Roma Tomato U-Picks – Also basil, tomatillos and hot peppers

The roma tomatoes are beautiful this year!  We will be holding several roma tomato u-picks.  Members can come out and pick up to 10 pounds (per share, not per family) at no cost; additional pounds will be available at $1.50 per pound, quantities permitting.

We need to know if you will be coming out to pick and how many pounds you want to pick.

An RSVP is required; farm@vermontvalley.com or 608-767-3860

If there are more requests than ripe tomatoes, we will ask you to wait until the next u-pick the following week.

We ask that everyone arrives at the same time so everyone has the same access to the ripest tomatoes.  If someone arrives a half hour later than the start time there may only be under-ripe tomatoes remaining.

A note on the weather:  Madison weather is often different from what we are experiencing out here on the farm.  If the weather looks questionable where you are on the morning of a U-Pick, check our blog for weather updates.  All events are rain or shine but we will give information about how to prepare yourself for weather.

U-Pick Dates and Times: 

Saturday, August 20th, 9:00 am – FULL

Saturday, August 27th, 9:00 am

Saturday, September 3rd, 9:00 am

Saturday, September 10th, 10:00 am (same day as Pesto Fest)

Bring your own containers or bags to pick into and to transport your tomatoes home.

The farm always can use plastic bags and neatly folded full sized paper bags.  Bring them if you have them.

Roma tomatoes are perfect for sauce and salsa because they are less juicy than slicing tomatoes. They are also delicious to eat and do keep very well.  We have 6 different varieties of traditional roma tomatoes (all red varieties) and 7 varieties of interesting heirloom varieties (a mix of colors and shapes with very rich flavors).

Basil: No charge for a limited quantity.

Hot Peppers:  We have grown 9 different hot pepper varieties.  You may purchase them for $3.00 per pound

Tomatillos:  Available for $1.50 per pound.  We grow a limited quantity of tomatillos.

Garlic: $5.50 per pound

Please leave your dogs at home.

Directions to the Farm 

• From Madison take Highway 14 (University
  Avenue) to Black Earth.  Turn left onto
  County F/Highway 78  (this is at the
  stoplight on highway 14, at the Shoe Box shoe store).
• Stay on County F for five miles to the intersection with County FF (Cty F turns
  right in Black Earth, then turns left 1 mile outside of Black Earth).

The farm is at the intersection of F & FF. A map
is on our website at www.vermontvalley.com

 

Crane-Ears

We grow several plantings of sweet corn for you, and for us as well; it is my favorite summer treat.  Unfortunately for all of us, many of our neighbors have decided to help themselves to your/our corn; the offenders primarily being our majestic Sandhill Cranes.  They have had a very successful reproductive season; the newborns are now nearly the size of their parents.  We always experience some wildlife damage to our sweet corn; raccoons, coyote, geese and cranes.  However, this year the cranes have just settled in for a long visit in our sweet corn patches.  They tend to peck a bit at the top of the ear and move on to the next; the ears are at the perfect height for them you know.  So what we are getting is an exceptional number of tattered ears.  The cranes only nibble on the very tops, so they may feel they are being polite, only ruining the upper 20% of the ear.

Now we could just pass over those ears and only deliver the non-crane ears.  However, that would mean you would not get much corn.  So we have decided to deliver these ears;  better a partial ear than none.  Last week some of you got less than perfect ears without this introduction to crane-ears, and were a bit surprised.  Even the ears that look perfect from the outside may hold a surprise once opened, such as a bad spot or some corn fungus that we cannot do anything about because we can’t see it; please just cut off the bad part.  This week we put in the effort to cut off the crane damaged ends; so you will be getting some “shortened” ears.  If we miss a few, please feel free to shorten them yourselves.  As of this writing, next week’s sweet corn harvest has not yet been discovered by the cranes; keep your fingers crossed.

