Ramp it up.

Great crop this year over 1.7 pounds of seed.

You may think that I am only a farmer here at happy cat, but you may have also noticed that I have a tendency to always be out foraging for edible plants. I am not much of a killer, so you won’t find me out there clubbing chipmunks over their little heads. But if someone where to wrap one of those little suckers in bacon and stuff it like a squash blossom? Maybe.

I grow up in the woods and I was always eating things that I found. My parents got me Euell Gibbons books when I was like ten.

So when I found my secret ramp stand I almost fell over, it is the size of 3-football field.

If I harvested all the ramps at once I would be taking Arugula to market in an Enzo Ferrari, for real.

Ramps Allium tricoccum are a native edible plant that is foraged for it’s wonderful spring bulb and leaves. Ramps grown from seed germinate in 6 to 18 months. 6 if the fall is warm and 18 if not. This year I am putting the ones I potted up into cold frames to get them some fall heat, hope I can get the 6 month window, but if not, cool gardening is all about patience.

What’s that? Patience, it is not being an over entitled self-centered prick, and boy the patience team could use some serious help.

Check out my Local Harvest Store it if you would like to buy some, or just ask me at the Kennett Square Farmers Market, I probably have some in the bottom of my pocket. You will not find them on our website, but be on the look out for a new web page in the near future, that will blow you mind.

Just be patient.

p.s. I got Lyme Disease out crawling around collecting these seeds and felt like something from a Hieronymus Bosch Painting for days and could not drink beer for a month.

where have all the tomatoes gone?

Me stealing Amy Goldman's thunder at the Terrain Heirloom Tomato Fest, Just kidding we had a great day and it was wonderful meeting Amy and talking to her about her books. I lectured about seed saving.
Chef Dave Berg of the Styer's Cafe @ Terrain is an amazing chef, he used 30 #'s of black krims and Tim's Black Ruffles (gay name and all) to make tomato water to poach this fish in. BOOM.

Above all things I am a tomato farmer.

That is a big statement; I am a lot of things (some good, some bad) we just don’t grow tomatoes we live tomatoes. This year we started with 174 varieties of love apples from seed. Seeds that we saved from the year before, seed that we sell and also turn into tomato plants, 20,000 of them this year, and we sold almost everyone of them. We also planted somewhere north of 1000 plants. So with some quick math, I figure I am responsible for close to 100,000 plants hitting the ground this year. Most years that makes me feel great, but this year, OUCH!

Have you ever heard of the Irish Potato Famine? The Irish feel in love with the easy to grow tuber, but the problem was that they only grow one type of potato, The Lumper, I still grow this one today, and it is a great potato. But an entire country growing on type of anything is a bad thing. (Think Kansas, 99% of all corn in this country comes from 3 kernels of corn) Biodiversity anyone.

Maybe it is my own fault, when I had my planting party we put 660 plants in my one field. I told my bubby Jacob, I think I am going back out and plant 6 more, you know just to keep farming evil.

Bad karma.

So maybe it was a large grower how sold sick plants to a national chain on a year with a wet and cold spring, that’s sounds pretty evil, right?

We started cut plants out of the fields in mid July, when I should of started to harvest the first cherry tomatoes, to date we have lost about 100 plants of the 1200+ we have put in, the others, well they look like shit. Some of the varieties don’t even look like them selves this year, shape and colors are off, it kills me.

So what happens now, well you pay more for tomatoes. You eat fewer tomatoes. We could be in a 5 years cycle of this weather. (I will move)

So please go the your local farmers market or road side stand and hug your farmer, they could use it.

This is where it all begins.

We slept in late, I am on vacation, then we went to Blue Hill to a great place for lunch. It is the sister restaurant of Cleonice called Table a Farmhouse Bistro. O my God. I had the Ploughman's Lunch (thought that was fitting for a busman's holiday) The Mackerel pate was out of this world.

This is where is all began.

After lunch we head to the 'Good Life Center' Helen and Scott Nearing place on the Maine Coast on cape Rosier. For me this is a true pilgrimage I read the Good Life when I was just 17 and was hell bent moving back to the land.

Hand built walled organic veg garden.
Helen and Scott's home that they made by hand.

Then we went to see uncle Elliot. Elliot Coleman and Barbara Damrosch, have changed my life more than any other persons I can think of. From there TV show 'Gardening Naturally' to the many books and lectures. We visited Four Season Farm

Elliot's wonderful 10 acres of organic greatness.  Sheer Mecca.


This is hard to see, but it is a wooden fist raised in defiance. What else can I say.

VIVA!

