The dearth of local vegetables at the market due to the extended cold and cloudy, wet weather has become noticeable. Just speaking for us, we expected a cold winter but the amount of rain and lack of sunshine has been a surprise. Current weather is impacting the sowing of spring crops.

We have picked about every marketable leaf off our over-wintered collards that we can. We expect some regrowth when the weather finally does warm up a bit and we get a few days of sunshine in a row.

Jenifer scrounged up 10 bags of spinach for last week’s market but she had to hunt and peck four 200+’ rows to get a half a tub.

Well, yeah… eating collards, black-eyed peas, cornbread and pork on New Year’s is a southern tradition and what better day of the year to sell our fresh, organic, just picked collards than New Year’s eve.

I contacted Maria at Fisher Farms and she said they would also be there Wednesday with collards, kale, and jars of their excellent tomato sauce that they actually make themselves.

Besides collards, we will have about 25 dozen eggs, some Tuscan kale, and some arugula.

Black-eyed peas represent coins, collards folding money, cornbread = gold, and pork, wealth in general.

I ran across an an interesting reason why pork, rather than chicken or beef, is the preferred meat for New Year’s.

Chickens scratch backwards, then back up to eat what they scratched up. Cows basically stand still most of the day. Pigs on the other hand, are always rooting forward. Seeking out new opportunities.

Cooking Collards

First thing, rinse them off. Since our farm has clay soils rather than sand, grit is not much of a problem. We rinse our collards in a couple of inches of water in the sink. If there is still some soil attached, I call that a natural nutritional supplement because we know how it grew and what we amended the soil with. If you don’t know the source of your collards or who grew them, I would suggest rinsing them 3-4 times in cold water.

REMOVE THE RIBS – Even on the small leaves. I have tried stacking leaves 5-6 leaves deep and cutting out an upside down V to remove the ribs but the fastest way I have found is to just fold them in half and make one cut to remove the rib.

Use a knife bigger than a paring knife and smaller than a chef’s knife. I use a rabbit knife.

Don’t discard the ribs. They will go to your pigs, chickens, worm bin, or compost pile. If you have none of the above, discard them around the closest tree. Don’t InSinkErate or put them in a plastic bag destined for the landfill.

You can stir-fry / saute collards in 10-15 minutes or simmer them for an hour or so. Minced garlic and onion work well starting out on both methods, your favorite hot sauce, if that trips your trigger, can be applied anywhere along the way. Finish them off with apple cider vinegar and a sparse grinding of black pepper.

Splurging

We are going to eat our collards and black-eyed peas with some oven cooked ribs finished on the grill from the Grateful Growers. We are going to dump a small jar of Fisher Farms tomato sauce into our pot of peas.

You can get dried black-eyed peas at the market as well as local cornmeal from Linneys Water Mill in Union Grove.

Good-bye 2009

It has been a good year for us. We have had our share of up’s and down’s, but we ain’t complaining.

Happy Music

Happy New Year!

As you can see, this blog has been static since early October.  Andy, the guy that had been doing it for me, is one of our CSA (community-supported agriculture) members and did an awesome job!  We traded him 22 weeks of vegetables for his IT knowledge and we probably owe him.  No, I know we owe him.   He as been strongly suggesting that I get out of my baby crib and start learning to crawl with this blog stuff.  Of course, he implied it in a very nice and laid-back way.   I am just excited that I finally learned how to add content to my own blog!  Pictures and videos are next when I figure out how.

Sauerkraut – I made a batch Sunday.  It should be ready in 6 weeks or so.

The moon was waxing and the signs were right.  Does that make a difference?  I don’t know, it sounds archaic.  But is it?  Planting by the signs developed over hundred’s of years from our ancestors watching the movement of the stars, observing plant growth, and paying attention to weather patterns.  They spent most of their days outside and sheltered in humble cabins and houses.  Most of us have parents or grandparents that grew up in homes with no electricity or running water and living on a dirt road or close to one.  Now we are constantly attached to our cell phones, the internet, cable or sat. tv  that we feel lost if we cannot have instant access to whatever we want immediately.  We no longer spend time looking at the night sky or paying attention to plant growth because we don’t have to.  But does that make our lifestyle better?

Check out these pictures of what they are doing.

The kicker is that this project is a finalist in the Tom’s of Maine’s annual “50 States of Good” grant program where they award 5 projects $20,000 each to continue working on their vision.

Here is the good part. You don’t have to open your wallet, purse, or checkbook to participate. All you have to do to go to Tom’s of Maine and click on Friendship Trays on the list. And you can vote once a day through the month of October.

How cool is that? You don’t have to spend one dime, just a clickity click of your mouse once a day to give a great Charlotte organization a chance of some much needed funds.

You may have to hunt for Friendship Trays on the list. The location varies each time you visit the link.

More details from Underwood Family Farms:

Have you ever wondered how molasses is made? Well here’s your chance to come see this southern tradition from start to finish. Underwood Family Farms will be harvesting their acre patch of sorghum cane the week of Sept. 27-Oct.2. They are looking for volunteers to help strip the fodder (leaves), cut off the seed heads, and cut down the stalks of cane to be milled that weekend (Oct.3-4).

If you don’t feel like coming for the work, then come for the fun! The milling and cooking of the cane will take place at Elliott Family Farm’s second annual Heritage Days which boasts a hit and miss engine, blacksmith, grist mill, and a general store full of farm fresh wares, plus a village of 1800’s cabins and outbuildings. It’s fun for the whole family!

For more details and directions talk to Christy Underwood at the Yorkmont Market on Saturday morinings. Underwood Family Farms ph: 704.538.5742 website: www.underwoodfamilyfarms.net

September 21, 2009: The Food Historian in the Kitchen;
Lecture by Sandy Oliver, Time: 7:00-9:00pm

Eliot Coleman at Winghaven
Eliot Coleman is sort of the guru of small-scale market farming. Starting out 20 years ago, I got his book, The New Organic Grower, and literally wore it out.

I still have it, held together by rubber bands but now keep a revised later edition handy that I still reference frequently.

It is so easy to eat fresh, you really don’t even have to know how to cook.

I got home Tuesday night from theTailgate market around 8:30. Arron from Red Dirt Ranch had given me a cornish hen he had butchered that morning. Talk about fresh. I fired up our Weber charcoal grill, split the chicken, and surrounded the chicken with peppers, eggplant, shitake mushrooms, and tomatoes .

Easy and awesome with real food…

We were issued a challenge by Tom Herlihy of Worm Power, the biggest worm guy in the US. He processes 30, 000 lbs of dairy manure solids a day with worms. His challenge to us, which is now your challenge in the Laughing Owl Worm Poop Name Change Contest, is to come up with a better consumer-friendly term to describe worm poop. Current terms are worm castings, worm manure, vermicompost, None of these make any sense unless one is already involved with worms and hip to the lingo. You mention these phrases to most people and they look at you like you are some kind of weirdo worm nerd.

Being hip to worm lingo does not make me a geeky nerd, I swear…

Info on vermicomposting.

The goal of the this contest is to come up with a descriptive and consumer-friendly name for earthworm poop used as a soil amendment and organic fertilizer. Give it your best shot. Not looking for cutesy. Winner, if there is one, gets 50 lbs of Laughing Owl worm fill in the blank.

I will admit to drinking the kool-aid concerning worm crap. We potted up 600 tomato, 300 eggplant, and 200 peppers in 4.5″ peat pots and the potting soil mix was 20% worm compost. We bought a 1500 lb. box of the stuff. Some of the best transplants we have ever raised. When we transplanted them out, we added two cups of worm compost to each hole and the results are impressive.