Scaffolding

Since we excavated the old cucumber trellis to make room for the barn, we needed to build some new structures for the beans and the cucumbers. We choose bamboo because it's rot resistant and really strong.

The cucumber box is on the left, the heirloom beans on the right. Whoa! We need to cut these back a bit. They are getting unruly!

The Lettuce Bucket

We are putting to work a few extra pots that have just been laying around. Lettuce, beets, carrots.

History Beans

This year we ordered seeds from the Baker Creek outfit in Missouri. They've got a great selection of heirlooms like these beans that came over with the Mayflower in the 1620s. They've been in the ground for a few weeks now and we'll share the progress.

Also of note… these beans darkly named Cherokee Trail of Tears. Read more about these here.

Harvesting Beans

Farmer No.Victoria came came over to harvest beans over the weekend. We got a little more organized this year by spacing out our plantings over two weeks. When the first crop finishes producing we'll have more beans from the second.

A couple beans were lost in battle.Unless you can still see those two in the pile here…

We made grilled pizzas, grilled skirt steak, grilled chicken, salad, and blueberry pie. This is what happens when Victoria comes over.

Harvest

We are rounding up some pretty peppers.And the carrot harvest is on. We are still trying to figure out why the carrots aren't bigger. It could be that the soil is too dense and the carrot can't push down.

Harvest

It's been a whole two weeks! Farmer No. 1 and No. 2 got married on August 8! The ceremony was hosted by Farmer Barbara and Dave Murphy in their beautiful backyard garden in Colorado Springs. We'll post pictures in a few weeks. 

Well we got right back to work at Brooklyn Farm. It's peak season right now with crops piling up everywhere. Here is Farmer No. 1 looking very serious and determined hunting down ripe tomatoes.

Our lima beans are ready for picking!
Tonight we ate a local fresh dinner with homemade spaghetti sauce. Onions from the farmers market, pasta from Caputo's, and Brooklyn Farm tomatoes, garlic and basil. The only major carbon footprint comes from the 4000 miles the parmesan travelled. Tough to avoid.

The green bean and lima beans were steamed with butter and truffle oil. Yummy!

Our Little Ones

Seems like a lot of our friends are enjoying having babies. Here are ours.

Baby Tomatillo
Baby Habañeros. These little ones are going to be HOT!
Baby eggplant.
And baby cucumber. This one is going through some ugly growing pains right now.

Harvest

A lot of the crops are producing at a good clip now. Today we harvested a couple poblano peppers, cherry tomatoes, green beans, plum tomatoes, eggplant, regular tomatoes, and a single hot red pepper.

Harvest: Garlic

When garlic stalks are about half yellow it's time to take them out of the ground. If you leave them in the ground the garlic heads will rot. Once out, you are supposed to hang them in a cool, airy, shaded location for a couple weeks to finish whatever it is they do. Some of the heads look a little small compared to the gigantic ones you see in the grocery store. One reason may be because we didn't cut the garlic scape early enough to promote the head to grow.

This head is huge.

Harvest 7/19

Jalapeño peppers, swiss chard, and peas.

Harvest: Lettuce Mix with Basil

We have plenty of lettuce for salads nowadays. We'll have to come up with more ways to use all this greenery. 

There are some pesky little bugs camping out on them. The bugs aren't eating the greens but we don't want to eat them either so it takes a few rounds of cold water baths.

Pea Shoots Salad

Our pea shoots!

Here is our pea shoot colony. It is really just an ordinary garden pea variety that we planted. The leaves and tendrils are called pea shoots. They can be eaten raw in a salad or sauteed. There is a hint of pea flavor. Of all our crops, peas are doing the best because the temperature has been so low. Unfortunately we've let these plants grow waaaaayyyy too long. Pea shoot harvest should happen when they are only five or six inches tall.
Lettuce show you lettuce.

Garlic Scapes

Garlic scape is the flowering stalk of the garlic cloves we planted in the fall. We picked some to include in our Sunday dinner and… news to us… it matters when you cut the scape. It should be young, tender and some say you should cut it before it starts to curl. Farmer No. 2 cut the big ones that had been there for probably a month and after sauteing them for a few minutes in olive oil they turned out to be a woody gnawing tool more than food. There were a couple tender ones that found themselves in the mix and they were tender and sweet. But overall it was a disaster.

There are still some young ones popping up in the shaded areas of the farm so we'll try it again. Garlic scape pesto is a really popular recipe. And using them in dressings too. Has anybody heard of anything else. We sauteed them like string beans and threw in some of our pea shoots (that was another mistake that we'll address later).

Green Architecture

We are learning from past mistakes. Although unsightly, putting the cages in earlier is a lot easier than wrestling with a unwieldy four foot tall tomato plant.We are also trying out pole beans planted from seeds. The said pole is salvaged wood from a bench that went from "I can fix this" to "look! now we have wood for poles!".

Thinning out our sprouts

Our sprouts are up and it was time to thin them out. Trimming off every other sprout will give the survivors more space to grow. Here Farmer No. 1 thins out the swiss chard. You can see the red stalks taking shape.
The lettuce mix has been doing very well and deserves the landscaping.
And then, we used all of the clippings in a super salad. There is swiss chard, beet greens, salad mix, arugula and assorted herbs.

More gifts from Nick the Farmer

Nick the Farmer gifted us seeds from the crop of italian long beans he grew last year. That other suspicious package are sunflower seeds that he also gave us. Thanks Nick!

Sprouts

Seeds we planted a week ago are up. 

And even though it is a little late we are going to try growing tomatillos this year.

Seeding

Soaking sugar snap pea seeds in milk overnight is supposed to help them germinate easier. Who knows, apparently it is the lactic acid in milk that breaks down the seed coating. Farmer No. 2 is lactose intolerant and remains skeptic.
Beets!

Pepper Box

Farm Boxes No. 3 and No. 4 are ready for their plants.
We had really good luck with peppers last year and have designated Farm Box No. 4 as the Pepper Box.
Farm Box No. 3 (left) got three eggplant plants and some lima bean seeds.

It is February. Is this alive?

Or just frozen? There are a few plants that have kept their green color this far into winter. This particular green onion must have been too small to pick during our final harvest. And now… we're just scared. We might break a tooth trying to get through that.