The Fall Garden

As you can see from the various pictures, Farmville is still alive and kicking. It's been awhile since the last post and I can understand why you might come to the conclusion that everything was finished for the season. The truth of the matter is wine making has taken up a great deal of time, so posting updates fell a little behind. In between the batches of wine, I did manage to get a few things planted for the Fall garden. These were planted mostly in mid-September:

• Celery
• Broccoli
• Cauliflower
• Cabbage
• Lettuce
• Beets
• Radishes
• Peas
• Bok Choy
• Romanesco
• Chard

These are all great things to have in the garden because they can be used in so many ways. Broccoli, cauliflower, and Romanesco can be steamed and served as a vegetable side dish with just about anything. They are also very good for soups and casseroles as well. Most of these vegetables can be used raw in salads or on vegetable platters or cooked with meats and starches. Those with the good fortune to have access to very fresh picked vegetables for salads know how much this adds to the dish. I find that using very fresh picked vegetables in cooked dishes also makes a big difference. The freshness contributes more concentrated flavor when compared to something picked a few days before, so you can go very light on seasoning and enjoy the true taste of the vegetables. Another advantage to having a garden full of vegetables to pick dinner ingredients from is you can customize according to what dish is being prepared. For instance, the small, secondary sprouts of broccoli are the best for stir frying. You can use a larger head cut up into smaller pieces, but being able to pick the small side shoots takes things to a higher level. I planted the beets for nostalgic reasons. They are very good when simply boiled and eaten fresh versus the canned version we are familiar with. Back in 1983, I was living in a small house on our headquarter farm. Next door to me (for context, next door was about a half a mile away) lived an old guy named Andy. He was very colorful and had a lot of good stories about the area. He had grown up there and remembered when this area of West Sacramento had not even been cleared of brush to plant crops. He was in his mid-eighties at that time, so was born just before the turn of the century. That particular fall, he decided to plant beets behind his house. He didn't like the beets at the grocery store and being on a fixed income, he always planted a big garden to feed his wife and him. For some reason, the beets flourished. Every single row he planted came up and grew like weeds. He and his wife could only eat so many beets and I think he gave so many to his friends and family that they got tired of eating them too. Every day when he saw me drive down my driveway, he would flag me down and ask if I needed some more beets. I always said yes and told him how great they tasted. That was the truth too. They were very good. I think he would actually pull a handful up when he saw me coming, and I would usually wash and cook them within an hour or so. When they're fresh like this, they don't need much seasoning. Just a pinch of salt and pepper. Be careful though, the juice leftover from boiling them will stain everything bright red. Years ago, beet juice was the red dye of choice for many things.

The other pictures show how some of the summer planted stuff looks in the fall. The peppers have all just about turned red. The jalapenos are actually milder when red. The tomatoes are much smaller in size and what green ones are left, take almost forever to ripen up. Good thing I have a freezer and pantry full of tomato products from last summer. The sunflowers are drying out but I think the birds will get more of the seeds than I will. That's OK. The pumpkins and winter squash have all ripened up and are ready to be picked.

It's been a very good year for Farmville. Just about everything cooked for dinner the past few months has had something from the garden as the key ingredient. When fruits and vegetables are the foundation of the meal, it tends to be healthier for you. Not 100% of the time (I do use things like bacon to flavor up dishes), but for the most part. That's all I shoot for anyway. As the fall planted vegetables mature, I'll get better about posting updates.

Are We Tired of Squash Yet?

Before we wander too deep into a philosophical discussion about squash, I'll answer the question from my perspective. Nope, not yet. As I poked around yesterday to see how things were doing in the heat wave, I found a yellow zucchini. This was a nice little treasure because that side of the garden hasn't been watered in a few weeks. Everything around this squash plant has been finished for the season, so it didn't make sense to drag the hose over there to water it. It is showing just how tough and strong it is by not only surviving this man-made drought, but also producing more of its kind. I "celebrated" this discovery by seasoning with salt, pepper, oregeno and olive oil. A few minutes on the grill and it was a very tasty partner to the nice NY steak known as "last night's dinner".

