Springtime!

As our fourth season here in Missouri gets rolling, we are excited about the good soil we are continuing to build up! We have been amazed by the dozens and dozens of worms we find when we pull away the mulch before planting.

As many of you know, we just welcomed our new baby girl Cassidy into the world. She came 2 weeks late, so the last few weeks have been a bit hectic trying to keep up with farm work and the kiddos. But, luckily for us it has been a very wet spring, so we haven’t had to worry about setting up all our irrigation yet. And since we do mostly raised beds, and farm on a hill, we don’t have to worry about our fields flooding either.

Right now our sugar snap peas are going gangbusters, as is our salad mix. Our garlic scapes are also starting to come on. Garlic scapes are the flower stalk that grow up from the hardneck garlic, and would flower and go to seed if we let them. But, we want the plant to put its energy back into the bulb, so we snap off the scape before it flowers. And we get to eat the scapes! They are mild, tender, and delicious anywhere you use garlic. You can cut up and use the whole thing, raw or cooked. We love them in eggs, pasta, stir fry, roasted with veggies, casserole, burgers…the possibilities are endless!

Another season, come and gone

And here we are, the last week of this year’s Farm Share. For our final week, we have another new fruit for you to try. As you may have gathered, we enjoy doing a bit of foraging in addition to our farming, and the wild persimmons are early this year, and bountiful! Wild American persimmons are related to the large orange cultivated Japanese persimmons, but are softer and sweeter. They are a good source of vitamin C, as well as B vitamins, and contain lycopene and potassium. We enjoy just eating them as-is. You can eat the skin, and they do have large seeds in them that you can spit out. You can also squeeze the fruit through cheesecloth and use the puree anywhere you would use pumpkin puree (we make a delicious pie, but cookies, breads, muffins, and puddings are also good).

We are enjoying our life gradually start to get less busy, we actually have time to breathe now! We are still planting some, but not too much, and are mostly busy weeding and harvesting. We will continue to have quite a lot of produce until the first hard frost, whenever that is (first frost date is Oct 15, but it is often later). And after that, we will still have hardy greens, root veggies, and winter squash. Soon it will be time to plant garlic, which is always a bit of a production, and we try to put all our circle plots “to bed” each fall by composting and heavily mulching them, so that they will be ready to go in the spring.

Thank you so much for being a member this season, your support enables us to bring sustainably-raised food to our community!

Autumnberries think it's Autumn!

We have continued to enjoy the cooler weather and the rain—we got 1.5” last weekend! The berries from the autumn olive bush, or autumnberries, are beginning to ripen, and this is looking like it will be a good year for them! Even though it’s not autumn yet, the cooler weather has brought them on.The autumn olive is originally from Asia, and considered an invasive species, as it is now growing wild in many parts of the midwest. The upside, though, is that the berries are delicious and nutritious (some think it will be the next superfood)! Autumnberries have over 15 times more lycopene than tomatoes. Lycopene is good for the prostate, as well as potentially lowering the risk of heart disease and certain cancers. Not only that, autumnberries are also high in antioxidants, and vitamins A, C, and E! They are tart-sweet, and have small edible seeds. We like just snacking on them plain, but they are also good in salads, fruit salads, smoothies, jam…we have made a really good fruit leather of it in the past too!

More Rain, Less Roosters

The other day we took the afternoon off and spent a few lazy hours at the river. The kids loved throwing rocks and we loved relaxing in the tubes. We all enjoyed a nice cool break despite the summer deciding to turn the heat back up.

Although it is hot again now, we have been reveling in the on-and-off cooler weather! The coolness, along with a bit more rain, is helping all of our fall crops germinate. And all our established summer crops don't mind a little less heat either. The cooler weather also enables us to actually work outside all day, instead of retreating inside for the "hot part", so we have been getting a lot done. We have been direct seeding radishes, lettuces, spinach, arugula, beets, carrots and more!

This past week we gave away the last of our chickens, making us chicken-free for the first time in years. We had a few big massacres while we were away earlier in the summer, and decided to take a break from chickens until next spring. So we butchered the roosters, gave away the laying hens, and now are enjoying less responsibility!