Red Fern Farm Blog

We've had our first garlic scape sighting! I ran out of time this morning, so the photo above is from last year's market, where our garlic scapes were a hot ticket item. A scape is the flowering stalk of a garlic plant and emerges a few weeks before the bulb is mature. At first they curl in on themselves and look totally alien and rather whimsical; as the bulbil containing the garlic "seeds" grows, the scape thickens and eventually unfurls to stand straight up. Or at least that's what would happen without human intervention - it turns out that garlic scapes are delicious and cutting them before they unfurl also contributes to bulb growth since the developing bulbil shunts energy from the rest of the plant.

Garlic scapes are fantastic sauteed in butter or as part of stir fry, but the preparation that really gets my mouth watering is garlic scape pesto spooned over a bowl of hot pasta and garnished with grated Parmigiano. We offered the pesto recipe at the market last year and will do so again this year (and of course I'll be posting it on the website too). It's a great recipe to make and freeze in ice cube trays for later in the year when you need a little taste of spring.

The shearers arrived this past Wednesday to shear the sheep, throwing our garden schedule into chaos, but at least that's one more task we can check off of the list! Having the shearers here is always fun because even though the work is hot and dirty, everyone knows there's a huge dinner and good conversation to look forward once night falls. Now it falls to me and Mom to skirt the wool before we can send it off for processing - another hot and dirty task, but the results are well worth it since it means roving for her to spin and yarn for me to knit when the garden winds down in the fall.

I ate the first few sugar snap peas out of the garden this morning, and they were so sweet and crunchy. The pea plants have summited the cattle panel trellises and show no signs of stopping, so of course I went ahead and fertilized them this weekend for kicks. We've experimented with a lot of different types of makeshift trellises over the years from bamboo poles to chicken wire, but the cattle panels are by far the best we've tried so far.

The onions and cabbage are still looking good, and I managed to get another 60 or so Big Italy plants in the ground this morning before starting in on the zucchini. We've got some interesting varieties this year, including one called "Eight Ball" which is shaped like - you guessed it - an eight ball and is good for stuffing. Mom and I are thinking a ricotta and ground lamb mixture would be pretty tasty...

This weekend at the market I picked up a container of "Summer Garden" chevre from the Spinning Spider Creamery booth, and it is delicious. I just finished baking some homemade crackers to use as a vehicle for that creamy goat cheese goodness; it's a perfect light summer dinner. Buying from other vendors is one of my favorite aspects of the market, and I'm especially looking forward to the blackberries and sweet corn later in the summer!

One last thing before I go fix another batch of that pasta with green garlic sauce we've got posted on the website (this time with black olives and prosciutto!): we now have a facebook page, so check it out!

I hardly know where to begin! This weekend brought us all to the point of physical exhaustion, but it was well worth it. The opening day of the Carolina First Saturday Market was superb on all fronts - the weather was overcast but refrained from all but the hint of a drizzle, we were busy all morning with a constant stream of customers, and I managed to get almost everything ready in time to take (the digital picture frame that we've been wishing for since last year - and finally purchased - got edged out in favor of the handspun yarn, but it should be ready for next week). I think our new tablecloths, custom-made by my mom to fit the market tables, are a vast improvement over last year's sheet.

We also expanded to two tables from our one last year, and have plans to add a third within the next week or two - we have that much to sell this year!

The green garlic made a lovely presentation and sold well, so I'll be bringing more next week. I've posted the recipe we were handing out at the market on the website with a few additions that space didn't allow for on the printed card. My mom whipped up another batch of it to send home with me this afternoon and tossed in some black olives, which were a great addition - I'll be taking it to work for lunch this week as a chilled pasta salad.

In other market news, I was thrilled by the response to the tomato plants this week, and was thanking my lucky stars that they simply stayed "enormous" and didn't quite get to "gargantuan" before we could sell them. Those suckers need to go in the ground! We sold nearly all of the plants we took to market yesterday, so when we got home it was time to plant what was left. That means the first wave of tomatoes is entirely gone except for the smallest of the Costoluto Genovese, which will still be saleable next week. The tomato table looks positively empty right now,

but those tomato plants should double in size by next Saturday, and there are more in the seed starter that need to be potted up, much like this little guy:

In the meantime, we're awash in basil. There's the Greco, which is starting to form little bushes,

what I can only term as a sea of Summerlong,

and there's only more in the offing.

