1 qt new potatoes
½ bunch parsley, chopped
2 green onions, sliced thin
1-2 sticks butter

Cut the potatoes in 1” pieces, place in a pot of cold water and bring to a boil. Meanwhile, melt the butter over medium-low heat. Add the parsley and onions to the melted butter, reduce heat to low and gently stew or braise them until the potatoes are done. When the potatoes are fork tender, drain them, stir or toss them with the butter and herbs and season with salt and pepper.

2 tbsp sesame oil
3-4 cloves garlic, minced or ½ fresh garlic, minced
1 bunch braising greens, coarsely chopped
1 tbsp rice or cider vinegar
1 tbsp maple syrup
2 tbsp tamari or soy sauce
1 tsp red chili flakes or 1 tsp hot pepper, minced
2 tbsp sesame seeds
2 tbsp fresh ginger, peeled and grated

Toast sesame seeds in a skillet over low heat — tossing or stirring often — until lightly toasted and fragrant. In a large skillet or wok, heat the oil over medium-high heat. Add garlic, ginger and chili, stir fry for 30 seconds, then add the greens. Toss and stir the greens until they’ve just wilted; remove from pan. Add the vinegar and tamari to pan to heat, then add the greens back to the pan with ½ of the sesame seeds, tossing to combine. Sprinkle remaining sesame seeds over top when served.

yields 1 cup

2/3 c olive oil
1/3 c balsamic vinegar
¼ c onion, minced
1 tbsp fresh herb, chopped (basil, cilantro, etc)
1 tsp garlic, minced
½ tsp salt
¼ tsp ground black pepper

Combine all ingredients and mix well. Pour over vegetables and marinate briefly (or up to 4 hours) turning or tossing veggies occasionally. Excess or leftover may be poured over finished veggies for extra flavor, or saved for use later.

We are happy to announce availability of farm shares.  Instead of the already boxed (or bagged) shares that we’ve offered in the past, these are “pre-purchase shares” that can be redeemed at any of our weekly farmers markets (in Waterville and Orono).  Simply put, you buy a share and we keep track of your balance; as you shop at our market booth, we’ll deduct your purchases from your balance.  This saves you the hassle of fumbling with cash or writing checks at market.

You can start using your share as soon as you purchase it — be it for the remainder of this season or for next.  For more info, download the flier or email us.

Broccoli Raab (also called Broccoli Rabe or Rapini) is a wonder, under-appreciated vegetable and here at Fail Better Farm we grow a wicked good Raab: sweet with just a touch of bitterness.  Willing to try it but not sure how?  Below are a few recipe suggestions.  (Note that we’re liberal recipe-adapters and are happy to drop an ingredient if it’s not available at market or to substitute for another that is available.  We’ve made some notes below.)

Sausage and Raab Pizza (about 1/2 way down page) from NPR – Fennel is usually available at market in the fall, we’d leave it out if you can’t find and perhaps carmalize the onions instead.  We might substitute a simple chevre for the provolone.  (That link also features Anchovy And Broccoli Raab Pasta and Raab Fritatta.)

Rapini with Sun Dried Tomatoes and Pine Nuts (also about 1/2 way down page) from Mariquita Farm, a great CSA farm in California.  (Also features recipes for Rapini with Asian Flavors and Penne with Broccoli Raab, Pine Nuts, and Currants.)

Enjoy!

At this point, I’ve put at at least 5 hoophouses and assisted in various parts of many others. I feel like I’ve got a pretty good grasp of the process, but I just stumbled on a handy publication of high tunnel construction tips (PDF) from UVM.  If you’ve never put up a hoophouse, it spells it out pretty well.  I definitely picked up a few things that I’ll do differently (and many that I’ll keep doing my way).

Don’t let the “we’re looking for a new farm” thing put you off; we’re safe and secure for this year and we’re looking forward to another productive and bountiful harvest.  There are still CSA shares available; see the original announcement.

Updated: We’re sorry to say that we have canceled our 2010 CSA.  If you would like to pre-purchase produce from our farmers market stands in Waterville and/or Orono, please contact us.

Kendra and I are beginning the search for a permanent location for our farm and bakery.  (And our family!)  Please help us by downloading our farm wanted flyer (also linked on the above image), printing it out and posting at your local general store, post office, deli/cafe … you get the idea.  Thanks!

(CSA Shareholders please rest assured that we’re not going anywhere until after the 2010 growing season.)

