It's the Iron Chef Brunch Challenge at the Midtown Farmers Market this Saturday...and the Raleigh Downtown Farmers Market starts next Wednesday on May 4th.  Market season is heading into full swing!  The farm enjoyed a good dousing of much-needed rain last Friday, and our spring crops are really starting to pop.  Tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, beans, and more are in the ground and growing strong for early summer harvests.  Our to-do lists get longer every week, but it's a gorgeous time of year to be outside all day every day, and we thoroughly enjoy the work.

If you are interested in signing up for our CSA program, we are now accepting new memberships for pick-up at all of our locations.  We offer pick-up year-round at the Midtown Farmers Market, Harmony Farms on Millbrook Rd (North Raleigh), and at our farm.  Pick-up is also available at the Raleigh Downtown Farmers Market May through early August.  Our CSA is a little different than most - you get to choose your own box!  You pick your own items each week, and save a little money by paying in advance for your super-fresh organic local produce.  Check out the details here.  If you'd like to sign up, please email me at wildonionfarms@gmail.com and I will send you the current membership form.

Gardeners, it's high time to plant!  We still have a slew of garden plants available again this week, though we are starting to get cleaned out on a few items.  Just a couple of bell peppers left, a few roma tomatoes, and down to a handful of our wildly popular Kellog's Breakfast tomatoes.  Reserve yours while they're still available!  Bring a box, load up on plants this weekend at the market, and spend a happy sunny Saturday afternoon in your garden!  If you're up for a drive, you are welcome to head on out to the farm and pick your own plants from the greenhouse (*please let us know if you're coming, so I can ensure someone will be here to meet you*).  We can only fit so many plants on the truck to take to the market, so if there is something you have your heart set on, feel free to send me your shopping list and we'll make sure it gets packed up for you. Thanks as always for your business, and have a great week

The Midtown Raleigh Farmers Market at North Hills is back in full swing again this Saturday!  We'll all be there, from 8am to 12 noon.  Our spring crops are a bit behind in production this year, as we had 7 inches of rain in February and couldn't get into the fields to plant until March (even then it was a fairly mucky affair).  The variety will change and increase very soon.  We still have plenty of overwintered kale and chard, and a mountain of winter carrots and beets that all need to go this week.  As in now.  Apparently I got a little root-happy when doing my winter planting last September, and the last of our winter roots are currently sitting in the very same spot I need to set out the first cucumbers, squash, and beans of the summer.  A little help, please, so I can get those in the ground in a timely manner! 

Just a bit of asparagus is starting to come up in fits and starts.  We are limiting asparagus orders to one pound per customer this week, and we will give preference to our CSA customers.  A bit more should be available as the weather settles and stops flip-flopping back and forth between 20's and 80's.

Sunday morning we saw what looks like the last freeze of the season - hooray!  It's a little later than we usually see on our farm, so we'll be scurrying this week to get both the final successions of cool-season crops in the ground, while also starting to plug the tomatoes and other summer crops in their places. 

Yes, it's time to plant!  We have a slew of garden plants available starting this week.  17 different varieties of heirloom tomatoes, 3 different varieties of cucumbers, 4 varieties of summer squash, 12 varieties of sweet and hot peppers, and even 3 different kinds of eggplants.  These are all organically grown, and I bet you won't find that kind of variety in any garden center!  Bring a box, load up on plants this weekend at the market, and spend a happy sunny Saturday afternoon in your garden!  We also have plenty of varieties that will grow well in containers; look for the asterisk * on the list for plants well suited for smaller spaces.  If you're up for a drive, you are welcome to head on out to the farm and pick your own plants from the greenhouse (*please let us know if you're coming, so I can ensure someone will be here to meet you*).  Thanks as always for your business, and have a great week!

I've got a spring bug in my bonnet today.  Winters are so bizarre here: an ice storm last weekend and five days hunkered down in a house without electricity wrapped up in blankets.  Today it's 70 degrees, warm and sunny.  I spent the bulk of the day seeding tomatoes, dreaming of standing in the middle of a tomato field on a hot July afternoon, taking big bites out of a just-plucked fruit.  Andy asked what I was sowing, and when I said tomatoes, he exclaimed, "already!"  Yep - it takes 8-10 weeks to get a good-sized start grown and hardened off, ready for planting.  If I want to plant out the tomato field in early to mid April, that means starting the seeds now.

