Week 3, 2017-18

A bit chilly at Steed Farm this week.  We started the week with lows in the mid-30's.  On Monday morning, as I was taking the kids to school, we looked at frosty ice on the windshield and roofs of houses. I knew that we would have some damage at the farm. You can imagine that green beans, roselle, squash, sweet potato, and eggplants don't favor this kind of weather.  They all wound up with moderate frost damage to the plants.  Not killed to the ground, but wounded.  The beans, yellow squash and roselle were the most affected.  Thankfully, I was able to close up the greenhouse to protect the tomato and pepper plants and nothing bad happened there.  So a minor set back but, God willing, things will be progressing again soon.  The other crops really responded well; cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower look better.  This weekend I hope to plant more peppers, cabbage, mustard greens, diakon, red onions, and turnips.

Frost damaged squash and sweet potato plants.

Week 2, 2017-18

Our first pick up went very well.  It is always great to catch up with our members who we haven't seen since May and greet our new members.  Jenn made zucchini muffins as a sweet add-on for everyone. 
It is always a little hard for me to shift back into harvest mode from production mode, as the work is under a time crunch.  I thank our volunteer friend Issy and the rest of the Steed family who made things much easier this time.
One thing that always happens at our first pick up is the question "What is that and what do I do with it?"  It is always fun to talk about the fresh produce we bring to the pick up tables and our favorite recipes that we use to eat them.  I never considered us to be "foodies" but since we have all this unique produce it sort of happens over time and I am now warming up to that definition.
Daikon radish is one of those vegetables we had at our first pickup. 
For all the folks who have no idea what to do with a diakon radish I have included some links with  recipes...

Here are a bunch of yummy recipes from Saveur Mag  https://www.saveur.com/article/collection/daikon-recipes

daikon fries - http://cookingontheweekends.com/2014/01/spicy-roasted-daikon-french-fry-recipe/

and these from New Hampshire NPR - http://nhpr.org/post/what-do-daikon-radishes#stream/0

We like to eat them roasted, fried, and in salads.

I hope this helps!

Week 1, 2017-18 Season

Harvest is set for this Saturday.  Looks like we will have loads of zucchini and yellow squash.  The green beans surprised with a good harvest of beautiful pods for this weekend.  Broccoli raab looks like it might have been a week early.  We will see if we can harvest enough for everyone.  Strawberries are starting to flower.  This is about a month earlier than last year.  To round out the baskets are diakon, turnips (which look excellent), roselle, patty pan squash, oregano, and garlic chives.  Things are looking good and doing well as the season starts.

We will be planting cabbage, broccoli, scallions, more bok choi, lettuce, and cauliflower grown from our own transplants for future harvests.   

Season Start 2017-2018

I've taken a bit of a blogging hiatus since our last post way back in April.  I have been somewhat overwhelmed with work, fixing up a mobile home, caring for six kids, and making sure that the household and vehicles are up to par as well as preparing for the next season.  Usually the summer is a slack time from our busy pace;  not this year!  We lost a well pressure tank, an AC unit went out, someone ran over our farm mailboxes, hurricane preparations and clean up, and a work-cation.  I am running just to keep up with things lately and the idea of sitting at a computer late at night hasn't seemed that attractive.  Blogger has however, been calling to me and finally I have a free moment and will catch up from the last post.

Our 2016-17 season was one of the best seasons we have had in terms of vegetable/fruit production so far.  The weather was mild and cooperative and plantings performed well.  We added edible pod peas, spaghetti and acorn squash to our veggie line-up.  Strawberries exceeded our expectations.  All-in-all we had a "A-" season.  The biggest downer was not having kale for an entire season.  I just couldn't get it to germinate and stay alive to transplanting size.

This new season has started off with much difficulty.  Our farm received over eight inches of rain at field preparation time.  This greatly hampered our transplant starts and the formation of beds in the field as I wasn't able to get a tractor in to form our planting beds.  So we started off two weeks behind schedule.  Next we had some very cold weather during our warm-season cycle and that further delayed some plants another two weeks.  Usually we are harvesting mid-Nov, this season will probably start mid-December.  Other farmers I have talked with are in a similar situation.   Fortunately, we grow many crops over the season, we have been spared major damage from storms, and will recover.  So many growers in Florida have had a much worse time and have lost much of their crops for the year. 

