July 2024: Summer is here!
Summer Festival ☀️ News from the Farm 🌱 Growing Together 🥬 Recipe Share 🌻Featured Friends
Celebrate Summer this Saturday
Join us this Saturday at the Lewiston Artisan Farmers Market from 9am-1pm in Academy Park for our Summer Festival! In addition to the regular farmers market there will be additional artisan vendors, pony rides, face painting, and food vendors. Perfect for the kiddos & if you have guests in town for the holiday weekend.
Alongside our fresh salad mixes, veggies, microgreens, herbs, and flowers we’ll also have organic bread, organic sourdough pizza crust, organic sourdough granola, unique jams and jellies, and dried flower arrangements.
News from the Farm
If April & May are focused on prepping soil, seeding, and transplanting, June is the month where there is still a strong focus on prepping soil, seeding, and transplanting, but there is also SO MUCH WEEDING & harvesting to do!
The perfect June storm of precipitation, increasing humidity and temperatures make weed seeds so happy and they want to come out an join the farm party!
June also saw the start of the summer farmers market season & the first 3 weeks of our 20-week Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) shares.
As I’ve been doing lots of weeding, I’ve noticed so many more lady bugs on the farm than in previous season. And this is a good thing! Lady bugs are predatory bugs and help to control the populations of damaging pests, like aphids.
I’ve added a significant number of perennials to the farm in the last 2 years, particularly around the areas where I am growing, including some lady bug favorites like yarrow, so I think that creating a welcoming habitat is helping with pest pressure.
The first round of the spring snap peas were taken out of the field this morning. By mid-July I’ll direct seed another round for September harvesting. Garlic scapes were harvested in mid-June, so in about another 3 weeks I’ll be harvesting and curing garlic bulbs.
Check out my mini early-June farm tour video here!
Growing Together
For the last 3 seasons, I’ve grown an open-pollinated broccoli variety called, Solstice. I grow this variety because it’s suitable for short-seasons (it's ready in about 70 days) and I procured the seeds from a NYS seed company that trials in their zone 6 farm.
The original breeder of the seeds, Jonathan Spero, is an Oregon-based organic farmer and plant breeder. There are very few open-pollinated broccolis that exist, so Solstice is a great example of needed innovation in organic seeds. I’m so grateful to Spero for releasing the variety under the Open Source Seed Initiative.
Every year I’ve planted it around the last week of April or the 1st week of May and while it’s “supposed” to provide heads around the time of the summer solstice (June 20), but I’ve never been lucky enough to get the timing right.
However this season, with the warmer spring temperatures, I had so many heads available for harvest during the week of the solstice!
It’s a small joy, but having the heads, round and upward towards the sun, was such a reward for the last few marathon months.
Recipe Share
A digital index card with in-season, too-good-not-to-pass-along recipes.
Sometimes, herbs are so overlooked. Oftentimes herbs are an afterthought - a dried up “spice” to add something to a dish. While dried herbs are a fabulous way to add concentrated flavoring to dishes, fresh herb are incredible.
Incorporating fresh herbs into your meals is another way to add valuable minerals and vitamins, as well as fiber and antioxidants.
After hearing from the market manager that many Facebook followers wanted to see more fresh herbs at the market, we’ve been bringing them weekly as they’ve been ready for harvesting.
Each week at our market table you’ll see a variety of herbs - from mint & lemon balm to basil & sage.
As a way to increase the amount of herbs in your diet, try adding them to homemade salad dressings. They’re much simpler to make than you might think!
Herbal Yogurt Dressing
½ cup full-fat, plain yogurt (for a vegan version, opt for plant-based yogurt)
⅛ cup chopped fresh herbs (parsley, dill, cilantro, sage, thyme, etc.)
1 clove chopped and peeled garlic
1-2 tsp lemon juice
⅛ tsp ground black pepper
salt to taste
Directions:
Simply place all ingredients in a blender or food processor and blend until evenly mixed. If you don’t have a blender, just shake all the ingredients up in a well-sealed glass jar (you’ll have to do an especially good job at chopping the garlic and herbs in this case).
Herb Vinaigrette
1 huge bunch of fresh herb leaves (2 cups packed)
1/2 cup olive oil
2 tablespoons white vinegar
1 clove garlic
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes (if desired)
1/4 to 1/2 cup water, if needed
Directions:
Blend everything up for about a minute until smooth. Add the water if you need more volume in the blender to make it run smoothly. Season to taste!
Featured Friends
This past Saturday night, I went to Burley Berries & Blooms for an event to learn more about growing berries and flowers.
Megan Burley grows many varieties of berries on her farm and has been doing lots of experimental research on growing berries to harvest in the fall. She talked about how she tends to her strawberry plants to get them to fruit in September vs. June and showed off her high tunnel, where she is growing and harvesting raspberries into late September.
There isn’t a whole lot of guidance for doing this, especially in our climate zone, so hearing what Megan had to share of her experience was invaluable. And it absolutely has me thinking about how I might expand to include some berry production on the farm.
I was also able to see inside her new micro creamery. This was so, so, special to me!
When I was a kid my dad was a dairy farmer - he had a herd of about 40 Holsteins - so I grew up with fresh milk being super available. One of my most vivid summer memories is my dad making chocolate milk for my brothers and I. This chocolate milk from The Creamery is like the summer milk taste of my childhood. It was perfect. 🫶🏻
Although Burley Berries & Blooms and The Creamery is located in Warsaw, you can find her low heat pasteurized milk in farm stores across WNY.
