Contact us

  We'd love to hear from you.  Please call or e-mail us with any questions.  We'd also be glad to get you on our e-mail list.  You can find our contact information on our Local Harvest Listing.  Just click the link below.

 Milk and Honey Farm - LocalHarvest

Herb Highlight: Oregano

 The oregano plants are big and healthy right now, so enjoy this herb fresh right now and get extra to dry for use throughout the year.  It can be dried in the dehydrator or hung in small bunches to air dry. 

  A quick story about our journey with oregano.  We've been growing oregano for years and enjoyed it but always thought our oregano didn't have a very strong flavor.  So we were curious when, a few years ago, we read in the Southern Exposure seed catalog the description of their oregano: "the flavorful Greek Oregano, not the flavorless oregano commonly available."  So we bought some seed and it grew well.  And in fact, this oregano had quite a bit stronger flavor.  Another interesting difference was it bloomed white while the other blooms pink.  In any case, we were excited and ready to make a complete switch to the new variety when we noticed something: the new variety was starting to suffer with some mildew diseases while our original variety was still going strong without any issues.  The plants didn't die completely but couldn't be harvested from.  So we kept both varieties to over winter.  And again the next year, they both came on strong, but our original far outlasted the new one that again got disease.  So we're continuing to grow both varieties of oregano, but the one because we like it better this time of year when we could grow either, and the other in order to extend the season after the variety we have now is done.

From the kitchen: baked sweet potatoes

  You can microwave a sweet potato, but it will taste a lot better if you bake it.  That's what a friend told us after we served him our baked sweet potatoes for dinner, and sent him home with some extra baked ones to eat later.
  I have multiple sweet potato cookbooks from the library right now, and after I try a few recipes from them, I'm pretty sure I'll hear what I always hear when I try a new sweet potato dish, "You can make that if you want, but they taste better if you just bake them."  Of course, I'm not including slicing potatoes into chips and deep frying them in lard.  And sweet potato pies are popular, too.  And everyone likes sweet potato biscuits every couple weeks, but our family can eat simple baked sweet potatoes multiple times per week and not grow tired, especially by rotating through the different varieties with all the different tastes, textures and colors.
  It doesn't seem quite right that such an easy preparation can be so good.  Just put the washed sweet potatoes directly on the oven rack and bake at 425 for about an hour.  That's it.

Seminoles

   Seminoles taste great, keep well, and are productive in the garden.   The pulp can be eaten as a simple side dish or used in baked goods.  The seeds roast up easily for salty snacks.  They are pretty, both before and after cooking.  In fact, in almost every way, seminoles are an outstanding winter squash.

Sign-up for our e-newsletter

 Want to know what we have available for pick-up at the farm or to find out about drop-offs in Statesville?  We send out a regular e-mail to keep you up to date.  Sign-up by contacting us through our Local Harvest account.  Let us know your e-mail address and approximate location.

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.