Our sweet potatoes are looking good, squash, zucchini, diakon, broccoli raab look fine.  Our strawberries were direct planted to the field.  This uses a bunch of water.  For the better part of ten days, overhead water needs to run on bare-root transplants to keep them alive so they can grow new roots.  I used low-volume sprinklers to keep the plants alive until the roots formed.  This has saved me planting twice though.  Usually I plant them into trays, mist them in the greenhouse, and form little starter plants, then transplant the rooted plants into the field.   So I wind up planting twice to save water.  Since time has been my limiting factor lately, I tried the standard method that strawberry farmers use to grow plants.  I did notice some negative factors such as earthworms that recovered in the field (by using cover crops for a few years) were drowning in puddles trying to evade the saturated field and swamping other nearby crops.  Maybe I will look for rooted strawberry plugs for next year. 
That is a good start at catching up on things and I will continue in fill in details in future posts.  Looking forward to a few hours of sleep and a great 2018 season!

Week 22, Season 2016-2017

I can see the light at the end of the tunnel as the season winds down.  Just a few weeks to go this season.  I have been doing the final activities to help the crops finish strong; a little fertilizer here, some weeding there, a broken drip tube, etc.
We still have corn and beans to finish and they are looking nice.  Cantaloupe and some new squash types are a few weeks away from finishing along with the new cucumbers in the greenhouse.
Strawberries are still doing well but the size is getting smaller with the heat.  I checked the sugar level and they are at 10% which is still very high for this late in the season.  I would love to do a sugar test with berries being sold in the store to see what you could get commercially.  It would be great to see how we compare.
The seed bugs are beginning to take over.  These guys live in the plants and eat the surface of the fruit and cause a bronzing to the surface.  It doesn't seem to alter the taste but makes the berries look like they are bad.  I've sprayed them with pyrethrins in the past but it just seems to slow the bugs down for a week before they are back.  Since we are so late in the season, I am going to leave them alone.  Having a week off allowed the Steed household to produce six quarts of jam and two and a half quarts of jelly (of which I will not be making again in the future due to the low yields and extra fruit and work that is needed). I have also tried making dried fruit and fruit leather.  The fruit leather came out good and is super easy.  Just blend up the strawberries after stemming them.  Add a little lemon juice and sugar if you want.  Then pour over a plastic lined baking sheet and put the oven on low at 140 degrees.  It took all night for it to set but it tasted great and the kids liked it. I sent it to school with them for a snack.
The potatoes are yielding great and will pick for about four weeks.  Leeks will pick for the first time this year.
Hopefully a good finish to a great year.

Week 19, 2016-17 Season

We had an amazing reversal of heat this week with temperatures going from high 60's to mid -30's at night.  All of our warm season crops are in the ground and a few of them, like the beans and squash plants, got a bit of frost damage.  The last crops were planted out this week including lettuce, green onion, basil, and cantaloupe.  I covered some of them with one gallon pots just to keep a bit of warmth near the plant and reduce radiation heat loss.

The strawberries have been picking well but slowed down a tad after the cool snap.  The cool weather should keep the sugars high.  They have been picking great this year.

The potatoes are just over the half way mark and I missed my St. Pat's Day timing again.  Maybe next year.  Corn is about 6 inches high and so are the squash.

I am happy that the season is winding down and hope production can stay up with this cyclical weather.

Week 16, Season 2016-2017

We have reached the two thirds point of the season and the growing is going well.  Cabbage, snow peas, red beets, cauliflower, and komatsuna will be picking this weekend for the first time this season.  I just planted corn, beans, and a few different squash this week.  I will be transplanting peppers, lettuce, cabbage, bok choi, kale (finally) and a few different items this week.  I also hope to plant cantaloupe and melon transplants and Seminole pumpkin seeds to finish out all this year's plantings.  Cucumbers were planted in the greenhouse this week.  Potatoes are up and running and looking fine.  The cauliflower was doing amazing and we had some that were about 10-12 inch heads.  I came back after the rainy days and they had hideous black spots all over the heads and I had to cut and toss them over the fence to the cattle.  It was a trial as we have done poorly in the past, so I was relieved that I actually could grow them.  We will be able to harvest about half of the trial section and I now will add that to our list of plants to pursue.
This is probably our last week of sweet potato harvests and am happy that we got about 13 weeks out of our planting.  I found a great recipe for you to try to say farewell to the sweet potatoes.  I serendipitously ran across a sweet potato soup recipe that was delicious and extremely easy.  It was in Cook's Illustrated magazine.  Did you know that if you have a Hillsborough County library card you can download tons of magazines to your reading device for free!  I happened to figure this out two weeks ago and was pursuing the magazine rack and saw Cook's Ill. and low and behold there was a great recipe for this soup.  All you need is sweet potatoes, shallots (I used onions), butter, thyme, and water.  That is it. I made it for a bunch of friends along with smoked ribs and everyone commented on how great the soup was.  Here is a link to the recipe.  https://www.cooksillustrated.com/videos/3101-sweet-potato-soup  Enjoy!    