Blogger recently informed us that they would stop allowing us to publish our blog to our own website.  I took the opportunity to move everything over from our old (but still viewable @ http://failbetterfarm.blogspot.com/) blog into this shiny, brand new blog. Most everything is setup and working, but if you find something that doesn’t please let us know.

Information about and sign-up instructions for our 2010 CSA season are now available for download. When shareholders signup and pay early, it gives us working capital in the winter and early spring that allows us to buy seeds and supplies. This early income is more helpful than you know. General info and details available in the sign-up form, but any questions which aren’t answered in there can be directed right at us.

Download 2010 CSA Sign-up Form

Updated: We’re sorry to say that we have canceled our 2010 CSA.  If you would like to pre-purchase produce from our farmers market stands in Waterville and/or Orono, please contact us.

In what is hopefully now an annual tradition, we’ve put together an annual report for the farm that covers the highlights of last year, our plans for next year, as well as a profit and loss statement for last year and a detailed summary (is that an oxymoron?) of what was in last season’s CSA. Hopefully, it will be interesting to CSA shareholders and other farmers alike.

Download Fail Better Farm’s 2009 Annual Report.

Please take a few minutes to answer some questions about this year’s CSA. (Inside the full post, of course.)

Please be candid; constructive criticism is always welcome! Simply copy and paste the following questions and send them to us at goodfood@failbetterfarm.com.

1. What were your overall impressions of the CSA?

2. Do you plan to sign up again for next year? Do you have specific reasons?

3. What about the veggies? Were there too many? Too few? Enough “staples”? Too much “weird” stuff? Were veggies clean enough? (Too clean?) Fresh?

4. Did the share pickup situations work for you? Were they convenient or inconvenient? Did you mind not meeting your farmer very often (if at all)? Did the tote bags work well?

5. Did you read the weekly newsletter/blog? If so, how often and did you find it useful or informative? If not, do you have a specific reason for not reading it?

6. In general, what are your thoughts about ways we could improve the CSA for next year? (ie, more pictures, more farm gatherings, less kale, different pickup time, etc)

Thanks!

We wrap up our second CSA season today. It’s been a busy, frustrating, exciting, depressing and ultimately very successful season for us here at Fail Better Farm. (Yes, even with all of that rain in June and July and the Late Blight in August.) As of early October, overall sales for this year are up from last year by an astounding 73%. Unlike the banking and bogus mortgage industries, we actually have to have something to sell in order to make a buck, so that means production was up fairly substantially as well. I’m looking forward to putting together this year’s annual report so that I can crunch some of those numbers and really get my head around some of the things we did this year. (In the “hindsight, 20/20, yadda yadda” sort of way.)

This week marks 18 weeks since we started the CSA harvest, and we have given out $424 worth of fresh, organic veggies to full shares and $212 worth to half shares. This marks a 6% bonus over the $400 that full shares paid for and the $200 that half shares paid for. The smallest shares (by value) were $8 half shares (on 8/18) and $18 full shares (also on 8/18) while the largest were $16 for half shares (on 8/11) and $32 for full shares (on 9/1).

In terms of the goings on around here, I have to say that this is one of the hardest times of year for us to feel productive. The amount of work never changes: there’s always too much of it. But much of that work is much less urgent than what faces us during the summer, and it requires a surprisingly large shift in the way we approach and plan our days in order for us to get anything done. After the summer, we’re accustomed to choosing our work based on how urgent it is. Since most of the candidate tasks needed to be done last week, we’re used to making those choices based on the amount of stress and guilt each of those tasks is causing us. With the change in season, all of the tasks facing us now — though no less important — are so much less urgent that the conditioned response of stress and guilt never really kicks in. So our productivity in the fall and winter really depends upon us completely reconditioning our decision making process. Not really all that interesting, I’m sure, but it’s something that looms over us every October and November.

We finished up garlic planting this week, as any of your following us on Facebook probably already know. We planted just over 5 beds of garlic, at 4 rows per bed, which works out to something like 4000 individual cloves of garlic planted. We used our “new” Cub tractor to mark out the beds this time and discovered that its narrower tires actually give us more room to plant. (The center-to-center measurement of the wheels of the two tractors is the same, but the Cub has narrower tires and so less space is devoted to pathway and more to growing space.) To whit: we planted 6 beds of garlic last year at 3 rows per bed, for a total of 3600 plants. This year, in only 5 beds, we were able to plant 4000 plants, an increase of over 11%. The benefits of that old, kind of janky tractor keep stacking up: even if all we get out of it is a little bit more space to plant in each bed, the tractor will pay for itself many times over in just one season.

