It’s hot. And all last night it was somehow hotter. And wetter. Not rain – we’d have loved rain – but sticky, icky humidity. The air was so wet that the mosquitoes dog paddled through it, diving through chinks in our screen armor, and snorkeling their faces down through our sweaty skin, all night long. It was a lousy sleep, but hey, it was over soon enough, as we woke up with the dawn to race the sun’s desiccating rays to the salad and pea rows.
This week’s harvest was brought to you in part by a grant from strong coffee.
But really, mostly, we’re exhausted because life is awesome and we’ve been graced with a lot of fun people and times. We’ve been up too late, imbibing too much, having too many people over, and perhaps even spending too many hours floating languidly down the Saint Croix River, sunburning ourselves in unusual spots.
4th of July float – 6 rejuvenating hours down the Saint Croix. I can see how I got the sunburns on my inner thighs …
It’s been great, but we’re excited for some home/work time, to get re-grounded; we’ve been leaving the Farm far too often for our tastes, as we make important connections with friends and family – and prepare to trade our house in South Minneapolis for a nest egg to hatch out here in the Sterling Sand Barrens.
Kristin emerges from beneath West Saint Paul
It’s all wonderful, all worthy, and we sure as heck recognize how blessed we are to face every single one of the stresses we have … but still, damn I’m hoping to fall asleep early tonight, wake up late, and spend several days without leaving the Farm at all.
CSA Members Aaron & Robby scale a wall, because it was there.
Box #4
As usual, everything in your box was harvested fresh today!
Salad Mix (red & green lettuce, green mizuna, arugula, pea tips, baby kale) We’re getting toward the end of spring salad days, as the heat cranks up and the cool-weather-loving plants throw up their seeds in surrender to summer.
this salad mix is punk as fuck
Beets (mostly Detroit Dark Red & Chioggia varieties) – Kristin likes to use feta cheese with beets, sometimes simple olive oil and salt and pepper, or compliment them with citrus flavors. We often roast the beet roots, and then chop the beet greens and toss them in toward the end, letting them wilt and combine into a beetastic dish.
(Since we are obsessed with doing all in our power to preserve the freshness of your food, we cut off the greens and bagged them together – once they leave the ground, root crops left attached to their leaves lose moisture and become withered and rubbery and sad.)
Sugar Snap Peas – also getting toward the end of these – the plants hate this heat and aren’t doing much in the way of flowers (future peas) anymore.
Green Onions – These are getting bigger now – did you know that the bulbing of onions is triggered by shortening day length? So now that we’re past the summer solstice, the onions are putting on some girth.
Broccoli – A good harvest this week!
Matriarch Deb splitting up the broccoli harvest
Hakurei Salad Turnips – these are done until maybe fall – you’ve had them a few times, maybe change up how you’re using them – if you’ve been enjoying them raw, try them roasted, or vice versa!
Sage – We ate ours in grilled hamburger this week and it was delicious; highly recommended. If you’re not able to use it now, it’s easy to dry and use later!
Shareholder Melissa’s beet/salad mix dish made this evening
WWOOFer Sarah celebrates the completion of the final row of hay mulching!
WWOOFer Marty surfs the logging operation’s woodpile
Farm babies! One of two (so far) new arrivals – spawn of Slick the Rooster & Grey Goose, the Gray
lean, mean, weeding machines
Kristin (right) getting a tractor ride from grandpa on the Farm, back in the 1980s.
Although there have been several days where we worked in the rain and got wet, there hasn’t been enough rain to really ever soak the soil – just slow, steady drizzles that don’t really add up to much. And it’s been chilly, too – down into the lower forties at night – so low it even blackening the tips of the basil plants..
All the chilly weather has the plants growing slowly – it’s strange looking back to this time last year, and realizing just how ahead things were – even crops we planted later than we did this year! Fortunately, even the weeds have been slowed down a bit.
The voles have rejected our peace treaty, and really upped their evil quotient this week – they’ve taken to utterly destroying our tomato plants, eating their root systems up and leaving the healthy-looking plants to dangle from their trellis strings like hanged men for us to find in the morning.
look ma, no root! The voles didn’t eat this one all the way up above the soil line as they did the other 7, but still devoured enough to kill it.
