) and the temperature is dropping a bit. Joanna will work until 9 or so; I do the evening animal chores, including milking, around 8 and often go back to the house to clean up the kitchen and so on. Some evenings I'll stay out in the field after milking, chilling the milk in cold water so I don't have to go back to the house until dark either. After showering and often eating a second smaller meal around 9:30-10, we rarely get to sleep before 10:30.

OVER THE WEEK
Sunday-Thursday our work schedule is mostly as described above, with employees coming a few mornings and afternoons on a set schedule. Starting soon, Tuesday afternoons will be our restaurant delivery day when one of us drives into Columbia to drop off products to our contacts, and to do any in-town errands we might need.

Fridays are spent harvesting and preparing for market; during the summer this work tends to take part of Thursday as well. Saturday I get up extra-early to make it to market, and get home anywhere from 1-3pm. Joanna usually stays home to do all of the morning chores (animals & plants), then she takes a walk around all of the growing areas to check on plant progress, compile a to-do list, and project upcoming harvests. I generally take part of Saturday afternoon to rest, as market tires us out far more than you'd think. We also tend to make use of the hot Saturday afternoon hours to do a planning session for the coming week. Sometime in the few days after market, we wash out all the market containers and equipment and store those for the next week.

GENERAL WORKLOAD
During late spring and early summer, planting and transplanting are prominent tasks, along with weeding and general maintenance. As the summer moves on, harvesting becomes more and more time consuming, with many items needing a strict 36-48 hour picking schedule to keep their quality up (peas, green beans, edamame, zucchini, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, etc.) Sooner than we'd like, we're back to lots of planting as all our fall items start to be seeded and transplanted while the main harvest season is ongoing.

Managing the animals takes a little over an hour a day, plus a few days each month of extra work like moving the goat paddocks, cleaning the chicken shed, and so on. Occasionally, animal emergencies come up that force us to drop everything else on the schedule.

Somewhere in all this we squeeze out time for other projects like our walk-in cooler, fencing maintenance, and so on.

WEATHER-RELATED WORK CYCLES
Needless to say, our day-to-day tasks are strongly weather dependent, and the urgency of our workload varies with the weather, too. Following rain, we usually do a lot of hand weeding, both because the rain makes the weeds grow and because hand weeding is one of the few tasks that we can do when the soil is saturated. As the soil dries out, we transition to bed preparation, planting, hoeing weeds, and other tasks as needed. Eventually it dries out enough that watering/irrigation start requiring attention, and mulching to conserve moisture also becomes top priority. The busiest time for us, especially in the spring, tends to be at the end of a dry spell when rain is in the forecast. Getting seeds out just before the rain gives them a good chance of getting a good start, and there's no telling when the soil will dry out again to give us another opportunity to plant. The actual arrival of rain after a dry spell provides initial relief, because it gives us a chance to sit down for a bit; however, the prospect of severe storms often tempers the relief of rain, as hail can set back a lot of work.

DAYS OFF
We try to take one day off a month during the growing season (March-October), though this doesn't always happen. We are able to take lots of smaller breaks, taking an hour or so here and there to go watch birds, explore the stream, read, etc. But we rarely do much off the farm.

Product handling & quality at market

Even though we strive to handle our products well on the farm, it's still pretty easy for the quality to go downhill at market. Items have to sit out on tables to sell, and on a breezy, warm day like today's market, lots of products start to be affected. By 10:00 today I was putting wet towels on the radish tops, trying to keep them from wilting. It's really hard to maintain high quality under such conditions, which hurts when our business model is based on things being extra-fresh and long-lasting for customers. But I can't leave things in coolers, either, because customers won't stop and buy what they can't see laid out.

Moreover, many customers don't always think about the best way to handle their produce post-market. If you buy some nice fresh lettuce or herbs, which then sit in your handle-bag at 85 degrees for the next 30-45 minutes while you shop and talk, plus the 10-15 minute drive home in a hot car, you've just taken some real shelf-life off your produce. I've heard many farmers bemoan the pattern of folks buying produce, then going off to Gerbes to complete their shopping trip while the market stuff sits in the hot trunk. So please, please consider bringing a small cooler for your purchases and taking them back there if you're going to be very long. Our reputation will thank you.

That being said, sometimes we don't get things right either. We brought a few heads of broccoli raab this morning, which we'd gotten a good review on from a friend who'd tried some of ours, but we hadn't eaten it ourselves yet. I brought one bunch home, we sauteed it for lunch, and found it to be really bad. Way too strong & bitter for our tastes, I actually spit it out. So if the other bunches were like that, our apologies to the customers and please ask us for your money back. I emailed one purchaser whom I know to warn her.

We also had a nice lady inform us that the radishes she'd bought from us last week had gone bad very quickly, becoming soft and shrivelled by the next day. I found this very odd, as we routinely keep de-topped radishes in our fridge for a week with no ill effects, and have overall had very good reviews of the radishes from repeat customers. I asked about her handling, and she swore she'd taken them right home, taken the tops off, put them in the fridge. So who knows what we did wrong with those. She bought some more, and I told her if there was any problem with those we'd give her both weeks' money back.

