Spring Sprouting

Sprout Salad

The snow is finally gone and plants inside and out are beginning to sprout.  We have lots of seedlings growing under lights in our basement as well as cold hardy seedlings such as alliums and lettuce out in our hoop house ready for planting soon.  Year round we have green sprouting plants in our home though, as we grow shoots and sprouts.  I realized that though the sprouting operation is really paying for most of our other farming endeavors at the moment I have never written a post about it.  Somehow the bigger farm picture of a diversity of annual vegetables, perennial fruits, and how they work together with our animal systems just seems sexier to write about.  The reality is that sprouts have been a great way for us to start up as a farm and make year round income from a very small space (inside our house).

What is the difference between shoots and sprouts?  Shoots are grown on potting soil and need light, so they are larger and more substantial in texture (some might call them micro-greens).  Sprouts do not need soil, just water and daily rinsing, some like light and others don’t.  We have grown sunflower and pea shoots for several years now and this winter we added buckwheat shoots which have a nice tart flavor and succulent texture.  Our sprouts are grown in glass jars and are rinsed twice daily.  We are happy to have a non-plastic option for growing them in, unfortunately we haven’t found a plastic alternative for trays yet, we found wooden trays to hold too much moisture and old plant debris which caused mold.  In jars we grow clover, radish, mung bean and lentil (the last two needing darkness).

Clover Sprouts in Jars

Buckwheat Shoots ready for harvest

Our new stacked lighting system

There are challenges to growing shoots as they are really a monoculture grown in a tight space with high humidity.  Mold can be an issue, and sunflowers come with soil born disease most of the time.  We are constantly experimenting with ways to cut down on loss and increase our yield.  This year we started a higher seeding rate per tray, which greatly increased our yield.  We have also been attending some workshops about nutrient dense growing practices and wanted to see if some of our issues with the sunflowers might be solved by adding the right balance of nutrients to the potting soil.  We tried a potting soil additive by Advancing  Eco-Agriculture called “Fortify”.  To our dismay it did not solve the disease problem, but to our surprise it did double our yields!  At the same time we added some more tables and lights to our grow room, so with increased yields in fewer trays we now have the capacity to grow quit a bit more.

We sell our sprouts and shoots through a variety of local stores and restaurants, and they are also available through our CSA.  Our newest account is the non-profit distribution organization called Green Mountain Farm Direct.  We are excited to offer our products to more institutions and businesses in the North East Kingdom, and we are especially excited about the schools that have participated in sampling our shoots!

2013 CSA Shares Available

We are looking forward to filling bags full of tomatoes, kale, basil, lettuce, peas, carrots, beets, cucumbers… for our CSA members again in 2013.  We had a great first year in 2012.  Though we started with fewer members than we had hoped for, it served as a great practice run resulting in satisfied customers and farmers reassured that they could provide a rich variety of vegetables every week mid- June through mid-October.

This year we are hoping to offer more of the perennial favorites such as carrots, green beans, and broccoli.  We were excited to have enough raspberries to offer members several weeks last year, and this year our asparagus is old enough to do a picking or two!

In addition to our weekly shares of mixed seasonal vegetables and culinary herbs we are offering a bread share and a sprout share as add-on options.  The bread will come from our friend Charlie Emmers at Patchwork Bakery in Hardwick.  The sprout share will be available year round featuring a half pound a week of sprouts, rotating through the seven types of sprouts and shoots we grow.

For full details about pricing and sign up, visit our CSA page above or click here.

We offer our shares on a sliding scale, trying to make good food available to people of all income levels!

Getting Lucky

On our farm we are trying to minimize our dependency on fossil fuels and mechanical equipment.  There are lots of good reasons to do so; carbon emissions, expense, and the fact that oil will probably become increasingly expensive and dirty as we run out of it in the near future.  Our house is not off the grid at all- so we have a lot of changes we would like to make there.  We don’t till our gardens, so the need for a tractor is diminished, but we do still need to move a lot of materials around (manure, mulch, wood, logs, soil, etc.) and we end up using our truck for this work- abusing it over stumps and pig turned humps.  So- our attention turned to the idea of getting a draft animal to do some of what our truck does for us.  We debated about the type of animal, the cost/benefit analysis, and if we really have enough grazing land, and we probably would have put it off for a year or two- but then Lucky arrived.  Our friend had a single Holstein ox that she had raised for four years from a calf and she was no longer able to keep him on her rented land.  The sense of urgency and a good deal helped push us toward choosing a single ox to work with.