I had a blast last week at the Southern SAWG conference in Kentucky.  Good people, good food, good ideas, and more new information than I'll probably manage to integrate in the upcoming year.  I always come away from these conferences with a slew of practical tips and a few lofty ideas.

My new favorite low-tech tip is pictured above.  Over the years I've spent hundreds of dollars feeding expensive vegetable seed to herds mice in the greenhouse, tried a thousand tricks and gone through many a mouse trap trying to keep them from destroying newly seeded trays of vegetables.  Flip a mesh tray upside down over the seeded flat, weigh it down with something heavy, and we're mouse-proof.  Doh.  This job keeps one humble, if nothing else.

In all the conversations I heard last week, one word kept popping up over and over again.  Resilience.  Resilient agriculture.  I'm not one to get hooked on the latest buzzwords, but this one struck a chord with me, and the idea keeps circling round and round in my head.  Organic, local, biodynamic, pasture-raised, ecologically-produced, sustainable, natural, profitable, flavorful, marketable...all of these things are good values to strive for, but none are achievable if the farmer is not resilient.  We have to have the systems in place to bounce back from ice storms, drought, floods, hurricanes, record temperatures.  We need to have a diversity of crops in place to handle freaky weather, changing markets, or plain old hard times.  We have to try and maintain a flexible, adaptable mindset or this job will drive us crazy in a heartbeat.  To be resilient means being able to remain strong, healthy, and successful after misfortune.  To be resilient means to be able to return to a whole shape after being pulled, stretched, pressed, and bent in every direction.  We've hit more than a few hard bumps in our ten years of farming, but we've never plain run out of food.  Resilient agriculture.  I love that idea.

Romanesco.  It's as if a broccoli and a cauliflower met in the 60's, had a funky little love child, which then grew up and didn't quite know where to place itself in the world.  You're not sure if you want to eat it, or just center it on the table, hang the leftover Christmas ornaments from its spirals and top it all off with a disco ball.  Math fans love it; its spirals grow in perfect Fibonacci fractals.  The conch shell of the vegetable world.  Personally, I just want to park myself outside in the row of romanesco, and marvel at the crazy things nature can dream up in the dark of winter.  It feels like a guilty slaughter to cut them down, but they won't last on the plant forever.  And they are quite tasty, on top of everything else.  My favorite way to cook romanesco is to break the head into florets, and toss with a bit of olive oil, salt and pepper.  Spread the florets on a baking sheet, and roast them in the oven at about 400 degrees for 15-20 minutes, or until tender and slightly browned.

Winter crops grow at a snails' pace; sometimes we need to rotate certain crops in and out over the weeks to keep a nice mix of vegetables available each week, and refrain from cutting some crops down to nothing.  High demand in recent weeks plus a drastic turn in temperatures means we have a few crops out of play this week that need a bit of R&R (rest and regrowth) before we can harvest them again.  We hope to have them available again in the near future.  Eggs are still in quite limited supply; we try to provide for our CSA members first, but the chickens still never produce enough for everyone this time of year.

I'm putting together the last of the seed orders this week for the year to come; including varieties of tomatoes, peppers, and more for our usual spring plant sales.  We'll grow all the same again, and possibly more.  If you have any special requests, now's the time to let me know!

Thank you very much for your business, eat well, and have yourself a great week!

Happy new year!  It's hard to believe, but our annual break in the vegetable production is almost over.  December is the one month out of the year we don't plant anything new.  By January we're planning and planting for your spring crops already.  Time to start perusing all the seed catalogs that have been arriving in our mailbox the last few weeks, and thinking about seed orders this weekend!

I like to think of winter vegetables as stored sunshine.  Not much new growth happens through the darkest months of the year.  We plant for fall and winter in late summer, hope those seedlings absorb as much of the tail end of the season's warmth and light as possible before the short dark days set in, then watch the plants go into a hibernation mode over the winter.  The past few months have been one of the wettest seasons on record for our area.  There just hasn't been a lot of sunshine for your veggies to store, so we've seen much slower growth than usual.  On the bright side, it's been far warmer than ordinary, so we haven't lost much to icy weather - a welcome change after the past two winters.

Thank you very much for your business, eat well, and have yourself a great week!