At the Corn Boil last weekend, one young girl found it particularly exciting that she was sharing her sweet corn with the Sandhill Cranes.  I very much appreciate the perspective and attitude, but will have to admit the farmer in me has a hard time embracing such a thought.  Organic sweet corn is a very high maintenance crop; so much effort goes into producing it.  To give you an idea of what I mean in financial terms, if I sold it at a market, I would need to sell it for $1.50 per ear to justify growing it, and even then I would not do it; too risky with those cranes and other critters about.  So why do you see way cheaper corn all about this time of year?  The answer is chemicals.  Several types of pesticides applied to conventional corn make it an “easy” crop to grow and relatively cheap to grow.  We don’t use those chemicals.

The most common question I was asked at the Corn Boil: why does your corn taste so good?  Answer: it is fresh, harvested when it tastes the best, and kept at the proper temperature.  Large growers supplying grocery chains get paid by the ton, so there is an incentive to let the sweet corn get big kernels; that means overripe corn.  Sweet corn should not be left unrefrigerated.  All the local sweet corn you see sitting in the heat of the day on the roadside stands is getting worse by the hour.  It loses eating quality unless kept cold.  Even then, corn is significantly better fresh.  So eat it up right away.  Alternatively, a fresh ear freezes extremely well if par boiled for 3 minutes, then dunked in cool water to cool down, kernels cut off, bagged and frozen.  When you want it, just lightly reheat it.  We eat fresh tasting corn all winter following this process.

I hope you get a chance to enjoy the beautiful Sandhill Cranes on our farm sometime.  That would be your payback for some tattered sweet corn.

Harvesting Sweet Corn. The people harvesting the corn follow behind a conveyor. Each ear of corn they pick is put onto the conveyor and lifted into the wagon. Two people are waiting to receive it and count it into crates.

Corn traveling on the conveyor.

David

 

Tomatoes, Tomatoes, Tomatoes

Introducing the Vermont Valley Tomato Family.  We are now harvesting from every tomato patch on the farm.  Here is what you can expect to see in your share box over the next couple of months.  Hopefully this will help you identify it when you see it in your share.  Most of our tomatoes are Heirloom varieties.  An Heirloom is an open pollinated variety that has been passed down for generations.

Garden Peach:  These 2oz yellow fruits blush pink when ripe and have fuzzy skins somewhat like peaches.  Soft skinned, juicy and very sweet.  Light fruity taste is not what you would expect in a tomato.

Green Zebra:   A 3-4 oz. tangy salad tomato with green stripes and a yellow blush.   Eat them when they get soft.

Red Zebra:  A small red tomato overlaid with golden yellow stripes, the red version of Green Zebra.

Roman Candle:  A long, yellow colored, paste tomato.  Great for drying, sauce and fresh eating.

Ruth’s, Estiva, Wisconsin 55, Pink Beauty:  Red slicing tomatoes with amazing flavor and texture.

Cherry Tomatoes:  Sun Gold, Sun Cherry, Yellow Mini and Black Cherry.  We mix them up for you. 

Roma/Paste/Plum/Processing Tomatoes:  These tomatoes are drier than most slicing tomatoes, making them perfect for cooking, drying, sauce and salsa making. We grow a mix of traditional red paste tomatoes and others with fascinating shape, size and color.  Here are their names:  Debarao, Super Marzano, San Marzano, Monica, Mariana, Viva Italia, Speckled Roman, Amish Paste, Federle, Sheboygan, Opalka, Orange Banana. 

Black Krim:  A slightly flattened, deep red/mahogany colored tomato with heavy green shoulders; interior is a deep reddish-green color, sweet and tasty.  Unbelievably rich flavor. The Black Krim is ready to eat when it has turned a very deep purplish-black color, the shoulders may stay green. My personal favorite! (Barb).  

Japanese Trifele Black:  A tomato that looks like a beautiful mahogany-colored Bartlett pear with greenish shoulders.  A rich and complex flavor.