Our overall trend is certainly to have many repeat customers happy with our quality, but we're grateful to those who give us any forms of feedback so we can monitor our results.

Oh, and thanks to everyone who came out today and made the Memorial Day market a huge success. The place was bustling, and I sold out by 11. We never know what to expect on holidays, but this was fantastic. Enjoy the rest of your weekend; we'll be planting, transplanting, and weeding like crazy until/unless the expected storms pop up.

Market plans, May 29

As this blog enters its third year, we're starting to get excellent data on the seasonal patterns of product availability. I have posts from May 30 2008 and May 29 2009 detailing what was growing and what we'd have at market. This makes a great comparison with this week's market report (and the 2008 post shows how far we've come in developing the farm). They also prove that the last two springs and this spring have all been colder and rainer than preferable, since each one has us commenting on such conditions and their effect on our productivity.

This week we'll be introducing garlic scapes and snap peas (both were just appearing at this time the last two years). There should be a decent amount of scape bundles, and just a few pints of the year's first peas. Overall we have over 400 row-feet of peas planted, most of which are now flowering, so we expect good availabilty of peas in the coming weeks (snaps, snows, and shellers).

Unlike last year, lettuce is now done. With this week's heat, and having already gotten two cuttings from all our loose-leaf plantings, we decided enough was enough. The lettuce was likely to get bitter by the end of the week, so on Monday all the beds were cut one last time, and the bulk harvest sold to Uprise Bakery for their salads. We'll continue having the saute mix of various baby greens like mustard, kale, arugula, beet greens, tat soi, chard, etc.

Radish bundles will be available, along with the usual herbs like garlic chives, mint, and dill. Green onions are finished. We might have a few bundles of broccoli raab, with more to come.

Garlic scapes

This weekend we'll have the season's first garlic scapes. These are the tender young flower stems of hardneck garlic, which begin to emerge about a month before the heads are ready. They should be removed to force the plant's energy into bulbing. The easiest way to harvest scapes is to cut them off, but that wastes the best part: the tender, flavorful stem within the plant itself. With equal parts luck and skill, you can gently but firmly tug on the scape and convince it to break near the base of the plant, then be drawn up through the long, almost 2-foot stalk of the plant to emerge as a tender, coiled garlic scape. If harvested too late, scapes will become tough and woody, but the young, tender scapes are a true highlight of seasonal fare for us.

We sell ours in grades; highest price for those we've extracted successfully intact, and lower prices for smaller ones and broken ones that don't have the inner portion. Use scapes like garlic scallions; chopped into anything they add a nice flavor. I particularly like them with eggs and soup. Another more creative way to use them involves making pesto; read our recipe here with a photo.

We love scapes for their tender texture and fresh garlic flavor and always enjoy their brief season. And it's a good sign that the true garlic harvest is growing near.

Not an Ozark farm

I'm resting after a long morning that drained us both (still feeling sick), so thought I'd share a good story from a few weeks ago.

We'd just transplanted 90' of zucchini and seeded 40' more, and were setting up our row cover. This is a thin, breathable fabric that stretches tightly over PVC hoops to protect young plants from insects while the plants are young and developing. It needs to be held on pretty well to withstand winds, for which we often use rocks (some farms use sandbags or bury the edges in soil). We don't have enough large rocks in the field, however, so took the truck down to the stream and collected about 4 5-gallon buckets worth and drove them out to the field for this purpose.

We often describe the farm's physical setting as Ozark-like, and it is, but as we were distributing the rocks something occured to me. You can't possibly call yourself an Ozark farm if you have to truck rocks into your fields. That's a prairie farm problem if I ever heard one.

There's a reason our physiographic province is called "Ozark margin" or "Ozark fringe".

Good market, long week ahead

Market was great this morning. Gorgeous weather, lots of customers, had no trouble effectively selling out. I was really tired, but for whatever reason wasn't feeling any outward symptoms of the lingering nasty cold, so was comfortable handling & selling produce. When I got home, though, I crashed and am now on the couch listening to baseball while getting up just often enough to monitor a 2-gallon batch of cheese.

The coming week will be tough but productive. We're forecast for sunny mid-upper 80s all week, with very high humidity due to the super-saturated ground. Even though this isn't all that unusual for Missouri, the NWS has a warning out because no one's adapted to these sticky conditions all the sudden after months of cool, cloudy, and wet weather.

As the ground dries out and the soil warms up, we have a huge project list to undertake. Just about every kind of summer item needs to be seeded and/or transplanted, often into beds that still need some hoeing and shaping since it's been too wet to do this properly. Corn, green beans, okra, peppers, tomatoes, tomatillos, edamame, drying beans, squash, etc. Many of these haven't gone out yet because it's been so wet and cold that we felt we'd do worse to put them out, due to cold soil temperatures and increased disease potential. For example, our first plantings of edamame and green beans never germinated, because the soil T crashed 10 degrees just after we seeded them due to nearly two weeks of clouds & rain.

