Photos - Our first tomato of the year!

Things are really cooking along here.  We picked our first ripe tomatoes and cucumbers and combined them with some onion, parsley, vinegar, and oil for an awesome salad.  It won't be long until we're packing up boxes of veggies for the market and La Minestra, maybe only another few days for the latter.  I suppose I should also mention that we made an addition to our family when Meridith recently gave birth to a healthy and happy baby boy.  So we've got a lot going on here at Medicine Gardens right now, and there's a lot of excitement about the future.

Here are some photos of our gardens:

Mandan Bride Flour Corn

Hidatsa Shield Beans

Canning, SD



Our first ripe tomato of the year

The tomato patch



Beets beets the magical fruit - wait, that's not how it goes

The herb bed, with thyme, sage, rosemary, parsley, cutting celery, oregano, marjoram, and stevia.

Basil and green beans

Yes, apparently you can grow artichokes in SD.  We're considering growing these for sale next year.

Beans

Yellow Squash

Basil

Medicine Gardens produce at La Minestra!

(photo by La Minestra)

We're excited to tell you that we'll be supplying our favorite local restaurant La Minestra with produce this summer.  We absolutely love their passion for food and the creativity and originality they bring to their menu and special items.  Last summer we supplied them with a few items and they combined our Sungold cherry tomatoes and Desert King yellow fleshed watermelon with feta and mint to make the mouthwatering salad in the picture.  We're thrilled to see our produce put to such good use again this year, and we can't wait to see what they come up with next. 

We'll be supplying them with tomatoes, Italian sweet peppers, zucchini, cukes, basil, and other special items like the occasional melons or squash.  Look for our produce at La Minestra starting in a few weeks and lasting throughout the summer. 

Spinach this Saturday!

We're very excited, because we've got lots of spinach for you this weekend at the Capital City Farmers' Market!  Our spinach bed is overflowing with tasty, tender goodness, so we're picking a bunch today.  We'll also have a few heads of broccoli, along with all of our soaps, lip balms, and lotion bars.  Remember, the market is from 9 am to noon, Saturday mornings on the corner of Sioux and Coteau.  There will be lots of other great vendors, too.

We've also noticed that the nice little local newspaper article about us has traveled to a few other papers, running in the Rapid City Journal and the Scottsbluff Star Herald out of Nebraska.  We think the trend toward local, whole foods is growing, and great press like this supports that notion.  Hopefully it gets a few more people to go to their local farmers' market to see what all the hoopla is about. 

Medicine Gardens is in the news!

We just had our first Capital City Farmer's Market on Saturday and had a wonderful time selling our soap, lip balm, lotion bars, popcorn, cookies, and fresh ground Mandan Bride corn flour.  We've also been finding our way into the local news lately.  Our hometown newspaper, the Pierre Capital Journal, visited our place last week and wrote this very nice piece about our gardens, the varieties we grow, and the little slice of heaven that is Canning, SD.  Then at the market we chatted with another Capital Journal reporter and found ourselves in this article.

We count ourselves as very fortunate to be getting such good press, not to mention press at all, and applaud the interest our hometown journalists have shown in local foods and market. 

First farmer's market of the year! May 24!

We will be at the Capital City Farmer's Market this Saturday for the first market of the year.  We will have a whole bunch of soap, lip balm, and lotion bars for sale, along with our Mandan Bride Cornflour and some delicious homemade cookies from our kitchen.  Below is a list of the items we will have for sale.

Soap - Citrus, Oatmeal, Grapefruit, Tea Tree, Rosemary Mint, Lavender, Coffee, and Gardener's Scrub

Lotion Bars - Grapefruit, Orange, Rosemary Mint, Cedarwood, Bug Bar (with citronella), Sun Bar (with zin oxide for sunscreen), and Unscented

Lip Balm - Strawberry, Chocolate Mint, Mint, Unscented, Unscented (with zinc oxide for sunscreen)

Mandan Bride Cornflour

Cookies - Chocolate Chip, Oatmeal Raisin, and maybe a few others

Many other vendors will also be at the market this weekend, so don't miss out.  There are many great products, and quite a few vendors are selling vegetable plants they started in their greenhouse that you can plant in your garden.  We hope to see you there!

Starting plants under shoplights - a greenhouse alternative

Oh, to have a greenhouse.  If dreams came true according our wishes, we would have a greenhouse already.  But, alas, life does not automatically convert wishes to realities, and we must do our best with what is available and affordable.  If you're like us, the variety of garden vegetables available for sale at the local nurseries just doesn't cut it. We love to experiment with rare and heirloom varieties, and the only way to do that is to order seed and start it ourselves. A greenhouse will cost at least $600-700, and that would be an itty bitty greenhouse - not the one we really want.  We also know that starting seeds in the window sill doesn't work very well, and you're likely to end up with weak plants with elongated stems that tip over in the slightest breeze, or no breeze at all.  After doing some internet research, we turned to a system of shelves and shoplights.  These setups are really pretty cheap for the amount of money they save in the long run when you have to buy all your plants.  With shoplights we get strong, healthy plants with thick stems that survive windy days after transplanting.  The best part is that you don't need any specialized equipment like expensive grow lights, everything you need can be found at a hardware store.