We aim to harvest our tomatoes just before they are vine-ripe. We do this so you don’t receive an over ripe tomato.  But it also means that you may receive a tomato that needs to sit on your counter for a day or two before it is perfect to eat, heavy and quite soft.   And when you do receive a very ripe tomato, eat it up.

 

(left to right): Black Krim (slightly under ripe), Black Krim (ripe and ready to eat); three red slicing tomatoes: Ruth’s, Estiva, Pink Beauty; Japanese Trifele Black, Garden Peach, Orange Banana, RedZebra, Green Zebra

Barb

 

Hot and in Transition

What do farmers do when the heat index is 119 degrees?   Harvest vegetables.  We don’t get a day off because it’s the Fourth of July and we don’t get a day off because it’s hot .  If anything we are doing more harvesting because the vegetables are experiencing tremendous growth in all of this heat.  We drink a lot of water and take supplemental electrolyte tablets.  We sweat out gallons of water and work as fast as possible to get the vegetables out of the field and into the coolers.  Not only is this week special because of the record heat wave.  This week marks the transition between early season vegetables and summer vegetables.  As you know, the season began with a lot of greens (lettuce heads, salad mix, spinach, chard) and other early season vegetables (radishes, salad turnips, rhubarb, scallions, pearl onions, snap peas).  All of those early season vegetables like cool weather.  As the weather gets warmer those vegetables begin to show signs of stress.  The loose greens will bolt, which means they elongate and produce flowers and then seeds.  Radishes become very hot and woody and then bolt.  Many of those vegetable seeds won’t even germinate in soil that is too warm; those seeds were planted in April and May.  In May we also plant vegetables that take longer to mature than do the greens:  zucchini, peppers, tomatoes, green beans, cucumbers, and eggplant.  We tend to these vegetables for months; we mulch, weed, irrigate and trellis, put row cover fabric on them to keep insects off and remove row cover so the blossoms can be pollinated.  And then the week comes when we can begin to harvest them.

A bit exhausted after a hot morning of harvest, but we did it!!

Cooling down in some icy water after coming in from the fields

This week we began big harvests of cucumbers, zucchini, tomatoes and green beans.  We harvest zucchini five days each week (we skip Thursday and one of the weekend days).  If we are not out there nearly every day the size of an individual zuc can double or triple.  That vegetable keeps us on our toes, or more accurately, keeps us in the zucchini patch.  As soon as cucumbers start to size up we keep a close eye on them, because all of a sudden they are ready.  We harvest cucumbers and tomatoes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.  The tomatoes that we are harvesting now are growing in our hoophouse, a large greenhouse structure where we plant directly into the ground.  We do this so we can have a crop earlier than we could outside.  The outside tomatoes are beautiful, but it will be several weeks before we will begin to harvest them.  This week was the first of eight green bean harvests.  I think we will harvest the first eggplants next week.  Of course there are lots more summer vegetables on their way, I chose to highlight the ones that define the coming of the summer season.

You may have noticed a slightly smaller quantity of vegetables last week.  This seems to happen when the early season is winding down and the summer season is beginning.  Plan as we may, Mother Nature always has the final say.

Broccoli Harvest: Heather (worker share) pealing leaves from broccoli

Chris (worker share) loading broccoli into the truck

David cultivating beets. The cultivator scrapes out the weeds between rows. We then hand weed in the rows. Yea, lots of time spent keeping the crops weed free.

Barb

 

Madison Area CSA Coalition Recipe Contest

Check out this great opportunity to get your favorite original recipe published in new Madison Area CSA Coalition cookbook.  Information below:

http://www.csacoalition.org/news/recipe-contest/

 

 

Madison Area CSA Coalition Cooking Workshops

Here are some great workshops to put on your calendar!

