Doing the Can-Can

Sorry, folks… we know it’s been a long time since we posted.  But right now everything in the garden is going gangbusters, and we’re working night and day to get it all picked and sold, frozen, canned, dried or given away.  Nothing hurts a farmer’s soul worse than perfectly good vegetables going to waste.  So this month, we’ve been doing the can-can.  Can we can it all?  Yes, we can.  And can.  And can.  Our houseguests last week (Michelle’s parents) even got conned into canning with us! 

We started off our canning marathon with green beans.  We grow stringless varieties called Bush Lake Blue and Slenderette so we don’t actually have to “string” them.  We just break off the tough stem end and break them into inch-long pieces so they fit in the jars better.  Green beans are a low-acid vegetable, so they have to be pressure-canned in a canner that can process jars under 10 lbs of pressure, to make sure all botulism spores are killed (it takes 240 degree heat to kill them, not just the 212 degrees of normal boiling water).  We hot-pack our beans, meaning we heat the beans before they go into the jars, then fill them to 1” below the rim with boiling water.  A teaspoon of salt, a lid with the seal softened in hot water, and a canning ring screwed on “finger tight” to keep the lid in place during processing, and we’re ready to carefully place the jars in the canner.  After ten minutes of off-gassing the steam inside the canner, we can put a weight on the canner to start bringing it up to pressure.  The beans’ twenty-five minute timer starts when the dial shows we’ve gotten to 10 lbs of pressure.

You could say we’re going in ascending order of messiness, because yesterday we tackled sweet corn. Naturally, the kernels have to be cut off the cob before they can be put in the jar, and it’s not a neat process. (Note to selves: next time, sweep up errant corn kernels from the floor before picking up the 22-month-old from daycare. “Yummy! Corn!” She was too fast to stop.) We also pressure-can the corn, but we “cold-pack”the jars with raw kernels before adding our boiling water. It increases the processing time, but we think it gives us crispier kernels when we open the jars in winter.

 

Finally, today was tomato juice day.  A motorized juicer made short work of a table full of tomatoes – way faster than our old hand-cranked food mill.  Tomatoes have higher acid, and since acid kills the spores that produce the botulism toxin, we can safely hot water bath our juice by submerging the jars in a huge pot of boiling water for 40 minutes.  It’s a lot faster than pressure-canning because we don’t have to wait for all the pressure to release before taking out the jars and starting the next batch.   But over the decades, tomato varieties have been bred to a lower level of acidity, so we add some lemon juice to each jar just to be safe; there’s no reason to take chances!

It has been said that there is no sweeter summer sound than the laughter of children, the waves of the ocean, the chirp of crickets or <insert your favorite summer sound here>.  For us, it’s that little metallic “tink!” that a jar makes when its lid seals completely, as if to say “You can relax now – it worked!”

Busy Bees in the Garden

We have lots of busy bees in the garden these days (and we don’t just mean our daughters)!  We really mean the bees – our honeybees.  Without them, we wouldn’t have much of a harvest.  You could call them our garden superheroes, born with the power of pollination! 

Almost any plant where the fruit or the seeds are eaten (instead of the leaves or the root) relies on pollination to get the food production ball rolling.  Some vegetables, like tomatoes, beans and peas self-pollinate with a minimum of outside intervention.  They have male and female parts inside the same flower, so the pollen gets where it needs to go within a single bloom.  Corn is pollinated by the wind carrying pollen from the tassels on top down to the silk on an ear of corn.  

Zucchini Blossoms

But vegetables like cucumbers, zucchini and other squash can’t pollinate without insects, often bees.  These vines have separate male and female flowers on each plant, and rely on insects to transfer the pollen from the male flowers to the female ones.  Without ample bees or other insects to do this important job, it’s up to the gardener to hand-pollinate the plants, using a cotton swab to transfer the pollen between blooms.  Frankly, we can think of a lot of things we’d rather be doing than gender-typing blossoms and Q-tipping pollen.  Weeding, getting eaten alive by deer flies, root canal…   

Nationwide, there’s an emerging pollination crisis because the honeybee population has been declining.  Some enterprising folks have built good businesses trucking hives of bees from one commercial crop producer to another through the growing season.  The bees pollinate a few fields before packing up and heading off to the next stop, like a honeybee midway carnival.  Maybe that’s what we’ll do when we retire.  If you see an RV pulling a trailer full of beehives in a few years, give a wave – it could be the Kopp’s Crops Honeybee Carnival Caravan!   

Mid-Season Maintenance

We’re smack in the middle of the garden season now!  We’ve gotten past the “salad days” when we eat salad just about every day because lettuce, spinach and radishes are the only harvestable vegetables.  Now we have enough variety that we can eat out of the garden every night for supper, without having the same vegetable two days in a row.  But we haven’t yet started the canning and freezing frenzy that occurs when the garden is at is fullest production.  ‘Tis the season of mid-season maintenance.  There’s the weeding, of course.  And more weeding.  And whining about weeding.  But wait, there’s more!

Cocooning The Cauliflower:  As soon as a head of cauliflower starts to form (about 1-2” in diameter), we gather the outer leaves and tie them together above the head, creating a little cauliflower cocoon.  We do this because when the sun hits the developing cauliflower, it starts turning purple or green or some other color we don’t care to see on our cauliflower.  Using the leaves to shade the delicate florets keeps them nice and pasty white, like Michelle’s legs in March.

Thinning the Beets:  Beets are grown from compound seeds, which means that those Grape-Nuts-cereal-looking seeds that we plant are actually a conglomeration of up to 6 individual beet seeds.  If all those mini-seeds actually germinate, the baby beets are duking it out for room to grow.  We end up having to sacrifice a certain percentage of the plants, plucking them from the row to make sure the remaining ones have ample space.  Then throughout the summer, we strategically pick beets from thicker clumps first, to keep thinning the rows as the beets get bigger and need more room to spread out.  We thin carrots and onions this way, too – we intentionally plant them thickly because as we pick and eat young tender onions & carrots, it naturally allows nearby plants to spread out and reach their “full potential.” 

