Swarm

  In beekeeping you'd rather not have swarms but when they happen they can be quite impressive.  About a month ago we caught this late season swarm.  Fortunately they had landed within reach of our tallest ladder so we were able to cut off the branch and relocate the bees into a new box.

A Week on the Farm

   I was a little optimistic today and hung the clothes out to dry - it's raining on them as I write.  But we did have a small window of dry hours this week and got some weeding done in the garden.  I recall dry years how "clean" the gardens look.  This year, it's more like searching for the produce among the weeds.  By now we're getting a little used to the rain.  That said, Saturday's market downpour was like no market we've ever survived.  Thanks for coming out to support the farmers!  Eric and Nora came home a bit chilled, grateful for the kitchen I'd heated up with canning tomatoes.  It has been a tomato week since then.  On harvest days, Eric will bring in box after tray of them and I'll start the processing line.  Drop them in boiling water to peel for whole tomatoes, slice onto a tray in the oven for roasted tomato sauce, cook down in a pot on the stove for juice.  It was music to my ears the sound of sealing jars on the kitchen table.  We've almost filled our shelves with our needed supply, so now it's your turn to stock up!
  You may know, we are really into taste tests.  While this is quite useful - helps us grow the best tasting varieties - it's also fun to blindfold someone and feed him something.  Trust.  This week it was blueberries.  Now 5 years in the ground, our blueberry planting is starting to amount to something.  Not sure which variety to plant, we planted 19!  You'd think a blueberry is a blueberry, but taken one at a time and really tasted, there are good ones and really, really good ones.  (Of course, it's also nice to have early- and late-yielding varieties to extend the fresh blueberry season.)  Most members of the family chose the same top four varieties, with the overall winner for the Browns this year being a variety named 'Yadkin.'
   New additions always brighten the mood around here and this week we welcomed our third kid, goat kid that is.  All three have been nanny (female) kids this year.  We found the latest kid in the pasture with her mother where she was healthy and had already figured out nursing.  This was a reassuring sight after losing one of our goats about a month ago to late term pregnancy complications.
  It's a delicious time of year outdoors.  We find ourselves grazing around the farm - cherry tomatoes, blueberries, our first little crop of very organic-looking apples, big tame blackberries, raw beans (just Melissa), grapes, figs...

Drowned

 We had over a week ending earlier this week when it must have rained well over an inch on average every day.  Fortunately, we didn't suffer any noticeable washing or other long-term damage, but we've never before stayed this wet this long in the middle of the growing season.  In all but our very best drained soils that meant continually water-logged soils, and the roots of most garden plants can't stand that very long.  So all the rain put an end to some crops, left others rotten in the ground, and set us back on weeding and planting...

dead cabbage plant

lots of dead cabbage plants (and other cole crops)

dead bean plants

rotting carrot

  But on a diverse farm adverse weather like this still leaves hope in other crops:

the field corn still looks good but so do the weeds

it's not looking like a big crop this year but there's definitely honey to harvest