So don't expect much blogging this week. When the sun rises tomorrow, we're focusing solely on catching up and taking advantage of sunny & dry conditions; it will take us all week to even hope to get back on track, provided we get our energy back after a week of feeling sick.

Market plans, May 22

We'll have about the same stand as last week; lettuce mix, salad mix, radishes, green onions, herbs, etc. Peas are flowering and should be available next week. We'll probably bring pea shoots again.


It's been a long week for both of us. We measured 7 consecutive days of rain, with a short break Wednesday followed by more rain, which makes the weeds go wild but prevents us from getting many other things done.


In addition, we're both battling a nasty cold, which creates real problems for harvesting and marketing. Joanna was out of commission for the first part of the week, and I came down hard and fast Wednesday night and am currently in no shape to sell fresh produce. We think we're both past the contagious phase by now, but it is still not good practice to be sniffling and coughing when working with produce or customers, so we're hoping that Joanna's cough goes away quickly. We don't want to make people sick, but also have this one 4-hour window per week to make sales of products that have taken months to grow. Thank goodness we have workers scheduled for Friday morning to help with harvest.


So be nice to Joanna at market on Saturday; we're both worn out.

BTW, here's a nice photo from a reader/customer showing sauteed pea shoots with chive blossoms, both sourced from us. Very pretty.

Recipe quirks

Even good cookbooks & magazines have quirks in their recipes, and lesser ones can be rather annoying. Here are a few that especially bug me:

- No/poor index: How can you not put an index in a cookbook? And some have indices that are poorly organized or incomplete. Then there's the inconsistent listing of ingredients between books. Do you look under Beans, white; or White beans? Peppers, green; Green peppers; or Bell peppers? I get intellectual whiplash trying to remember which book does it which way.

- Ingredient lists not in recipe order: Yes, you should always read the whole recipe first, and I'm a big fan of getting everything ready before I start. It's still easier to get things right if all the ingredients are listed in the order you need to use them.

- Major steps/time gaps buried in the recipe: You're moving right along, until you run across that buried "let chill overnight" or "prepare X the day before". Yeah, read ahead, but I love cookbooks which state right up front that there's a longer prep stage. Same goes for cooking time; don't just say "stir until ____", give us a sense of how long to expect. This helps too if you're skimming a recipe to see if it's worth proceeding on.

- Lazy/nasty substitutes: This is partially me being a food snob, but I hate processed ingredients that have no business being there. Garlic powder? How hard is it to chop a clove of garlic? Everyone will define this cutoff differently, and I'm pretty far toward the snooty end (rejecting anything with corn syrup, among other things). Italian dressing in marinades is a big reject, as is orange cheese (we actually cancelled a cooking magazine over this one, though it was just the last straw in a string of annoyances).

- Blatantly unseasonal combinations: Yes, I know most people don't grow all their own food and take seasonality literally. But some things just don't make sense together, especially when the recipe is from a monthly cooking magazine that makes a point of touting seasons. And some things just aren't very good when out of season; again the gourmet cooking magazines should know better. Asparagus and peppers in the Februrary issue? Uh uh.

- Placing wet ingredients before dry ones, especially in baking. It's easier and more efficient to measure and mix all your dry ingredients first, then move on to the wet ones with the same utensils when practical. You can get around this, but why not write the recipe in the most efficient and fool-proof order in the first place?

I've sure I've violated many of these ideas in writing up recipes for this blog, and will only justify it by noting that I'm not paid and am not selling them. So even with my glass house, these are what annoy me about real recipes. Anyone have others, or comments on these?

Not your traditional farm

It's a rainy, stormy day last week. I'm in the barn doing some manly construction work on our walk-in cooler. Cutting lumber, framing the cooler, attaching insulation, etc. The rain is coming down outside, thunder is muttering away. Got the boombox turned up so I can hear it over the rain, thunder, and power tools; singing along happily.

Classic rock? Country? No...mostly Evita & My Fair Lady, with a touch of Y0-Yo-Ma.

Yep; farmin's a-changin'.


OK, in fairness it would have been a Royals baseball game if we recieved any stations that carried the Royals. But still...

Recipe: fresh Filipino chili paste

This recipe makes a strong, hot, and flavorful seasoning paste, similar to a chili or curry paste, that can be used for Filipino or other Asian cooking. I've adapted it from the original in The Filipino-American Kitchen, making it fit the seasonal ingredients we have on hand. Even cutting out a few authentic ingredients like fish sauce and shrimp paste, it works nicely as a flavoring or dipping sauce.

The original calls for garlic cloves & green onions, which is fine, but I find that using garlic & onion chives instead works quite nicely to produce a smooth, green paste. And at this time of the year it's more seasonal, and is a great way to use lots of chives if you have them on hand.