The Genovese is by far the slowest growing of our three varieties, but the first batch we potted up is finally starting to put on some noticeable height, so it won't be long before I'll be up to my elbows in it - literally. My record Genovese plant size from last year was 3 feet high by 2 feet wide, so we'll see how big it'll get this year.

Also in the greenhouse, the zucchini are up and raring to go. They'll need to be set out sometime in the next week, and will go in the space behind the barn. We've got five or six varieties this year, but decided to pass on yellow squash. I prefer zucchini over yellow squash because I think the flavor's better, and many of the yellow squash varieties don't keep quite as well as zucchini. Besides, I have to have enough to keep the zucchini fries coming this summer! I also want to try one of the "zucchini spaghetti" recipes I keep seeing - that looks tasty. (That reminds me of a cookbook review I need to write up and post - "Fast, Fresh, & Green" is one of my new favorites, and it's all about making vegetables the star of the meal.)

Out in the garden, the cucumbers I planted during the week got a little bleached out by the sun but the new growth is nice and green, so they should start climbing the cattle panels in a week or two. But this is what gets us all dancing around with barely contained anticipation:

Pea flowers! They're popping up everywhere, so it won't be long now before the sugar snap pea pods begin to appear. The plants look much stronger this year than last year's crop - that may be due to something as simple as the sturdier trellis, or maybe it was the wet spring weather. Regardless, I'm hoping for a sizeable harvest.

Since my mom insisted that I take a picture of the clematis that's blooming right at the corner of the barn, I'll leave you with that for now. Expect a few more posts during the week about upcoming events - one will have more information about the CFSA Farm Tour we're participating in, and one will be about an upcoming event at Bioway Farm, which is just down the road from us and is another great sustainable farm. I'm also going to be starting an ongoing series of posts about container gardening using my deck as the testing ground, and first up is a post about growing Italian parsley in containers.

My usual garden update post will be forthcoming tomorrow, but I wanted to take a moment and say this to those of you who came out to see us at the market today: THANK YOU!

Thanks to your enthusiasm, we doubled our sales compared to our best day at the market last year, which is an amazing start to the season (and it makes our "finance manager" aka my dad, very happy). It was so wonderful seeing familiar faces and laying the foundation for new friendships. We hope that you'll continue to follow along here on the blog as the market season continues - in addition to this weekend's garden update, I'll be writing posts about two upcoming events in the area as well as posting today's market recipe and adding more information to the transplants and garlic page. We couldn't have asked for a better kickoff, and it's all thanks to you!

Now I'm off to plant the tomatoes that we didn't sell today to make room in the greenhouse for the second wave that we've got growing!

The clematis blooms, and it's ever so lovely. It's easy to get caught up in the practicality of vegetables, but there are so many flowers on the farm as well, most of them thanks to my grandmother's efforts.

Things have reached a fever pitch here on the farm ahead of the market's opening weekend - only two (!) more days left. I finished planting the cucumbers tonight, so that's bought us a little time and space in the greenhouse. I'm also in the middle of some storage experiments with the green garlic; right now it looks like storing it like parsley (ends in a glass of water, tops covered in a plastic bag) is winning out.

I had a good laugh tonight when I read through my weekly supply lists/inventories from last year's market - we really were scrambling to put together enough to warrant a trip downtown. Timing and scale are our two biggest challenges because of our manpower issues, but I think this year we've made tremendous progress, and we're actually planning for succession plantings of some crops like tomatoes and basil.

Since the garden/greenhouse situation can be left in a holding pattern for the next few days, we're spending most of our working time organizing supplies and working on our booth presentation. It's times like this when I'm extremely grateful for the marketing and packaging experience I've accumulated in my career as a graphic designer!

But for the moment I'm going to put on the clerical hat and draw up some spreadsheets to keep track of what we take to the market and how much of it we sell. If you're on the mailing list, expect a test email tomorrow and then this week's actual market inventory email to go out late Friday afternoon.