Later

Eating local in Maine

Wow, the bounty of the Maine coast in summertime is amazing. The season is so short that everything seems to come to life at the same time. Peas and new potatoes grow next to the first cherry tomatoes. We toured a great farm yesterday, darthia farm was really great and I saw a porcupine in the tomato patch, I never saw that before. But Maine in the summer is really about foraging for me, and man the hunting has been good.

                                               Clams are everywhere, just make sure your cove or bay is not over raked and claming is banned. I had to walk along the coast until I got to the next township (about a mile) to rake them.
                                             Oysters are everywhere, wait for the tide to go out and walk out to the kelp covered rocks and boom.
Snails, they are on every rock and just cover the beach. They are called wrinkles here and if you get a chance you should eat at. Cleonice

I ate there last night and it was really really good, that and Elliot Coleman of Four Season Farm produce in on the menu. Maybe because I Elliot has been God like to me for decades (just look at his hair.)

The Chanterelle's are insane, they are just covering the ground. Slice and fried with some browned butter, then in go the local eggs and it makes a great side dish for our fresh foraged blueberry buckwheat pancakes
If you feel down up here (or down east ?) chances are you would end up with a blueberry in your mouth.
The last cool thing I found where these coastal cranberries, just about as sour as sour gets, but I wish they where growing outside my house.
Word from Pa. is that the farm is doing well and Late blight is not spreading. I miss the work and the landscape, but I did see a 65 acre farm with 4 greenhouses for 220,000 thats dollars, WHAT?

Later

Yo what's up haulms?

Today, man what a day, it has stopped raining every ten minutes, and the temp is in the high 70's and the Springfield like sky that would have made Homer happy. I have been digging new potatoes all day today. Making food is lots of hard work, so come and hang out at Kennett Squares Farm Market this Friday with me or Big D and Amy on Sunday at Headhouse. 

I love digging potatoes,  not grabbling them, but really digging them. I love potatoes because they have there own lexicon. Grabbling is the act of digging 'new potatoes' while not digging up the entire plant. so you dig in rob some new spuds and let the plant keep on keeping on. Haulms is the English term for the green above ground part of the potato and new potatoes, does not mean that I genetically modified them, it means (with most varieties) that when the Haulms flower you can dig the spuds and eat the best thing that comes out of the ground.

Also potatoes make me feel like a Hobbit, maybe because my feet are filthy, or my brain is sun baked. I love the hard work and smell of the soil and how every time you turn the soil and there is this mass of tubers and my 4 year old niece standing next to me yells every time, like she is opening a birthday present. 

Here are some of the prizes of the day. Starting in the upper left hand corner is a new one for me, it is called Inca's Gold. BOOM! this is a long season storing spud, but I lifted them now. The plants where about 4 feet tall and the root system is massive. The flesh is bright yellow and the skin is yellow with stripes of purple. The ones on the bottom is purple viking, this wonderful looking spud is pure white on the inside and purple and pink on the outside. This potato really needs a new marketing rep. it should be called purple haze or at least techno viking. 

The one in the upper right hand corner is Ozette. OK, so Spanish explores picked up this potato in Peru and took it with them as they traveled up the coast, they gave it to the Makah Indians in Washington State and some how it ends up in my dirty little hands.

Later

so long Mr. Jackson

I am not sure I want to farm in a world without

Michael. 

Odd little fellow, but just watch the video and enjoy.

Man that is a great song.

Mache pit

So my buddy was in from Colorado this week and besides all the drinking and fishing, I gave them a farm tour,  My friend said he reads my blog and wanted to know why the punk rock farmer.

So here is the story.

It all started on a summer day while on summer break, and shopping with my mom I bought a cassette tape for my brand new Miami vice inspired tape deck, it was teal green with gray and orange buttons, Very cool.

When we got home I took my new Suicidal Tendencies tape to my bedroom and pugged it into my player. The tape started playing and I was never so scared in my life, so I turned it right off. It was pure evil and I needed to take it to the basement.

So life goes on and skate boards and punk rock filled days, then in 88 Youth of Today released Your not in this alone. The band was really in  Vegetarianism and Hare Krishnaism. In the liner notes they had info about PETA and books by Peter Singer. I read Animal Liberation and became a Vegetarian, we all go thru weak points in our lives. 

Back then Health Food stores were the only places that you could find Veg. food. Then I started running into organic veg.  

I started my own garden and tried every thing I read Elliot Coleman and then started working for Tim Stark of Echerton Farm. ( I think I was a hippie then, but I never stopped playing the Misfits and Minor Threat. )

I still skate, I still play punk rock and I still farm, some just more than others.

Later 

Tomato Tim

p.s. I just could not bring myself to post a picture of my devil lock hair cut.