Time for all things green and leafy again! 

New this week are mixed baby lettuces, tatsoi, baby collard greens, and red russian kale.  The 'baby' collard greens are this week only, as these are actually just large thinnings that need to be cleared away to make space for the plants to grow to full size.  I would not recommend cooking them in the traditional manner (in a pot on the back of the stove all afternoon).  Just give them a quick steam or saute and they'll be done.  Red russian kale is a very sweet and tender kale, that tastes nothing like the awful curly stuff you'll find at the grocery.  And tatsoi is a very mild Asian mustard green.  It's great by itself in a green salad, or try sauteeing it with a little garlic and oil.

I make bags of salad greens in half-pound quantities; cooking greens are in one-pound bags.  (I know some are interchangeable, but you gotta draw the line somewhere).  I am happy to make half bags if the listed quantities sound like too much.  I can also fix up mixed bags for your own custom-blend of greens if you'd like - just ask!

I started this farm seven years ago in 2005.  The long-term plan was for both my husband Andrew and myself to earn our living together from the farm.  In 2006, Andrew decided he wanted to pursue a military career.  I have to admit I was never wild about the idea, but it was what he had his heart set on, and I'm proud of his service to our country.  He has helped out here at the farm as he's able, but he's had his own full-time job, and then some.    He just returned from the most recent of many long government-sponsored field trips to hot sandy climates, and guess what?

He's done with it.  If you think you just heard a long slow sigh of relief on the breeze...that was me.  From right here it sounds like the whole heavens are singing the Hallelujah chorus in my head.  No more long periods of separation.  No more waking up alone at 3am in a cold sweat wondering if some lunatic just set the world on fire.  No more gas masks stashed in the back of the closet.  No more farmer on the verge of a nervous breakdown posts (we can hope).

Seven years and many adventures later, we're coming full circle.  Andrew will be joining me full time on the farm beginning early next year.  He's ready to make peas, not war.  Literally.  You heard me right: by next spring, there will be two Wild Onion-ers growing even more food for you!!

We do have a lot of details to work out over the winter, trying to figure out where best to expand to earn enough on the farm alone to pay all the bills.  We're both excited as can be, and yet nervous as a field of mice on a full moon night.  Andrew will be staying on with the military on a very limited basis for a while, because that federal insurance package is really nice.  Otherwise, we will be relying on the farm for 100% of our income.  It's a bit of a swan dive, but I'm all for jumping off cliffs and belly-flopping into unknown waters.  Easing into the pool an inch at a time isn't really my thing. 

Here's to peas, not war. 

And you can count on quite a few more tomatoes next summer!

Did you get outside this morning?  Ahhhh......

We're sitting on the cusp between summer and fall; one of my favorite times of the year.  The fall crops are beginning to produce: sweet potatoes are harvested, the arugula bounced up and is ready to cut, radishes are ready to pull, with much more just around the corner.  In the meantime, it's still warm enough, and the days long enough, that summer crops like cherry tomatoes, sweet peppers, and eggplant are still producing in abundance.  The cucumbers are fading away quickly.  It's been a good long run, we've had cukes of one sort or another producing a full month longer than they usually do, but this is most likely the last week for cucumbers.  I keep harvesting peppers and eggplant through late October, but if you have it in mind to tuck some away in your freezer for the winter, do it in the next few weeks.  Both will slow down in the cooler, shorter days of October.  Just about any of your favorite eggplant dishes can be made in larger quantities, and the prepared meals will freeze and reheat quite well.  All you need to do to freeze peppers of any kind is to chop them into pieces, tuck them into containers, and toss in the deep freeze. 

And what's with all these beans???  I usually plant a wide variety of beans (snaps, shelling beans, & more) to harvest in August and September.  The weather here in late summer can vary so widely, it's impossible to predict which varieties will do well, so I sow them all.  Typically a few varieties produce well, and most of them get turned back into the ground.  This summer they've all grown well, and the plants are cranking out beans faster than I can pick them.  Personally, I have a love/hate relationship with beans (love to grow and eat them, hate to pick them), but if you love beans, this is your season!  You can also tuck extra beans into your freezer for the winter.  Butterbeans only need to be shelled, put into containers, and tossed in the deep freeze.  Snap beans or romano beans should be blanched in boiling water for one minute, then plunged into ice water to cool.  Drain and dry them as well as possible, portion out into containers, and freeze.

And just to be a tease...I have some fabulous news to share with you in a week or two!  Stay posted!!

If you've dropped by the farm for your produce in the past few weeks, you might have noticed that it looks like I've got my Halloween decor up a little early.  I know, they can be a little startling.  I do keep them clear of the front entrance.  But they are one of several of my favorite beneficial insects (yes, I have favorite bugs) that appear this time of year.

Large black-and-yellow garden spiders (also known as writing spiders, due to their intricately built webs) have set up shop all around the house, with even more out on the farm.  They do tend to get disturbingly large, and while I don''t want one for a housepet, I go out of my way to leave them to do their business.  I think of them as my late summer clean-up crew.  They have voracious appetites, and will snare and consume non-benefical insects by the dozens.  They are the only creature I've ever seen that will eat a squash bug (even my chickens won't touch those stinky specimens).  They are not poisonous, and will not bite you.  If you find them around your garden, let them be.  They're doing you a favor!

Everyone knows that ladybugs are a wonderful beneficial insect.  But do you know what a ladybug looks like in her infancy?  Ladybugs are great, but the adults prefer a diet of mainly pollen and plant residues.  It's the junior ladybugs, the larvae, that are working the hardest for you.  The young ones eat aphids by the thousands.  Many organic gardeners will spray BT (a natural organic insecticide that targets caterpillars) on their fall crops to keep the cabbageworms from destroying new seedlings.  Be sure to scout your plants for baby ladybugs first - the BT will kill ladybug larvae as well as the caterpillars, and then you'll have no ladybugs next spring.

The most amazing multi-legged beneficial out there right now are miner bees.  They only show up for a few weeks in late August and early September.  There are a number of different species - I'm not sure which one lives here, but it's a pretty nifty-looking bug with iridescent blue wings and an orange-gold striped body.  The adult bees tend to hover over bare cultivated ground in the middle of the day.  It's admittedly a little un-nerving to work surrounded by a swarm of bees, but they don't sting unless agressively bothered.  They pollinate many edible crops, and also eat irksome cicadas and grasshoppers.  Their neatest trick of all?  Miner bees don't live together in colonies like other bees.  Instead each and every miner bee burrows one to two feet down into the soil in the evening to sleep, then digs it's way back up again in the morning.  In the process, they create millions of tiny little vertical channels through the soil structure.  I could get an expensive sub-soiler and rig it to the tractor and burn a lot of diesel to aerate the soil and break up any hardpans.  Or I can sit back and watch the miner bees do the job for me, gently, naturally.  How cool is that?

It's all in.

I don't typically like to work on Sundays, but the ground was finally dry enough to work this morning. After a month of incessant rains, it was dry enough by week's end that I could at last get the tractor out, work up some beds, and the remaining big block fall and winter plantings got sown by my seat-of-the-pants last-ditch target date of Labor Day.

An hour after the last row of seeds met the dirt, the skies blackened up on the horizon, and the rain rolled in again.  Now that's some good timing.

Some see crows as ill fortune.  Some say crows in pairs are harbingers of good luck.  Lately all my crows seem to be appearing two at a time.  This morning I saw a female crow digging a hole in the tilled ground for a dust bath, like a chicken hen will do, while her partner stood by keeping watch.  Did you know that crows mate for life?