...is a lot of onions, as far as my hamstrings and quads are concerned. But they (the onions, that is, not my legs) look so pretty:

These are the sets that we started from seed a few months ago - they're only now big enough to plant in the ground, so for next year we'll be starting the onion seed much earlier! There are just under 250 each of Granex Yellow and Red Burgundy, and about 70 Cipollini Yellow. The last is really just an experiment, but I'm looking forward to the Granex Yellow because it's a sweet variety that should grow big enough for onion rings. (We've got a killer "tumbleweed" spice mix recipe for onion rings that I'll post a little later in the season.) 

Onion sets that tiny are the most fiddly things I've transplanted to date. It's important to plant them very shallowly, since onions develop at the surface of the soil. Because the root systems of those tiny sets are so small compared to say, a tomato start with roots enough to fill up a 4" pot, getting the onions in the ground at the right depth and still making sure they're deep enough to stand up is a delicate business. But I think they'll do well now that they're in. I cut the top half of each plant off before planting so that the bulb and roots would conserve moisture while adjusting to the garden soil, and so that the plant will direct its energy into establishing more roots instead of trying to do that and put on height at the same time.

Before I move on to a greenhouse update, some clarification: although the byline for all of these blog posts read "Katherine Mizell," the person actually doing the blogging is Meredith. Hence the references to my apartment and such - I live 15 minutes from the farm and work a full-time job during the week, so I only spend weekends indulging my farmer alter ego. Katherine, my mom, is the one who holds down the fort during the week and we use her name as the default for any written farm communication.

She's also a Master Gardener and the reason we enjoy as much success in the garden as we do. I hope to eventually follow in her footsteps and get my own Master Gardener certification, but in the meantime, I'm learning by watching her and doing my own work in the garden. So while I was planting onions, she was potting up parsley, basil, and tomatoes in the greenhouse. Although I cleared out all those flats of onions (save for one flat of shallots), those empty spaces in the greenhouse were quickly occupied, mostly by my growing armies of dill

and parsley.

And the rest of the parsley is occupying the risers:

(The plants leafing out in the center are a couple of horseradish roots - another experiment.)

I'm seriously going to take over the world with this parsley. There is so much that I'm going to have to plant the Catalogno straight into the garden, as we'll absolutely fall behind schedule if we take the time to pot all of it up again. The Catalogno is more sparsely planted, relatively speaking, so there shouldn't be a problem keeping it in clusters. 

Herbs are so much fun to start from seed because what looks like a tiny handful of seed yields a truly insane number of plants. I saved about a dozen heads of dill in the fall by stuffing them in a brown paper bag, and it worked beautifully. This grand dill experiment has been extraordinarily successful so far, and I've still got plenty more seed, so I'll be starting more of that soon. 

On the subject of herbs and saving seed, the sage is in bloom right now,

so I'd like to try saving some of that this year. A number of these second-year sage plants have reached unexpected proportions; I'm not entirely certain what we're going to end up doing with them. We'd planned to pot them up and sell them at the market, but they're just enormous. Then again, you'd be getting a lot of bang for your buck.

In other herb news, the first wave of basil should be entering the "rapid growth" phase soon - it's slow to start, but once it gets going, there's no stopping it. The Summerlong has doubled in size in the last week,

and every time I go in the greenhouse, I lightly brush the plants so I can smell that wonderful, summery basil scent.

On the vegetable front, the cucumber seedlings are up and going,

and of course the first wave of tomatoes are forming a jungle in the back corner of the greenhouse. They're positively irrepressible.

We're hoping that these guys won't put on too much growth before the market starts. But even if they do...well, there's nothing wrong with having some overly robust tomato starts. I've been trying to visualize how much room the tomatoes are going to take up this year because while this looks like a lot of open space right now,

it's going to fill up fast. Fortunately, harvesting the garlic at the end of May will free up a full third of the total garden space in the front, so we may be all right if we make sure we utilize the smaller plot behind the barn until then.

There's only one more weekend before the market starts, so I need to start working on some non-gardening things like signage, record-keeping, and stocking the Rubbermaid bins with my market kit. Mom and I will be at the market's vendor lunch this Wednesday in Greenville, and I'm very much looking forward to it. The market is just around the corner, and we're all excited!

Chang would like to know what I've been doing that's kept me from posting about this past weekend at the farm!

The truth is, I'm running a little behind this week - things are getting truly hectic at the farm, and there's been some craziness at my apartment as well (but at least the leaky c. 1920s windows have been replaced, and my new sofa has been safely delivered!) - but suffice it to say that everything is growing as fast as possible in the greenhouse and the garden. The unseasonably warm temperatures from last week gave way to beautiful, cool spring days after a bout of thunderstorms that swept some of the heavy pollen away - in short, it was perfect for garden work.