A couple of things worth mentioning:

• This week, each of the bags should have had a note in it. The note includes a member survey. Please fill it out and send it back to us. The survey questions will be posted to the blog in a few minutes, so you can copy them for emailing from that if you’d prefer.
• You should each only have one tote bag now. If you find you have extras, please be in touch and we’ll pick them up.
• Sometime in December, we’ll send out (and post on the blog) our annual report and 2010 CSA signup form. Keep an eye out for it and please do consider signing up early.

Thank you all so much for helping to make this year such a success for us. The CSA is an integral part of our farm and we hope it’s been an enjoyable, nourishing part of your lives for the past 5 months.

As always, detailed share information, notes about the veggies, storage tips and recipe tips are all inside the full post. Continue reading »

The gardens are pretty much shut down for the year and the pace of our work has slowed a bit. Not because there’s less to do, per se, but mostly because we get kind of lost in the transition from the growing season to the … not …. growing season. Our weeks are still divided into CSA and market days (and bake days), but the intervening days aren’t also filled with harvesting so we can get back to fixing things (like our front door knob that has been sticking for over a year and needed only — it turns out — a couple drops of oil). Last week was the first time in probably six months that I found myself actually thinking that I had enough time to take on another project.

All of our fields are cover cropped; late, late crops are covered with reemay; garlic beds are prepped and being planted; our tomato hoophouse has been emptied of tools and plants and awaits deconstruction; deer fence has been taken down; hens have been moved to their winter area; and irrigation equipment has been collected and put away. Aside from planting and mulching garlic and doing a little bit more pickup, we’re just about caught up.

Egg shares are done. It feels like the egg thing is still so new to us, and yet here we are at the end of the egg shares. Egg shareholders had signed for 10 weeks of eggs and, as of last week, we’re there. The first eggs went out on August 4th, and October 20th is 12 weeks later. (Remember that we missed two weeks because they had stopped laying.) A full share of eggs was valued at $50 way back before we had any real data to work with. (That’s $5/dozen for 10 weeks.) The first week was valued low (at $4.25/dozen) because so many of the eggs were still small pullet eggs. Towards the end, though, we realized that $5/dozen just wasn’t enough to make it work, so we bumped our retail price to $6, and then $7/doz. Anyway, last weeks eggs were valued at $6/doz and that brought the overall value of eggs given to full egg shareholders to $50.25 … pretty much right on the nose. (For the curious, keep an eye out for our Annual Report later in the season. We’ll go into the details of some of our accounting and pricing standards in there. Suffice it to say, though, that it ain’t cheap to raise certified organic, pastured hens.)

Only one week left. The last share will be November 3rd — next week! Please remember to bring back any extra tote bags that might be kicking around the house. (Remember, though, that you get to keep one.)

Detailed share information, notes about the veggies, storage tips and recipe tips are all inside the full post.

All shares contain:

• red and golden Beets (from South Paw Farm, Unity, ME – a new farm (first year!) run by a MOFGA Journeyperson – grown “organically”, but not certified)
• Winter Luxury pie pumpkin
• Leeks
• white and yellow Carrots

“Full” shares also contain:

• more Beets
• more Carrots
• Garlic
• Broccoli
• Shallots

Bread shares: no bread this week

Veggie Notes

Beets – Beets are a wonderful winter crop that’s gotten a bad rap after how many millions of tons of them have been boiled and boiled and boiled to death (or mush). There’s nothing wrong with boiling them, per se, but if you don’t like them like that then you’ve probably never gone out of your way to have them any other way. As with most root veggies, we like to roast our beets. This doesn’t wash away any nutrients, and it preserves some of their toothsome texture. Beets can sometimes be bitter, but most of this bitterness resides in the skin and can be removed by peeling.

Winter Luxury pumpkins – A few squashes might vie for the title “Queen of Squash” (Musquee de Provence and Galeux d’Eysine come to mind) and Winter Luxury would certainly be among them. As ornamental as it is edible, it’s mottled, bumpy skin is beautiful and should earn it a place in the center of your table for the next few weeks or month. (For a squash, it doesn’t keep very well; only lasting into December or perhaps January if you’re lucky.) Once you’re done admiring it’s beauty, you’ll get to enjoy its wonderful flesh. Though it’s slightly sweet, the real attraction is it’s creamy texture — not tough or stringy — that almost purees itself. Perfect for pies, muffins, etc. And remember that that puree freezes well, so you don’t have to go pie crazy all at once.

