Garlic Pepper Glaze

Due to popular demand, we have added a section to our blog where consumers can purchase the Garlic Pepper Glaze online with Paypal and have it shipped to their home. Our Garlic Pepper Glaze was a St. Louis Garlic Fest "favorite.” It is a sweet and spicy glaze made with our organic garlic that goes great with chicken or pork. It also can be served as a delicious appetizer when poured over cream cheese and served with crackers. Check out this link to purchase your jar of Garlic Pepper Glaze online: http://blog.leafygreensfarm.com/p/products.html.

St. Louis Garlic Fest

Leafy Greens Farm kicked off their 2012 Summer festival season with a booth at the St. Louis Garlic Fest. It was a fun, family event in south St. Louis started by a bunch of urban garlic farmers. Last November, we had planted about 180 cloves of garlic and early this June we harvested all of them. Yes, garlic takes about 8-9 months to grow! After we harvested the garlic, we cleaned it, cut the stems off, and let it cure -or dry out- in the barn for about 4 weeks. Once the curing process is done, it is ready to be eaten, sold, or stored until the next planting season. Since we planted about 10 different speciality varieties of garlic, we wanted to find the right venue to sell them at. Luckily, we found out about the garlic festival so that we could sell them directly to consumers interested in trying fun, new garlics.

Our garlic varieties we sold

It was exciting talking to so people about garlic - which is considered both a vegetable and an herb. We brought other vegetables to sell, but garlic took center stage. Many people didn't know that garlics came in so many varieties and frankly we didn't know either before we started growing garlic. At the grocery stores, we typically just see one variety of porcelain white garlic, but we have read that there are over 600 cultivated sub-varieties of garlics in the world. The varieties range in flavor from mild to hot and spicy. We had a small range of flavors, but enough to intrigue some of our customers.

We shared and learned new garlics recipes as well as talked about how we prepare the soil for growing garlic. Damian used his amazing selling skills to our garlic and we ended up selling 90% of what we took to the festival. According to one consumer, we had the "cutest" garlics of the festival. We even had two celebrity sightings at the Garlic Fest, Mayor Francis Slay dropped by our booth and Garlic Man came over for a rare photo opportunity!

Mayor Slay and Garlic Man



Baked goods and canned items

One of the most surprising parts of the festival was how quick our baked goods and canned items sold. We had made garlic flat bread, zucchini bread cookies, and garlic pepper glaze. Garlic pepper glaze was the biggest hit of the day. I am not sure if it was the free sample or the awesome recipe, but we sold out of the garlic pepper glaze by 11am!

22 Days of Temperatures above 90°F

Summer 2012 has proved to be a scorcher, but it is not stopping the vegetables or bees at Leafy Greens Farm. We are thankful for the well water and drip tape irrigation system we installed. We have been going to the farm every couple of days, watering for an hour or two and harvesting the hardy summer veggies. We found that kales and chards are the hardiest leafy greens around. Our other vegetables that seem to love the heat include the following: beans, zucchini, squash, okra, and cucumbers. We had to harvest all of our broccoli and cabbages because they started to flower and get burned by the sun.

One of my favorite things to watch at the farm is the zucchini and squash leaves come back to life after watering. In order to produce the zucchini and squash, the plant uses the water stored in the leaves to create the vegetable. In high heat, the plant's leaves become wilted and sad looking; however, they bounce back with a small amount of watering.

As for the bees, we were worried that the heat might make them swarm and disappear to a cooler place. Inside the bee hive, the temperature is normally higher than the outdoor temperature due to all of the busy activity going on inside. During the summer it is essential to have a water source for the bees nearby so that they can take it into the hive and help the hive cool down. We have two buckets of water near the hive. We also placed the hives under a shade tree for added protection from the scorching sun.