week 31: we're eatin' good!
this week on the little dream farm
As many of you have seen, the Cut Flower Patch has really soared this year! The fruits and veggies, however, have been a bit of a different story.
We had a late hard frost in May that wiped out entire fruit crops for farmers all around the region. Here on the farm, the apple, pear, and plum trees were hit the worst. There are zero plums and zero pears this year, and the lower orchard behind the chicken coop has one or two apples here and there on each tree. We haven’t been up to the old orchard up on the hill yet to check how the apples are coming along, but I imagine we may still get some apples out of those trees, just simply because they’re well-established trees and pretty heavy producers.
In terms of the veggies and fruits we planted on Memorial Day (thankfully post-frost), we’re having a very sub-par year in the Big Garden. I’d chalk it up partly to the weather since we’ve just had so much rain this summer, but we also have a lot more rabbit and woodchuck pressure this year than we had last year and my attention has been more on the Cut Flower Patch, too.
The following years will be a better balance of both spaces since we’ll have the experience under our belts of two seasons of growing fruits and veggies and a full season of cut flower production. While there’s infinitely more to learn about gardening, the learning curve for next year isn’t going to be as steep.
I spent a bunch of time in the Big Garden yesterday doing some harvesting and here’s how things are looking!
We harvested all the garlic for the year and it looks great. I’ve lined it all up on this little sled so that we can slide open one of the barn doors and let it cure for the next few days. I’m going to try my hand at braiding some of the garlic so we can hang it up to store and gift to some friends, too, and then the rest of it we’ll be using for cooking all throughout the next year! Last year’s garlic harvest lasted us all the way up until a few weeks ago so we should have plenty on tap again for the coming year.
The cucumbers have been coming in nicely and Chris and I are snacking away! I like to make a vinaigrette of olive oil, red wine vinegar, and some spices (think salt, pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, basil, oregano but I do switch it up from time to time) and slice up the cucumbers and toss them in the vinaigrette. That’s been a faithful summer snack for us this year and we’ll be having plenty of it this week!
The snacking tomatoes are one of our favorite things from the summer garden. The harvest is starting to come in nicely and we should have tomatoes consistently now for the rest of the summer. We did three of our favorite varieties from last year and this past week we made whipped feta and whipped ricotta for snacking on the tomatoes. It’s so easy. For the whipped feta I just crumbled up a block of it, added olive oil, salt, pepper, and pulsed that in the food processor and then processed until smooth. For the whipped feta you need whole milk ricotta so it doesn’t get watery and I poured a small container into the food processor with a dash of olive oil and added salt and local honey and processed that until smooth. Once the slicing tomatoes are ripe we’ll start loading those whipped cheeses onto some toasted sourdough with some garden harvested tomatoes with some fresh basil and making ourselves little sandwich feasts!
We’re also harvesting beets, Swiss chard, green onions, cabbage, cauliflower, squash, and kale at the moment. The blueberries are having a banner year since we’ve covered the bushes with netting, but the raspberries are really suffering with all the rain and they just haven’t been very productive. A few weeks from now we’ll be seeing potatoes, onions, melons, pumpkins, and corn.
I’m not planning on planting a fall garden because we’ll be headed right into tear-down of the Cut Flower Patch and I also have 60 peony roots on order that’ll need to be picked up on Lake Champlain and then planted before it gets too cold this fall—likely at the end of October. I am planning to till 12 smaller rows in a large square pattern with four quadrants and walking paths in between so that it feels like a true peony cutting garden. This will be going in front of the solar panel at the front of the farm and I can’t wait to share more with you about that project in just a few weeks!
We lost all of our broccoli, celery, sugar snap peas, and eggplant to rabbits and woodchucks and the peppers just never really took off. The cauliflower came in ok, but suffered from all the heat and rain and rotted from the bottom up in the sopping wet soil. The napa cabbage had crazy beetle damage and the watermelons, cantaloupe, and honeydew melon really struggled in this super wet summer.
I’d say I’m disappointed from the losses but I’m just not. There are so many factors at play and we were blessed with an insanely good year our first gardening season so that gave me the confidence to grow things and the passion and enjoyment of wanting to keep coming back to do more of it!
This year we’re learning a lot of really good lessons—where we can use more deterrents for critters, how to keep after the weed pressure a little better, and that some of the veggies will need to be sprayed with organic sprays in order to save the crop from being totally devastated by pests.
Our wheels are turning and we’ll likely add some taller fencing to the Big Garden next year and we’ve been talking about growing all our fruits and veggies in landscape fabric, too. In the Cut Flower Patch we ran the drip irrigation and then put the landscape fabric over it. What we’d do in the Big Garden is lay all the landscape fabric, lay out each of the plants where we want them, cut our own holes into the plastic (instead of using the jigs I had made for the Patch) and then run the soaker hoses on top of the landscape fabric and around all the plants once they’re planted since the soaker hoses are really flexible and can be nestled right up next to each plant. We’ll also plan to make up some of our own cloches to place over things like broccoli to keep the critters away.
For each of our losses we gained some really good insights and we’ve got a whole host of notes to do it better next year. So for now we’ll enjoy the harvest that we have and give thanks for all the rain that we’ve truly needed, the wonderful veggie and fruit harvest we are getting from the gardens, and for all the ways these gardens and this farm are growing us in the process.
That’ll be all from me over here on this 31st week of the year. David drove up from Florida late last week and made it into town over the weekend. He’s very good friends with the woman we get our hens from, and he’ll be staying at her cabin not too far from here for the month of August. David is in the process of turning the meditation class he’s been teaching for years into his first book and I’ve been working alongside him to self-publish his book. He’ll be coming by the farm a bunch in the next month for us to continue another round of editing (we just finished the first round a few weeks ago!) and then I’ve designed the cover and this week we’ll talk about formatting the book, getting it into print and digital copies, and launching it when he’s ready! It’s a really exciting project for him and I’m so happy to be able to assist him in bringing this dream of his to life—more on that (to include a release date!) once we’ve got our game plan in place!
As always, we love to hear from you so catch us up on anything you’d like—what you’re growing, what you’re up to, where you’ve traveled to, what you’re working on, what’s keeping you up at night, what you’d like to try…anything! We read every single comment and we love to hear about what’s up in your corner of the world.
Enjoy your Sunday, friends! Catch you next week.