Here is an updated list of what we have available going into the New Year. We are happy to take orders Monday or Tuesday for pickup Wednesday-Friday. The cold December nights have (finally) done in the field greens and kale, but what a year it has been! Soon enough we will be planting seeds for spring! We will have mesclun and parsley from the high tunnels, and the usual delicious roots and beans!
With Farmers' Markets only once a week, or every other week, and the farmstand closing, we can provide packages of produce for pickup at the farm. Please choose from the items listed below, and provide the amounts you would like...Also, you can purchase gift certificates. Please let us know if you are interested!
Yesterday we had our first Beets of the season. They are still a little small but very soon will be ready to go to market! Grating the beets raw and tossing with some lime and olive oil made for an awesome salad. The greens went on a pizza topped with Gorgonzola green garlic and anchovies--Yum! In other matters lettuce is in full swing and we are transplanting like crazy and trying to keep up with all the plants that want to get in the ground. Thank goodness for the sun!
It's perfect spring planting weather, so we have decided to kick off the season with a yard sale featuring all kinds of fun and unusual treasures, plus BIG BEAUTIFUL certified Organic plants to get your garden off to a bold start!
We will have sweet and hot peppers, and an array of tomato plants featuring heirlooms from Italy, to the Ukraine, to right around here!
where: Meadow's Mirth Farmstand
61 Stratham Heights Rd, Stratham
when: 8-2
The farm is in full swing now. The soil is warm enough that we are able to start planting. Lettuce loves the spring and is happy to get into the ground! We just moved our Hoop House and planted the first tomatoes.Today begins our first out door market in Exeter and we are ready to go!
While we are moving fast and furious we still make time for friends and fun. We don't eat out often, but when we do we like to go to one of the restaurants that uses our produce. To celebrate a friends birthday we went to the Black Trumpet and had a great meal. The picture is our menu, special attention to the delicious salad!
The green house is looking might full and we have started to add plants to the cold frame. The hoop houses are cranking out fabulous salad, and the Asparagus is just starting to poke its head out for a breath of spring air. Tomorrow is our last Seacoast Eat Local market and only two weeks till the first out door market in Exeter.
Jean is planting our first lettuce plants out in the field. Her wagon of choice is our "New" truck. A member of our CSA heard that our old truck was no longer drivable and asked a family member about their old truck. Long story short--there is a new truck on the farm right in time to start hauling. It really brings home the community aspect of a farm. Thanks to all of the folks who help keep Meadow's Mirth rolling.
Finally on Sunday we were able to get into our fields. With the summer markets only a few weeks away its nice to get going. We hope to have some delicious spring greens at the end of this month and into May. Yesterday we were able to get all of our sugar snap and snow peas planted. Some of my most favorite veggies! We are still accepting new members for our year round CSA. Check out our website for more info. The picture to the right is a happy Jean coming back from seeding peas. Happy Spring!
Spring may have arrived, but its not quite the t-shirt weather that we had this time last year. With the spring comes maple season and we are happy to have a rough homemade evaporator. It takes some time to boil, but is worth the wait. Here the farmers are taking a break to enjoy some Ginger Mate Chai SAP tea. The tea is from our friends at White Heron Tea and the Ginger Mate Chai is a farm favorite.
We will be headed to the Seacoast Eat Local market this weekend and carrots will be the highlighted vegetable! We will be bringing some beautiful carrots so start thinking about fun new carrot recipes.
Spring is beginning here on the farm. Even though the temperatures are still chilly, the sun is high in the sky, and the birds are starting to sing. Last Thursday we put packets of seeds in our backpacks, grabbed some rakes, and headed out on our snowshoes down the hill to the high tunnels in the lower fields. We rolled out our "Jang" push-seeder out over the frozen fields down with us. Inside, it was almost 80º in our unheated high tunnel, "Thunder!" We opened up the vents and let in the fresh air. It felt great to be soaking in the sun's rays, not to mention the thrill of putting seeds in the ground in February! The season begins, and may it be a great one!
