Farm Update

We always have beautiful sunsets at our house

Summer is a great time on the farm, with lots of juicy produce available - tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, zucchini, peppers, watermelon, cantaloupe, etc. I've been off schedule for the last couple of weeks, mainly due to the loss of my dear girl Ginny plus we had Melanie, our farm intern, staying with us. So I have a quick recap of random events from the past week, plus a little bit on plans for the coming week.

We worked the new market on Tuesday - the third week. The sky opened up as we were setting up and we thought the afternoon would be a total wash out. Turns out we had some dedicated shoppers who showed up to buy fresh food and flowers even in the rain. The rain stopped not long before the official closing time and more people ventured out. It ended up a pretty decent market day.

I made a delicious zucchini and blueberry bread using dried blueberries that I rehydrated in hot water. Next year I should be able to make it using our own fresh blueberries. Next I want to try a zucchini cranberry bread - maybe even add some pecans.

Melanie spent a lot of time cooking for us. She's a vegan and I told her I knew that meant I could and would eat anything she made. She was quite creative with her cooking and I tried some new combinations I would not have considered.

We had our big market day today. The market got off to a slow start but it picked up. We ended up selling out of almost all the produce we brought plus we sold a few other items, such as my cookbook, bug bite salve, herbs, and sausage.

Processed chicken-of-the-woods mushroom waiting to be cooked

On our regular evening walk, Bill spotted a chicken-of-the-woods mushroom growing in the spot we found one last year. I cleaned it up and will be preparing it tomorrow. I got this book in the mail just in time to try out new recipes using the mushroom:

Over the next few days, I'll be canning and freezing some of our surplus produce for the winter. I'm determined that this year we will reduce more of our food purchases and rely more on what we've put up. We had a few tomatoes left over from the market so I'm going to try a tomato jam. I also have some green beans that didn't sell at our Tuesday market so I'll be putting those up tomorrow. I pulled out an old cookbook with lots of vegetarian dishes and I'll be trying a few new ones with leftover eggplant. Of course, I'll cook and freeze some of the mushroom we harvested (it weight 4 pounds!).

Have a great week!