Carrots – These are in fact carrots (not parsnips) and are best suited to cooking. In fact, I’ve included our favorite carrot soup recipe below.

Storage Notes

Store beets, carrots, broccoli and leeks in a plastic bag in the fridge. Pumpkins and Garlic are fine on the counter with no bag. Note too that the beets and carrots can keep for months; the leeks, garlic and pumpkin can keep for weeks.

Recipe Ideas

Beets – for us, the simplest possible recipe for beets is also one of the yummiest: cook up your beets (roast or boil) and sprinkle them with little crumbles of a good goat cheese, like chevre. The sweet, slightly bitter beets are complemented perfectly by the smooth, creamy, tangy cheese. Bonus points if you also mix in some caramelized onions with the beets.

Broccoli – Kendra and I had some of this last night chopped up and stir fried with the sauce from the Ginger Sesame Stir Fried Greens recipe. It was great!

Carrot Soup with Nutmeg
This recipe is from Cooks Illustrated originally, but we found an online version on another farm website and we’ve made a few modifications. It’s a simple, classic and totally delicious carrot soup.

2 Tbsp unsalted butter or olive oil
1 medium onion, or 3 shallots, or 1 medium leek; chopped
2 Tbsp dry sherry or white wine
1 1?2 lb carrots (8 medium); peeled, halved lengthwise ans sliced thin
2 cups vegetable or chicken broth, or just water
1 tsp salt
ground white pepper
a pinch nutmeg; freshly grated if possible
1 1?4 cup whole milk
2 tsp fresh herbs: tarragon, mint, chives, or parsley; finely chopped

1. Heat butter or oil in large saucepan over medium-high heat. Add onion (or shallot or leek) and sauté until golden, about 5 minutes. Add sherry and carrots; stir constantly and cook until sherry evaporates, about 30 seconds.

2. Add broth, salt, pepper to taste, and nutmeg to saucepan; bring to boil. Reduce heat to simmer; cover and cook until carrots are tender, about 20 minutes.

3. Ladle carrot mixture into blender. (Or just use an immersion blender right in the pan.) Add 1 cup milk; blend until very smooth. Return soup to saucepan; cook over low heat until warmed through. If soup is too thick, stir in additional milk to thin consistency. Adjust seasonings. (Soup can be refrigerated for 3 days and reheated just before serving.)

4. Ladle soup into individual bowls. Garnish with minced fresh herb and serve immediately.

As always, we welcome your feedback. Please let us know if you have any questions, concerns or problems. Also, please send along any recipes you’d like to share.

We hope you enjoy the share!

I’m not the only one that noticed the snow, right? It did happen? Right? It was actually kind of fun to dig the parsley and cardoons out from under a few inches of snow, though any more than a few inches and it would have just been bothersome.

The past week has seen us cutting the last of our tomato plants from the field and pulling up the last of our black plastic. We hung our popcorn crop up to dry and we started planting garlic. Last year we planted six 100′ beds of garlic, and I’d like to do the same this year. We also seeding our big garden to cover crop and got a new (to us) reach in cooler up and running. The second cooler will be great for the fall and winter because it will let us keep our big storage crops in our big cooler and we can keep our apples and such separate from them in the reach in. Next year the second cooler will let us take better care of some crops that don’t like to be chilled so much such a eggplant, peppers, zucchinis and such.

Two weeks left. The last share will be November 3rd.

Detailed share information, notes about the veggies, storage tips and recipe tips are all inside the full post.

All shares contain:

• Cabbage (from Freedom Farm, Freedom, ME – also MOFGA Certified Organic)
• Delicata squash
• Cardoons
• Parsley
• Popcorn

“Full” shares also contain:

• a bigger Cabbage
• more Delicata
• Celeriac
• Leeks

Bread shares: one loaf each of Brooklin and Multigrain Sourdoughs

Veggie Notes

Cabbage – Just a cabbage. To prepare: cut in half and cut out the conical “core”. Now prepare as the recipe indicates. See below for a recipe.

