Happy Thanksgiving! I hope you were able to enjoy some good food this holiday week.
Thanksgiving is hands down my favorite holiday - with no pressure of presents, the meal is what takes center stage. Our family always enjoys incorporating as many local ingredients as we can into our meals, and Thanksgiving is certainly no exception. Whether they are prepared roasted, steamed, mashed, or eaten fresh, we appreciate that nearly all of the veggies that we use for our feast are grown locally and organically right here in the great Northwoods. And of course then there are the pies....
We are so thankful to be a part of this community of local food eaters, farmers, and food producers - and grateful to be so appreciated by all of you!
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If you are looking for something fresh and light to eat after all that holiday feasting, we've got a deal for you - our organic mild mix microgreens will be on sale this week! We grow the micros year-round, but once the cold settles in and the field crops stop growing, interest in microgreens really picks up. They are so nutrient dense and convenient to eat, it's easy to get your servings of veggies in for the day. Fresh food is good for the soul.
Even the herb micros are a fan favorite during the cold winter months - they have so much flavor! The basil micros are fantastic on home made pizza during the winter along with our family's favorite South Shore italian sausage (remember to use bread flour for your crust to make it crispy - our favorite is Bobby Flay's pizza dough recipe) and the cilantro micros take taco night to a whole new level with delicious grass-fed South Shore ground beef.
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Here on the farm, we’ve been focused on getting our garlic planted in the hoophouses for next summer. Two of the 5 garlic beds are planted now, and we hope to have the rest planted by the end of next week. Temps dropped pretty fast the last few nights, but it looks like they will be moderating next week, which should give us enough time to finish planting before the soil in the hoophouses freezes up. It looks like we saved a little more garlic than we needed, so once our beds are all planted, we will offer up any remaining garlic bulbs in your CSA boxes to supplement what Rob at Twisting Twig has grown.
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When we plant it, we use these boards as jigs to help us space the garlic out evenly. There are 7 black marks along each side of the board. We work from either side of the board, sticking one garlic bulb down into the ground at each mark, covering the soil over the top. Then we move the board forward one board-width and plant the next row. It goes pretty fast, and this way our garlic comes up in nice even rows for easier hoeing. When finished, we have a fairly even grid of garlic spaced about every 8 inches across the entire bed. And look at all of that dark rich compost in the bed by Farmer Ryan- it should be a good crop next year.
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The second big project this week was getting the last of the brussels sprouts harvested when they all thawed out. Plus, my inlaws are up for a holiday visit, and I am pretty sure it's written law somewhere that on a farm you can't have family visit without putting them to work! Since it would be a while until the brussels made it into your CSA boxes, we cut off the tops of each plant (instead of picking off every sprout individually) and hauled the stalks into our root cellar for safe keeping. And just in the nick of time - Thursday night we had a low of about 10 degrees, which would have frozen them back up for a while again. Keeping the sprouts attached to the stalks will help them keep better in storage than if we picked them individually. Next week, after we know how many bags of sprouts you all want, we can pick them fresh off the stalks in the root cellar, wash and bag them, and send them out in your boxes.
Another sure sign of the holiday season: seed catalogs have begun to arrive. We’re getting really excited to dive into variety selection and crop planning for the 2022 growing season. The team of developers at Harvie - the CSA software system that we use - has developed some pretty neat analytic tools to help us farmers see which items you choose to add to your boxes compared to how much of that item was offered during the season. This tool is really helpful for us farmers when we are planning out production for the coming season and eyeing up all the new varieties in these seed catalogs.
During the growing season, we’re so busy that it’s hard to remember how many of each veggie we offered each week vs the number that were chosen and added to your CSA boxes. We have a pretty good general sense (and we’re changing our record keeping here at the farm to track that information more efficiently), but being able to see an aggregate “score” for each veggie at the end of the season helps us to know some really important information. First of all, it lets us know what crops you really liked, so we can plant accordingly to more of them for more weeks of the year. It also helps us know what crops you were less enthusiastic about, so we can plan on keeping production lower for those crops, and devoting production space to crops that were more favored.
Oh, and the top item you chose for the year in 2021? Salad mix from Farmer Brian at Northcroft Farm!
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In addition to detailed spreadsheets, there are some neat graphs like this one that shows ALL of the options available in our Bayfield Foods CSA boxes. The larger the print, the more it was ordered - pretty neat to see all these options laid out in one visual aid. I am continually amazed at the huge variety of products available in our cooperative!
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Finally, I'll leave you with an old picture from our farm 10+ years ago, when we used to raise these heritage Bourbon Red turkeys for Thanksgiving. This picture is a hard copy, pinned up on the bulletin board in my office. They are an old breed of turkey that is listed on the Slow Food Ark of Taste. We had a breeding flock of hens and several toms that we kept year-round, and we would gather their eggs in the spring and hatch them in incubators. We'd hatch and sell chicks around the region, and keep about 100 chicks to raise on the farm. After starting out in the brooder for several weeks, we would put them out on pasture for the summer. As you can see, they were really free ranged and pasture raised! They took twice as long to raise up to harvest size as a "conventional" broad breasted white turkey, and those turkeys were a wiley bunch, but the flavor was incredible. It was a lot of work and worry, but I don't think I have never had a better tasting bird than those Bourbon Reds.
That’s it from the farm this week. Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours!
In community,
Farmer Chris
Great Oak Farm