So far, 8 plants have met their doom this way. This is quite an escalation, and if it continues we just might have to dynamite the entire farm and start over.
First though, we’ll try reasoning with the vermin again, and then maybe come up with some kind of vole-dance to drive them away.
The raccoons have been very active this spring as well – we’ve already evicted three from our chicken yard this spring, and lost two wayward hens that weren’t sleeping in the secure coop at night. Bears, however, have not been seen at all – very unusual for us at this time of year. We think that WWOOFer Sarah’s canine sidekick, Kingsbury, has been driving them away. They’re definitely in the area, just not on our land, which is great.
Meg helped Kristin run the market booth in Saint Croix Falls this week while Gabe worked on the root cellar – she’s the one who painted all our lovely little signs!
This was a week of transition. Meg & Eldon, two of our springtime WWOOFers that helped us get the field started have moved along out into the wide world, and we’ve been joined by Rob – a friend of Sarah’s who comes to us from Habitable Spaces in Texas, where we have spentmany a wintertime , and where we first met Sarah, as well as Marty and Jeff, who both were out helping us this week. It’s an interesting exchange program we have going with them, in which humans flee the summer Texas heat and join us, and then flow back South when the cold returns.
And in a transition that seems somehow connected, we both poured the first foundation on our land this week, and decided to sell our beloved house in South Minneapolis. (We have’t lived there since 2013, but have been renting it out.)
The root cellar will give us a place to store, ferment, and cure food, beer, flower bulbs … in the winter it will keep things from freezing, in summer it will keep things cool yet moist – and in all seasons, provide a storm shelter for when the trailers just aren’t as stuck to the ground as we’d like them to be. I’m not sure that there are many things that feel quite as much like putting down roots as pouring concrete footings for a root cellar!
Gabe’s Dad spent a few days at the farm and helped lead up the project to build the root cellar foundation properly
As for the Minneapolis house … I really never thought I’d leave it all, let alone be able to sell it, but I’ve slowly realized over the past four years that it’s no longer where my heart and soul are, and although it will always be magical, it is now so firmly in our past.
The change has been made, and it’s time to let go of the pieces of chrysalis that sheltered us in our earlier forms, to focus on the new, living home we’re creating together here.
It’s always interesting, and every day is an adventure.
We are so grateful for the luck to have found a living we love to make.
Box #3
part of the CSA harvest crew relaxing after all the boxes were loaded up
Sugar Snap Peas – you can do so much with these delicious, versatile favorites … including just eating them all straight out of the box before anyone else in your family finds out what they’re missing.
it takes a village to pick the peas.
Chop Salad Mix – (red & green lettuce, mizuna, baby kale, pea tips, arugula) Bigger leaves for your eating pleasure – enjoy it full sized, or chop it like it’s haute.
picking salad mix ingredients before the sun rises high enough to hit the greens
Scarlet Queen Turnips – so scarlet that an unnamed helper (STEFFAN) accidentally harvested a bunch of beets today. We’ll blame their absence on the voles perhaps.
Mother & Son turnip packin’ squad
Bok Choi Leaves & Sprouts – you know how to eat the leaves I reckon – treat the flower stalks similarly, chop ‘em up and sauté them. Tender, delicious, and not deadly poisonous at all.
Green Onions – I’m really trying hard not to link to Booker T and the MGs this year but I’m weakening.
Purslane – Perhaps the most nutritious and delicious weed we battle on the farm! We actually let this patch grow up a bit as a temporary ground cover beneath the corn, so we could harvest it for y’all today. Enjoy the tangy, sorta-lemony crunch fresh on sandwiches and salads.
Broccoli – the variety we grew this year has been confusing me about when it’s ready to harvest – bits of the flower develop fully, while the majority of the head remains tight and poised to grow more … it might have gotten larger if we waited, but it’s plenty delicious now. Don’t toss the leaves – they’re awesome eating.
broccoli packin’ squad
Oregano – in the little herb bag on top! Perhaps chop it up and use it in a salad dressing, with the green onions, some oil, salt, and vinegar, or throw it in a pot of beans as they cook! If you don’t feel like using it right away you could dry it or infuse some vinegar with it.
