There is no other crop which elicits more surprise than brussels sprouts. Certainly many of you may have grown them yourselves, but for the many who have not, the term prehistoric comes to mind. They are weird looking, like the backbone dug up on an archeological site from a long-forgotten dinosaur. To make them look more like food, just twist them off the stalk and give them a rinse in water. They will keep like little cabbages in a crisper or plastic bag in the refrigerator.
I was telling a friend the other day about how my own energy changes across the course of the season. Last fall I think I had a set of buckets just sit in my yard for a month. I passed them everyday and thought about putting them away. I probably even wrote about putting them away on a to-do list multiple times. Still, the task just never happened. Those buckets suffered through a winter until spring, at which time I emptied their contents and got them put away in about 15 minutes. This is the curse of late season. Even the smallest of tasks becomes just too much after a summer of being on the veggie harvest ‘hamster wheel.’
After showing some people around on Saturday, I realized that I’m continually practicing this late season coping mechanism of simply ignoring things that just need to little attention as we trudged through a yard that needs mowing and passed our tiller abandoned in the middle field for the past month, poised to mow down crops that are long done. When surrounded by acres of crops in need of harvest, I think my mind blocks them out.
Why would I do any of these other things when there are literally tons of tomatoes in need of picking? If I simply put in a half hour, I could have 20 lbs on the farm stand for sale. What about the corn? Onions? Melons? Peppers? Potatoes? You get the idea. It’s kind of like being in one of those machines at a casino where the dollar bills fly around you and you try to grab as many as possible before time runs out. Same here. Run as fast as you can, Ryan, those crops won’t hold in the field forever!
Let me get another cup of coffee and get at it. I think I’ll push of mowing for another day 🙂
For those of you who made it to the Deep Roots Festival this weekend, I think we can all agree that the food was amazing. The guys at Spanky’s did a bang up job taking whatever we had in season and turning it into a something glorious. I was especially struck by how they combined our sweet corn, peppers, and tomatoes with some butter beans to make this corn succotash.
As I was sitting there eating with Mar and other festival goers, I was thinking, you know, this is how we should be eating all the time. On our good days, we certainly do. But, on the days we work too long or are simply out of juice, we eat like every other American on a weeknight – frozen pizza or some other pre-made thing – even though we have literally tons of fresh food sitting in fields surrounding our house.
So, the role of the chef? Get us inspired to do better! Fresh food in season doesn’t need to be complicated. This was Amy Thielen’s message at her demonstration at the festival and certainly one I needed to hear in this time of too many things going on. Get good ingredients, get slightly creative, and you’re good.
So I want to thank Zach at North Circle Seeds for hosting us and everyone who made this a great event. We started this as a way to celebrate the season and local foods. For myself, it just felt good to gather with a group of people as do this ritual as we transition from summer to fall. Maybe it’s just some deep tribal thing that’s in our genes.
Sorry all, when it’s just me, I flat out run out of time to get something written on Monday.
The only thing I will note is that this Saturday will be Deep Roots Festival from 2- 6 pm featuring Amy Thielen and and catered by Spanky’s. Hosted by North Circle Seeds near Dunvilla, please consider coming – it’s a good way to celebrate the season with the local food community. But only the first 200 signed up will be assured of a meal – so please consider RSVP at the website.
In the box:
Salad Turnips: Banded bunch with greens. Best just peeled and eaten fresh.
Tomatoes
Sweet pepper mix
Sweet Corn
Watermelon: Yes, I know it’s been 4 weeks of these, but, man, cantaloupe are neither ripening or are eaten by gophers before I can get to them.
Well, we’ve hit the time of the season when too much is in season. What to pick? Can I pick it all in time? Welcome to farm labor 101. It can be a slog, but something certainly to appreciate on this Labor Day, a day we set aside to appreciate the worker.
As some of you know from reading this blog for a while, I grew up a blue collar kid in a blue collar town (East Grand Forks). Lots of times when people learn I farm, I’m often asked if my parents farmed. But I often say I come from a long line of landless peasants – we worked FOR the farmers, we weren’t the farmers. My grandpa made a career of being a hired man and working in the potato warehouses of EGF.
And that’s certainly a point to be made on this Labor Day. We’ve mechanized and modernized American agriculture a lot since my grandpa’s day. The migrant farm workers of my youth in the Valley are long gone, replaced by chemicals and vacuum seeders – no need to thin beets anymore. But in the world of fruits and vegetables, we’re still very much a labor dependent. Drones are not (yet) harvesting and bunching radishes or picking apples. That’s why we see such an impact on California produce with recent ICE raids. Those strawberries still need human hands.
But this newsletter is not about me adding my own hot take to a world awash in political pundits. Today, I simply want to appreciate all those who have labored the fields of Lida Farm with me including my family and all the apprentices over the last 10+ years: Kelsey, Mason, Sarah, Molly, Camila, Archer, Jane, Zach, Gretchen, Marissa, Maya, Emily, and Luke.
A Couple Summer Turnips: The loose white radish looking things with tops. Actually quite similar to a radish, you’d simply slice and eat raw, not unlike a kohlrabi.
Lida Farm 