Market success, cover crops, fall crops, and growing chicken food

We had a great time at the Capitol City Farmer's Market on Saturday.  We sold all of our produce except for a few bunches of herbs.  We learned a lot of new things about selling our produce, such as having bags on hand for customers and labeling our goods more clearly.  We are looking forward to next weekend.  We should have mostly the same products on hand, but I'm sad to say that we're out of Mandan Bride corn flour until this year's crop ripens and dries. 

Meridith planted a whole bunch of seeds under the grow lights for a fall crop of spinach, swiss chard, arugula, lettuce, and broccoli.  We didn't have much success with our fall crops last year, but we had a pretty early frost.  Speaking of frost, we were scared might have gotten one the other day when our outside thermometer read 39 degrees F at sunrise.  I ran out of the deck looking for frost and was relieved to not find any. 

We picked a bunch more onions today and we will have more of those at the market next week.  We will also have leeks, yellow squash, zucchini, Sungold cherry tomatoes, some herbs, and perhaps some loaves of freshly baked bread.

Today we began planting cover crops in our corn that will form a thick mat of organic matter and break up the soil, then die at the first fall frost.  Our mix includes radishes, turnips, yellow mustard, cowpeas, and oats.  As we harvest crops this summer, we will plant this mix in any newly open patch of soil. 

We made some improvements to the chicken pen as well, by reclaiming some ground where the chickens had killed the grass and nothing was growing but creeping jenny.  We pulled the creeping jenny, tilled, and planted a mix of flax, yellow mustard, radishes, and turnips.  This mix should provide nutritious feed for the hens.  Next year we can use these beds to plant more forage crops throughout the spring and summer like sweet clover, oats, millet, and the others mentioned above. 

Mandan Bride Honey Cornbread Recipe

Best get your cornbread makin' shoes on, here's a recipe for honey cornbread that we've been making with Mandan Bride.  It is light, creamy, and has the rich sweetness of honey. It is currently our favorite cornbread recipe for Mandan Bride.

1 and 1/2 cups fresh cornmeal
1/2 cup flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 beaten egg
1 cup milk
1/4 cup oil
1/4 cup honey

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.  Combine dry ingredients, then add to liquid ingredients.  Stir until consistent, then stir a little more.  Pour into a greased (bacon grease, shortening, oil, Pam, whatever) and heated cast iron skillet or baking dish.  Bake for about 25 minutes.  If the loaf is thick it might need a few more minutes.

We'll be making our first market appearance July 27!

Sungold Cherry Tomatoes

We are pleased to tell you that we have enough produce ready to make our first market appearance of the year on July 27th. 

We have a handful of items for sale this weekend:

Sungold Cherry Tomatoes
Green Onions
Onions
Gypsy Peppers
Yellow Squash
Zucchini
Cabbage
Fresh ground Mandan Bride Corn Flour

The Capitol City Farmer's Market is on the corner of Sioux Avenue and Coteau Street in Pierre and runs from 9 am to 1 pm.

Orange Infused Tomato, Cucumber, and Onion Salad

One of our favorite things about fresh veggie season is the huge variety of salads possible.  One of our favorites is a combination of tomatoes, cukes, and onions with orange infused oil.  Orange juice can also be substituted, but some other kind of oil such as olive or canola oil should then be used.  Cilantro can be substituted for parsley.  Many kinds of vinegar go well in this salad, so feel free to experiment.  Try this with grilled foods on hot days. 

2 cups diced cucumbers
2 cups halved cherry tomatoes or diced tomatoes
1 medium sized onion, diced
3-4 sprigs fresh parsley, chopped
1/3 cup vinegar (use rice vinegar, red or white wine vinegar, or white vinegar)
1/4 cup orange infused oil (or orange juice)
1/2 tsp salt
Pepper to taste

Mix all ingredients, leave in the fridge for half an hour before serving.  Add more vinegar or orange infused oil to suit your tastes.

Some chicken coop improvements and egg price increase

Young Barred Rock rooster.