Happy holidays!  Our honeybees and produce have been enjoying the unusually warm December weather this month, hope you are doing the same.

We will be delivering to Harmony Farms on Wednesday 12/23 for our CSA customers.  Farm pick-up will only be available on Wed 12/23 this week.  I will be at North Hills for the Midtown pre-Christmas market on Wednesday, 12/23, from 4-6pm (as it is dark by 5:30, I may leave a little early if the lighting is poor).  Please have any orders for Wednesday submitted to me by Tuesday night.  There will be no market at Midtown this weekend on Saturday 12/26.  We will be back to our usual schedule next week.

We had a very busy weekend, and are sold out of a few of our usual items for the time being, but still have a great selection of produce for your holiday tables.  Tons of greens for salads or cooking, huge heads of beautiful cauliflower.  All of the main crowns of broccoli off the current planting have been harvested, there are just a few secondary side-shoots available this week until the next round of broccoli is ready.  Some smallish but delicious heads of radicchio (average 1 pound each).  Sweet and tender baby beets, with greens.  Getting down to the last of the turnips.  Large, tender celery that is at its finest quality this time of year. 

Thank you very much for your business, eat well, and have yourself a great week!

This Saturday will be the last full market of the season at the Midtown Farmers Market.  Rain or shine - don't miss!  The winter market hours continue through the next five months with limited vendors attending, from 10am - 12 noon.  Yes, we will be there!  We only cut produce to order through the winter, if you have any questions about the process, stop by our tables this weekend and ask away.  There will be one more somewhat-full pre-holiday market on Saturday, November 21, from 10am-1pm.

Our available produce is still fairly heavy on the leafy greens, but that should change in the near future with the addition of lots of roots and brassicas.  We put all of our fall and winter crops in at the usual times this year, but growth seems to be lagging a bit more than is typical.  As the days grow shorter throughout the course of the season, plant grows slows markedly.  While we've seen fairly mild temperatures of late, I suspect that the unusually high number of wet, overcast days this fall have slowed things down beyond their normal growth rate for this time of year...one of those things a farmer just can't predict when assigning a planting date in August to November or January's crops.  For those of you who've been inquiring, YES the beets and carrots, broccoli and cauliflower, spinach and celery will be here eventually!  And most of all, I'm tickled that you like our carrots and such so much to keep asking every week :)

I've also been getting a slew of questions about why our sweet potatoes are so small.  The sweet potatoes are harvested all at once in late summer.  No matter when we dig them up, some will be small, some mid-sized, and some larger.  After they are cured, I roughly grade them by size.  The smallest potatoes do not store as long as the larger potatoes, so we try to sell those first.  I love these little potatoes...you can roast them whole or halved in no time, pop them in the microwave for two minutes for a quick and nutritious snack, or halve them and get them done on the grill in no time.  Enjoy the little fellas while they're around; the potatoes get larger as the winter wears on.  If you absolutely must have larger sweet potatoes right now, please let us know ahead of time, and we'll dig out a few of the bigger specimens.

Thank you very much for your business, eat well, and have yourself a great week!

The Midtown Farmers Market's regular season ends in just three more weeks on November 7th.  Just as the produce starts to get interesting again, darn it.  So what then?

You can still get super-fresh produce from us throughout the winter months, once that market is done.  Some of you are familiar with this process, some may not be.  I've been getting a slew of questions about it all in recent weeks, so I figure an early reminder is worth a moment's time.

We are still at Midtown every Saturday, all winter long, from 10am - 12noon!  We do not, however, set up a full display of produce.  Most of our produce through the upcoming months will hold just fine in the fields or greenhouses until you want them.  We prefer to cut everything to order so there is no waste.  This means you'll need to pre-order off of the weekly list (sent out every Monday).  All you have to do is hit 'reply' to these weekly newsletters, and send me your shopping list.  We do need your orders by Friday morning.  On Saturday mornings, we will be on the commons near Ben and Jerry's with your orders packed up and ready to go.  You don't even need to fight to find a parking space; Midtown Events blocks off a short lane in front of the winter vendors as a loading zone for our customers, so you can grab and go.  No orders are too small or too large.  Quick and easy!

There are absolutely no changes to our usual pick-up schedules at Harmony Farms or at our farm over the winter.