We start with a simple set of shelves you can buy from just about any department store.  The one requirement is that you must be able to fit 4 foot shoplight fixtures in each shelf, so you want shelves that are open on the end or over 4 feet wide.  As you can see in the photo, we use cheap wire shelves.  From each shelf we hang a pair of 2-bulb T12 shoplight fixtures, so each shelf has 4 bulbs.  It is important to use wide spectrum bulbs, or those labeled for plants and/or aquariums.  Two of the flats that are commonly used for seed starting will fit on each shelf.  Seed starting cups come in many sizes, and we use the size of cups where 32 fit into one flat.  We have three shelves set up, so we can start 6 flats of 32 cups each, for a total of 192 plants.  We're considering hanging a set of lights from the ceiling above the top shelf, or perhaps even rigging another whole set of shelves with lights.

The lights can be raised and lowered as the plants grow.  An alternative approach is to raise and lower the plants using books, 2x4's, or something similar while leaving the lights in place.  We have little hooks on the ends of the chains that hold the lights, so it is simple to raise the lights when we need to.

Hopefully you'll find that this is an acceptable substitute for a greenhouse, even though it won't hold nearly as many plants.  It is much cheaper, and also easier to assemble, so it is a nice set up for those that don't want or can't afford a greenhouse.

New products for the market and elsewhere - soap, lotion bars, and lip balm.

 

We got bored this winter and decided to branch our little business into an additional direction this winter by offering soap, lip balm, and lotion bars.  Meridith has been going crazy in the kitchen concocting a variety of these homemade skin products and we will have them for sale when we make it to the Capital City Farmer's Market this spring.  You can also order them directly from us by sending an email to meridithbenter@gmail.com with what you want.

Lip Balm

 

Our lip balm is made from organic beeswax, shea butter, and coconut oil.  We currently have mint, chocolate mint, strawberry, and classic beeswax flavors.  We plan to offer lip balm with sunscreen very soon, as well.  $3 per tube.

Soap 

Our soaps are made with essential oils and natural ingredients.  Some soaps include whole bits of rosemary, oatmeal, grapefruit skins, orange peels, and poppy seeds.  $3-6 per bar.  We currently have the following line up of soap:

Rosemary Mint
Oatmeal
Grapefruit
Citrus
Tea Tree
Gardener's Scrub (with citronella for bug repellant)

Lotion Bars

We had never heard of lotion bars until a few months ago, but we are blown away by how well they heal dry skin, even in the dead of winter.  Lotion bars are like lotion, but in bar form.  Just rub the lotion bar on your skin to add moisture and healing oils.  $5-6 per bar.

If you would like to purchase any of these products, simply email us at meridithbenter@gmail.com.

"What are those little spots in my eggs? Why is my egg white cloudy?"

These are two questions you may ask yourself when you crack open one of our eggs.  There will be differences from store-bought eggs, and if you didn't know better you might think the egg was bad.  So read on if you're one of our egg customers or simply interested in the characteristics of farm fresh eggs.

Those little small red or brown flecks near the yolk - These have one of the worst sounding names you're ever heard when it comes to eggs: meat spots.  Yes, they're called meat spots.  There is another similar condition called blood spots, which doesn't sound any better.  But don't freak out!  They won't kill you, and it's ok to eat an egg with a meat spot.  If it really bothers you, you can pick it out with a spoon or something.

There is a good description of meat spots at thepoultrysite.com

It isn't possible to detect some of the smaller meat spots when we candle the eggs for quality, so you might get one.  Our eggs are more likely to have meat spots than store-bought eggs because we have older chickens.  Meat spots become more common as the hen ages, and we have some hens that are as old as 5 years.  Along with more meat spots, the hens also lay fewer eggs as they get older, so a typical industrial egg operation kills the hens as soon as egg production and quality decrease.  A hen in an industrial egg operation is killed before it reaches a year and a half.  While we aren't against turning an old hen into chicken soup, we like our hens to live quite awhile past their second birthday.  For this reason we will tolerate the occasional small red fleck as long as you can, too. 

Here is what the Egg Safety Center says about meat spots:

"Blood or meat spots are occasionally found on an egg yolk and are merely an error on the part of the hen. They’re caused by the rupture of a blood vessel on the yolk surface when it’s being formed or by a similar accident in the wall of the oviduct. Most eggs with blood or meat spots are detected by electronic spotters and never reach the market, but even with electronic scanners it’s impossible to catch them all. Eggs with blood spots and meat spots are fit to eat."

So don't worry about meat spots. 

Cloudy whites - When the white of the egg looks like it has been slightly cooked and is cloudy, there is nothing wrong with the egg.  A cloudy white is actually a sign of extreme freshness.  We typically see cloudy whites in eggs that have been laid in the last day or two.  The cloudiness is caused by carbon dioxide gas trapped inside the egg.  As the egg ages, this gas is released and the white clears.  So there's nothing to worry about with a cloudy egg white.