Local citrus

  "Is that a citrus tree?"
  Until we finally harvest the last of the fruit sometime in December or January, the evergreen "bush" laden with orange balls is hard to miss.  Visitors pulling up our driveway regularly point toward our front porch and ask.  
  It is a citrus, in fact, one called a satsuma, familiar to lots of casual backyard fruit growers in Louisiana and elsewhere near the Gulf Coast.  They are very similar to clementines/cuties, though a bit larger.  They're very easy to peel ("zipper skinned"), seedless, and a nice fresh eating fruit.

  This is a 10-year-old tree, planted against our south facing rock porch.  Harvests have gotten bigger as the tree has grown, of course, but the last few years we've had around 150-300 fruits each year.

  We're a bit too cold for satsumas, which means our satsuma needs to be kept warm when temperatures fall.  We're not sure how much cold the fruit can take so we cover it more often until we've harvested all the fruit, but the tree itself can survive temperatures in the mid-teens, so after the last of the fruit is harvested we only cover it any time the nighttime forecast shows any chance of teens or colder.  The coldest night we've had since we planted it it got down to right around 0 degrees.  We keep some water buckets next to the tree with the idea that they'll provide a temperature buffer as they gradually freeze, but we don't use any supplemental heat.  The blankets come off most days so it can get sunlight, but we're not sure how necessary that is.

It is really amazing to see the branches full of fruit.  The other great thing about the tree is the smell of the blossoms.

Both the interior and the exterior of the fruit are precious.  We always zest them before we eat them and then mostly let the zest dry out on a plate for later use.  We use the zest for ricotta pies, donuts, salad dressing... 

Until just a couple days ago (mid-January) we were just harvesting the fruits as we ate them, but with multiple nights in the forecast with lows in the teens we decided to go ahead and harvest the rest of them.  The eight of us have eaten one or two per person almost every day since about the beginning of December, and we filled a couple small tubs with our final harvest.  We're hoping we've figured out a way to keep them in cold storage for a few more weeks without drying out too much.  Then the only fresh fruit we'll have to eat until spring will be fuzzy (regular) kiwis (which have kept incredibly well for us in cold storage) until strawberries start to ripen in late April or early May.

Some eggs

  The hens determine what we have for breakfast.  Slowly moving to the "some eggs" options.

Sweet, sweet winter carrots

   Winter carrots are the best.  We grow both a spring crop and a winter harvested crop of carrots.  And by far, the winter carrots are sweeter.  They are sweeter than you thought a carrot could be.  We seed them in mid to late August.  By November, some of them have sized up enough to pull up.  But they keep so well in the ground, we're not in a hurry to get them out.  During a really cold winter spell, we cover them with hay mulch.  But for the most part we enjoy them fresh dug through late February at which point we try to have them all dug.  We then store them in the fridge where they continue to keep very well.

Threshing dry beans and peas

  A major food in our diet is dry beans and peas.  We try to grow a variety of both beans and peas to keep things interesting.  During the summer, as these crops dry down on the vine, we collect the dried pods into paper bags.  We then hang these bags in an outbuilding from wires to finish drying and to deal with them when we have time later.
  Now is that time.  Winter is when we catch up on threshing all of the beans/peas and seed crops.
 

  If we need to keep a variety pure, like for seed, we'll thresh the bean/pea in a pillow case hitting it with a baseball bat to insure there is no contamination of another variety.  But for eating beans/peas, our electric sheller makes quick work of the job.  From the picture you can see there is a drum within a box.  In the drum are flails that rotate.  The peas are knocked out of the pods and fall into the drawer below.

The first step is to pour about a quarter bushel of pea pods into the sheller.  Much more and the drum is too crowded to thresh well.

Then the lid of the drum is put on.  As you can see, the drum is covered in hardware cloth.  Off set from this about a half inc is sheet metal.  This allows the peas to roll out without the pods coming out too.  Then there are three gaps in the sheet metal from which the peas can fall out into the drawer below as it rotates.

Finally, the box lid is put on.  We made the lid out of some scrap lumber lying around (thus the Turkish writing) after we realized some of the peas were flying out.  It usually only takes a couple minutes of running the sheller to get the peas good and threshed out.

Once it is finished running, we pull the drawer out.  There are some hulls, but it is mostly peas.  We dump this into a bin for later winnowing.

The next step is to take the box lid off and then the drum lid.  Then just the box lid is put back on and we run it a minute.  With that large gap in the drum, all the hulls are dumped into the drawer, leaving the drum empty and ready for the next peas to thresh.

The hulls get thrown to the chickens to find any remaining peas.  The bin of peas is then ready to winnow.  We simply set up a large fan and dump the peas back and forth in front of it. 

They are quite clean of hulls and chaff at this point, but will need one final going over to pick out any bad peas before they are ready for the pot.

Finally, it is time to cook them up.  These here are Big Boy Brown Eyes.

Pick-up at the farm

  We welcome customers to pick up orders at the farm.  To find up what is available, sign up for our e-newsletter list.  We send the newsletter with an updated farm goods list out weekly from April through November and about monthly December through March.

  

Sorting sweet potatoes

  The reality is, not every sweet potato is perfect.  Some get cut when we plow the sweet potatoes out, some are really crazy shapes, some are tiny and some are huge, and some are partially rotten.  While some farms might just grab the best ones and leave the rest in the field, we have a use for every sweet potato that grew, no matter how it looks.  So we pack them all in the harvest boxes to be sorted out later. 
  Now, with colder days outside, we're glad for the indoor chore of sorting through boxes.  While we've been eating and selling sweet potatoes up until now, we've just been going through boxes one at a time as needed.  But the time has come to get all of the boxes sorted.

  In the field, the dirt is rubbed off from the sweet potatoes and they are packed carefully into half bushel cardboard boxes.  Since we grow 23 varieties of sweet potatoes, keeping track of box contents is very important.  Boxes are labeled with the variety name both on a piece of paper and written on the inside of the box lid.

  The sweet potatoes are then sorted into four different categories.  This is a picture of some first quality sweet potatoes.  They are pretty, of normal size and shape and without blemishes.  These are the ones we sell.

These are the seconds, the ones that are quite small or very large or odd shaped or broken, etc.  These are the ones we will eat.

  These are the seed potatoes.  We choose healthy looking roots with no blemishes.  They are fairly small in size.  These will be stored until we are ready to put them in our seed bed in early April to grow sweet potato slips.

   Finally, these are the thirds, which includes the very tiniest ones and ones that have significant rot or other issues.  These will be fed to our goats or cooked and fed to the hogs.  The dirt is returned to the garden. 

 

Chop up some extra onions

Almost every good meal starts with chopped onions.  But that doesn't have to mean pulling out the chef's knife and cutting board each time.  Here's a few ways to make onion prep more efficient in your kitchen.  One time saver is to chop extra onions then put them in the fridge for later use.  Another is to chop and saute double or triple the amount of onions needed for that meal and put the extras away for another meal.  Both raw chopped and sauteed onions can also be frozen.  We also dehydrate green onions and bulb onions for later use in soups and stews or to be ground into onion powder.