After the many snows we get to play "Find the Hoop House" and clear the snow off the sides so it does not build up on the roof. Some pretty hefty work, but good exercise and actually fun on a sunny day. The greens in the houses are slowing, but should start to grow in the next couple of weeks when we get more daylight hours. Some black beans (Jean's Beans) cooked with cilantro, onions and garlic were a welcome sight coming back inside from work!
Winter brings visions of the future. We plan, budget, order and hope. Jean and I are definitely looking forward to the coming season, but we always try to make some time for the fun. The combination of friends snow shovels and some giant snow banks brings a farm luge together.
The winter normally is a time for us to settle down and spend our days drinking tea. With the winter markets we still have the tea, but we have hardly settled down. We continue to bring vegetables to restaurants and travel to farmers markets on weekends. Our new Hoop Houses have been a great addition to having greens all year long. It can be freezing out side but on a sunny day its 50 degrees in the houses.
A special thanks to our CSA members who did not finish there credit with us by the end of the year, but elected to donate the value in food to the food bank. Definitely a great way to share the love this winter.
Well, I am off to Italy for a few days to attend Terra Madre, a sustainable food conference in Torino. It is very exciting, although I am unsure what to expect! There will be farmers and food producers from all over the globe, which is kind of a mind-blowing concept to me right now. So, I am going with an open mind with the intent of sharing and learning as much as possible. I am almost sad to be leaving as we are in the midst of harvest time bringing in beets, potatoes, and carrots, but I am happy to know that there are many hands keeping the farm chugging along - I am sure they won't skip a beet without me:) Ciao for now!
a happy beet harvest: Becky, Eric, Bridget, Jean & Josh
I found my camera the other day! On it I found some lovely pictures from the field this summer...perfect warm sunny shots for a blustery October day. Here is the winter squash field, a shot from within "Thunder", one of the tomato tunnels, and the bean field. The winter squash is sweetening up in the basement, the tunnels are just about ready to be rolled onto greens from the winter. And we should have some great dried beans as well for the winter market.
OK, so it isn't red either. But the verdict is: definitely not green. Lets hope they keep it up. Plus here is a little 'test dig' on our dark red norlands. Pretty and pink, but not big enough yet. We are hoping for the weekend, but time will tell.
With farmers’ markets and farm stands open throughout northern New England, it is fun to see what new varieties of vegetables appear and to find ways of preparing them. This week’s recipe, though, brings us familiar flavors from unusual sources.
Pea tendrils, the tender tips of pea plants often including blossoms, taste similar to peas, both raw and cooked. Commonly used in Asian cooking, they have found their way into some restaurants but still cause comments when presented. They make great additions to salads and can be quickly sautéed for a fresh taste of spring to add to any meal where peas are appropriate. When buying them, look for bright green color, avoiding those with browned leaves or tips. Stems should be soft to the touch.
Garlic scapes are the seed pods of garlic plants. In New England, most garlic grown is hard neck garlic from the cold climates of northern Europe. The bulbs are harvested in August, but in July stems rise from the center of the leaves, each bearing a pod of seeds, with the stem continuing beyond the pod and tapering to a point. Some make a graceful loop and bob in the wind like a graceful bird, while others make double coils, resulting in rows of interesting geometric designs. When they first emerge, they are tender and the entire stem can be eaten. As they mature, the lower ends become woody, and only the tender ends are used. They taste of garlic, but are milder than the cloves. Garlic scapes can be chopped and added to salads, added to soups and used wherever garlic cloves are used. I like to sauté them to use as a side dish or to mix with potatoes or other vegetables. As is often the case with vegetables which appear at the same time, the mild garlic flavor of these scapes blends perfectly with the sweet “green” taste of fresh pea tendrils.
The most difficult part of this recipe may very well be finding both of these together, but either will be a fresh new taste alone. We’ve been enjoying the pea tendrils alone for over a month, well before the scapes emerged.
Four servings:
8 cups of pea tendrils, washed and roughly chopped
1 ½ - 2 cups tender ends of garlic scapes, excluding the seed pod, cut into 1/8 inch pieces
2 tablespoons butter or extra virgin olive oil
Kosher or sea salt to taste and freshly ground pepper
Heat a heavy sauté pan over medium – high heat. Add oil or butter (or a mixture of the two), add scapes and sprinkle lightly with salt. Cook, stirring, until scapes are bright green and slightly softened. Add chopped tendrils and cook until they are just wilted. Add further salt and ground pepper to taste.