Cooking and food preservation workshops

 

Fourth of July Vermont Valley Community Farm Style

The day began at 4:50 am, civil twilight it is called, just a glow of light about 35 minutes before sunrise.  I met our Cambodian crew in the yard.  We loaded 130 large black crates into a box truck and drove out to the field to harvest Swiss Chard.  By 7:15 we had harvested 1150 pounds of chard.  Then on to harvest pearl onions.  8440 pearl onions later and it was 10:00.  The crew took a short break to refuel and then joined us in the strawberry patch.  We usually have several work crews doing different jobs simultaneously.  At 8:00 four workers had gone out to harvest the first of the season’s zucchini while another group headed to the strawberry patch.  We harvested strawberries until 10:00 at which time the Cambodian crew joined the strawberry harvest so others of us could go harvest broccoli.  The broccoli had responded to the heat and grown like crazy over the weekend.  1756 heads of broccoli were harvested, loaded into another box truck and driven to the packing shed where they got hydro cooled (soaked in tubs of cold water to remove the field heat) then counted into crates, iced and put into the cooler.  Broccoli likes to be stored really cold.  A truck load of strawberries came in at noon. We carried the crates of berries to a cooler and then took a nice lunch break.  After lunch the Cambodian crew washed and banded chard and a crew of four transplanted basil, three varieties of basil for the Pesto Fest!  David and Jesse kept busy irrigating the crops today.  A lot of time goes into irrigation.   This beautiful recreational weather is a bit dry for the vegetables.  Today has been warm, sunny and productive, what more could we ask for.  Happy Fourth of July!

Broccoli Harvesters

 

The first zucchini of the season

 

Strawberry harvest; William and daughter Bella show off a beautiful quart

 

Washing and banding Swiss Chard

 

Transplanting four varieties of basil (Lemon, Lime, Red Rubin and Sweet Basil)

 

Irrigation gun watering crops (upper left) and transplanting (lower right)

 

Barb

 

 

 

Pea Pick Annoucement

Details will follow, but to get right to the point: the Bad News is we will need to call off the Pea-Pick this year; the Good News is you will be getting peas in your share boxes.   Why the change?  The peas are maturing differently for us than in past years.  As many of you can recall from attending prior Pea-Picks, you are greeted with a jungle of pea vines loaded with plump sugar snap peas ready for the picking.

Prior year pea pick with members lost in the pea filled vines; this is what we plan for!

The peas we plant for the most part mature within a short time period which then allows us to invite all of you to the farm for a bountiful harvest.  This year the peas decided to be different.  We often don’t know for sure why plants behave as they do, but having done this vegetable thing for a lot of years now, we can take a pretty good guess.  We transplant our tall vining peas; they are planted in pots in the greenhouse, six seeds to a pot, and are planted into the field two weeks later.  We stake and trellis these peas so they grow 5 to 6 feet tall.  Their white flowers produce the pea fruits we all enjoy so much.

The flower that develops into your snap pea.

 

This spring was exceptionally cold, which we would have assumed would be fine for a cold loving crop like peas.  However, along with the cold came several late spring hard frosts.  The cold settles in our valley, when Madison gets a light frost, we are 10 degrees colder.  So those transplants were getting pretty tired of being walloped with 20 something degrees several times in a short time period.  They just sat there and waited for spring to settle down.  However, the time clock marched on and the pea flowers began to come on schedule but the vines had not had time to do their growing.  Below, you can see this year’s vines; although we’ve put in just as much work to make this plants grow, they are taking their sweet time.  You can see the maturing pea pods even though the vines are relatively short.  We expect (hope) the vines to continue to grow and produce, but over an extended time frame. 

This year’s pea vines struggling to grow tall.

 

Pea pods maturing on still growing vines.

 

As a trial, we also tried a different type of snap pea this year.  This pea variety grows only about 25 inches tall and is not trellised.   Turns out this was a bit opportune to have done this trial because these peas can supplement the harvest of the tall vining type we have planted in the past.  The “short” peas are doing quite well although we did not plant enough of these to pull off a pea pick with just them. 

Shorter style of pea variety.