1 big bunch garlic chives (maybe a few ounces?) or a couple garlic cloves
1-2 tsp grated ginger
1 equal bunch onion chives (or minced green onion)
1 dried or fresh Thai chili pepper (adjust to taste)
1 tsp sugar
2 tbl olive oil
1-2 tsp soy sauce

Mince whatever combination of chives/garlic/onions you're using, along with the hot pepper. Grind in a large mortar & pestle until crushed into goo, then add the other ingredients and grind more until you have a smooth paste. I suppose this could be done in a small blender as well, though I haven't tried it (I like the crushed texture of this method).

At this point you can taste the base flavor and add anything else you want, like curry powder, other herbs, other sauces, etc. It should be a strong, garlicky paste with some heat to it.

I've used this to flavor various sauces, and it could also be a nice dipping sauce for spring rolls, shrimp, and more. The original recipe calls for cooking chicken in the paste and combining with rice. Use your imagination.

I most recently used it to flavor a tomato/edamame sauce, which I combined with rice & marinated meat in my lumpiang (Filipino egg rolls):

Good drizzly market

The weather was ugly this morning at the Market. Cold, drizzly, light breeze... the kind no one in their right mind would go out into. In past years, it's the kind of weather that means low customer counts, low sales, and depressed farmers.

Not this time. I don't know what the count was, but I and two other vendors I talked to thought the crowd and the sales were excellent given the conditions. We made slightly more than last week, though I was sure I'd have lots left over given the conditions.

At the end, we had four pounds of lettuce mix left, which was happily purchased by Courtney from Uprise Bakery for use in their kitchen. Uprise certainly goes out of their way not only to buy from local farmers, but to make deals at the end of market to take on items that weren't sold and otherwise wouldn't be sold. They've been really good about supporting and sourcing from us, and pay a very fair price. Support them, and thank them.

Thanks also to everyone who came to the Market despite the weather, and pleased every vendor I talked to with their loyalty. It's a good sign.

Harvesting & handling greens

Harvesting fresh greens for market needs to be done right to maximize the quality and freshness of the product. Greens are very susceptible to heat, sun, and wind, and need to be handled gently and cooled quickly. We've been using a system for several years that works very well for us, and gives us the long shelf life customers tell us about.


All greens, whether lettuce, cooking greens, or baby leaf mixes, are cut with knives and placed directly into containers of cold water. Above, you see Joanna with a typical harvest container. We'll keep adding cut leaves until the container is reasonably full, but the leaves can still be pushed underwater and swirled around.

This method chills the greens instantly, arresting the decay process that begins the moment a leaf is separated from its roots. Even a few minutes sitting out in the sun and wind can start to degrade leaves, so going right into the water both protects the leaf and sucks the heat out of it. Even on a 60-70 degree day, the effect is very noticeable. By the time a full container makes it back to a packing station, the water is quite noticeably warmer.

Once harvested, the leaves are swirled around in their original water to get most of the dirt off. We'll also try to float off any clover, straw, or other plant scraps we don't want. Then the greens are transferred by hand into a separated container of clean, cold water and given another rinse. From there they go into the salad spinner (above, right) to get most water off them, then packed gently into lidded containers. Within an hour, they're in a fridge at proper storage temperature of mid-30s.

These methods help ensure the greens are very good when they get to market, but their life at market is still difficult. Any kind of breeze or sun exposure hits greens hard, and we try to be really careful how they're presented. The nature of a farmers market is that we have to have bins of greens open for people to see, plus we like the flexibility of custom-bagging, but anything at the top will start to degrade after about half an hour. When it's busy, natural turnover keeps new leaves on top, but when it's slow we'll start pre-bagging 1/2lb bags to aid in the turnover. The bags protect the leaves, while giving customers an easier option than custom-bagging an amount.

Over the last few years we've been happy with the greens quality these methods have given us, and most feedback agrees. We did have one customer last year tell us some lettuce didn't last very long once he got it home; it seemed to be one variety in our lettuce mixes. We did some tests and home and determined that while every variety stored for weeks just fine in the fridge, that one variety was especially susceptible to the open-air conditions at market. In other words, his lettuce was great when it got to market, but that one variety sat out just a little too long and was degraded by wind by the time he got it home. It seems to have been more sensitive than the rest. So we're even more careful now about our at-market handling.

Certainly if anyone does have a problem, we hope they'll let us know. But overall we're pleased with the quality we get by harvesting into cold water and handling carefully.

Harvesting & handling radishes

Radishes are reasonably easy to grow. Taking only 30 days from seed to sale, and tolerant of cool temperatures, they're a great fit for early markets. We grow seven varieties of spring radishes, ranging from sweet/mild to spicy. Together, they make beautiful bundles.