Gabe’s Dad observes as we figure out the best tools for planting leeks (which are planted into deep, narrow holes)
The night of last week’s CSA harvest, an insane wall of wind followed us back to Wisconsin, striking in the middle of the night, waking everyone up with howling and shaking and falling trees and debris thwacking against windows and walls. I’ve never heard the wind so loud at the farm – nor felt it so strongly … when I stepped outside to see the storm, it almost blew me over – my robe was flying straight out behind me like Superman.
Pretty neat, but I quickly opted to duck back inside in case it got stronger still. Fortunately, it lasted only a couple of minutes before settling into less gusty rain and thunder, and our damages were minor – several downed trees, a smashed window in the outhouse, a tree-hung chandelier that spun so fast it shed nearly all its crystals, some tomatoes and peas knocked off their trellises, and a whole lotta branches and random stuff blown all over the place.
The next morning, as we cleaned up the mess, we learned just how lucky we were, as on Facebook farm after farm not far south of us reported absolute devastation by hail – shredded row cover, smashed crops, and major losses. We often curse the way that weather systems seem to always skirt by us in the Barrens, but this time, we sure were grateful.
The crops are really taking off now, with the looooong sunny days boosting their growth (today is the longest day of the year, in fact!).
The tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, peas, and okra are all flowering … as well as many of the cool weather crops, which we’d rather were not! The bees are loving it though.
flowering okra
In the May newsletter I mentioned how the logging nearby had run over the remains of the “The Architect’s Land” – the amazing ruins of a 1930’s homestead built out of car body panels and logs – which we scavenged and salvaged to build the Rust Shack.
Well, we learned something pretty cool this week, from a 95 year-old neighbor who lived here on the edge of the Barrens for almost a century:
“The Architect”’s name was actually William Henry, and he used to own a 120 acre parcel … which came across the road … to include our land. The hill that our trailer and the Rust Shack sit on was known as “Henry Hill” – he lived on our land! So without knowing it, we’ve been rescuing the ruins of William Henry’s homestead and moving them up onto his old hill.
The more we learn about the local history here – of the Barrens and of our land itself, the more fascinating it becomes – and more it feels like home … exactly where we’re meant to be.
Box #2
Sugar Sprint Snap Peas – the very first arrivals – there aren’t many yet, but these are just the vanguard.
Kale (Red Russian, Dwarf Blue Curly, Scarlet, and Dino …. with a couple token mustard greens for zip)
Green Onions
Garlic Scapes – the weird looking twisted branch dealies are actually the flower stalks of garlic plants, and taste like it. Mince them up finely and mix with sour cream or cream cheese for a tasty garlic dip, or toss it in near the end of your cooking.
The first boxes are on the way to the cities, and we’re decompressing from a first CSA harvest that was actually quite pleasant and smooth, all things considered. (The first harvest is always likely to be problematic, as various forgotten elements are rediscovered in the most frustrating of ways.) This year, only one thing went haywire, but we’re not even gonna talk about it! Not just because it was most likely my fault. Really.
Since we last posted, we’ve almost entirely mulched the non-crop spaces of the field, which feels great. While we’ll still be transplanting and weeding, the pivot has definitely been made into Harvesting season – aka Summer.
Speaking of summer – wow, holy heat!
We went to the local farmer’s market for the first time this year on Saturday – and it was ridiculous. SO HOT AND SOOO WINDY. Not many folks braved the weather to come out, so most of the day consisted of chatting with other vendors who were also holding down their canopies as best as possible (although one did manage to take a brief flight, knocking a sweet old lady on her back).
We’ve combated the heat with lots or irrigation and mulch for the plants, and dunks in the Saint Croix River for ourselves.
In Box #1: ALL THE GREENS
Garden Huckleberry Preserves – We grew these last summer, and made this jam after the berries had ripened in late fall (they’re better after some frosts).