Neither of us have had any real experience working with draft animals, though we have family and friends that do and have helped give us some advice.  Lucky was trained, but had not done a lot of regular work.  So between the three of us we have had some learning to do together about how to communicate.  At first we took it slow and would take Lucky for walks and practice directional commands- that he followed pretty well though stopping to graze was a perennial problem.

We then moved into trying to do a little work.  The areas where the pigs pasture get incredibly humpy as they turn over the soil and make wallows.  We try to smooth these out with shovel and rake sometimes- but often the grass grows back faster than we get to it.  So we tried harrowing the pig areas by having Lucky pull a log (which rolled, go figure) so we nailed a bunch of logs together, which busted apart in about 20 seconds.  We determined that we needed to borrow a real harrow or make something a little heftier.

We also got Lucky to pull some logs for his winter structure.  We had had pretty good success with that, until one day on about the 5^th log he got spooked and took off with a 15-foot log attached to him heading down hill towards the main road.  Fortunately he got snagged on another tree before getting to the road.  Needless to say both Lucky and the two of us were a little shaken up and we had a wake up call as to his power and potentially dangerous possibilities.  So- we unhitched him and put him back in his pasture.  That was apparently the wrong thing to do!  Now we know that Lucky was training us to let him stop working when he freaks out.  We continued to work with him in the following weeks, with a bit of trepidation, until we hitched him to the mobile chicken house (with no current residents thankfully).  The chicken house was light and on wheels which probably startled him and he took of f running over hill and dale- and very close to running through the pigs’ electric fence, continuing until the front of the structure pulled off.

That was several months ago and we have not hitched him to anything since.  We decided it is time to start over again establishing our relationship, learning more about training and developing Lucky’s respect for us before he is attached to heavy objects.  We have a lot to learn together- and about once a month we toss around the idea that maybe we are crazy and should start over with a calf, but for now we have hope that we will find more time to work with Lucky and that he’ll be an everyday useful part of the farm in years to come.  Meanwhile, he is helping us to create more compost on the farm, and eliminating our need to scythe the field.

Lucky’s winter housing. We decided to try to use 3 living trees as posts, as they were pretty close to square. We also used lots of round wood from the property to save money. We learned that building with round and funky shapes requires more skill than we have- and relatively square is not square. We ended up getting some great help from our friend Dave and the result is a functional structure that is “good enough”, though there are still quite a few details to finish.

Making Scrapple

In early December we had our pigs slaughtered on the farm as we feel that is the least stressful way for animals to be respectfully killed.  Since these pigs are for personal use we were able to butcher them at home.  We try to utilize as much of the animals as possible. Rebecca’s grandfather Willard Beidler was a butcher in Pennsylvania, and passed along some of his skills to her father.  We are grateful that he can lead us through the butchering process and slowly we are becoming more comfortable with it, so we can be more independent in the future.  One strategy for whole hog utilization is to make scrapple.  Just as it sounds, scrapple is a way to turn the scraps into a more desirable meat product, Pennsylvania Dutch style.  In order to fit more pork into the freezer my Dad’s strategy is to de-bone most of the meat cuts.  You are then left with a lot of bones that have meat still attached that is hard to get completely clean.  The bones, some organ meats and any other parts of the animal that are less desirable for straight up eating can be turned into scrapple.  There is grain added to the mix, so your end result is a sliceable loaf something like meaty polenta.  It is most commonly sliced thin, fried until crispy and eaten at breakfast or lunch with a touch of apple butter.

Here are the basic steps, recipe follows:

1. Put all of your bones and meat scraps in a big pot and cover with water.  Boil until the meat is falling off the bones.
2. Strain off the hot broth and save.  Cool the bones until easily handled, then pick off the bones and set aside the meat.
3. Put the meat through a meat grinder.
4. Measure out your broth and heat to boiling in a big, heavy bottomed pot
5. Pre-mix cornmeal and buckwheat with broth or water until it has a batter like consistency. (this is one of those feeling measurements, not exact.  Some years we used water for this, then felt we needed to add in some fat later, so if you have plenty of broth then utilizing some at this stage adds a little extra fat)
6. Stir cornmeal/buckwheat porridge into boiling broth and stir with a sturdy stick or spoon constantly until it comes back to a boil.
7. Add ground meat into the boiling mix.  Keep stirring- it will get really thick, so it is nice to have two people so someone can keep the pot steady.  At this point add the seasonings and adjust to your liking.  If the mix seems very runny at this point you can add some additional flour, traditionally this would be done with wheat flour.  The mix will get really thick and should come away from the sides of the pot and the paddle should be able to remain straight up without holding when done.
8. Turn off the heat.  Scoop the scrapple porridge into loaf pans about 4 inches thick, they can be various sizes.  Let cool until firm (for us this process is easiest done in the winter when we have a “cooler” outside).
9. When scrapple is firm flip it out of the loaf pans onto a cutting board.  Cut into portions that make sense for your family, wrap and freeze or slice and fry.  I usually cut them into about 4inch cubes for freezing.
   