Even easy items take care and proper handling to achieve the highest quality, and to make the harvesting and washing process efficient enough to be economic. For root crops, this means getting the dirt off without excessive handling that can damage the item or take too long; we also want the radishes cooled off as quickly as possible to keep them crisp and fresh.

We're using a new handling method for radishes (and most other root crops) this year: plastic shopping baskets. These are sturdy and washable, and can be dunked into tubs of cold water to wash dirt off in bulk. Handling radishes this way is much, much faster than hand-washing them, and ends up being more water-efficient. Repeatedly sloshing the baskets up and down creates a washing-machine action that sluices most of the dirt off; we can hand-wash the few which don't clean up well enough. Below, you see two baskets full of radishes being dunked.

Our baskets come from the Good L Corporation, based near Nashville, TN, the last American manufacturer of such baskets. We heard of them through another farmer who has been promoting this method, using factory seconds. This works great, as they have lots of odd misprinted baskets around that they can't sell, but don't want to toss. When we called, they were happy to work with us and sent us a shipment of 20-something baskets of all different sizes for us to test. They weren't cheap, but were cheaper than buying them new, and we're proud to be using American-made materials. So far we're thrilled with the results, as these baskets are very sound and sturdy, and work great as harvest containers. I suspect we'll end up buying many more.



Once the radishes are bulk-washed, they're spread out on a packing table and sorted by type (we tend to harvest one or two types per basket to simplify this). Any that look too dirty will get a quick hand-washing. Then I start going through and making 4-oz bundles, trying to keep consistent sizes within bundles and to represent as many varieties as possible. We'll range from 4-10 radishes per bundle depending on size. Once the lower-producing varieties are gone, I'll start doing single-color bunches for folks who want just spicy or just mild radishes. The bundles are rubber-banded and tossed into a clean container for transport and storage in our market fridges.

We always harvest radishes the day before market, so they're as fresh as possible. Usually these go from soil to cooler within an hour, so they're being chilled very quickly and will be very good.

Market plans, May 15

I'm posting this on Thursday morning instead of Friday, because (a) I know what we're going to have and might as well give more notice, and (b) the posts I intended to write up for tomorrow involve some photos which are on our desktop computer, which is having issues right now and we're tired. Look for a couple posts on Friday about how we harvest, wash, and pack our radishes & greens, to better understand the steps we take to ensure quality and freshness. We feel strongly about our handling procedures and the resulting produce quality.

We'll have the same stand as last week. Lettuce mix (multiple varieties of cut leaf), salad mix (lettuce plus baby greens such as kale, arugula, beet, dill, mustard, etc.), bundles of mixed & straight-color radishes, herbs (lemon balm, catnip, chives, garlic chives, multiple mints), and green onions. Everything harvested fresh on Friday. So far we've been getting good reviews on all these from customers and employees alike.

We'll have some pea shoots coming on, but may not have enough to sell on their own. We may just end up adding them to the salad mix for an extra feature.

Also, Saturday will be a special event at the farmers market: the yearly omelet-making by culinary students from the Career Center. This is a treat, and they use all market ingredients. I stopped by Tuesday to deliver a pound of fresh chives. Make sure to come by and enjoy; Show Me Eats has more detail.

Recipe: German roast & noodles

I made this last Wednesday, a long and tiring day in which we did a lot of work with multiple employees, and badly needed to replenish calories. Hearty and tasty, it required very little work at the end, just some preparation a few days ahead. It probably took me 20 minutes once it was time for dinner at 8:30pm. No photos, unfortunately, because my camera is dead and Joanna's doesn't do indoor photos well. I make variations on this kind of German cooking all winter and early spring, but finally paid attention enough to write it up this time.

Beer-marinated venison roast with gravy-noodles & sauerkraut
all quantities estimated, as I just threw this together

MEAT MARINADE
1-2 lb meat, in this case a venison roast
3/4 bottle good beer (the other 1/4 for the chef)
1/2-1 cup dried or chopped onions
1/2-1 cup dried or chopped tomatoes
2t caraway seeds
2T cider vinegar
2T brown sugar
Some water if necessary to nearly cover the meat
Salt as desired

I made this with our own dried onions and tomatoes, which made the preparation super-easy with no chopping needed. I like the way they worked with the liquids, but fresh produce would work too. Combine everything and let sit for a few days. When ready, stick into a 350F oven and bake for a few hours. Browning the meat would be better, but I didn't have time as I literally came back to the house from the field just long enough to throw it in the oven for later; it came out good enough.

NOODLES & GRAVY
2T butter
2T flour
Pan juices
Some good German noodles, spaetzle or otherwise

When the meat is nearly done, melt butter in a small pan, and add flour to make a basic roux. Stir until thick and starting to brown. Drain/spoon off a good amount of the remaining liquid in the meat dish, and whisk into the roux. Keep stirring/whisking for a few minutes to produce a nice, thick gravy. It should be a good balance of sweet and sour with undertones of the onion and meat; add vinegar or sugar as necessary to get the flavor right. Meanwhile, cook the noodles in a separate pan.

