We’ve added wood chips to all the walkways on our Fort Wayne farm, which required a lot of manual labor. However, we know this will pay off in the years to come. Wood chips have so many benefits. They reduce soil compaction, reduce wedding, keep the soil moist, and provide food for insects and mycelia (mushroom “roots"). As an added bonus, the wood chips decompose into compost in a year or two. This can be shoveled onto the vegetable beds to help all your Fort Wayne CSA goodies grow! Wood chips also mark the growing beds, which is integral as we move to a no-till system with permanent growing beds. In traditional row crop farming, the entire field is mechanically plowed and tilled to remake the beds each year. However, there are a lot of benefits to permanent beds:
In the photo above, the broccoli and cabbage were planted into straw mulch, which was left over from the previous garlic crop. These were planted just days after the garlic was harvested (I added a bit of added compost from our chickens). The year after, there was some remaining straw mulch, and I planted potatoes into this in the early spring. That's three crops with just one mulch application on our Fort Wayne farm!
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From July through the first frost, we have a lot of peppers in all sizes and colors at our Fort Wayne farm stand. Some of them, like bell peppers, you'll recognize. However, we often get questions about how to best use the more unusual varieties, so we created some blog posts! This one goes over some of the less common sweet peppers. Our offerings do vary from year to year, so be sure to stop by our Fort Wayne farm stand to see what we've got! Peppers usually start going crazy around July and last until the weather turns.
We grow a wide variety of hot and mild peppers for your culinary needs for our Fort Wayne CSA. Here, we've listed our hot peppers from hottest to mildest. Hot peppers are easy to preserve whole as pickled or dried peppers, or you can make pepper powder or hot sauce. I have provided my favorite use for each variety below.
When designing the initial layout for our biodiverse Fort Wayne farm, I knew I wanted to incorporate several hedgerows into the design. Hedgerows are essentially perennial beds spaced every 100 feet that incorporate dozens—if not hundreds—of herbs, flowers, fruits, and trees. Hedgerows are designed to flower most of the growing season. Their occupants span from a fifteen-foot pear tree to creeping thyme (a six-inch ground cover). Hedgerows accomplish three main goals for our Fort Wayne farm:
Dear Reader, We’ve been getting a lot of questions about Tokyo Bekana lately. This Japanese cabbage is a little thinner than normal cabbage—it sort of resembles Bok Choy or napa cabbage and can easily substitute for those in recipes. It can be eaten raw or cooked and has a nice, light flavor. Personally, I prefer my greens cooked into a hearty meal or doused in bacon grease. This recipe doesn’t do that, but I would absolutely still eat it. It features raw Tokyo Bekana and its crunchy cousin, kohlrabi, in a slaw made with miso, soy sauce, and rice wine vinegar—three classic Japanese flavors. Add other veggies from our Fort Wayne farm stand, like green onion or julienned turnips or radishes, to give this slaw an extra crunch. Love, Ginger the Hungry Dog Tokyo Bekana and Kohlrabi Miso Slaw
HDF Ingredients:
Non-HDF Ingredients
How to Make
Dahlias do not survive over the winter in our Midwestern climate. When lows in the mid-teens come, we work hard to dig and divide the dahlia tubers on our Fort Wayne farm. Dahlias grow into large clumps of tubers below ground, which can be divided and replanted each year. With a bit of care and proper storage, we can propagate dozens of new plants off a single cluster! Each cluster is cleaned, cut in half, and divided into smaller tubers for storage. It is important that each tuber has an “eye,” or growth spot, located near the stem of the main cluster. Dahlias need the energy stored from the root to make it through the winter storage, but they will not sprout without an eye. Divided tubers with eyes end up looking like small potatoes or even weird, gnarly fingers. It's because of the eyes that the tubers have these long, delicate necks as pictured on the right above. Once the tubers are cleaned and free from any debris that may cause rot, we wrap them in plastic to ensure they do not dry out in winter storage. The wrapped tubers are stored in our walk-in cooler at around 38-40 degrees - just cold enough to prevent premature growth, but not so cold that they might freeze. Thanks to these funny-looking tubers, we will have plenty of Fort Wayne dahlias for next year! Obligatory side note: dahlia tubers are actually perfectly edible, but with so many other veggies on hand, we prefer to keep them for flowers! Finished and ready for winter storage. Each tuber will eventually grow into the massive clumps pictured previously.
