Feeling Peckish

We humans of Kopp’s Crops have a serious case of Cabin Fever with a side of Spring Fever.  But we think the chickens are feeling it even more acutely.  After a winter of being cooped up (pun intended) inside, they’re feeling a little peckish.  As in, they’re pecking at each other.  A couple of the hens who fall to the bottom of the proverbial pecking order (yes, a phrase that did indeed originate in the chicken universe) are sporting some feather-free bald spots above their tails.  Hopefully as the weather warms up and they get outside more to stretch their wings, their appetites for each others’ tailfeathers will wane.  If not, some chicken coats may be in order.  Seriously.  You can actually buy peck-proof coats for chickens!    

The pecking really took off a couple of weeks ago, when the weather dropped into the sub-zero, egg-freezing zone.  Our hens stayed comfortable with their thick winter feathers and the collective chicken body heat, but the eggs they laid in the colder corners of the coop didn’t fare so well.  Of the five or six eggs laid each day by our eight hens, we were lucky to retrieve one before they froze and split their shells.  Then all the sudden, those frozen eggs started sporting mysterious, jagged holes.  The hens were pecking at their own eggs, as if they were in some twisted poultry version of the Donner party. 

Fearing the ongoing loss of future omelets, we took a two-pronged approach to exterminate the egg-pecking.  First, we dug out the plastic eggs from the girls’ Easter baskets to use as decoys.  Go ahead, ladies, let’s see you try to peck through that tough plastic!  Then we filled all the pre-pecked real eggs with yellow mustard, which chickens apparently detest.  Yes, dear hens, it may just look like egg yolk, but trust us – it’s kryptonite to you!  It took about five days, but they finally tired of the pecking prevention measures and started leaving the eggs intact, just in time for the winter warm-up that allowed us to once again enjoy fresh (unfrozen) eggs!

The Science of Sausage-Making

It has been said for decades “you don’t really want to know how the sausage is made.”  Well, here’s your opportunity to find out how our venison sausage is made, with nary a stomach-churning description to be found.  Unless you’re vegetarian, of course.  But if you are, we probably lost you at the title of the post, didn’t we?  For those still with us, read on for a peek behind the curtain (or into the grinder).

The secret to venison sausage is… pork.  Yes, pork.  True, venison alone would make a nice low-fat sausage, but it would also be a dry, tasteless sausage.  Sausages need fat for flavor and juiciness, but what little fat venison has just tastes nasty.  Really gross.  So before we grind our venison for the sausage, we trim all the fat off.  Enter the pork.  Most venison sausage recipes call for a mix of venison, pork fat, and pork lean, with the pork fat & lean at a 1:1 ratio.  We trade off a little of the flavor and juiciness for a lower-fat sausage, so we buy pork butt roasts that are probably closer to 75% lean.  We grind the meats separately, then plop them into a giant plastic tub, 25 pounds of meat at time.  Next, the spices, which get mixed with water into a spicy slurry, so that they mix more evenly with the meat.

For our favorite wild rice bratwurst, we soften up 16 oz. of wild rice by pouring boiling water over it, let it cool, pour off the water, and repeat the process two more times.  After the meat, spices, and wild rice are well-mixed by hand, we load the mixture into a sausage stuffer, where we pump it into natural casings made from beef intestines.  (Ok, we lied.  That may have grossed some of you out…sorry!  We promise, that’s the last time.)  We twist the casings every six inches to form the individual sausages, creating a long, somewhat festive meat garland to adorn our freezer for the coming months (in tidy vacuum-sealed packages of four).

                We use manufactured collagen casings for our smoked snack sticks (think Slim Jims, only larger in diameter, with a fraction of the ingredients, and way, way, way tastier), for which we use 60% venison, 40% pork, and a different spice blend.  Since these sausages are eaten cold or room temperature, we have to add cure (sodium nitrite) to inhibit the growth of microorganisms, particularly the ones that cause botulism.  Cure is also what gives sausages their trademark pink/red color and adds some distinctive flavor.  After stuffing the casings, we load them into our refrigerator smoker.  Yes, you read that right.  Our smoker is made out of 1940’s refrigerator.  More on that in an upcoming post.  We smoke the sausages at 125 degrees for five hours, then at 170 until they’re fully cooked with an internal temperature of 156 degrees, then cool and freeze them. 

                This year we tried making hotdogs for the first time!  We made them the same way we made the snack sticks (but with larger-diameter casings and yet another spice blend), but smoked them for only an hour and a half at 125 degrees before raising the temperature.  After they reached the requisite 156 degrees, we gave them the full Minnesota treatment – we pulled them from their sauna and threw them into a refreshing ice bath to cool them down quickly and preserve some of the internal moisture.  Since the collagen casings are kind of chewy compared to the texture of the wieners, we peeled them off before freezing them.  The final tally:  100 wild rice bratwurst, 25lbs of chipotle snack sticks, 13 pounds of hot dogs, and a fully-stocked freezer full of savory sausage to go with our cellar full of sauerkraut!

Sauerkraut Season

It was the best of times, it was the wurst of times… it was sauerkraut season. 

Sauerkraut is among the most unpleasant canning tasks we have.  It is definitely the stinkiest.  In a nutshell:  we take an inherently unpleasant-smelling vegetable and let it ferment in our garage for three weeks.  We start by shredding the cabbage with an old-school, antique three-blade kraut cutter into a 10-gallon crock.  After the crock is completely full of shredded cabbage, we pack it down with a wooden ram until the top is covered with cabbage juice.  Then we sprinkle in a handful of salt – a quarter cup or so.  Then we fill the crock to the top again, tamp it until it’s under cabbage-water, salt it.  Repeat.  Repeat.  Repeat until the crock is full.  Then we set it aside to ferment for three weeks.  Yes, that’s twenty-one days of stinkiness in our garage.  Hey, at least we’re smart enough not to try to do it in the house!  Over the fermentation period, the sugar in the cabbage turns to lactic acid, giving the sauerkraut its sauer-ness.  Normally we’d actually let it sit there for four weeks, but this summer’s heat sped up the fermentation process.

The most important part of sauerkraut success (aside from making sure we have enough salt – mmmmm… salt…) is making sure no kraut is exposed to the air.  Air + sauerkraut = a stinky, moldy mess.  Ick.  We’ve found that the best way to keep the air out is to cover the cabbage with a white kitchen trash bag full of water (double- or triple-bagged to avoid leakage).  The water not only makes sure that the plastic is sealed into all the cabbage/crockery crevices to keep out the drafts, but it also puts some weight on the kraut to keep it submerged in the cabbage water for more even fermentation.

Sauerkraut is preservation method agnostic – frozen or canned, it tastes about the same to us.  Since canned foods usually last longer than frozen ones, we decided to can the first 36 pints. But after those four batches, we were a little “sauered” on the canning, so we froze the rest, and we’ll just plan on using it first.  Now that we have all these pretty jars of kraut, Jason’s looking forward to deer season to get some venison sausage to go with them!

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.**