Ground Cherries

Great article on ground cherries today, which you can find here.  We got our seeds for the ground cherries in our garden from Hudson Valley Seed Library as well.  It’s said they’re super easy to grow but we had a hard time just getting ours to germinate.

Ground cherries look like miniature tomatillos, with a similar papery husk and plants that grow quite bushy and wild if left unstaked.  However, unlike tomatillos, they are very sweet, hence their name.  I think they’d be great in a jam if you had enough of them.

Although ours took awhile to get started, they hung in there once we transplanted them into the garden.  We gave some to our garden neighbors Anne and Sebastian, and once in their plot, they took off and are HUGE now.  Ours are not so large, probably as a result of a failure to weed properly early on.  Still, we should definitely get enough to assuage our appetites for this delicious fruit.

Ground cherries are ripe when they fall to the ground (hence the name GROUND cherries).  You can allow the fruit to ripen in the husk after they’ve been harvested to make them sweeter. They’ll last up to 3 months if you store them in the husk.

Make sure you don’t eat unripe ground cherries! (I unfortunately am guilty of this.) That’s because they contain solanine, which is what makes potatoes toxic when they turn green.

And finally…what to do with all those ground cherries?  There are lots of recipes out there for jams and chutneys and even ground cherry pie, but we have enough already stocked for the coming year.  This recipe looks fantastic.

Fresh Ground Cherry Salsa
Adapted from Cook’s Illustrated (America’s Test Kitchen Magazine)

1 lbs of ripe ground cherries, halved (about 2 cups)
½ lb of ripe Roma or cherry tomatoes, diced (about 1 cup)
1 large jalapeno chili, seeded, with the flesh finely minced
½ cup minced red onion
1 small clove garlic, minced
¼ cup chopped fresh cilantro leaves
½ tsp salt
pinch ground pepper
2-6 tsp lime juice (1-2 limes)
Sugar to taste (up to 1 tsp)

Place tomatoes in colander and let drain 30 minutes. As they drain, layer ground cherries, jalapeno, onion, garlic and cilantro on top. Shake colander to drain off excess juice. Discard. Transfer to large bowl and add salt, pepper and 2 tsp lime juice. Toss to combine. Taste and add minced jalapeno seeds, sugar and lime juice to taste.

Note: This salsa can be made 2-3 hours in advance, but hold off adding the salt, lime juice and sugar until just before serving.

(makes 4 cups)

Farmer’s Market Sunday

Oh, I’m so far behind in posts.  Maybe I’ll be blogging about the summer in the middle of winter the way I’m going.  So much to do, so much to make, so many blog posts to write.  Guess what’s falling by the wayside?  I’ve had a post on crushed tomatoes waiting to be written for more than a week now!

This week’s loot from the market:

• One loaf Italian Rustic from Our Daily Bread
• 1 half-gallon reduced fat milk and 1 pint cream from Battenkill Creamery
• 1 canteloupe, 1 bag of garlic, two ears sweet corn, and 10 jalapeños from Barber Farm
• 1lb fresh mozzarella from R&G Cheese.
• 1lb beer sausage and 1lb ground beef from Sweet Tree Farm

Notes:

• Oh the milk.  The poor poor milk.  We had TWO half-gallons but one didn’t make it home. That’s what happens when you have a husband who takes the curves at crazy angles, and one bottle smashes against the other.  Like we needed to clean that up on top of everything else we had to do?
• P.S. We cleaned it up but do you know how bad the car smells now?  Rotten milk baking in the sun, despite our best efforts. Need to get the car detailed.
• Cream is for more vanilla ice cream.  It’s so good. If only I could stomach the cost of actual vanilla beans and I could have vanilla bean ice cream! Unfortunately, methinks $13 for TWO beans is outrageous. Never mind if it comes from the most exotic lands.
• We have our own garlic, but with all the canning we’re doing and sauce we’re making we’re running out fast.  I need a whole bed of garlic next year I think.
• We broke down and bought jalapeños from Barber.  We bought seedlings labeled jalapeños from Peace Tree Farm earlier this year, and they turned out to be cayenne peppers. Not that I don’t appreciate the cayenne peppers, but really, not the same. And the Marconi pepper plants we bought haven’t been very fruitful either.  Not a fan of that farm.  We have lots of tomatillos salsa and stuff to make and we’re going to need some hot stuff!