Dear Reader, Last winter, I decided to master risotto. It’s a bit tricky when you have paws, but I managed it (plus the mistakes were still delicious)! Fear not—it’s not as complicated as it seems, and as an added bonus, you don’t even have to peel the Jerusalem artichokes. This recipe is sure to impress your guests, and it’s a great way to try out this healthy tuber from our Fort Wayne CSA. If you are extra hungry, make like Gordon Ramsey and add scallops. If you are looking to keep it vegetarian, mushrooms are a great option. I’ll take it all! Love, Ginger the Hungry Dog INGREDIENTS HDF Ingredients
Other Ingredients
HOW TO MAKE Step 1: Celeriac Risotto
Step 2: Hazelnut Sunchoke Topping
I like to get a cover crop of winter rye sown before October so it is established for early spring growth. Rye is an amazing crop that stays green all winter and will grow six to eight feet tall by early June. At that point, I can crimp it (basically run it over with a giant wheel behind the tractor) to terminate the crop, leaving a thick mulch to fertilize crops for our fall Fort Wayne farm share. A year of rye: This system has many benefits that facilitates healthier soil and better crops:
This last photo is of our main fall crop, which I planted into crimped rye. I’ve experimented with planting broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kohlrabi, and winter squash (not pictured) in this way for our Fort Wayne farm stand. You can see the above crops have thrived in the rye, benefiting from the covered soil and weed-free beds. The patches of green that are actually rye that has self-seeded, an indication that I was a little late on crimping, but the new rye hasn’t out-competed the crop. Our Fort Wayne farm will continue to benefit from this system for years to come.
Peppers are one of my favorite snacks in the field and one of my favorite vegetables to cook with. Also, they are simply beautiful! Peppers are also one of the easiest foods to save for winter. If you ever have some veggies piling up in your fridge from your Fort Wayne farm share, I suggest trying some preservation. You will thank me in January! Freeze
Two of the easiest peppers to freeze include bell peppers, which are best cut into strips. Banana peppers also work well because you can cut them into rings, and they have a nice thick wall that holds up in the freezer. Simply slice into strips or dice into chunks, place in a zip lock bag, and freeze. It's that simple! We use them all winter in soups, chili, curries, fajitas, omelets, and other dishes. Quick Pickle Finally, all peppers are easy to pickle, but banana peppers (sweet and hot) and serranos are the most commonly used. Here is a nice guide to pickling them! We will also be putting up a quick pickle recipe in our recipes section that can be used for a variety of veggies, including peppers. Our chickens don’t often make it into the vegetable portion of our Fort Wayne CSA newsletter, but they do more than just lay eggs. In fact, they are an integral part of our soil fertility program, as they are efficient compost makers. Get ready for a good breakdown of chicken composting! All our vegetable and kitchen scraps go to the chickens. They are omnivores, so they eat a bit of everything, though favorites include lettuces, cheese, bread, tomatoes, zucchini, and earthworms. We mix in loads and loads of woodchips to provide carbon and neutralize the smell. For you backyard compost nerds, chicken manure is high in nitrogen, which makes a very “hot” compost. You really cannot overdo it when it comes to woodchips or any similar brown material. It is not uncommon for our piles to reach 160°, which is on the upper end of becoming too hot. The compost pile provide great interest for the birds, who dig for worms and other bugs as well as sprouted seeds. Each day during the growing season, we add some sort of green material to the pile: split tomatoes, bolted lettuce, or weeds. What the chickens don’t eat, they scratch into the woodchip pile. I heap the pile, back up and the cycle repeats itself for a couple of weeks. In the photos below, you can see how big the heaps can get—generally 3-4 feet off of the ground and several feet wide. When the woodchips start to break down, I allow the pile to “mellow,” meaning I pile it up one last time and throw a tarp over it to keep moisture in and chickens out. This allows earthworms, fungi, and other microbes to break down the remaining material over the course of several months. This period is crucial to building a legion of soil life in each handful of compost.
When the pile is done, it is roughly half its original size. It's dark brown, has no odor, and is teeming with worms. This is when its ready to be added onto our garden beds. Because our compost is made with chicken manure, it is extremely fertile, so a little goes a long way to help us grow all the veggies for our Fort Wayne farm CSA! Thank you, chickens! |
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