I'm seriously considering a new cause to champion and that is to educate the masses about the benefits of growing squash in their gardens. They are very easy to grow and produce an insane amount of food compared to how little effort the gardner needs to do for them. I know people get tired of eating squash a few weeks into the summer, but the solution is to mix up how it is prepared. Here is a list of some the ways zucchini was used this past summer here at Farmville.

• Baked into cookies with walnuts and dried fruit


• Grilled with light seasonings


• Fried Tempura style


• Stuffed with meat and cheese


• Diced and sauteed with garlic


• Raw with ranch dressing


• Tossed with pasta, garlic, tomatoes and basil

As you can see, if you arm yourself with a handful of recipes, you can enjoy summer squash for as long as your plant keeps its end of the deal.

The other type of squash we planted was the hard shell or winter types. We planted acorn, butternut, and delicata (not to be confused with Delicato Winery where I bought grape juice this past weekend to make into wine, but that will be another post). Also, closely related are the pumpkins. They are in the same plant family and can be used in the same recipes as most of the other winter squashes. Much like the zucchini plants, the pumpkins and winter squash will take care of themselves for the most part. You just need to make sure they are well watered early on so their roots spread out and grow deep.

The winter squash and pumpkins are ready to start harvesting now, but will also keep for a few weeks longer outside in the garden. By Halloween, the plan is to have them all picked and stored in a cool, dry location inside. If luck is on our side, they should keep until late Winter.

In anticipation of the mega-squash harvest, I fould two cookbooks devoted entirely to squash recipes. These are going to come in handy because the assistant winemaker at Farmville is very fond of home cooked dishes from the garden. The next couple of weeks will be pretty busy with crushing grapes and her help will be most appeciated in getting some grapes picked in the Sierra Foothills in early October. Her reward for this manual labor will be a dinner made up of various squash recipes. Some of the ideas so far are:

• Butternut squash soup with pesto


• Roasted acorn squash with pistachios


• Pumpkin and beef stew


• Pumkin pie


• Winter squash rissotto


• Pumpkin stuffed raviolis

I think when you take the time to search out and try different recipes, you can enjoy the bounty a squash garden produces almost all year. Considering how easy it is to grow and how healthy it is in your diet, one has to wonder why more folks aren't growing it.

Transitions

As the title suggests, Farmville is in the midst of transition. Transition in this context means the classical sense, moving from one phase to another. These days, the word transition is thrown out there each and every time change takes place, but my opinion is this is not entirely accurate. Change just means it's different than it was, say five minutes ago. Transition means it changed, but the change is part of moving forward toward a place that signifies progress. In Farmville, transition includes many things: the end of summer, the beginning of a new school year, a new vintage for those that measure a year in terms of how the wine turned out.

I realize the week after Labor Day is not officially the end of summer, but there are many who feel this is the most prominent weekend to define that dividing line. I happen to be one of those. It has become a last hurrah for summer activities and in most years, the long hot days we identify summer with are gone after this point in time. This year was a bit out of the ordinary because the Labor Day weekend gave us some of the hottest days this season and a few weeks ago, you could swear it was fall already. But this year has hardly been ordinary for many reasons.

The beginning of a new school year represents a big transition for just about everyone. For the kids, starting a brand new grade level, and sometimes a brand new school, transition can seem like an understatement. It's definitely progress, but the perceived change is very dramatic. The same can be said for the many parents that have kids going through this. I'm sure there are many out there who can easily identify with both of these vantage points. One group that probably contributes more toward making this transition happen smoothly are teachers. If you think about it, teachers help kids and parents navigate this transition seamlessly, and in a lot of cases, they have their own kids to shepherd through this journey as well. I had the good fortune to spend the summer with a teacher that exemplifies this and the children she will teach this year are very lucky. They will learn much.

