Leafy Greens Farm 2013

It is 2013 and Leafy Greens Farm is about to kick off a new year of growing delicious vegetables! We plan to continue our mission of growing great produce using organic practices and sharing our produce with friends, family, and community members. We took a brief break from farming last year in order to move, but we look forward to sharing new stories and connecting with all of you during 2013.

We have big dreams for this year and also more space to get things started. Our new home offers us enough room to grow transplants in our basement until it is warm enough to transplant them outdoors. It may only be January, but many of the vegetables we eat can take 90 to 120 days to grow. We set up two shelving units of lights and heating mats and have already planted 250+ seeds. The only thing we need more of is electrical sockets. :) Today, we have cabbages, lettuces, snap peas starting to sprout.

After two years of growing vegetables, we are considering starting our own CSA this year. If your not familiar with a CSA, it is otherwise known as Community-Supported or Community-Shared Agriculture. You can think of it like "subscription farming." You buy a subscription from a local farmer just like you buy a subscription to a magazine or Netflix. Instead of receiving a magazine or movie each week, you receive a "share" of fresh, locally grown vegetables. We are a little nervous and still need to work out all the details about starting this new venture in farming, but we have the confidence that we can keep the vegetables growing and boxes of produce filled for our customers.

More news to come soon.

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.

New Harvest & New Recipes

We are in between lettuce growing seasons, but that doesn't mean the end of leafy greens. Fortunately, there are a lot of hearty leafy greens that are able to withstand the heat of the summer such as rainbow chards, kales, and radicchios! We found that our romaine lettuces and bibb lettuces do not fare well in the heat and become bitter if left too long in the ground at temperatures over 90 degrees. So, we are enjoying new salads and recipes with these greens that we would like to share with you.

Sautéed Rainbow Chard

• 2 tablespoons butter
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 tablespoon minced garlic
• 1/2 small red onion, diced
• 1 bunch Swiss chard, stems and center ribs cut out and chopped together, leaves coarsely chopped separately
• 1/2 cup dry white wine
• 1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice, or to taste
• 2 tablespoons freshly grated Parmesan cheese
• salt to taste (optional)

Directions

Melt butter and olive oil together in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Stir in the garlic and onion, and cook for 30 seconds until fragrant. Add the chard stems and the white wine. Simmer until the stems begin to soften, about 5 minutes. Stir in the chard leaves, and cook until wilted. Finally, stir in lemon juice and Parmesan cheese; season to taste with salt if needed.

Grilled Radicchio Salad with Balsamic Vinegar

·         2 heads radicchio, quartered through the core so that the leaves don’t fall apart

·         3 tablespoons olive oil, or to taste

·         2 cloves of minced garlic

·         salt and pepper to taste

·         1 -2 tablespoon of balsamic vinaigrette

·         Feta or Parmesan cheese

·         1 orange or lemon (optional)

Directions

1.      Rub each quarter of radicchio with olive oil and garlic. Sprinkle with salt and pepper.

2.      Grill them over high, till they’re tender and nicely charred, 5 to 10 minutes depending on your fire.

3.      Drizzle them with balsamic vinaigrette and top with feta or Parmesan cheese

4.      Garnish them with orange zest or lemon zest and give them a squeeze of juice.

Kale Chips

• 1 bunch kale
• 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil, divided
• 1 tablespoon sherry vinegar
• 1 pinch sea salt, to taste

Directions

1.      Preheat an oven to 300 degrees F (150 degrees C).

2.      Cut away inner ribs from each kale leaf and discard; tear the leaves into pieces of uniform size. (I made my pieces about the size of a small potato chip.) Wash torn kale pieces and spin dry in a salad spinner or dry with paper towels until they're very dry.

3.      Put the kale pieces into a large resealable bag (or use a bowl if you don't mind getting your hands oily). Add about half the olive oil; seal and squeeze the bag so the oil gets distributed evenly on the kale pieces. Add the remaining oil and squeeze the bag more, until all kale pieces are evenly coated with oil and slightly 'massaged.' Sprinkle the vinegar over the kale leaves, reseal the bag, and shake to spread the vinegar evenly over the leaves. Spread the leaves evenly onto a baking sheet.