The bad news first: we have increased the price of our eggs from $3/dozen to $4/dozen.  We hope you understand that we put a lot of work and money into our chickens in an effort to produce the highest quality eggs we possibly can.  OK, we've got that unpleasant task out of the way. 

Now on to the good news - or at least the not bad news.  I'm sure you've noticed that the temperature has been increasing lately.  You'd have to be living in a cave to not notice.  Now that I mention it, living in a nice, cool cave doesn't sound all that bad right now.  I think I'll still opt for central air, though.

The coop - more about function than form.

The chickens have noticed that its getting to the hottest time of the year, as well.  We designed and built the chicken coop in late fall, so we had winter on our mind.  We neglected to include windows that would allow air flow during the summer heat.  This was a major oversight as the chicken coop would get awfully hot.  We made up for it by opening the door and putting some chicken wire in front of it, but chickens inevitably escaped the coop and swere at the mercy of the neighborhood dogs.  We even contemplated running a fan in the door to increase airflow.  None of these were attractive long term options.

The birds like the new windows.

To remedy the situation, I cut a few holes in the door and one on the opposite wall with my Sawzall.  I then covered the holes with chicken wire.  I went with chicken wire over screen because it allows more air to pass through.  The improvements immediately lowered the temperature in the coop and there was a nice breeze passing through. 

Update: Mandan Bride Flour Corn

Chest high on the 4th of July

We previously wrote about Mandan Bride flour corn and how much we love it.  We planted some this year and it has blown the other corn varieties away in terms of germination rate, growth, and early maturity.  That said, it will never have the sweetness of sweet corn, so it isn't an apples to apples comparison, but as a crop it is evidently suited to growth on the northern plains.  It germinates in cooler soils than other corn, grows rapidly during the short wet season, and matures just before it gets too hot and dry for corn to do anything except wither and die.  We've all heard the saying "knee high by the 4th of July", but this corn was chest high on the 4th of July.

Mandan Bride ears in early July

 It should be cautioned that there is no guarantee our potential crop will become a real crop.  Last year our Mandan Bride suffered significantly from both disease and insects.  Drought may have amplified the damage due to the plants being stressed, so hopefully we will see better luck this year.  We still managed to produce a decent pile of corn last year, but it wasn't what we had hoped.  This year's crop is already far ahead of last year's, so we've got that going for us.  We don't spray our corn with anything, so it is a bit of a gamble.  If we do spray it with anything for whatever reason, we will certainly tell you about it. 

Mandan Bride has multicolored pollen.  The color of the pollen affects the color of the kernel that it pollinates.

Update: Sweet bell peppers

Every year, from right after planting until late June, it seems as though our pepper plants refuse to grow.  Sure, they look reasonably healthy, but they just sit there.  Motionless.  Simply waiving their right as plants to grow in response to moisture and sunlight.  But there is that one vital ingredient missing: heat.  Peppers love it.  As soon as Mother Nature turns the furnace on in July the plants explode.  We are currently in that period of rapid, expansive growth.  Some varieties are beating others, but they're all starting to do well.

We treated the peppers with copper fungicide as mentioned in our tomato update post to prevent the spread of bacterial or fungal disease that could spread from the neighboring tomatoes.  As we described, copper fungicide is an organically approved treatment for fungal and bacterial disease outbreaks.  We have fortunately not seen any signs of disease in our peppers so far.  We're very thankful to see that it is not spreading, because in 2011 we had somewhat similar conditions and lost most of our pepper plants to disease.

When they start ripening, which will be in only a few short weeks, we will bring them to the market.

 

 

 

Update: Desert King Watermelon and Squash 7/8/13

Desert King Watermelon

Last year, the only item we sold in any quantity at our single outing to the Capitol City Farmers Market was Desert King watermelon.  This is a yellow fleshed watermelon with exceptional sweetness.  From what we heard through the watermelon vine, people enjoyed our watermelons as much as we did.  Because everyone loved them so much, we planted a lot more this year.  Maybe not as many as we could possibly sell, but as many as we felt like planting, weeding, watering, and picking.