SERVING
When the noodles are done, remove the meat from the oven and from its baking dish. Mix the rest of the cooking liquid, especially the onions & tomatoes, into the gravy and combine with the noodles. This should result in a thick, rich sauce on the noodles, which are then ladled onto a plate next to the carved roast. If you want, reserve a bit of the gravy to ladle over the meat, which should be tender and flake nicely. Serve with sauerkraut on the side.

In our version, we used our own venison, home-dried onions & tomatoes, home-fermented sauerkraut, and Boulevard wheat beer.

Working with employees

We knew we needed help this year, but it needed to fit two parameters: anything we do is going to be legal and above-the-table, and it has to be affordable. So we set up the pay-in-produce model, in which we take advantage of IRS rules allowing farms to pay workers in farm products rather than cash, and not having to do the withholding paperwork. For about a month now, we've had three weekly time slots in which folks come out to work for four hours at a time, thus earning about $30 worth of farm products. In effect, it's a working CSA in which their share is paid by labor instead of cash. At the end of the year, we just file the total value paid to the IRS.

We have three blocks of time; two people coming for four hours each, and a married couple coming for two hours together. All these folks have full-time jobs as well, and see this small-time job as a good way to get a form of CSA share along with exercise and a better understanding of the farm.

As this is our first year with employees, it's been a good learning experience. There is always plenty of work on the farm, but it's a surprising challenge sometimes putting together a solid block of work that makes sense to do with outsiders. So much of what we do, even basic jobs like weeding, is actually pretty skilled labor that can be hard to quickly teach to someone who's only here a few hours a week. We take our knowledge of the farm for granted, but trying to explain which little plants are baby carrots and which are grass is not as easy as it sounds, and trying to convey the subtleties and long-term plans behind any given action is difficult.

A lot of what we do is contained and planned within our heads, such that we generally can't just send someone off to do something. It's not a question of competence, just of knowledge and context that we have from doing this full-time. But it's still something we have to pay close attention to, to make sure someone isn't making an honest but still problematic mistake or doings something not quite the way it's needed. Sometimes it's less efficient to have to redo something later than just to do it yourself in the first place.

It's also a challenge trying to keep the work diverse, so that someone doesn't get stuck doing the same thing every week. The reality is that basic chores like weeding are a core labor need on an organic farm, and I think everyone understands that. But we also see it as our job to make sure they get a better experience and more learning than just being a weekly weed-monkey. So we try to plan ahead to integrate at least some other jobs or opportunities, as possible.

Then there's weather. We monitor weather constantly, and plan our daily and even hourly work around the right conditions. We can adapt as needed to what's coming and happening, and shift chores back and forth. But when you have people coming at set days and times regardless of weather, it really changes the management strategies we have to use. So some jobs get pushed on or off certain days because of the employee schedule, when on our own we might do things differently. Thus one person has done little but weeding and fence work for weeks, because we've been in a cycle of rain just around their work time with dry weather opposite, so weeding and fencing are the most sensible jobs, whereas others coming at other parts of the week have been able to do more. And some of the most interesting jobs have to happen when conditions are right; we did a ton of planting and seeding on Sunday that folks would have enjoyed taking part in, but that's when we had to do it (and our Sunday worker couldn't make it this week). Oh well.

The payment system has also been interesting. Overall, I think it's working fine, with people having the right to take good amounts of whatever is available, including fresh milk & eggs. Spring is a lower-production season for us, so everyone is building up some credit toward later-season booms in produce. I think we're all interested in doing some joint canning days for things like tomatoes and pickles, when their work time will pick up the slack in produce pay. We also want to do a couple cheese-making days so they can learn more about how to use their milk. At times I think they're reluctant to "take too much", whereas we're often concerned they're not getting enough. Hopefully it all evens out in the end.

As the season progresses, I expect the work get will more and more diverse, and they'll get tired of harvesting instead of weeding. But hopefully it will become more and more interesting for them to see how the long-term arc of farm management plays out. Certainly I think everyone is willing to be open about what's working and what isn't, and we can figure out any mistakes we make in management. Even though we don't work well for other people, we can still try to be worth working for.

And if we make it through this year without running anyone off, we'll have a good model for expanding again next year. Certainly, in the meantime, we can definitely tell that we have help. It makes a noticeable difference to look at the task list and the state of things whenever someone leaves, and know that real progress was made.

Farm projects, mid-May

With a rainy/stormy day coming up, this is a good time to write up blog posts and take a break from the long week of dry-weather work we just put in. We're both very tired at the moment.

May marks our transition from spring growing to summer, as we finally move beyond the threat of frost and the soil & air warms enough to accommodate summer plantings. Every kind of produce has a range of soil temperature and conditions that are ideal for germination and/or transplanting, and we monitor these carefully to get the best start possible.

Sunday was a long day of dry-weather work, getting beds worked & prepared and seeding/transplanting various things before an expected week of storms and rain. Lots of hoeing, hand-weeding, digging, and other basic work to get the necessary beds in good shape.