Spring Salad Mix(Red & Green Lettuce, Mizuna, Arugula, Pea Tips, Baby Kale, Baby Tat Soi) layering the salad mix
Corn Shoots – These … are weird. We grew a lot of popcorn last year, and a bunch of it we dried over the winter – and then this spring, started looking for creative experiments to try. The shoots of popcorn have a very unique flavor – sort of grassy, corny, bitter, and sweet … and then more sweet, lingering, like Stevia or some kind of sugar substitute. If we didn’t grow them ourselves I’d be suspicious of how that kind of sweetness got in there! But it’s all natural!
corn kernels soaking for sprouts
Broccoli
Radishes(Mostly ‘French Breakfast’, with an occasional ‘Crimson Giant’)
Green Onions
Bok Choi – crunchy goodness for your stir fry needs
‘Grand Duke’ Kohlrabi – you probably don’t care what the variety is called, but I’m pretty sure it will taste better knowing . Peel the outer layer, then it’s great raw, served with salt and maybe pepper, lemon juice, olive oil – you can also cook it though, and the leaves are edible too. Eat your alien.
“Buttercrunch or Something Like That” Head Lettuce – some big leaves for your sammiches.
this is what a broccoli plant looks like when voles have tunneled through its roots. Have I mentioned we hate voles? We hate voles.researching our land’s backstory with Neighbor Marcia
Neighbor Dave teaching Kristin how to dig a root cellar hole with his tractor
we’ve been keeping ahead of the potato beetle larva onslaught by seeking and destroying their eggsadorable baby potato plant
we find some cool relics buried on the farm …
the farm dogs beat the heat in the shade of a hay bale
When I told WWOOFer Meg I was going to put up a blog post about recent weeks, she suggested it simply be the word “HAY!” It was tempting.
We’ve been busting out row after row of thick hay mulch, keeping the ravaging hordes of weeds suppressed while the crops get their feet under them; it holds moisture in the sandy soil, and eventually breaks down, adding nutrients and much needed organic matter for future crops. It’s not the most pleasant of tasks, especially for those of us with hay and mold allergies, but we’ve gotten some pretty good tactics down to make it easier; one person with a wheelbarrow per row to be mulched, doing relays back and forth, while one or two people rip up bales outside the field, and load up the wheelbarrows when they return, empty, to the fence.
This process has made things much more efficient, and since we’ve had a few WWOOFers helping, we’ve managed to get much more of the field under cover than previous years … which will mean happier crops and less weeding for the rest of the season.
tortoiseshell hay mulch
In a similar vein, we found a free silage tarp the exact dimensions of our high tunnel greenhouse, while scavenging for useful items at the annual “Trash Days” in Bloomington MN (where folks put all manner of unwanted piles out on the curb for scavengers like us to pick through, prior to it all heading to a landfill). Although it hadn’t been the plan, the dimensional match seemed too meant to be to ignore, so we transformed the high tunnel into a plastic bubble for heat-loving plants.
It’s amusing since neither of us really ever wanted to grow using plastic, but it’s hard to argue with luck and with results – and it’s certain that such a ground cover is ideal for the sandy, weedy soils we contend with here, as well as for heat-loving plants. (The plants are watered by both driplines connected to the well, and by soaker hoses gravity-fed by various rainwater collection tanks around the farm.)
sweeping the loose soil away from the sensitive tomato plants. Tomatoes are total Bubble Boys
And speaking of rain – we’re finally getting nice amounts, after a nearly month-long dry spell, where we were having to run the generator/well irrigation daily to keep the seeds and transplants alive in the field. We’d watched storm after storm split apart on the radar and pass around us, leaving us dry … but finally, we were blessed with three inches over the course of a few day rainy spell (an amount that would have been problematic in less well-drained soil), and since then it’s been a lovely syncopation of sunshine and rain, alternating daily or even hourly.
the crew unloading a trailerful of free woodchips
As I sit writing this on Monday morning, it’s going from full sun to downpour about every 10 minutes – the photo above is the sunny field with the next squall rolling in.
The crops love this rhythm, and are looking quite pleased with their lot in life.
cloudy weather kept us from properly hardening-off the tomato plants to the sun – so of course as soon as we transplanted them out, the weather left the forecasted script and went full blazing sunshine … we spared the tomatoes from the strongest rays with suspended row cover fabric
The mulch has unfortunately provided habitat for our population of tunneling colonial vegetarian rodent-monsters (aka voles), however we have been heartened by the influx of snakes around the field this spring – the hugelkultur mound, for example, had been nicknamed the “Vole Hotel” last year, as it was clear they’d infested the spaces between the buried branches and logs. When we got to work this spring, we noticed the holes into the mound seemed larger, and feared it meant even MORE voles … soon enough, however, we saw the huge gopher snakes cruising in and out, basking atop the mount in the sun, breeding in the grass, and hopefully striking terror and population control into the resident rodents.
snake sex! We hope for many babies.
