On our farm we’re continually experimenting with new crops, new varieties, new growing methods and more. We build off our past experience, our successes and failures and seek to improve as much as we can every year. It’s really one of the things that keeps me going: each season has it’s own subset of experiments that take most of the year to figure the results for. So here are our top three farm wins of 2023.
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Green Onions: We switched to a new variety and method for planting green onions which was mostly driven by a desire to have green onions available more often since they are so popular in so many recipes not to mention how delicious they are. This was a huge success - we’ve heard from so many folks about how much they love our green onions and we’ve sold so many green onion bunches this year that I’m a little blown away. We have some tweaking to do on our successions but overall we’ve had a very steady supply since mid May. We can’t wait to grow them again next season!
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Mini Broccoli: The inspiration to grow mini broccoli came from a Kenji recipe coupled with frustration that broccoli heads don’t grow as uniform size as we’d like. We decided to give it a try and we were again blown away by the flavor and quality we saw. In my opinion, it tastes better than regular broccoli. Other benefits include that it has less pest pressure and that we can bunch it to uniform sizes which makes selling it easier. Next year, we’ll have more successions and a steady supply so that it’s available more often in our CSA shares and on our market stand.
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Recipe Cards: Speaking of recipes our third big win this year was adding a small selection of recipe cards for free at our market stand. Our recipe card ingredient list is color coded so you know what you can find on our market stand, what you can find at the farmers market, and what you’ll need to visit the supermarket for. The recipes we share are recipes that we use in our own kitchen on the regular. That way, if someone has a question about the recipe, the directions, the flavor or anything else we are equipped and experienced to explain everything about it. We’re already writing down ideas for recipe cards for next season including blistered shishito peppers with dipping sauces and stuffed peppers.
There were plenty more wins than the three above but these are the three that stick out the most as I was thinking about writing this update.