We set out 130 feet of summer squash plants, about half of them Costata Romanesco, a variety intended for baby squash and squash blossoms. These are intended partially for Sycamore Restaurant, and partially for market. Below, you see a long row protected by row cover, a thin fabric stretched tight over PVC hoops that helps exclude insect pests until the plants are large enough to withstand some of their privations. Handling and stretching 100' of lightweight row cover in even a slight breeze is no easy task.


Our late spring items are growing beautifully. Below you see one of many plantings of peas. These are the later and thus smaller ones; in the garden they're waist-high. Our tall, vining pea varieties are planted along cattle-panel hoop trellises. If you look closely, you'll see another parallel row on the far side of the hoops. The panels are 16' long, bent over an 8' diameter, such that each row of peas gets 8' of trellis to grow on but we never have to reach very far to get to them. There's another row down the middle planted in heat-sensitive greens or brassicas which will want some shade by the time the peas are big enough to provide it. We'll be doing cucumbers the same way once the peas come out.

We've also seeded, or are about to seed, the first round of many summer items. Sunday, the first rows of edamame and Fin de Bagnol green beans went out, along with some more zucchini. Below you see Joanna planting a row of Fins. Dried beans, corn, and so much more are coming soon.

In preparation for the large amounts of produce we'll be handling this summer and fall, I've been squeezing in time to work on building our walk-in cooler. Below is an early shot, when it's just been framed in with cedar lumber. I'll be adding siding and thick insulation, and sealing all cracks with caulk and spray foam. Cooling power will be provided by a basic window air conditioner, tricked into going beyond the call of duty by a nifty little device called a CoolBot, which is a form of thermostat that converts A/C units into cooler machinery. These were invented by a small farmer and come highly recommended by farmers around the country. More on this in a separate post, but you can see the frame for the A/C unit toward the back, where I'll cut out the barn siding to allow venting to the outdoors. Hopefully this project will be done in another week or so; I expect to get some more time on it during this rainy, stormy week.

Along with all this, there's the ever-present weeding (that's all we did with multiple employees on Wednesday), watering/irrigation, general maintenance, harvest/market, indoor/greenhouse seedling maintenance, daily milking & animal chores, building and managing a new large compost pile, and so on. Then there's the good cooking we refuse to neglect, generating some of the tasty recipes & meals I intend to share on Wednesday.

Oh, and sleep. There's that too.

How NOT to solicit business

Having the same home/business number means we get a fair amount of annoying phone calls from random people. I don't know who trains these people trying to drum up credit card business or something, but they have no idea how to make a sales pitch that you'd actually want to listen to. For one thing, at least rehearse who you're calling and how you're going to pronounce their name. That slight pause as they check their computer screen for the next name on the list is a dead giveaway for an upcoming dial tone. This one was pretty typical, although they actually hung up on me for once:


CALLER: Hi, is this the owner?

ME: Who's calling, please?

CALLER: Oh, this is Brian! Is this the owner?

ME: Of what?

CALLER: Uh...(short pause)...Chert...Hollow Farm? Is this the owner?

ME: Yes.

CALLER: And how may I properly address you, sir?

ME: Well, that depends on whether we have anything to discuss.

CALLER: (hangs up).



Yeah, good job there, Skippy. In four chances, you gave me no indication why you were calling, who you were representing, or why I might be interested in whatever it is you're offering. FAIL.

Market plans, May 8

We'll have about the same mix of items this week as last week: lettuce mix, salad mix (lettuce plus small amounts of baby kale, arugula, mustard, dill, beet greens, and more), green onions, radishes, herbs (mint, chives, garlic chives, lemon balm). Last week we easily sold out; looking forward to another good market with more good weather.

We have a good chance of frosts overnight Friday and/or Saturday, hopefully our last of the year. By Sunday we'll be out in the field transplanting the first zukes & tomatoes, seeding the first edamame, soup beans, green beans, and more. Tomatillos, corn, and much more going in soon.

Spring cleaning society

The Washington Post this morning has a fun feature with 12 short columns on things our society should get rid of in a massive spring cleaning. I quite enjoyed it, especially the arguments on fine print:

Contract law is based on the idea that two people can come together and strike a deal, knowing that the courts will enforce their agreement if something goes wrong....Fine print means that one party (think: a big corporation) can lay down the terms of the deal in a way that the other party (think: a customer) is unlikely to figure out....Fine print costs everyone else money, too, because it makes products impossible to compare....By decreasing competition, fine print increases prices.

And carbon credits:

You know the idea: Let's make climate rescue painless by paying Zambian farmers not to till their soil while America continues its oil- and coal-burning binge....Offsets are ethically troubling, as well. They allow rich countries such as the United States to avoid full responsibility for their actions.