So what can you expect through the dark months?  Roots galore: beets, carrots, turnips, radishes.  Sweet potatoes until March.  Loads of greens: kales, collards, mustard greens, asian greens, spinach spinach and more spinach, lettuces and other salad greens.  Cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, leeks, celery, parsley.  As always a smattering of unusual items here and there to mix things up.  We always like to try something new; this winter we're attempting to grow snow peas in the greenhouse - so far, so good!

The tomatoes and cucumbers get all the glory in the summer, but winter produce can be every bit as delicious.  If you've never had some of these foods fresh from a farm, I encourage you to try them.  They are every bit as different from their supermarket counterparts as a vine-ripened heirloom tomato is from those hard orange imposters they call "tomatoes" in the grocery store.

If you have a friend you think might be interested, there is a "forward to a friend" link at the bottom of this newsletter.  Share it on Facebook, if you're into that.  Your word-of-mouth recommendations are always our most effective method of advertising (thank you!!).  Anyone interested can sign up for our weekly newsletters through the simple form on the homepage of our website - or just send me a quick email message and I'll get you signed up in a minute.

Thank you very much for your business, eat well, and have yourself a great week!

Sometimes I wish I'd chosen a different name for our farm.  "Wild Onion Farms" seems to translate in some people's heads into "the farm that should have onions all the time."  I regularly get some pretty amusing spam emails from large international onion distributors (if you ever find yourself with five tons of onions on your hands, let me know, I can refer you to a buyer).  I've been scowled at countless times by market customers for not having onions.  I've been lectured by little old ladies for daring to charge a whole two dollars for 'what anybody could pull out of their yard' that were actually carefully cultivated scallions.  It's all in the name, I suppose.

Why 'Wild Onion Farms' then?  Ten years ago we were shopping around in the area for some good-but-cheap farmland.  In an area that is rapidly turning into a sea of subdivisions, I lucked into finding Mr. Brown, a cranky old farmer that had held a ten-acre parcel in his wife's family for generations.  He'd already sold off most of the road frontage for small residential lots, but the back of it was still prime farmland.  Mr. Brown wanted to retire, but was dead set against selling out to a developer.  The first time we looked at the property was on a cold and windy March day, and the land was teeming with clumps of wild onions, those almost ramp-like weeds you can likely find in every roadside ditch in early spring.  Mr. Brown asked what I wanted to do with the land.  He spat, snorted and recommended I take my money to Vegas instead.  After many months of negotiating, he was happy enough to take my money for his onion-riddled farmland.  There you go.

I reasoned that if the land grew wild onions so prolifically, it would grow some pretty good cultivated onions too.  And it does, just not in every season.  I've you've been craving something oniony, we have scallions again for a while through the fall months.  Scallions are a spring and fall crop, bulb onions are a summer crop in this climate, leeks are a winter crop; there's inevitably a gap in the progression here or there.  And remember, it's just a name :)

Summer has been cranking on, and I keep forgetting to post here - sorry!  Sometimes it's hard to find the energy for every last detail by the end of the busy season; the goal boils down to just keep on keepin' on.  The fall equinox is this Wednesday, which for me marks the true beginning of fall.  Always bittersweet: it's sad to see another summer fade away, but what a relief to be done with another summer!

September is admittedly a bit of a challenge to eat locally from our farm, unless you are really into eggplant and okra.  It always starts to feel like there are one too many months in the summer season, and even we rely heavily in our own kitchen on the vegetables I've put up from previous months.  The good news is, we're finally starting to move out of eggplant-and-okra season!  A few more fall crops are happily here this week: sweet potatoes and kale (available 'til sometime next spring), lettuce is back, and snap beans should be available for about the next 4-6 weeks.  If you are very much a fan of eggplant and okra, both should be around for at least maybe another 3-4 weeks, weather permitting.

The farm is still a hive of activity, even though it may feel like things are winding down.  We have endless tangled messes to clean up from the summer rush, and a final push this week to get the last of winter's field crops into the ground before it's too late.  Then it's on to planting out the big greenhouse for deep winter's food.  The days are getting noticeably shorter, so that crunches the tasks into a shorter available work period.  Roughly one more month, and we'll be able to put our heels up for a bit, not doing much but wandering outside to harvest...and yes, we're looking forward to it!

Thank you very much for your business, eat well, and have yourself a great week!