Cardoons – OK, so, yes, these have thorns. And they’re BIG. They’re also just kind of strange all around. These are a leafy relative of an artichoke from which you eat the tender stalk instead of the flower. There is also a bit of prep work involved (cut off leaves, peel off thorns, blanch) but once you get past that they really are delicious. If you’re really curious about this odd (to us) veggie, check out this great write up of Cardoons of at the Ladybug Letter, in which he mentions not only Charles Darwin’s feelings for cardoons but also that the Swiss developed chard because they couldn’t grow cardoons. (The name “Chard” is, apparently, descended from the French word for cardoons, or “chardon”, and “Swiss Chard” was, again apparently, a sneering dismissive used by cooks with access to real cardoons.) To prepare: Step 1: cut off the top of the stalk as it too small to be of much use (about the size of a pinky finger) and then cut off the leaves that remain on the stalk. Step 2: Now use a knife or a veggie peeler to remove the thorns that grow along the edges of the stalk. Some suggest that the skin of the cardoon is bitter and should also be peeled, but we haven’t found this to be true. If you will be chopping up the stalk, there is no need to do any more peeling, but if you will be using the stalk whole (for dipping, perhaps) then you may want to peel off some of the stringy bits from the ridges on the back of the stalk. Step 3: finally you’ll probably want to blanch the stalks in salted water. Bring a pot of salted water to boil as you would for pasta and, just before adding the cardoons, add a splash or two of red or white wine vinegar. (The vinegar keeps the stalks from discoloring.) Boil them until they are “fork tender”. (How tender depends on how much more cooking you’ll be doing to them: if you’ll be making a dip out of them, then you’ll want them pretty tender, but if you’ll be baking them for another 45 minutes in the Potato and Cardoon Gratin, then you can leave them a little al dente. Finally, Step 4: prepare the blanched cardoons according to your recipe.

Popcorn – We did grow popcorn this yes, but this popcorn is actually from last year’s crop. We harvested last years crop and hung it to dry, only find that every test batch we tried failed to pop. So there it hung, in our living room all winter, spring and summer. Now that we’ve harvested this year’s crop (disappointed, we planted a different variety this year — the same one that was a resounding success in 2007) we needed to hang it to dry, so I had to clear out last year’s crop to make space. But before I composted all of it, I tried one last batch … and it popped wonderfully! Two, three, four more test batches followed just to be sure — they were all great. So now this year’s crop is drying and you get to enjoy last year’s crop. The variety of this popcorn is called Pennsylvania Dutch Butter Flavored. (Do you blame me for growing something whose name includes the words “butter flavored”?) Some might disagree, but we don’t taste any butter in there, but we do taste a light, crunchy, fun snack. To get the kernels off the cob: sometimes you can loosen up the kernels just by working them back and forth with your hands, but wedging a butter knife between rows of kernels and prying it one way or the other will do the trick. Once you have a row or two of kernels removed along the length of the ear, you can get the rest off simply by rubbing with your thumbs or by pretending you’re back in elementary school and the ear of corn if the forearm of your friend who you’re going to give an “Indian burn” to: grasp the ear firmly in both hands and twist your hands in opposite directions. (Do this over a bowl!)

Storage Notes

Store celeriac, cardoons, parsley, cabbage and leeks in a plastic bag in the fridge. Delicata squash and popcorn are fine on the counter with no bag. Note too that the celeriac, cabbage, squash and popcorn can keep for months; the leeks can keep for weeks.

Recipe Ideas

Cabbage – Kendra and I love to make a cabbage dish from Deborah Madison’s book Local Flavors. It’s called White Beans with Black Kale and Savoy Cabbage. This cabbage isn’t a savoy cabbage, and there was no Lacinato kale in the share this week, but it’s still a great recipe. It even calls for leeks! The recipe in question is the second one listed on this website.

Cardoons – I will again direct you to the excellent write up of cardoons over at the Ladybug Letter. Further down, there is a recipe for Potato and Cardoon Gratin (which we’ve made and loved several times in the past week) as well as a link to a “photoessay” of the making of the dish. If that doesn’t do it for you, then Kendra and I both think that the cardoon would be excellent when substituted for artichokes in a Spinach and Artichoke Dip.

Popcorn – If you have an air popper or a stove top popper, you’re all set. If you don’t? We have had luck in the past just using a large soup pot: we heated it over medium-high heat, added the oil and popcorn, put on the lid and periodically shook ther kernels around. Once they started to pop, we just shook things up more often. You’ll need some potholders, but it works fine. But now the more interesting option (for those of you with microwaves): homemade microwave popcorn. All you need is a microwave, a brown paper bag and some popcorn. Too cool.

As always, we welcome your feedback. Please let us know if you have any questions, concerns or problems. Also, please send along any recipes you’d like to share.

We hope you enjoy the share!