the tomatoes are looking pretty good but we have more to prune and tie up

Grafting

   Eric confessed yesterday that he was done grafting for the year (but this morning that's sounding a little too final). This may not sound like a big deal, just another farm task completed, but then again, you've probably never lived with an obsessive grafter. Let's start with a quick lesson on grafting. In short, you connect a piece of wood from an outstanding tree on any random tree and that transforms that tree into an extension of that outstanding tree. Take an apple tree grown from an apple seed, for example, and you'll get an apple tree that will most likely produce a fruit not fit to eat. Now cut a twig off a good apple tree and graft it onto the sorry apple tree and now it too will produce wonderful fruits. It's an ancient practice, talked about even in the Bible. While some of Eric's good wood comes from neighbors or a remarkable tree found growing in a ditch somewhere, he gets most of his wood sent to him through the mail. Yes, grafting addicts mail each other twigs! These folks typically meet each other on a fruit forum chat group. They discuss to exhaustion the pros and cons of all known cultivars of mulberries, they console each other about the coming emergence of the 17 year cicadas that could decimate their orchards, they post pictures of their first blossoms of the year; they are fruit and nut nuts. And they share wood. Often it's an exchange, you send me this and I'll send you that. But sometimes they force their favorite varieties on each other, like a package that arrived this spring full of seedless native persimmon cultivars we just had to try. In any case, the 6 inch pieces of wood arrive carefully packed with damp paper towels sealed in plastic bags labeled with names like Rosseyanka, Shinseiki, and Thomas Myers. They are cut in the winter before the trees start to grow and stored in the fridge until the trees they'll be grafted onto are ready. Soon the fridge produce drawers are all taken up with twigs. A friend suggested we could serve dinner to a family of beavers with all the wood in our fridge!
   In practice, it's interesting, especially when grafting season begins. First, he grafts onto potted plants to be planted out after the graft has established itself. At our house, many of these potted plants found their way into the house "because it's warmer in here and the trees will be ready to graft earlier." I envisioned delicious Asian persimmons and accepted, for a time. The other method is field grafting. Here you have a seedling already established in the ground where you want it, no need to dig a hole or to worry about watering transplanted trees. All you have to do is graft onto it. You simply turn a weed into food. Our pastures and fence lines are full of useless callery pears (with tiny bad tasting pears like the ornamental Bradford pears) and persimmons and mulberries of unknown quality and possibly non-fruiting male trees. So Eric has put wood of known pear or persimmons onto them, marked them with flagging tape (a reminder not to let the cows graze too close). But here there is less control as the elements can be hard on the delicate new grafts. Little tin foil bonnets protect the persimmon sticks until they get established. Many times a weeks, Eric takes the kids out on the graft march into the fields. They too can now spew off the technical terms: scion, stock, cambium, banana graft, bark graft, whip and tongue...
So grafting season is pretty much over. And now we watch as the new buds swell, turn green, and expand into new branches. Yesterday I was checking on the bean planting and Eric came over and asked if I wanted to go look at the nearby Hana Fuyu graft. Jokingly -- although he takes his grafts too seriously to have gotten the joke at first -- I immediately responded that I already had. Once the tree begins to fruit it will be another story: I'll be at least as eager for the fruit as he is to see his buds grow. Our farm is quickly growing into a forest of seedless persimmons, and sweet, crunchy Asian pears, thin-shelled black walnuts, big fat pawpaws, and delicious mulberries. We look forward to sharing, too.

Sweet potato pies

We couldn't resist, we made a sweet potato pie with our blue sweet potatoes.  While we were at it, we did pies of our white potatoes, yellow and orange.  They all disappeared pretty quick!

PRAISE FOR CORNMEAL

  We're just back from the mill this week where we had another batch of our heirloom white 'Floyd' corn ground.  After having it ground, we store it in our freezer until we bring it to you at the market. We don't understand what makes store-bought cornmeal sit just fine on the shelf for months, but we wouldn't want to store our cornmeal at room temp for more than a couple weeks.  In any case, there's a huge difference between our fresh cornmeal and what you're probably used to.  To keep it fresh, our freezer is now full of cornmeal, so this seems like a great time to sing the praises of cornmeal (we just had some delicious hush puppies last night).  We encourage you to stock up on cornmeal (simply store in your freezer for months/years or fridge for several weeks) and enjoy using the only local heirloom grain staple you're likely to find anywhere.  Isn't it time you sourced your most basic food staples from within your community instead of buying all your grains from huge-scale farms that you really couldn't know much about even if you wanted to, that you probably don't even know what state (or country) they're in, exclusively processed and sold by corporations motivated by anything but the interests of the health of our community (to say nothing of what's not even organic)?  Is that the system you trust to stand up against the onslaught of chemicals and biotechnology redefining food?  Here are a few of our favorite cornmeal recipes.  You can find more recipes, including a couple types of cornbread, fritters, and spoonbread, on our blog.  Anson Mills' website also has a lot of good recipes highlighting heirloom grains.  (Let us know, by the way, if you'd like to buy whole kernel corn for making your own hominy/tortillas/tamales/etc. from scratch.)

Almost As Good As Aunt Gerri's Hush Puppies

1 2/3 cup cornmeal
1/4 cup flour
1 tsp soda
1 tsp honey
black pepper
2 eggs
1 cup buttermilk
1/2 cup finely chopped onion

Mix well.  Drop in heaping teaspoonfuls into hot fat.  Flip and cook until well browned on both side.

Cornmeal Pancakes

1 1/2 cups cornmeal
1/4 cup flour
1 tsp soda
1 tsp salt
1 tsp honey
2 cups buttermilk
2 tbs butter or oil
1 slightly beaten egg yolk
1 stiffly beaten egg white

Mix dry ingredients.  Add buttermilk, fat, and egg yolk; blend well.  Fold in egg white.  Let stand 10 minutes.  Bake on hot griddle.

Corn Mush
we'll just give you a link for this one:
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-cornmeal-mush.htm

Photos from the last month

peach blossoms at the breakfast table

the second mother hen of the year to hatch a clutch

Liz, our WWOOF visitor from Maine

our family