The final transition topic of this post is vintage. In wine terms, it simply means the year the grapes were harvested. Since every year has its own nuances as far as weather, a vintage can indicate quite a bit about what one might expect from the wine made that year. Overly hot years can mean high sugar levels and subsequently, high alcohol levels. Very cool years yield wine with lower alcohol and higher acidity. Because consistency is considered one of the most important attributes in mass marketing and most wine is mass marketed, various techniques are used to "smooth" the impact that Mother Nature has on each vintage. Since this year has been very cool, most vineyards are doing all kinds of things to try and make the grapes ripen the same as they do every year. They are under-irrigating, pulling leaves, repositioning the fruit, and many other things to get the sun to pay attention to the beloved grapes. Since Farmville has a wine making unit, we follow this madness. Mostly for the entertainment value though. Since our wine making is strictly for our own consumption, we need only satisfy our own taste and truth be told, inconsistency is what makes it all interesting. Because each year is so different and that difference is captured in the character of the wine made that year, my vote is to accept it and appreciate the diversity it provides. This will insure your palate will never get bored and your cooking style will always be versatile enough to make good use of this. Let's hold our glasses up and toast everyone that runs as fast as they can from consistency and celebrate individuality. Cheers.

After all of that soap box rhetoric, here is your reward. The following link is to the Photobucket page where we will post the 2010 wine making pictures. I can almost guarantee if you follow the blog and use the pictures as visual aids, by 2011, you too can make your own wine.

http://s1210.photobucket.com/albums/cc418/kevin756/2010%20Pinot%20Noir%20Winemaking/

More Comparison Pictures

This one shows how much changed from when the tomatoes were planted til they were being picked. We will be picking tomatoes for the next couple of months. The other pictures show the pumpkins and winter squash when first planted and later, when the vines started spreading out. The one with the combine harvesting the wheat behind Farmville doesn't really show anything in the garden, but I thought it was cool anyway. It captures that this is part of a "real" farm. What's funny is if I had a better camera, I could capture the tract houses a few hundred yards away from us. They're close but because of how everything is situated, we really are pretty far removed from their world. I'm betting they're glad we're removed from their world as well.

Grown Up Farmville

The topic of this post is as the title states. We are now at the almost very end of August and just about everything in Farmville has "grown-up". The only things left that are still working their way through their journey to the table are the pumpkins, winter squash, and sunflowers. Very shortly, we will add some more to the list, but those will be the newly planted Fall vegetables and they will have their own post to explain their story. The pictures with this post are all about the corn. The main reason is I'm not very skilled at using this blog software and making pictures conform to the text has been tough. I'll put some more posts up with comparison pictures of the other crops we grew this summer and rely on everyone's ability to make sense of it. If any of it's confusing, feel free to ask questions via the comments feature. The corn is the absolute poster child for showing how dramatically things change in just three or four months time. The early picture shows them just coming up and then the later pictures show them at almost nine feet tall. That's a lot of change. When they were first coming up, it was hard to imagine they would grow to where they are at now. I remember watching the non-stop wind blow them sideways and wondering if I would come out one day and find them gone. Luckily they hung in there and, despite the unusually cool season, did very well. Looking back over the season, we harvested quite a bit of corn. We even froze some. At this stage, I'm cutting the stalks to use for decorating the pumpkin patch. One of my many children swears she is going to make the dead tree in the back the scariest thing known at Halloween. I think we have everything we need to do that. We'll post pictures later if we pull this off.

Our other crops that grew up this summer in Farmville also provided a very bountiful harvest. They included watermelons, cantaloupes, crenshaw melons, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, zucchini, basil, dill, and various other herbs. The melons attracted some gophers and we ended up having to share some of the harvest with them. Those that know me well understand how much that bothers me. In the end, I made the painful but mature decision to not do battle with them. I had some pretty wicked tactics lined up to use in getting rid of them but more than likely, it would have led to the complete destruction of Farmville. I guess splitting the harvest with them is a small price to pay for having my garden not look like a nuclear battlefield on a distant planet.

