Benjamin Shute
News from the farm – part 8
As you’ll have seen from the weekly farm share email, we’re expecting potatoes in the share tomorrow…but only if everything goes well with the harvest today! For more information on what they’re up to at Hearty Roots right now, have a look at the update from Benjamin below:
We are hoping to include potatoes in this week’s share. It all depends on the potato digger working properly, and equipment is never as reliable as we’d like it to be!
We plant our potatoes early in the spring and then hill soil up around the plants as they grow, using hilling discs on the tractor. This makes the plants produce more potatoes, since more of the plant is underground, and prevents any potatoes near the surface from “greening” that comes from sun exposure.
There are two main pests that bother our potato plants: Colorado Potato Beetles and Leafhoppers. Colorado Potato Beetles have a predictable reproduction cycle, and it requires careful attention to keep them from getting out of control in the potato patch. Once we see adult beetles in the patch, we scout every day or two for juvenile beetle larvae. Once these ugly orange critters get to a certain stage, it’s time to treat the potato patch with Entrust, an organic biologically-based spray that is toxic to beetle larvae but non-toxic to humans. The beetle larvae are fat and lazy, sitting on the potato leaves and munching away. I’ve never actually seen one try to fly, crawl, run, or scurry – they just sit and munch – so they don’t put up much of a fight as we approach with the sprayer. Before we had a sprayer, when we were farming just a couple of acres, we would just pick the beetles off by hand and squish them – and our faces would end up red from beetle juice! I don’t miss those days.
Leafhoppers are the other major potato pest we contend with. They are tiny green bugs, quick to hop from plant to plant, just about the opposite behavior of the Colorado Potato Beetles. This year the dry weather meant more leafhoppers than usual. These bugs feed on the underside of the potato leaves and suck the fluids from the leaf, causing the leaves to develop a black “burn” around the edges. We tried spraying a purified horticultural oil on the plants to prevent the leafhoppers from feeding (it works on the eggplants) but that didn’t do much good. We could have sprayed another substance to try to knock back these bugs: a biological pesticide called Pyrethrin, derived form chyrsanthemum seeds. However, that’s a spray that we prefer not to use since it kills the beneficial insects, like ladybugs, as well as the pest insects. So the potatoes weren’t as lush as they might have been, and we’ll see when we dig them up tomorrow whether the yields have suffered from that or not.
We dig up the potatoes with a tractor-mounted digger that we bought last year in cooperation with two other farms. On each one of our farms, we all realized that we needed a mechanical potato digger to avoid the back-straining work of digging them by hand; but we also knew that we’d only need the machine a few days per year. So it seemed a great candidate for a piece of shared equipment! We each chipped in equally and we run around to one another’s farms to pick it up when we need it. It’s a pretty simple device, a thick metal blade that cuts beneath the potatoes under the soil, and then lifts them onto a metal conveyor belt that shakes off the soil and drops the potatoes onto the surface of the ground, where we collect them by hand into boxes.
Here’s hoping that all goes smoothly with potato harvest today!
News from the farm – part 4
Sorry for the late update from the farm this week – we’ve been so engrossed in last week’s fresh mizuna that we completely let it slip our minds! See below for an update from the fields from Benjamin Shute at Hearty Roots, and – for those of you who still find it languishing in your fridges – a recipe for a Tuscan kale salad.
The CRAFT Program
This week, Hearty Roots hosted a meeting for the CRAFT program. CRAFT stands for Collaborative Regional Alliance for Farmer Training; it is a program for young people who are participating in apprenticeships on organic and sustainable small farms, to help them learn about the systems and practices of other farms in the area. There are CRAFT meetings weekly, each focusing on a different topic, in an effort to provide a well-rounded curriculum for participants. One of the great features of CRAFT is that is is a broad, grassroots program; it is a collaboration between many farms, without a centralized organizing force or funding.
Hearty Roots hosted a meeting of about 50 young farmers on the topic of “starting your own farm from scratch”. Since Hearty Roots was founded 7 years ago by young farmers with no land, equipment or family farming background, we feel that our story and the steps that we took to establish a successful farm can be instructive to other young people in similar circumstances. We had a great tour of the farm, followed by a summer solstice potluck celebration. There were young people there from Hilltop Hanover Farm in Westchester, Phillies Bridge Farm in New Paltz, Glynwood Center in Cold Spring, Stone Barns Center in Westchester, Long Lane Farm in Connecticut, and others.
We participate in the Mid-Hudson Valley CRAFT network; but the original CRAFT network was founded in the upper Hudson Valley and western Massachusetts, where the program is still strong. CRAFT has spread far and wide, with strong programs in the mid-west, Canada, and on the west coast. Visiting other farms to learn about their practices first-hand is an invaluable experience for young farmers, and we were proud to participate by hosting this week’s meeting.