This quick sauté will add to any meal, so check out your local farmers’ market or farm stand and give these great crops a try.
Welcome Spring! We are seeing bits of color from the crocuses and a few precocious daffodils on our street, but for the most part, we are waiting for the pop! It's truly mud season, and busy season at that! Here's a photo of a friend helping us put up the door to "West Side" one of our new greenhouses. (Note the trademark "W.") And one of Jean putting in the top purlins on a cool but sunny day last month. We are excited and a bit anxious for the season to begin. Putting in this kind of infrastructure is definitely one of our biggest leaps so far in terms of farming, and we are grateful for our Community Supported Agriculture members who have signed on (and hope to get a few more...see our website for details!) Having that support really makes a difference in how we move forward as a farm. This time next year, we hope to be bringing greens in addition to what we already have in root vegetables. Which, by the way, MARKET TOMORROW in Rollinsford!!!! We will be there...and the next one. This will be our second year strong of having food in all twelve months. So bring your tote bags, the 'taters onions and shallots will make it well worth the trip! Oh, and yes, it is egg season. Everyone here on the farm loves eggs. Everyone.
I was downstairs cleaning up red onions yesterday. As each of these little gems passed through my hands, I couldn't stop marveling at how gorgeously they caught the light. Then I started to think about how some of them were almost heart shaped, and what a sweet thing for someone's sweetheart! Just as is or perhaps sliced thinly with local greens, and maybe some orange wedges.
We'll have those red onions in abundance this Saturday at the Farmers' Market in Exeter! We'll also have the yellow onions, red potatoes, yellow skinned potatoes, and turnips. This could be the winter carrots' swan song, so snatch them up while you can.
So this year we are switching things up in the CSA department. We have been mulling this over since we began our CSA three years ago. How do we give members choice? If we were to join a community supported agriculture program what would we want? So we came up with a new model that would give our members free choice as to when and where they wanted to pick up as well as which vegetables they wanted in their weeks' share. Having pickups happen at farmers' markets not only gives members choice as to what they want from our offerings, it enables them easy access to other producers who supply products we don't have, be it pork or corn (which we don't raise) or something that we might not have in abundance that particular week. Although abundance is the buzzword for this year. We are currently building multiple hoophouses (see above) which should translate into MORE awesome and consistent tomatoes and greens and earlier than ever before. It is exciting. Here's a picture of last week's full moon over a future field of potatoes.
It used to be that winter was the time of year where we hunkered down with steaming mugs perusing seed catalogs and planning for the spring. It was a time to get part time jobs and generally rest our work-weary bones for next season. Then we started talking about "winter" markets. At the time it seemed a longshot: people barely came to our later markets in October, why would they want to come to a market in December? So we grew some extra winter squash, figuring that if it didn't sell, at least we'd have plenty of calories to keep us (not to mention friends and family) well fed in case of sudden apocalypse. That was two years ago. The overwhelming success of that first market and the ones that followed has shaped the way we approach farming. Come to find: we're not alone. We just attended the New England Vegetable and Fruit growers' conference. It was awesome to talk to growers out in Vermont and Maine and hear how to grow more food in the winter. It's really happening, and it's totally exciting! For us as well as many farmers, it's drastically changed what being a farmer entails during the cold months: from washing potatoes on the "warm" days to pulling carrots out of the snow, to pulling the van up the frozen barn ramp with the tractor to get ready for yet another market. Which, by the way is this Saturday in Rollinsford. The fun doesn't stop. Next year at this time we hope to be cutting greens out of our (soon to be constructed) unheated hoophouse. Suddenly we are becoming busy. Not that we mind. Shorter days mean there's still plenty of time to come inside and find that steaming mug. As I write this, I am glancing at a disheveled stack of seed catalogs awaiting my perusal. I think to myself, "next year will be better." Some things about farmers never change.