Things got off to a rocky start for the watermelon this spring when we had spotty germination and many of our plants didn't come up.  The soil may have been a little too cool, so we filled in the gaps in the rows a couple weeks later.  The second planting came up very well and we should have a nice crop of watermelons in a month or so.

Buttercup and Butternut Squash

We weren't really sure if we were going to sell squash at the market this year.  We eat a lot of it and we plan to save some for baby food.  However, we found that the chickens don't care for it much as a winter crop, and by the looks of the squash plants we're not going to have any shortage of the stuff.  So we're hoping that if all goes well we will have some squash at the market.


Squash blossom

Buttercup squash are my personal favorite.  When you cut them open it smells like a lot like a cantaloupe.  We've struggled, unfortunately, with squash borers in previous years that killed over half of our buttercup plants.  Butternut, on the other hand, is resistant to squash borers and showed no signs of insect damage.  Our neighbors have said that they have had similar troubles, as well.  We obviously have some learning to do on how to control squash borers if we are hoping to produce many buttercups.  They are so good they are worth it, though, so hopefully we'll be writing a post in the future about how to successfully control squash borers without dumping a chemical facility on your food.

 

Update: Tomatoes 7/7/13

So we've sorta been slacking on keeping up with putting together posts about our stuff.  We're going to get back on top of things with some updates about our crops, eggs, and chickens.  For our first update we've got some good and some bad to report on our tomato crop. 

The good is that we've got very good plant growth and some decent sized tomatoes coming along.  That means that we're doing something right as far as plant nutrition, and the pollinators are also doing something right.  In hot climates like ours, it is possible to experience blossom drop, where the flowers fall off the plants without producing a tomato.  To minimize blossom drop we plant heat tolerant heirloom varieties like Super Sioux and more early to mid bearing varieties like Black Krim that set fruit before the hottest weather arrives.  We don't grow the early bearing tomatoes like Early Girls because, frankly, we think they taste terrible.

Sungold cherry tomato

 

The bad is that we've got a disease outbreak.  We think we've got it narrowed down to either bacterial spot (the more likely culprit) or early blight, but we're not ruling anything out.  We experienced a severe outbreak of bacterial spot in the summer of 2011 because of the uncharacteristic wetness, as well.  That outbreak killed many of our pepper plants and spread to our beans and tomatoes.  Our neighbors also report having similar disease issues in their gardens, so perhaps it is something we should expect on a consistent basis. 

Diseased tomato plant

For treatment we decided on copper fungicide, an organic treatment that basically consists of copper.  It stops or slows the spread of bacterial and fungal diseases.  We sprayed it on our tomatoes and peppers.  Several tomato plants were looking like goners, so we figured they were nothing more than disease spreaders and pulled and burned them.  Our peppers weren't showing signs of infection yet, but we decided to treat them anyway because of their close proximity to the tomatoes and our experience in 2011.  With any luck we will have dry weather that will also slow the spread of the disease.

 

It would be nice if we never had to put anything on the plants, but that approach leaves more to chance than we're willing to allow.  Our hope is to create bacterial and fungal communities where beneficial and benign varieties keep harmful varieties in check.  However, it hasn't worked out that way for us in wetter years.  When we do feel we have to apply some sort of treatment, we don't take it lightly.  We choose the safest, most ecofriendly approaches and only apply treatment if we feel there is a significant threat to our crop.  Copper is an organic-approved fungicide and has worked for us in the past during similar outbreaks, so we figured that is the best approach.  Hopefully we can report in a couple weeks that we have big, beautiful tomatoes and healthy plants.

On the bright side of this whole ordeal, we get a great chance to determine which tomato varieties are most resistant to the diseases we will likely encounter on a regular basis.  So far the most impacted variety is Amish Paste, which is unfortunate because we had high hopes for this tomato.  Several varieties are showing no effect whatsoever, so perhaps a future post about resistant varieties may be coming in the future.