Staking and Suckering The Tomatoes:  We staked the tomatoes a while ago, using baling twine to tie them to metal stakes so they grow tall & straight and the sun can get to all the tomatoes.  Now we periodically “sucker” them.  Suckers are tiny branches that start growing in the crotch of two larger branches of the tomato plant.  If we let the suckers continue to develop, they take valuable tomato-growing energy away from the rest of the plant.  So we say, “I’m gonna get you, Sucka!” and pinch them off.  We saw our first red tomato today, so it must be working!

Cambridge Farmers Market Update

Saturday July7th   we'll be at the Cambridge Farmer's Market from 8-11am or until sold out. This week we'll have the following available. 

2nd Crop Leaf Lettuce...........................$2.00/Bunch
Beet Tops...............................................$2.00/Bunch
Swiss Chard...........................................$2.00/Bunch
2nd Crop Spinach...................................$2.00/Bunch
Kale.......................................................$1.50/Bunch
Red Potatoes..........................................$3.00/Quart
Snow Peas.............................................$3.50/Quart
Beets.....................................................$2.00/Bunch
Small Head Cabbage............................$1.00/Head
Zucchini................................................$0.50/Each (6-12” long)
Dill........................................................$0.25/stem
Basil / Thyme / Mint /
Oregano / Rosemary.............................$0.50/stem

**For those who can't make it or want the ultimate in freshness, contact us about on the farm pickup or call us to place an order to be picked up in Cambridge on Saturday.**

The War of the Weeds

What’s so wrong with weeds, anyway?  Aside from the fact that they end up making the garden look shaggier and more unkempt than a final-round contestant on Survivor, that is.  Mainly, we execute them for crimes against healthy plant nutrition - for stealing the nutrients our cultivated crops need.

To keep weeds from growing in the first place, we planted a lot of our widely-spaced plants like tomatoes and cabbage on plastic.  We rolled out four-foot wide IRT plastic rolls of plastic, then cut holes ever foot or two to plant the baby plants.  In addition to keeping weeds from growing (lack of sunlight will do that to you), the plastic has the added benefit of keeping the soil more moist.  Of course, now the south end of our garden looks a bit like a giant Hefty bag, but hey – you can’t argue with success.

For the close-together plants that we grow in rows from seed (like beets, carrots, and the various greens and lettuces we’ve been harvesting over the past few weeks), plastic isn’t really an option.  Our drip-tape irrigation system certainly helps – because we’re only watering a couple of inches on either side of the row, weeds further out than that tend to lack the water to thrive.    

But despite all the preventative measures, somehow the weed party always gets started eventually.  And there’s just no substitute for good old fashioned weed pulling.  We try to do a little every couple of days to stay ahead of it, but life is life after all, and sometimes it just gets away from us.  So we have days like today, when we spent a couple hours bending over row after row of small plants, pulling weeds with both hands until we filled the wheelbarrow!  Tomorrow we’ll bring out the grand-daddy of all weed whackers, the rototiller, to take care of the weeds in between the rows.   Tonight’s much-needed soaking rain means it will be easier to disturb the roots of the weeds and bring them to the surface where they can dry out and die.  Weeds, you’ve met your match.  Until next week, anyway.

Absentee Farmer’s Market

We’ve filed this this under “learning by doing” and “obvious in hindsight”:  our last couple of weeks at the farmer’s market have taught us that lettuce, spinach and kale do not hold up well in the heat of an asphalt parking lot on a Saturday morning.  They crisp up nicely again after a nice spritz of water and some time hanging out in the fridge, but they just look so droopy and sad after sitting in the heat.  And it’s going to be 90 degrees on Saturday!  So we’ve decided to take a couple of weeks off from the farmer’s market, until we have a larger variety of vegetables and a better plan for keeping them perky in the heat.

But that doesn’t mean you have to miss out on your Kopp’s Crops vegetables!  Check out the sidebar on the right for a “Fresh Garden Basket” you can pick up at the farm for $10 (limited delivery available – just ask if we’re going to be in your area).  A la carte veggie purchases are also available – just email us for pricing.  And yes, we’re in the chicken business now – reserve a bird (or five) now!

Our Littlest Livestock

We took a little after-dinner walk as a family last night, and discovered that we look at flowers differently now that we raise bees.  We used to just look for pretty flowers along the road.  Now we look for flowers that will make tasty and plentiful sources of nectar for our littlest livestock.  But all the nectar-rich flowers in the world don’t mean anything if we don’t have a bunch of worker bees out there collecting.  So the past month or so, we’ve been repopulating our hives - our "Littlest Livestock."  We’d sacrificed six of our colonies last fall so that the other four had enough food to make it through the winter.  It almost worked - three colonies survived.  And thanks to the mild winter, we didn’t have to give them any supplementary sugar water like we did last year – their stores of honey saw them through. 

Our new queens, in their little "Bee Kennels"

This spring, we bought four “bee packages” to start building back the six empty hives – each package contained three pounds of bees, mostly worker bees (they’re the ones with the little hardhats) & nurse bees (wearing comfortable shoes, of course), with one queen and a couple of drones thrown in to get the party started.  We had been hoping to split the three colonies that survived the winter to populate three additional hives and save on bee replacement costs, but they were weak with poor queens.  So we decided to replace all 3 queens.  We brought in younger, more productive queens who would lay more eggs to build the colonies back faster.  Thank goodness the queens can’t sue us for age discrimination!