We’ve been reconnecting with our human network as well – spending plenty of time with our friends, supporters, and neighbors, the Marquardts, meeting up with local historian and author Russ Hanson (he gave us an old coal boiler that we’ve turned into a wood-fired water heater), and taking the poop pile from our new goat-mancer friends and CSA members at The Munch Bunch. And we’ll be starting to sell at the Saint Croix Falls Farmers’ Market in a week or two … a few weeks after the market begins, as usual.
the wood-fired water heater, ready to provide up to 20 gallons of hot water every day. Made from a 1930’s Sears “bucket-a-day” coal boiler and a modern Sears water heater tank. The fire and gravity work together to circulate the water without a pump.
(We simply don’t have enough growing this early in the season for our attendance to make sense, especially alongside those coming in from south of here. Heck, we even have a slower start than other farms in the same township as us – the local historian let us know that his growing season, up the hill, is a full month longer than ours is, due to the way cold air settles into the wide glacial Saint Croix River valley where we grow!)
lettuce, beets, and kohlrabi
The biggest change afoot this spring is all around us, and it’s been a real test of our ability to “que sera, sera” with inevitable change – logging. Starting at 7 am, for weeks, we’ve been greeted by the sounds of the profit-driven logging machines devouring all the largest and oldest trees in the vicinity, and leaving arboreal carnage in their wake.
the north side of the farm has already been logged – you can probably guess where our property line is …
I could rant, here; there is much to be angry, sad, and disappointed by, seeing how callously these woods are turned into dollars for the Wisconsin General Fund … especially knowing that next year it will likely be the patch of woods right alongside our driveway that is razed.
the loggers “spare” a few token trees here and there, but they never fare well after having all their neighhbors removed and their roots run over repeatedly.
But I won’t rant. It’s one of those things that we cannot change, and must find peace with at minimum, and even better, silver linings. In this case, we will have ample access to the remnants the loggers leave behind, for use in our heating needs, and we expect that the suddenly-opened areas will allow understory fruit bushes to spring into productivity, producing wild raspberries, blackberries, and blueberries.
excavating the frosted ruins, ahead of the loggers
Another silver lining – although no one had told us, I had a hunch that the loggers were coming to the neighborhood – and launched a salvage expedition to recover the last of the old car body panels from the homestead ruins of “The Architect” … and just days later, the whole site was crushed by heavy machinery treads. Sad – but awesome that we salvaged the remains in the nick of time, to repurpose for future projects that have local historical roots, as well as powerful aesthetic appeal (to our eyes anyway!)
aftermath of the logging crewsWidget with a model-T body panel run over by a bulldozer
We’ve enjoyed feeling like we lived in a forest, but with the surrounding woods logged, we’ll be well-aware that we truly live in The Barrens, and we that we grow food in an area considered to be little more than a wasteland by many. Underappreciated, scruffy places on the outskirts of human civilization has long been our favored type of habitat, and that’s exactly where we are putting down our roots; deep tap roots that can draw sustenance from the most unpromising-looking sands.
No matter what, it’s going to be interesting, and interesting is our favorite thing.
So.
The first CSA box will be coming on June 6th … are you ready? We are!
See you soon,
Gabe & Kristin
morel capturedoyster mushrooms on a stick
HEY HAY MAY PICS
building the tomato trellises
the monster on the left had two yolks
killing quack grass – first loosening the soil with a broadfork, and then carefully digging the extensive root systems out by hand.WWOOFer woofer Kingsbury likes to find and bring home pieces of deer … so pleased with himself!grapevines coming to lifewe took several bucketfuls of quack grass rhizomes out that day … the weed bloodlust was strong.Widget ‘helps’ weed the raspberry patchElden pots up pepper plants
a box turtle came to visit
Kristin and her dad working on the screen porch roof
chive flowersJim helps install the new solar panelslaying irrigation linesbabiesthe eroding pipe of greenhouse heater’s booster fire makes for some beauty
And finally, let’s cap May off with a few good versions of our farm’s theme song!
(High Keys is my current favorite version. The Lords version is awesome for the band’s dancing lol)