Couldn't agree more with those two. Personally I would extend the fine print argument to tax law, as overly-complicated tax law is easily as big a drag on economic performance and government efficiency as private fine print. It's really disappointing that more politicians don't see simplification in general as a primary goal; for liberals, it would make bigger governments more effective and easier to accept, while for conservatives it would help shrink the governmental footprint in our lives.

As for carbon credits, I've never gotten beyond the opinion that they're somewhere between a joke and a scam. Solving problems does not involve paying someone else to pretend the problem doesn't exist.

Why soda taxes are a bad idea

I heard a report on NPR Tuesday afternoon about the possibility of soda taxes as a mechanism to discourage people from drinking too much soda and thus affecting their health. This is a thoroughly inefficient idea.

First, adding a special soda tax will create hardship for retailers, who will have to keep track of this special rate. I have far more sympathy than I used to for this kind of red tape, now that we have up to 7 different sales tax rates to track in our own county alone. Any bureaucracy like this costs businesses time and money which they do not need to lose.

Second, if the goal is to reduce sugar consumption, have fun defining just which drinks are too sugary and need the tax. Sweetened fruit juices? Drink mixes? Energy drinks? Chocolate milk? A kid chugging chocolate milk every day is getting too much sugar; why pick on just soda? There will be lots of money spent wrangling over the right definition, and it will end up being arbitrary and ineffective.

Third, it is not likely to work and will just be an economic drag on individuals. Presumably the idea is that a higher price will affect buying habits. To convince people to buy a smaller enough amount of soda to actually affect their health, that tax will have to be huge, which is not politically likely. Otherwise it will just suck money from individuals' budgets in the form of somewhat higher prices, but not actually change anything in a meaningful way.

Fourth, it's a wasteful and roundabout way to achieve the desired economic influence. The core problem with over-consumption of soda is that it's cheap. Taxing it does raise the price. However, the actual basic reason it's cheap is because we heavily subsidize its primary ingredient, corn (for corn syrup). Reform ag subsidies such that they support the farmer but not the commodity, and you achieve the same economic effect of higher soda prices, but in a way that costs the government LESS time and money, not MORE.

Levying a new tax that requires new compliance, new bureaucracy, and new costs, is far less efficient than simply changing the government program that creates the problem in the first place. Otherwise we're using government action at both ends of the issue to create competing economic incentives, rather than just streamlining the system. No wonder government grows inexorably; the only solution we can think of to fix a problem created by a specific policy is a new, different, and conflicting policy to counteract it. Someday maybe we'll learn just to fix the problem in the first place.

Early May meals: how to use milk & eggs

May on our farm is a time of abundant milk, eggs, fresh cheese, and greens, and lots of different ways to use them all.


Basic green salad; lettuce & greens mix, chopped green onions, sliced radishes, and farm-made feta cheese:

Quiche; milk, fresh ricotta, eggs, chopped greens & green onions, & herbs, all farm-sourced; crust of homemade bread crumbs. That's an onion flower in the middle as a garnish. Delicious.

Not photographed:

Homemade ravioli stuffed with fresh farm ricotta, greens, & herbs, topped with a butter/sage sauce.


Lasagna with homemade noodles, farm ricotta, greens, preserved tomatoes, and more.


Breakfast sandwiches of fresh bread, topped with scrambled eggs, herbs, onions, and farm feta.


Simple custards of eggs, milk, sugar, and cinnamon.


We love seasonal menus...

First market recap & other happenings

Our first market of the year was a great success. The market was nearly full of vendors, probably close to 60, and was busy with customers all morning. I was gratified to see just how many shoppers remembered us and were excited to see us back. We easily sold out of our lettuce mixes, radishes, and green onions, and sold most of the large quantity of mint and other herbs.

Salad mix, with lettuce & other baby greens (mizuna, mustard, kale, arugula, and more):

Diverse bunches of radishes:

With a warm, mostly dry week expected, we'll be very busy. Weeding is a top priority, as the abundant rain has let lots of things germinate. Sunday morning we cleaned up most of the market garden with our regular Sunday worker, and expect to take care of much of the main field by/on Wednesday, when three more people work.

Parsnips, onions, scallions, carrots, beets, various brassicas, and more are all in the ground and growing. There is also more indoor seeding to do, and Joanna is managing lots of growing plants indoors and in our small hoophouse, waiting for transplanting time. We think we have one last chance of a frost this coming weekend, as a strong cold front comes through, and expect to start setting out zucchini early next week. Tomatoes, peppers, and more will go out eventually.

I'm hoping to begin work on our walk-in cooler early this week, but am not entirely sure how long it will take me to build. Setting out irrigation is a looming task, though I hate doing it.

The next few week's markets will look a lot like this one, but toward the end of May new things like beets, garlic scapes, and more will start appearing. Summer and fall are our primary production seasons, so the stand will just keep getting bigger as time goes on.

So far we're pretty happy with our season. The no-till raised beds are giving us excellent results in this wet spring, when many other farmers have been complaining about not getting anything in the ground.