Lida Farm

It’s hard to believe that I’m now grumbling about fields being too wet. But we’ve hit a point of ‘be careful what you wish for.’ I spent the better part of July praying for rain and I did so without specifying the amount.

Beggars can’t be choosers, no doubt, and I’m 100% grateful that it started to rain. Still, a lot of moisture creates challenges on a vegetable farm. The big one are the weeds! I don’t know how they do it really, but weeds can take an inch of rain and super-charge into small trees overnight. Good for them. They have a real strength. I guess this is why they persist the way they do.

Before the rain started like 2 weeks ago, we had a nice stand of fall carrots established. Looking good except for some 3-4 inch pigweed mixed in the rows. Today, those pigweed stand three feet tall. How did that happen? I swear I just walked by and said to myself, ‘Boy, I’ll have to take a half hour and pull those out.’ Now I’m looking at a 2-3 hour surgery to extricate a massive woody bush without tearing out all the little carrots. It’s like the weeds conspired with the rain to make sure it rained enough and rainded long enough so the mud would hold me at bay as they grew.

Yes, the weeds are winning right now. But the war is long and we still have the will fight here at Lida Farm.

In the box:

• Yellow ‘Satina’ Potatoes
• Cauliflower
• Daikon Radish
• ‘Allure’ Sweet Corn
• Green Pepper
• Purple ‘Islander’ Pepper
• Red Onion
• Garlic
• Bunch of Beets
• Eggplant
• Tomatoes
• ‘Torpedo’ Korean Melon

How Farmers Cook Dinner: Shredded Beef Corn Succatash

Ever since had a Southwest Bowl at The Fabled Farmer in Fergus last week, I’ve been into riffing on the idea. This weekend I did a beef roast in the instant pot – from frozen, mind you! See recipe.

I’ve made three meals out of it and it’s great having this chuck of meat together with broth in the fridge. So, today, as I was harvesting sweet corn in the morning I decided I’d do something like a succatash and put on the couscous I made yesterday. I used the scrunt-y tomatoes and sweet corn cobs together with the smallest green pepper.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup shredded beef + 2 ladels of beef broth
• Corn from 2-3 small ears, cut off cobs
• 1 green pepper, chopped
• 2-3 cloves of garlic, sliced
• Tomato, diced
• Couscous or grain of your choice – could be rice, quinoa, whatever
• 1-2 T Olive Oil

Put frying pan on medium heat with olive oil. When hot, add sweet corn and let saute until brown on one side. Add pepper, mix and saute a couple minutes longer before adding tomato and garlic. Saute another minutes and then add shredded beef and broth. Let simmer and stew until tomatoes soften

• I like a strong garlic flavor so I added garlic towards end with tomato, but you can add with pepper to brown it a bit.
• I also ended up adding maybe a half a cup of chopped cabbage with the pepper just because I wanted to stretch the meal with two kids and wanted to use up this head sitting in my fridge. If you have some veggies sitting around the sounds good in something like this, saute it in.
• I served over couscous because it was left over and with bread but pick your grain of choice.

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