   Ground meat

   

   Heating the broth

   

   Stirring some broth into the dry cornmeal and buckwheat

   

   Adding the cornmeal porridge to the broth

   

   Adding the meat

   

   Stirring- you need a friend and a strong paddle

   

   Getting thick enough to come away from the sides of the pot

   

   pouring the scrapple into loaf pans to set up

   

   Scrapple cooling

Here is the basic scrapple recipe based on Willard Beidler’s original dictations, and standardized a bit over the 3 years we have been making it.  For the two pigs we processed we ended up with 20# of meat from cooking down the bones and adding in some extra parts such as tongues, heart, kidneys and jowls.  So we made three batches of the recipe below, which turned into 75# of scrapple!

6-7# pork

14c broth

3# cornmeal

2 _1/2c buckwheat flour

4 T black pepper

3 T salt

2 T coriander

 

We’d like to thank Leonard and Beatrice, the pigs that gave us so much good work , good food, and fertility on the farm this year!

Leonard and Beatrice

A Word of Thanks

This gallery contains 14 photos.

As the daylight hours grow shorter we are still hurrying to finish all the projects that need to be done before frozen ground and a thick layer of snow eliminate our work possibilities.  Our garlic is now planted and our … Continue reading →

Summer Progression

In the busy days of summer I haven’t found much time to write all of the blog posts intended, but we have snapped pictures now and again. Here is a gallery of photos from the farm to give a sense of what has gone in the last few months. As always we welcome questions and comments about anything you find interesting- or if you are wondering what the heck we are doing!

Scything the lower field with the help of our friends Sylvia and Ruth

A shot of our animal rotations- first Lucky the ox, followed by the chickens, then the pigs, and finally a cover crop

Our new ox, Lucky

putting the final touches on our herb spiral

Young blueberry plants finally mulched with cardboard and bark

The garlic harvest

A side view of some terrace beds, as you go higher on the hill the work is still in progress

Here you can see a newly built terrace filled with brush. Over time we will continue to add compostable materials and will finally top with some finished compost before planting

Some seed crops. Here we are growing out “Heartbeet” beets and “Clear Dawn” onions for seed.

an early summer CSA share

an early August CSA share

The Farmcorps Program

July days are full and long, and there are always things on the to-do list that don’t get crossed off.  That being said; I do feel like we are gaining ground and getting a lot accomplished lately.  Part of the reason is that Rebecca has been working full time on the farm for a little over a month now.  The other part of the equation is recent help from two youth in the Farmcorps program.  Farmcorps is a summer program that partners up farms that can use some help with high school students that can use some job experience.  The youth are paid for their work through a grant written by the Green Mountain Farm to School Program.  They work two days a week on farms for around 7 hours a day, and two other days of the week they receive agricultural related trainings, work on school garden projects, and have a booth at the Newport Farmer’s market.

Brittany and Dakota have been working at Peace of Earth for two weeks now and have tackled a variety of pleasant and not so pleasant tasks from weeding to mulching, loading compost, picking raspberries and garlic scapes, raking hay, planting, and picking slugs for the ducks.  It has been great to have some extra hands for all of these tasks.  One day while weeding a particularly thickly grassed and nasty section of the garden there was a good deal of exasperation being expressed about the futility of it all.  Brittany posed the question, “Wouldn’t it be easier to just weed whack or plow or rototill this all?’’  The short answer to that question is- yes.  The longer answer about why we prefer to do things the slow way with our hands and organic matter, and active soil organisms will take longer to tell, and experience.  My hope is that this summer they will not only learn something but also spark an inkling of interest and enthusiasm for farming and a respect for what growing food entails.