The take away message from this post is that the grown up version of a garden is a good thing. It means the harvest has provided a summer full of produce for the table as well as a well stocked freezer and pantry. As the garden chores lessen due to this grown up stage we are in, it affords the time to work on other projects. One of the projects we in Farmville are moving into is making grown up beverages. More specifically, wine. We'll save that discussion for a future post where we can do proper justice to the winemaking process. The next post or two (not sure how difficult posting a bunch of pictures will be just yet) will be devoted to comparison pictures of the various things we grew this past spring and summer. Enjoy.

Endless Summer

OK, before everyone starts thinking I'm crazy, I'll acknowledge we haven't had summer yet in 2010, at least in northern California. I hope I don't burst any bubbles out there, but it pretty much looks like we won't get one either. That being said, I still had a bunch of summer produce to make use of before it spoiled, so the decision was made to freeze it. The two things we had way more than we need for the next thousand or so meals was basil and tomatoes. Fortunately for us, both of these freeze very well with a small amount of prep work. I say small amount because once I describe the prep work, it doesn't sound like much, but in reality, it did take a fair amount of time to get all of this done. Luckily, the two main grunt workers in Farmville these days have a long history of knuckling down and getting this type of work done without complaining. It's actually pretty fun because once you establish a rhythm and pace, the discussion can range from favorite movies to anything else worthy of the attention of two people with a mountain of produce in front of them that needs something done to it.

First, we'll talk about the basil. The picture of the wicker basket full of basil stalks came from three of the eight to ten basil plants growing in Farmville. It's amazing how much basil can come from just a few plants. I encourage everyone to have at least one or two basil plants in their gardens. They are more than worth it. The basic process for freezing pesto is to cut a bunch of basil branches and strip the leaves from them. This part is time consuming but if you tackle it with at least one other team member, it's pretty easy. Once the leaves are stripped, they need to be washed several times in cold water and drained. A colander works well, but a salad spinner would probably be better. Our recipe used garlic, pine nuts, olive oil and the basil leaves. We used a food processor to puree everything to the consistency of a thick paste. Most pesto recipes also call for Parmesan cheese, but since this is going into the freezer, leave the cheese out for now. Once you thaw and use later, just add the grated cheese then. We spooned the finished pesto (the picture with the white bowl) into small Dixie cups to freeze. This makes it easier to use a vacuum sealer, but if you're using zip lock bags, it makes sense to portion into the bags and force the air out before zipping shut, and then throw into the freezer. Doesn't get much easier to have great tasting pesto to use during the winter months. Pesto truly is the "taste of Summer".

The tomatoes were not complicated to process, but like the basil, the amount of work was a bit more than what it sounds like when you write about. The basic process was to cut an "X" on the blossom end and drop in boiling water for thirty seconds to help remove the skin. Immediately upon removing from the boiling water, you cool them in ice water for a minute or so. After this, the skins are easy to peel off. We cut the tomatoes in half and squeezed the seeds out. Some might not want to go to this much effort and I'm not sure it makes a huge difference. The recipe I was following said to do this step and I'm not one to "swim against the current". The biggest hassle with the tomatoes was the amount of liquid pulled out when applying the vacuum to pack them in the bags. I saw a post on bulletin board later that said it's better to oven dry tomatoes and then vacuum pack to avoid this nuisance. The plan in a couple weeks is to oven dry some, so a later post will talk about that.

Regardless of how you preserve tomatoes, basil, or any other summer produce, you capture the true essence of a vine ripe product to use later in the year when a taste of summer is sorely needed. Even as the non-summer of 2010 is a distant memory, having a summertime dish on the dinner table in December, for example, is a nice experience. Let's all do what we can to preserve the bounty of Summer.

PS- I didn't feel like fighting with making the pictures correspond with the sequence of the text, so unitl I do that, please know the order of the pictures is out of whack.

