Steel Pony Farm Blog

Hey! We’ve got a new website and we are starting to sell shares for 2012. Visit www.steelpony.ca for all the information! We will keep this blog updated throughout the spring an summer with all of our farming adventures.

 

This Saturday a group of people got together to do some garlic planting at Steel Pony Farm. This was a root day according to the StellaNatura, and so I decided that it would be a good day to get out there and plant garlic. 17 of us planted almost 1700 cloves of garlic. After planting, we watered and mulched the garlic with some straw I purchased from Kris Vester at BlueMountain Biodynamic Farm by Carstairs.

Last year about this time, garlic was the very first crop seeded on Steel Pony Farm. This year, the garlic is the last crop that I will seed this year; from now until early May the field will go dormant, and garlic will be the first thing to grow up in the spring. It’s really a crop that measures the passing of time.

So 1700 cloves is quite a lot, and I’m looking forward to having a good quantity of garlic for next year. Last year we did about 1000 cloves, but a little bit less than half of those were from bad seed stock and so didn’t end up  making very good bulbs. This year I planted seeds that I had saved from the good part of last year’s crop, and so I’m pretty confident that we’ll get some amazing garlic for 2012.

 

 

 

 

Love these beautiful green onions harvested this past Monday. A lot of folks that I’ve been chatting with expect that the farming season is pretty much over. Even though we’re creeping toward October, we’ve still got a lot of food coming out of the field. It’s pretty exciting. The CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) farmer must time plantings and choose varieties that to ensure that there is a good early, mid and late season harvest. Still maturing in our field are parsnips, carrots, beets, rutabaga, diakon radishes, watermelon radishes, brussel sprouts, spinach, arugula, and mesclun greens. We’ve got at least two weeks of food boxes left, and if after that point there is still food in the field, then we’ll do another week.

Grateful for all the moisture we had at the beginning of the season. With such a dry August and September I’m more and more aware of how much the early rains set us up for a great season.

Still many farm tasks to focus on- clean up/tear down, prepping beds for garlic, adding to the compost pile, harvesting, transporting pumpkins, garlic, onions, potatoes in to town, the list goes on. Grateful for cooler days, but wishing for more daylight hours!

So, with a few frost warnings already this fall, and one very light itsy bitsy frost, Andy and I decided to harvest all of our green tomatoes yesterday. We must have got a few hundred pounds out of the field. We brought them home and put them in cardboard boxes, and are hoping that they will ripen up in the next three weeks or so.

Generally, we have been transferring all of our veggies by bike and trailer, but the few times that we have transported a bigger load of tomatoes, we have found that they do not transfer well by trailer. They are too delicate and because the trailer does not have any suspension, they bruise easily. So yesterday we borrowed Andy’s car to run out the to farm and pick up this load. We also harvested all the corn in the field. We didn’t get much as the heat units were so low this year, but we’ve got enough for a token ear for CSA members.

The beans just keep coming! I’m happy to have planted one succession of yellow and green beans quite late in the summer. It was a gamble, but this warm weather and the frost free fall means that we’ve got another wave of beans on the way. I picked through them this weekend for the bigger ones and got a great harvest.

Still lots of veggies in the field for fall boxes and market. Tonnes of swiss chard and kale, lots of spinach and arugula on the way, and turnips, brussel sprouts, parsnips, pumpkins and winter radishes are not too far off. Woot!

Mike

Finally!

Meet our new volunteer Joe, he doesn’t talk much but he listens well and sees all.

Hello, Andy here with a few thoughts/words from the field. We’ve been working away out here bending our backs together and keeping busy with the weeding and harvesting these days but still putting a few seeds in the ground here and there, but the seeding has slowed down as we move into late August. All the while I think we’ve all been keeping a keen eye as we wait and look forward to those bountiful root vegetables to mature, the potatoes, beets, parsnips, garlic, onions, leeks and especially the prized garden fresh carrots. Sounds like soup to me!

Last fall an artist would have looked at a canvas and seen what potential it could hold if he/she brought to it the right colors and applied just the right brush stroke to form the vision/idea in their mind. Mixing colors and setting each stroke onto the canvas, sometimes with care and thought and sometimes in the heat of the moment with great haste or a burst of energy and inspiration. Watching and observing as the picture came to life. There seems to be a lot of green in our picture as we’ve seen our vision come to life in a real way throughout the past 14 weeks of working the soil, seeding, weeding and harvesting. The other night we stopped to take a look at a photo from October and we looked in amazement at a flat empty 2 acre plot of soil with no sign of green to be seen. Today we’ve got all shades of green, and a full rainbow of colors, not to mention all the different shapes and designs of each crop. And then there’s all the other life that it brings, the birds and their songs, and also our great allies the worms, garter snakes, ladybugs and the dragonflies. With all of these the picture is looking bright and full! Very full! I never cease to be amazed at all of the food that we pull out of the field every week or the transformation of those tiny seeds into such big and juicy vegetables. Sure is nice to be able to “reap what we sow”, and enjoy all the efforts/fuits and vegetables of our labour which are now so richly filling our bodies and bringing us a new energy and state of health.