Vegetable of the week: Tuscan Kale
This variety of kale is loved by the chefs to whom the farm sells produce. It is tender with great flavor, and is traditional in the Tuscany area of Italy, where it is called “Cavolo Nero”, translated as “black cabbage”. In addition to being a great cooking green, Tuscan Kale can be used raw to make a delicious kale salad. Francesco Buitoni, chef at our town of Red Hook’s great Mercato restaurant, makes a particularly good version and orders from us every week. His salad varies depending on what’s in season, but here’s an example of a good Tuscan Kale salad:
1 bunch Tuscan kale
1 thin slice country bread (part whole-wheat or rye is nice), or 1/4 cup homemade bread crumbs (coarse)
1/2 garlic clove, or 2 garlic scapes, finely chopped
1/4 cup finely grated pecorino cheese, more for garnish
3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, more for garnish
Freshly squeezed juice of 1 lemon
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
1/8 teaspoon red pepper flakes
Freshly ground black pepper, to taste.
1. Trim bottom 2 inches off kale stems and discard. Slice kale, including ribs, into 3/4-inch-wide ribbons. You should have 4 to 5 cups. Place kale in a large bowl.
2. If using bread, toast it until golden on both sides. Tear it into small pieces and grind in a food processor until mixture forms coarse crumbs.
3. Using a mortar and pestle, or with the back of a knife, pound garlic into a paste. Transfer garlic to a small bowl. Add 1/4 cup cheese, 3 tablespoons oil, lemon juice, salt, pepper flakes and black pepper, and whisk to combine. Pour dressing over kale and toss very well to thoroughly combine (dressing will be thick and need lots of tossing to coat leaves).
4. Let salad sit for 5 minutes, then serve topped with bread crumbs, additional cheese and a drizzle of oil.
Yield: 2 to 4 servings.
News from the farm – part 1
Each week, we get an update from Benjamin Shute or his co-workers at Hearty Roots Community Farm, the farm which supplies all the great vegetables for our CSA. With recipes, planting news and updates on farm events, it’s a great way to keep in touch with news from the source of our fresh produce. We’ll feature the weekly update here on the blog as soon as we get it, so without further ado, it’s over to Benjamin:
It has been a warm spring! There was just plain more warmth and sunshine than normal, which in many cases sped plants up. Our spinach is huge, the swiss chard has been growing like crazy, and the heat-loving tomato plants, though still small, are shooting up by the day. It has also been quite dry for the past two weeks, which means we have been running around irrigating. Sometimes we come close to wishing it would rain– but then it doesn’t take long to remember the endless rainy months of last summer, and we are thankful for this weather– too dry (in moderation) is better than too wet, because it means less plant diseases, and because we have the power to irrigate, but we don’t have the power to dry the fields out.
So far we have been keeping super busy in the fields with our crew of 6. Miriam has been doing almost all of the greenhouse plantings and tending the garlic; KayCee has been planting the pick-your-own and working in the field (sometimes with her 3-month-old son, Sparrow, in tow); Benjamin has been cultivating and tilling and trying to stay out of the emergency room (one trip so far this year, for a finger injury). New to Hearty Roots this year are Matt, Jordan and Katie. Matt is the assistant field manager and has been doing lots of tractor work, and putting his fine carpentry skills to good use building a tool shed and other odds and ends. Jordan is the new crew leader and has been all over the farm transplanting thousands of seedlings, weeding, and getting ready to lead harvest, usually with Katie at her side. Joining us this week as harvest begins will be Zoe, Bennett, Maria and Kylie; they will get to introduce themselves in future newsletters.
We are looking forward to growing great produce for all of you this season. I am anticipating a really bountiful season of great veggies this year. And as always we hope you will plan to join us on the farm for one of our upcoming events, Garlic Harvest on Saturday July 17th or the Harvest Party on Saturday September 25th.
Recipe featuring Green Garlic:
Green Garlic is the young garlic plant before the bulb has fully matured. Both the bulb and the leaves of the plant are edible at this stage, and they provide a nice opportunity for good garlic flavor before the mature bulbs are harvested in the summer.
Stir-Fried Bok Choy with Green Garlic
1/3 cup chicken or veggie broth
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 1/2 teaspoons cornstarch
3 tablespoons peanut or vegetable oil
1 stalk thinly sliced green garlic (use the bulb and the leaves)
1 large or 2 small heads bok choy, cut into 3″ pieces
2 teaspoons Asian sesame oil
Stir together broth, soy sauce, cornstarch, and 1/2 teaspoon salt until cornstarch has dissolved.
Heat pan or wok over high heat until a drop of water evaporates instantly. Pour peanut oil into pan and swirl oil, coating the pan. Add green garlic and stir-fry 5 to 10 seconds. Add half of bok choy and stir-fry until leaves wilt, about 2 minutes, then add remaining bok choy and stir-fry until all leaves are bright green and limp, 2 to 3 minutes total. Stir broth mixture, then pour into pan and stir-fry 15 seconds. Cover with lid and cook, stirring occasionally, until vegetables are crisp-tender, 2 to 4 minutes. Stir in sesame oil, then serve.
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