Mid-Season 2016-17

We have passed the half-way point of the season and so far things are going and growing well.  Lettuce, strawberries, Chinese cabbage, zucchini, bok choi, kohlrabi, roselle, green beans, diakon, have done very well.  Carrots will be picking for the first week this Saturday in week 13.  Beets will be ready in a few more weeks.  Still no kale but I have some seedlings that I hope will transplant soon.  I have started the watermelon, cantaloupe, dill, peppers and eggplants for the warmer weather like mid-February.  I will place an order for a few different squash I want to try this spring.  I am also going to give lima beans a shot.  The snow peas that were planted about a month ago are growing well even though it has been warm.  I hope to plant more cucumbers in the greenhouse.  The potatoes have been in the ground for nearly three weeks and haven't reached the surface yet.

Here are a few pictures from the farm in the last few weeks.

A bountiful spread

Eggplant 'Nadia'

'Joi Choi' bok choi

Roselle or Florida cranberry

Broccoli 'Green Magic'

Strawberry 'Camino Real'

Storm tossed tomatoes in the greenhouse

  

Best Mustard Greens; Ever!

Mustard greens usually rank about third when it comes to my palate preference.  I usually place turnip first, collard and kale second, and mustards third.  I separate cabbage, Chinese cabbage, and bok choi out as a different class altogether. But I digress.  I found a recipe that elevated mustard greens to the top of the list.  Since I was unexpectedly surprised by the Thai fish soup recipe, I decided to try mustard greens Asian style.  Home run!  Jennifer didn't care for them as she doesn't even eat mustard greens (unless forced!), but Nate liked them.  Anna thought they were still too bitter.  I really liked them.  If you would like to try them, this is the link to the recipe.   http://allrecipes.com/recipe/218501/asian-inspired-mustard-greens/  I didn't have sesame seeds, sesame oil, or sake, so I substituted or omitted but it still came out great.  Give it a try and let us know what you think.

By the way,  if your greens are looking limp and you want them to revive, just cut off the very end about a 1/4 inch and stick them in water.  Here is an unbelievable picture of before and after of turnips when treated in this manner.

Before

After!

Soup Recipe

When I took my kids to the Sunbelt Ag Expo in Moultrie, Ga we went to a catfish cleaning and cooking demonstration.  After the kids got showered by a spray of fish guts we watched a cooking demonstration from a chef who had a great take on a Thai soup.  It was delicious and the kids liked it. The only problem was that I didn't take any notes and the only thing I took to remember what he did was a picture.  So I tried making it from memory and the picture.  It is a great recipe for right now in our season and can be used with chicken or catfish.

My attempt at recreating this meal at home was a resounding success as the kids liked it and ate the potful down in an evening.  You can use bok choi, sweet potatoes, and cilantro from the farm.  Here is my attempt to convey the recipe to you.

Ingredients:
Can of coconut milk
1 box of vegetable/chicken stock
2-3 cloves of garlic
piece of ginger or dried ginger powder
soy sauce
vegetable oil 2 tablespoons
1-2 pounds of boneless, skinless chicken breast or catfish fillets
1-2 sweet potatoes
1 bok choi
curry paste (2 tsp or to taste)
cilantro
1 lime

Saute a couple of cloves of garlic in a soup pan with some vegetable oil. When the garlic has browned a bit, add soy sauce and curry paste and stir up.  Next dice either boneless chicken breast or catfish and saute with the garlic.  When the meat is browned, add chicken/vegetable stock to a pot (3-4 cups) add a can of coconut milk.  Next chop some fresh ginger and add to the pot.  Then dice a sweet potato into very tiny cubes and add to the pot.  Next chop up a bok choi (you can use Chinese cabbage, spinach, probably mustard greens, or maybe even kale might work)  and add that to the soup towards the end of the process before the sweet potato gets too soft.  At the end, add cilantro and the juice of a lime to finish it off.  It takes about 20-30 minutes to finish.