Two of the four tables in the greenhouse are full now - this one is burgeoning with the tomatoes, Catalogno parsley, and a flat of basil.

This second table has my dill (putting out some true leaves!), more tomatoes, basil, cilantro, and cucumbers. The Big Italy parsley moved out of the greenhouse on Saturday and to the risers on the garden-facing side of the barn.

We have four sets of risers (two are at the other end of the barn in addition to the two pictured here) and they came in handy two years ago. We were unable to use them last year because of some overflow issues with the barn gutters, but we had them fixed last summer and so now we're ready to go. The overhang of the gutters keeps the plants on the risers from receiving direct rainfall, which is a good thing when the plants are still young and delicate. Of course, that means the plants need to be watered, same as in the greenhouse, but the additional space is worth it. I'm planning on building some of these risers on the deck at my apartment because they're so convenient (and pretty cheap). We keep straw under the farm risers to suppress weeds, but on my deck I could grow mint, cilantro, or other plants that like some cool shade and plenty of moisture underneath the riser levels and maximize my space further.

In the space between the sets of risers, there's a spigot and some monster comfrey plants. They absolutely LOVE the moisture in that area and have gone from dormancy to 2.5 feet tall in maybe three weeks. I recently read a tip (in an issue of The Herb Companion, I believe) that said wrapping a wilted comfrey leaf around the roots of a tomato plant before you transplant it in the garden speeds growth by trapping warmth around the roots and acting as a fertilizer. We have so many comfrey leaves right now that I think I'll give it a try this year!

Here's the garlic, still going strong. (You can see the setup of the risers and comfrey against the barn in the background - this was taken in the morning when that east-facing wall was in full sun, but by afternoon the barn shelters the risers from the worst of the it.) We've definitely learned some lessons from the garlic planting this year; the biggest one is: do everything possible to plant all the garlic at the same time (or close to it). Our planting was severely staggered this year because we were all working off-farm jobs and there was just too much garlic to plant in one weekend. But for this coming fall, I'm already planning to take a few days off of work to get it all in at once. I'm also entertaining the notion of having a "garlic planting party" - something like a barn raising, where friends and family can come to help with the planting and get a nice home-cooked meal or two and a sense of accomplishment in return. (Or maybe even the chance at some free garlic next summer in exchange for the work?)

For now, I'll leave you with a photo of one of our bantam roosters. The hens we got as chicks in the fall have finally started laying, and although we don't currently have enough to sell, we have been mulling over the idea of returning to some level of egg production like we had in the early years on the farm. But that's for next year at the very earliest - this year it's all about the garlic, transplants, and lamb!

Spring has sprung with a vengeance. April has been warm and dry so far, and you can practically see everything growing. It's a beautiful time of the year and although I'm sure we would all love to laze on the porch and watch the clouds go by, Saturdays are getting even busier and we get closer to the beginning of the farmers' market. The tulips are lovely to look at,

but this sight is even more exciting:

This is our sugar snap pea Fort Knox, designed to protect those tender little seedlings from hungry deer passing through. The first and second plantings are up and growing - the first planting is big enough now to start wrapping tiny tendrils around the cattle panels that will serve as trellises. I put in a third planting this weekend to finish out the first panel and fill most of the right side of the second panel. We'll likely end the sugar snap pea planting there and use the left side of the second panel for something later in the summer that would appreciate a nice, sturdy climbing wall. Maybe some Rattlesnake green beans.

At the same time, the greenhouse is starting to fill up with vegetable and herb transplants. The germination problems we were having a week or two ago seem to be gone along with the cool weather, which is great, but everywhere we turn now there are seedlings that need to be potted up! The parsley has been going crazy this week,

and while the plants may look a little small in the individual pots at the moment,

I can only imagine (with considerable glee) what they'll look like in a few weeks. We have some Catalogno parsley coming along as well, but a week or two behind the Big Italy. I'm curious to see how the Catalogno compares. It'll also be interesting to see how big these plants get - the Big Italy plants we put in the ground last year didn't really grow to massive proportions until the onset of cool fall weather. But we're 4-6 weeks ahead on the parsley this year.