Here’s a few last words/thoughts collected from out in the field. To download an .m4a version click here:

Well, I’ve been working with a shovel and a hoe,
digging that soil getting it ready to go,
Well, It’s a hell of a lot of work you know,
to get those vegetables to grow,

Peas and carrots, garlic and corn,
Up with the sun nearly every morn,
Cucumbers, onions and spuds,
Rained last night and now I’m stuck in the mud,
When the sun comes up well it shines and shines,
My necks red like tomatoes on the vines,

Well here we are so let’s get down to it,
Come on Y’all lets shovel that shit,
Manure’s good for the soil it’s true,
And vegetables are good for you!

Warmly,

Andy

In the introduction to her book Vegetable Favourites, Lois Hole writes about her early years of gardening in Alberta, and the new vegetables that immigrants introduced her to in the 50’s. She learned about vegetables like broccoli and garlic late in life from Italian families that asked that she grow them. Lois embraced the new veggies with gusto, and learned to grow them in order to supply the demand. She also learned to cook with them herself, adopting recipes from people from a variety of cultures that inhabited the prairies.

“Looks good, but what do I do with it?” is a common question at market and CSA pick up. Kale, swiss chard, beet greens and bok choy are some of the greens that we’ve been harvesting in heaps lately but that might not be very familiar to many veggie eaters. Still, lots of folks are interested in trying them out. It’s great that people are interested in taking advantage of some of the less familiar but oh so delicious seasonal eats. Others may have been using them for years, but might also be on the lookout for new ways to incorporate these foods while they’re here.

Finding new ways to cook the abundant green goodies spilling out of the field is a challenge for us as well. The simple salads and stir-fries at the beginning of the season (hooray! We’re eating veggies that we grew with our own hands!) have lost some of their novelty, but the greens keep a comin’ all the same!

After doling out shares and selling at market, we were left with a Tupperware tote full of beet greens (not to mention the broccoli, kale and sprouted cauliflower that also threatened to spoil).  Should we compost them? Should we feed them to the chickens at Fort Normandeau? We talked about freezing them for soups in the winter. But eventually just started in on them with determination. We blended beet green smoothies, tossed beet green salads, fried beet green eggs, broiled beet green chips, boiled beet greens into pasta, and baked beet greens into pies.  Finally, our friends cooked us a beautiful spanakopita with the last of those darn beet greens.

It’s true that veggies I buy at the supermarket could spoil eventually, but usually I select those I’m not challenged to find uses for. Even though I’ve heard about the wastage in large-scale grocery markets, I don’t take on the urgency of using up all that food before it rots.  But those beet greens! We celebrated the arrival of their seeds in the mail, carefully turned up and raked flat the soil where they grew, planted them, hoped on them, weeded them, watched them come up, and finally, picked them with our own hands.

A few CSA members have sent us photos and told us about the tasty concoctions they’ve made with our food. I’m on the look out for yummy new recipes!  If you have a favourite dish created with our food, please send it our way so we can share it around.

Here is a recipe for cauliflower, broccoli, kale and beet green pie that turned out beautifully. Herbs in pie crust=yum.

Spelt pie Crust

1 1/4 cups fine ground spelt flour

1/2 cup butter, chilled and diced (you can also freeze butter, and grate it into dry mix to ensure coldness)

1/4 cup ice water

1/4 tsp salt

¼ tsp pepper

1 tsp dried (or 2 tsp fresh) thyme

1 tsp dried rosemary

Vegetable pie filling

2 tbsp olive oil

1 large yellow onion, halved and sliced

1 head of cauliflower, chopped

1 head of broccoli, chopped

1 cup chopped kale

1 ½ cups beet greens

1tsp black pepper

1tsp salt

1 1/2 cups whipping cream

3 eggs

1 cup aged cheddar cheese, grated

1. In a large bowl, combine flour and salt. Cut in butter and press with fork until mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Add rosemary and thyme. Stir in water, a tablespoon at a time, until mixture forms a ball. Wrap in plastic and refrigerate for 2-4 hours or overnight.

2. Roll dough out to fit a 9 inch pie plate. Place crust in pie plate. Press the dough evenly into the bottom and sides of the pie plate.

3. In a pan heat the olive oil and saute the onion for 5 minutes. Add the kale, broccoli, cauliflower and beet greens and saute for about 10 minutes. Drain excess liquid from the pan. Let it cool a bit. In the meantime, whisk the eggs, cream, thyme, salt and pepper in a bowl.

4. Spread the vegetable over the crust. Sprinkle with the grated cheese and pour the egg mixture on top.

5. Bake at 200C for 15 minutes. Reduce oven temperature to 180C and bake for another 20-25 minutes or until the top is golden.

With the leftover pie crust, I made flatbread/crackers by rolling it into flat 2 by 5 inch slices, laying it out on a baking sheet and cooking it at 350 for about 10 minutes. Watch closely, because they burn fast! They’re so tasty with a fresh tomato, cilantro, lemon/lime and garlic scape salsa.

Hope you like it!

Kristen