This week’s menu:

Monday:

• Salmon Burgers (from Fresh Market, they were so good!), and a salad made from lettuce from Barber, cucumbers, tomatoes, and carrots from our garden, and sweet corn from Barber Farm

Tuesday:

• Eggplant parmesan with eggplant and tomatoes from our garden, mozzarella cheese from R&G cheese

Wednesday:

• Leftover clam sauce and pasta from last week

Thursday:

• Anniversary dinner!!

Friday:

• Burgers from Sweet Tree Farm, with swiss chard from our garden

New Harvest

First zucchini of the season!  Very late in the season.  We nearly lost all our zucchini plants, but after we figured out how to combat the powdery mildew problem, was able to save some of them.

Zucchini as big as my arm!

Still, between last year’s squash bugs disaster and this year’s powdery mildew, I’m looking forward to having some sauteed zucchini with dinner this week, and making zucchini bread this weekend!

The dry beans have been growing well all summer, and are finally starting to dry, allowing me to pick them.  More beans for the wintertime!

And finally, the tomatillos are starting to come in, in pounds!

A pound of tomatillos getting ready for preservation

In the meantime, we’re still drowning in tomatoes. Soon there’ll be a post on canning crushed tomatoes. I just need to give them a vinegar rinse and take pics. This time of the year is busy busy!

On recalls and stuff…

Half a billion eggs and counting on the egg recall so far.  And today, a new one, a nationwide deli meat recall from Walmart.  Well, really from a factory farm in upstate NY that sells to Walmart.  This on the heels of the Perdue chicken nugget recall from Walmart in June.

Sitting on top of my soapbox, looking at my eggs that came from chickens I know personally 2 days ago,  I’m feeling pretty smug.  And glad I no longer participate in the “normal” food systems this country.

Sprays for the Garden

It’s a little late in the summer for this, but it’s getting posted for future reference. I often use the search tool on my blog to look up things I’ve previously written about. 🙂

This is our second year using the easiest yet very effective homemade insecticide for our garden.  We had a big issues with our green beans last year, due to the Mexican bean beetle, an ugly little beast that destroyed our plants before we’d gotten more than a large handful of green beans from them.

Photo Credit: Jason Riedy/Flickr CC

Ugh, I hate these guys.  I can sit in the dirt with the best of them, but picking the larvae off the leaves and squishing them between two rocks, the yellow guts shining brightly, icks me out to no end.  This year, we realized what they were early, and started spraying.  They’ve eaten some of the plants quite a bit, but we’ve managed to harvest pounds of green beans by now, thanks to this spray.

Here are the ingredients:

General Insecticide Spray

• An old Windex bottle, left over from our previous non-green cleaning life.
• 1-2 tbsps of Dr. Bronner’s Peppermint Castile soap (though I’ve used unscented before)
• 1 quart water (or as much that will fit in the bottle)

That’s it.  There’s all sorts of more complicated recipes on the web, but these not only have sufficiently dealt with our Mexican bean beetle problem, but the flea beetle problem on our eggplants as well.

Another problem we countered for the first time this year was powdery mildew. Again, since it was our first time seeing it, we didn’t realize the issue until much much later. I’m surprised we got as many cucumbers as we did since we didn’t spray the plants until very late in the season. We also lost most of our zucchini to this.

Photo Credit: Jeff Kubina/Flickr CC

Another super quick and efficient fix here though as well!

Powdery Mildew Spray

• 1 quart water
• 1 tsp baking soda
• Few drops of liquid soap

And voila! Spray once a week (I usually spray after a rain, which is more than once a week here) and it will clear up almost overnight.  Amazing.

I’m sure as we go on gardening year after year, we will encounter more and more plant issues to deal with.  But each year we figure it out eventually!

Garden in August

The tides have definitely turned, and we are into “late summer” in the garden, with the heat taking over and beginning to turn our tomatoes into ripe, red, juiciness.

The onion stalks have mostly fallen over, resulting in the harvest of over 10lbs the other day.  There’s still a few left, but we’ll soon turn over the vacant land of the peas and onions and cucumbers to plant more greenbeans, peas, garlic and spinach.

Matt’s Wild Cherry tomatoes are still producing bucketloads.  These are the best tomato plants ever and I would recommend them to anyone!

The green beans are finally ready for harvesting but are already suffering from Mexican Bean Beatle infestation. We had this problem last year, but didn’t realize it early enough. I’ve already sprayed this year (homemade insecticidal spray – ORGANIC) but I still found eggs and larvae on the plants the other day.  Ugh…I don’t want to lose my green beans AGAIN!