The Bounty of Farmville

So far, the posts about the Farmville Reality Project have focused on different things being planted or taken care of. Last week, we were able to move in a different direction with the post about making pickles. This week, due to many circumstances, it just seemed the right time to start talking about the "bounty" that comes from working hard to plant and take care of the many vegetables we've talked about the past few months. As much as I enjoy the work out in the project, there is an equal amount of satisfaction in moving into the kitchen and using all of this to create meals. We have been doing this daily for the past couple of weeks. Before we dive into the many ingredients for our great meals this project has provided, indulge me on other aspects of the project that are as important. The Farmville Reality Project has many aspects to it, and the people involved with making these many "moving parts" work is truly an accomplishment. The crew here bring things together in a way that is both unique and very productive. This crew will serve as the foundation for this project for many years to come. We tie together the many experiences of our past with a future that is exciting. Doesn't get much better if you ask me. The ages of this crew range from mid-teens to those of us a bit older than that. We are all in agreement in our passion about this project.

The first and most important thing that comes to mind is how a productive garden captures people's attention. I'm not implying this project is any more well known than it is, but we have quite a few folks keeping track of its progress and asking questions about how things are coming along. Many of these questions come from people doing something similar and the opportunity to swap information that might help all of us successfully raise things from our gardens is priceless. We may be idealistic here, but the more we can engage people in what it takes to produce a good meal, the better we position our society to solve many health related issues that plague too many of us. It seems the more people think about their meals, the healthier aspects of the meal choice takes on greater importance. A productive garden fits into this in so many ways. The other really cool thing from this has been the interest from a younger crowd, way beyond what I had thought possible. Both of my kids were raised smack in the middle of vegetable production and because of this, they are very familiar with how to use the many vegetables that were always sitting on the counter. Since this project started, their friends have taken an interest in how things are progressing and even comment on how much certain crops have grown since the last time they stopped by. One of the crew (I have to bust you out RJ) has even planted his own garden and uses Farmville as a "school" of sorts to learn more about raising your own food. It's been good to demonstrate how a weed patch that was formerly a parking lot for construction equipment can be quickly transformed into a project that feeds an army.

This leads into another area I believe many people that operate large scale gardens should think about. No matter how many hungry kids and other relatives you have, most gardens begin to out produce their demand curve by about August of each year. Not sure why, but I suspect it's the convergence of plant biology, human physiology, and half-ass resource economics all thrown together in a way that sane people call "Uncle" and realize they can't eat everything the garden produces. In the old days (I won't even get controversial and throw time frames out there), people would get started canning or drying the production to carry them through the winter months. Now days, this doesn't happen as much as it needs to and the potential for things to simply go bad "on the vine" is very real. What we are going to do here in Farmville if this starts to happen is to pick the vegetables and take to the local food bank. I have read numerous articles about how food banks are always short on fresh fruits and vegetables. I have also heard many anecdotal accounts on home gardeners having more produce than they can use or give away to neighbors. Seems to me, this could work out perfectly. We'll post later on if we are able to do this and how the logistics work out. First glance cries out "win-win" though.

Now, lets move into quantifying the "bounty" known as Farmville. The picture with this post was taken tonight, so the methodology was simply to walk through and pick different things. Only the onions, garlic, and potatoes came from an earlier harvest, but that's what we do do with those. Keep them in a cool, dry place and use as the meal dictates. The following is a list of what was picked from a ten minute walk through Farmville this evening. I truly hope it inspires people to plant more next year so they can fully appreciate this "bounty".

• Yellow Zucchini
• Cucumbers
• White Onions
• Torpedo Onions
• Garlic
• Yellow Finnish Potatoes
• Dill
• Basil
• Garlic Chives
• Chives
• Chocolate Mint
• Spearmint
• Serrano Peppers
• Jalapeno Peppers
• Anaheim Peppers
• Thyme
• Roma Tomatoes
• Slicing Tomatoes
• Yellow Roma Tomatoes
• Sage
• Rosemary
• Sweet Corn
• Asian Melon

As you can see, we have a very large variety of ingredients to use when preparing meals here in Farmville. None of this required anything too complicated and we will likely have more than enough to share with those less fortunate. We at Farmville hope this helps those that might have come late to our community better understand what we're doing here. More importantly, the hope is to get even more on board with how we approach things. Our approach is to make sure to make improvements where ever possible and be open minded enough to know how to accomplish this. Not an easy task, but the Farmville crew is a very unique crew, so I think we will get there. Wish us luck.