We started potting up the first of the Greco basil as well, and even though the seedlings are barely a quarter of an inch tall right now, they give off a wonderful smell when brushed! Between the basil, parsley, and tomatoes, things are looking pretty good right now.

Considering we're under a tornado watch until 11 PM tonight as a band of thunderstorms moves through the area, I guess it's safe to say March has lived up to that old adage. But as blustery as it is today, yesterday was a great day for working the garden and the greenhouse. The garden chores are starting to pile up and it's sometimes overwhelming considering all of us work off-farm jobs, but we just keep chipping away at the to-do list as we can.

The garlic is loving the recent warm weather, and so are the weeds (mostly henbit, which is pretty but annoying). I've managed to weed a row each weekend for the past three weeks; I figure by the time I finish the last row, the weeds will have moved back into the first row and I'll begin the cycle again. The Kettle River Giant is really living up to its name by throwing up enormous stalks - I only wish it were a hardneck variety because I bet it would produce some truly epic garlic scapes! Speaking of garlic scapes, I checked last year's records and they were ready for market in mid-May, so we only have five or six more weeks until garlic scape pesto! Since the soil's been relatively dry this past week, we finally laid out new and improved drip tape. I'm digging the red valves - they're much easier to see than the black ones from last year!

(The black and white blob in the photo below is Squiggles, one of our barn cats.)

While the garlic grows outside, the greenhouse is starting to fill up. We've got cabbage,

onions,

Italian flat-leaf parsley (my personal favorite),

and the first of the tomatoes.

The parsley and tomatoes will be available as transplants at the market come May; the cabbage and onions we'll be growing ourselves. I have three more tomato varieties (Black Krim, Juliet, and Mortgage Lifter; the ones I managed yesterday were the San Marzanos and Costoluto Genovese), and three basil varieties (Genovese, Summerlong, and Greco, same as last year) to pot up next Saturday. My goal is to have plenty of tomato and basil transplants when the market starts, which seems to be easier said than done. We've had some trouble with the tomato seeds this year; germination rates have been poor. It's hard to pinpoint the culprit since there are so many variables - light, heat, and moisture in the seed starter, the seed starting mix, the seed stock, or maybe something else I'm missing. Heirlooms can sometimes be tricky to begin with, and we've purchased organic seeds where possible, so that's yet another possible issue. Regardless, we're going to continue to start as many tomatoes as it takes to have a good supply come May.

Not pictured, but coming along nicely are the sugar snap peas, which we planted in the plot behind the barn again this year. We're hoping to have more for the market this year than last year when we cobbled together maybe five 1/2 lb. bags a week and always sold out in the first 45 minutes.

In the week ahead we'll be starting more tomatoes and the first of the Swiss chard (we're kind of behind on that this year) and cilantro (way ahead on that!).

Lambing season continues out in the pasture. Last night we all sat down to a dinner of our own Red Fern Farm braised lamb shanks, cabbage, and homemade foccacia bread. The lamb shanks were amazingly tender, and Mom and I can't wait to try the recipe again this summer using our own San Marzano paste tomatoes!

And one last bit of news: this week we got our confirmation email for the downtown market, so all we're waiting on now is confirmation for our inclusion in this year's CFSA farm tour!

Although we had a great garden year in 2009, we all agreed we wanted to get an earlier start in 2010. So even though tomorrow's forecast for our part of South Carolina is 2-4" of snow, little parsley, onion, cabbage, and leek seedlings are up and growing in the greenhouse. Sugar snap peas are sprouting between paper towels on the kitchen counter; literally hundreds of seed packets wait their turn, organized by start date in a cardboard box on the dining room table.

In the meantime, the garlic is growing (as are the weeds!) - even though we probably lost a fair bit of the last variety we managed to get in the ground between the heavy rains in December. But that still leaves us with at least five times as much garlic in the ground as last year, so we're very excited to see how things turn out as we get closer to the harvest in May.

If you've followed us over the years, you'll notice that our website has undergone a major - and desperately needed - overhaul. We'll be adding much more content as spring progresses, and the recipe section will be of particular interest as we add more of our family's favorite recipes and develop new ones to utilize the vegetables and herbs we grow and offer as transplants.

So despite the chilly weather on tap for the next few days, our minds are already firmly fixed on spring.