4.      Roast in the preheated oven until mostly crisp, about 35 minutes. Watch very closely toward the end. You want the edges brown, but not the whole chip. Otherwise, it will taste charred. Season with salt

Garlic - It is a long complicated affair

One of the things we have been most excited about growing on our farm is GARLIC! It is something that you plant in the fall, overwinter, and harvest in the late summer. Garlic is something that takes about 8-9 months to grow. For us, harvest came early this year because we notice its leaves were browning, scapes were flowering it's stalks were leaning over - the tell-tale signs that garlic is ready to come out of the ground.  Since we had such a mild winter, we think that the garlic got a jump-start on growing during what was suppose to be the cold months.

Since this is our first year growing garlic, we are learning as we go. We had no idea that garlic plants send up a garlic scape - or a tall, slender stalk with an intense garlic that grows out of the middle of the garlic leaves and has a bulb that flowers. They are beautiful and can be used in cooking. They have an intense garlic flavor and can be used in stir-fry or pesto. Or, they can be left in a vase to flower and they create a huge purple bloom - only this bouquet has a distinct garlic odor.

When to harvest garlic is a judgment call, but basically it’s ready to go when the lower leaves start to brown or the stem starts to lean over. Harvesting too soon will result in smaller cloves that don’t store well. Leaving the bulbs in the ground too long and the cloves may be bursting out of their skins, making them unstorable and open to disease. We harvested a few to see if they were ready in early June and sure enough. They were!

We found that digging the garlic out is difficult. Since the bulbs were several inches down in the soil and developed a strong root system, we could not just pull them out. We used a small shovel to loosen the dirt around the bulbs and then dug underneath the bulbs to pop them out. We had to be very careful not to hit or slice the bulb with the small shovel because it wouldn't be able to be stored with a slice through it.

After all that waiting for it to grow and the effort it takes to dig them up, we still have to wait to actually use the garlic! I never knew that garlic has to "cure," or dry, for three to four weeks after harvesting it. We are curing it in a well-ventilated and dry, shady place. After that month, we can go crazy with all of our garlic recipes and we can store the garlic for about 7-8 months as long as we keep it in cool place at about 32°F.

Do you know who your farmer is?

Most of us search the internet or ask others to find out about the best restaurants, doctors, mechanics, or hair stylists are in our area; however, have you ever researched or asked about the best produce farmers in your area? It is strange that we know so little about the people that grow our produce and how carefully we chose other details in our life. We are used to the year-round variety of fruits and vegetables from all over the world in our grocery stores and there is a disconnect between the consumer and the produce farmer.

A few years ago, we didn't really think about where our food came from, but now that we are farming it is hard not to think about it! For us, there have been several things that changed this disconnect. Becoming a part of the organic trend has brought attention to importance of healthy growing practices of the farmers that deliver produce to the grocery stores. The label "organic" gives us insight into how our produce is grown, but not necessarily who grows it. The trend to "eat local" has also helped us connect to  local farmers by going to farmer's markets or participating in a CSA (community supported agriculture). There is something truly enjoyable about meeting the farmers that grow our produce and hearing their stories!

Recently, Damian and I were able to sell our produce through a local market called Sappington Farmer's Market and participate in one of their "Meet Your Farmers" event on a Sunday afternoon. We stood by our produce and talked to customers as they came into the store. We really enjoyed spending time at the event and meeting customers. We have never talked about lettuce and kale so much in our lives. There was quite an age range in customers and we were impressed by the individuals who felt that organic and local produce was important. We also were impressed by the variety of people who told us about the fun dishes they create with local produce - from kale chips to delicious sounding salads and soups. For us, it is not just about knowing who our farmer is. It is also about knowing who our customer is and knowing that they enjoy fresh vegetables as much as we do.