The celery is getting close to being ready to pick!  It’s at about 8 inches, and we’ll harvest when it’s a foot tall.

The dry beans are also producing well, and the melon plants have taken over the garden. They finally JUST started producing baby melons.  I don’t know why it takes so long for them to start. At this rate, I hope we have something by the time frost starts.

July Garden Tally

 

Sugar Snap Peas:  1.5lbs (mostly over by July)

Purple Podded Peas:  1lb, 13 1/4oz. (mostly over by July)

Cucumbers: 4lbs 1/4oz.

Matt’s Wild Cherry Tomatoes: 15oz.

Amish Paste Tomatoes:13 5/8 oz.

Fox Cherry Tomatoes: 1oz.

Cherokee Purple Tomatoes: 7lbs, 12 1/2oz.

Isis Candy : 4 1/4 oz

Garlic: 13 bulbs

Lettuce: 4 3/4oz. (mostly over by July)

Cayenne Peppers: 3oz.

Marconi Peppers: 3 oz.

Broccoli: 9 3/4 oz.

Green Beans: 3 1/8oz.

Carrots: 5/8oz

Onions: 8oz.

Tomatillos: 2oz.

 

Farmers Market Sunday

 

 

 

• 1 head Bibb lettuce, 1 watermelon, 3 ears of sweet corn from Barber Farm
• 1 bunch cilantro from Migliorelli Farm
• 1 pint cream, 1 pint chocolate milk, and two half-pints reduce-fat milk from Battenkill Creamery
• 1 dozen extra-large eggs from Cornell Farm
• 4 whole wheat rolls from Josephine Whole Grain Baking
• 1 Italian Rustic loaf and 1 sourdough baguette from Our Daily Bread

 

This week’s local menu:

Monday:

• Eggplant subs

Tuesday:

• Whole wheat pizza with eggplant and feta

Wednesday:

• Cheeseburgers with Predel’s ground beef, whole wheat buns from Josephine’s, and sweet corn from Barber

Thursday:

• Cheese omelets with swiss chard and mushrooms from the garden

Friday:

• BBQed pork ribs from Predel’s, sweet corn from Barber, and green beans from the garden

 

Plus lots of salad with garden-fresh tomatoes and cukes this whole week!

Salsa Time!

This weekend I made six pints of salsa with the 15 lbs of tomatoes sitting in my fridge.  Compared to last year, it was so much easier.  I also discovered you don’t really need to follow the Ball Book for the ingredients exactly, as long as you make sure to put in the proper amount vinegar so you don’t die of botulism or anything. 🙂

What I loved about this year is that nearly every single ingredient in my salsa came from my own garden, with the exception of the cilantro (from the farmer’s market) which I think is utterly ridiculous because I’ve never had trouble growing cilantro before, yet this year, my transplants haven’t done well.  But the tomatoes, onions, garlic, peppers were all by my hand, which feels great!

This year I half-followed the Zesty Salsa recipe in the ball book, using 10 cups chopped, seeded and cored tomatoes (not peeled though).  I hate peeling tomatoes, and I really don’t care if my salsa has a little tomato skin in it.  Although most canning recipes say to take off the peels, you can keep them on, they just might look discolored later on. To date, everything looks fine with our salsa, though.

The majority of the tomatoes we used in this salsa were our purple cherokee, along with a few amish pastes and even some isis candy!

Throwing 10 cups into the pot, along with 5 cups of chopped onions, 3 cloves of garlic, minced, 3 seeded cayenne peppers, a big bunch of minced cilantro (yummm, I love Cilantro) was all I basically did.  Most recipes don’t call for so much cilantro, but make it essentially how you like it!

Add 1 1/4 cups of cider vinegar to the pot and heat to boiling, then reduce heat and simmer 10 minutes.

Ladle into hot jars, leaving 1/4 inch headspace, adjust the two-piece caps and process for 15 minutes in a boiling water canner.

And for God’s sake, be careful when seeding your hot peppers.  I swear I washed my hands after doing so but I rubbed my eyes afterwards and was in so much pain!  Later on my eyes teared and the pain began anew! Wear gloves, it’s so much safer that way.

6 pints of salsa, enough to get us through to next summer 🙂

Coopers Ark Farm

Saturday morning I was puttering around the house when the hubby suggested checking out Coopers Ark Farm.  Coopers Ark is where we buy our eggs and chicken from most weeks at the Greenmarket, and it’s been a goal of ours this summer to go to the actual farms where our food comes from to see how the animals are treated.