 

Whenever things do not go as planned, regardless of the crop, the net result is more work for the farm.   Pea-Pick savvy members know that you are the pea harvest crew, meaning we keep a large portion of the harvested peas at the Pea-Pick for the following week’s delivery.  Well, no Pea-Pick means we do all the picking.  

We always learn something new each year.  We do our utmost to grow your food, but we also accept the limitations nature places on our efforts.  So, no Pea-Pick this year, but do enjoy the snap peas when they arrive in your share.

 David

 

 

Rain, Mud and Electricity – Wednesday, June 15th

I really don’t want to dwell on the weather and how it impacts everything we do around here, so I will talk about electricity instead.  Electricity, or should I say the lack of it, has just as profound an impact on everything we do.   Today was one of those all-day rainy days.  The rain started at 3:00 am at which time I got up, went to my computer and checked the radar.  It looked like a gentle rain so back to bed I went.  The rain never let up until about 5:00 pm.  It’s Wednesday, one of our busiest days, so we had a fairly good sized crew, 23 workers all morning.  The harvest was all in, and nothing else was pressing enough to go outside and work for 4 hours in the rain and mud.  Luckily there was plenty to do in the packing shed.  We washed and banded rhubarb and scallions (9 people for 6 hours); we banded garlic scapes (2.5 hours for another 9 people).  Three people kept busy bagging spinach.  Then we broke into all of the stacked up cleaning jobs – washing dirty styrofoam planting flats, delivery totes and strawberry containers.  A few people did get to put on full rain gear and go out to plant hot pepper plants and melon seeds.  We ate lunch in the greenhouse because it was dry.  Our afternoon started out with potato bagging.  Then poof, at 1:30 we lost power.  For no apparent reason, just gone.  All became very quiet.  We are used to the background noise of compressors and evaporators that run our coolers, the compressor that powers our pneumatic bagging scale.  We can hear the fans in the greenhouse moving air and the hum of the computer in the barn office.  It all stopped.  Silence is wonderful, unless it signals something wrong.  This silence was wrong. We couldn’t open our coolers or we would let precious cool air escape and if we did need to go in we wore a headlamp to see in the pitch darkness.  We couldn’t continue using the bagger to bag the potatoes; we couldn’t do all of our essential Wednesday office work.  No computer, no voice mail, no internet, no water.  But we had to get as much work done as possible.  We have one table scale that runs with batteries, so the potatoes could get bagged.  We had just filled up a 100 gallon tub of water to wash the strawberry containers, so that became our only source of water for the rest of the day.  It was odd and a bit eerie.  It’s now 6:30 pm, I’m typing on a lap top, still no power.  Black Earth Electric says they’re working on it.  

Early morning scallion harvest - Tuesday

 

 

Deb and Leah got to go out and plant peppers in the rain and mud - Wednesday

 

Deb and Joel potting up your basil plant

 

 

Barb

 

Welcome to Vermont Valley Community Farm

Welcome to Vermont Valley Community Farm’s 17^th season!   It means a lot to us to know who is eating the food we grow.  This farm was established in 1994 by David and Barb Perkins and our three children, who at the time were in grade school.  Now, 17 years later our sons Jesse, age 30, Eric, age 28 and Jesse’s wife, Jonnah all help run the farm.   The first season we delivered 50 shares each week.  This season we are delivering just over 1200 shares each week.  The support of the community of eaters has made this farm what it is today.  We look forward to a bountiful season.  Thanks for your support.

 

Vermont Valley Community Farm farmers

 

Pictured is the 2011 full time staff:

(left to right) David and Barb Perkins, still having fun after all these years; Chris Klaeser, crew leader and general fix-it guy; Deb English, crew leader and everyone’s mom; Jesse Perkins, usually seen riding a tractor or dealing with irrigation; Jonnah Perkins, Office Manager and go-to girl; Eric Perkins, Packing Shed Manager, silent and steady; Clara Murphy, awesome part time employee and (sitting in front) Cari Stebbins, the incredible Vermont Valley Community Farm cook.