Some of you may remember this post about an email K and I received from Phil upon finding out some of his chickens had Green Muscle Disease.  Our trust with Phil has come a ways since then, all of it good, as he has tried to be extremely forthright in all of our dealings.

Still, we had made a pact to visit at some point, and Saturday was finally supposed to be the ideal summer day, beautiful sun, low humidity, not too hot.  We jumped in the car and headed out to Schoharie, following Google Maps directions.  Turned on one road, then another, then found ourselves heading straight into someone’s farm!  Two farm dogs came charging at the car, protective of their master’s domain.  We brought the car to a screeching halt, balancing precariously on the gravel road (if it could be called such) before we hit a dog.

Have you ever driven through farm country on the east coast, on public “highways” that separate a house and its barns?  The barns are so close to the side of the heavily paved road, and the farmhouse sits on the other side, separate by the length of concrete?  It seems weird to see a parcel of land divided like that.  Well, drive to Coopers Ark sometime, and you’ll see how those roads became ROADS.  The private road we ended up on (because there was no other choice) was full of holes, gravel, rocks and we could barely get our car down it.  When the dogs brought our car to a stop (soon after I saw a Farm for Environmental Conservation sign on the side of THEIR barn), of course, the owner poked his head out to find out who the heck was driving through his land.  Sheepishly, we apologized for the intrusion and asked how to get to Coopers Ark.  He was very nice about it, telling us we could either continue on that road the rest of the way, or go back out to the paved road.  We decided to go back to the paved one, but when we found another turn off for Ark Hill, it was no better than the previous one.  Straight down a huge hill, ditches and rocks leering at us the whole way.  But we got down it.

The first thing I noticed was the house.  A nice ranch, but certainly nothing like the other farm we’d just passed through.

We actually almost drove past it because it didn’t look like a farm to me.  Little did I know that the farm buildings were in the distance.  Luckily, we happened upon Phil outside, just about to jump on his ATV and head to the barns.  After greeting us like old friends, we took a tractor ride out to the rest of the farm where we met many of the critters.

Outbuildings with small grain elevator

“Momma”, digging in the dirt for some corn

Guinea fowl, 3 weeks old

“Heidi” and “Willie”

Two calves sucking down water like there’s no tomorrow

Goats fighting over who gets the bottle

The lambs are much better behaved.

The piglets have freedom to roam almost anywhere. Look at their muddy legs!

One of the emus chows down

After we had fun with those animals, we headed down to the chicken “houses” to see how they’re kept.

I’m not sure why this picture is through the gate.  Phil let us in and I actually walked the whole length of the house.  Out back and to the sides the chickens have the freedom to come and go as they choose into the grass. I saw many of them taking dust baths, running around playing games, and several perched in the nesting boxes.  It really made me smile. They looked so happy.

Afterwards, we went back into the other barn because several ducks were sitting on eggs, waiting for them to hatch.

Look at the baby duck! He was born just the day before!  The mom had gotten off her nest to chase several other naughty babies who had decided to leave the nest and go on an adventure into the scary world.

What a good mom! She dutifully chastises them and they follow her back to the nest.  “This way!” she quacks.

There were other good moms.  Behind one of the walls of the barn, we found these.

How would they ever climb the 3 feet to the other side of the wall, we wondered.  But Phil pointed out this lovely lady.

There she is, standing on top of the wall.  Phil told us she goes down, picks up the chicks and drops them on the other side once they hatch.

After the duckies, we took Angelo the donkey for a walk.

I wanted a hug, but he wasn’t so interested.

Nope, all he was interested in was eating as much greenery as possible!

After we were done, we walked back toward the house, and Phil lent us one of his ATVs to head over to the turkey barn.  At this point, I put the camera away, afraid I’d drop it off a moving ATV.  The turkeys were a brilliant white, half indoors, half outdoors.  Whatever they wanted.  I was satisfied, especially because we had one of these turkeys last year for Thanksgiving.

After we were done with all the animals, Phil let us use the ATV to go touring around his property, so we could see the beautiful views he is surrounded by each day.  We took it to the edge of his farthest field and took it all in.

So gorgeous.  We spent about 4-5 hours at Coopers Ark, nearly all of that time with Phil Metzger personally, who took all that time to show us his farm, answer all our questions, and treated us like good friends by allowing us to tour around on the ATV.  Everyone should know their farmers so well.  🙂

P.S. – I could totally live on a farm.