It all begins in a land far, far away…

In 2005, I planted exactly three pots on my terrace in New York City.  I grew four kinds of lettuce, two kinds of thyme, oregano, lemon verbena, and one variety of cherry tomato.  In 2008, I married a farmer, and we bought 25 acres in Central Virginia, managed a flock of 800 pastured laying hens, and planted approximately 7000 tomato plants.

In a similar tale of living at full tilt, I made my very first batch of jam ever last month: apricots from our neighbors’ tree, simmered slowly with a vanilla bean, and tucked right into the fridge, in part because there were only two pints and in part because I’m still a little scared of canning.*  And then last week we** went to the Prince Edward County Cannery and put up 58 quarts of tomatoes.

We had a fantastic time, and the Huddlestons were such generous, patient, congenial teachers.  Mrs. Lena Huddleston has been working at the cannery since it opened in 1975, and she knows a thing or two (hundred) about canning.  She showed us how to use all the big equipment to steam the tomatoes before peeling and chopping them and to cook the tomatoes gently before putting them in cans.  After that Mr. Huddleston took over and sealed everything up.

Meanwhile we cleaned up our mess (and now I want a hose in my kitchen).

When all the cans were sealed, we placed them in an enormous metal barrel, and Mr. Huddleston used an elaborate system of pulleys and chains to lift them all at once into a giant kettle of a pressure canner, where they were processed for the better part of an hour.  (During that time we walked next door to Granny B’s Market, where we had some fine fine reubens for lunch.)  And at last they were plunged into a cool water bath, to stop the cooking and to cool them enough to load everything up into the truck and head home.

Guess what everyone’s getting for Christmas?

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* I know!  A farmer’s wife, scared of canning!  I just have to begin.  My excuse is that the times when we have the most abundant vegetables here on the farm are also our busiest times.  Freezing has always been more manageable — and, I maintain, an excellent choice for many kinds of vegetables. But I do dream of being a food preservationist extraordinaire, and I really want to make jams and pickles.  So I really will learn to can.  Maybe soon.  I’ll keep y’all posted.

** Let me say right now that by “we” I mean, “Miles, Katie, Shannon, Ali, and the Huddlestons.”  I arrived late with Arlo after his morning nap, and we cheered everyone on in the final stretch.

This gal swears she’s a great radio voice.

Last Wednesday Arlo and I traded the juicy tomatoes and the excruciating heat of the farm for some blessed A/C and delightful conversation at the WRIR studios in Richmond. (Don’t get us wrong: we love the farm! But the cool of the studio was something else.)  We joined our good friend Eli of Eli’s Greens and Sunny Gardner of Lightly on the Ground for a great chat about farm life and local food systems.

Have a listen!

Lightly on the Ground radio interview, 21 July 2010

Down below the photos, we’ve listed a few recipes we’ve been loving lately.  Some CSA members have also been sharing recipes via email, the comments sections here on the blog, and over at our Facebook page.  We’ll try to highlight some of those soon as well.  And plans are still afoot for adding forums to this website, so you can share your recipes and cooking adventures directly; we’ll keep you posted!

Here are some tasty ideas for working through these early summer CSA shares and farmers market finds.  Most of them would be fantastic fare for your Fourth of July BBQ!  Lots of these posts link to other great recipes too.

Ginger Scallion Sauce at Chocolate & Zucchini

Red, White & Blue Roast Potatoes and Firecracker Potato Salad (two recipes) at Babble

Fondant Fennel from Edward Schneider at Mark Bittman

Raw Beet Salad at Just Braise

Quick Sauté of Zucchini with Toasted Almonds at Smitten Kitchen

Chard, Onion, and Gruyère Panade at Orangette

101 Fast Recipes for Grilling at The Minimalist

Soon, it should be easier to search recipes we’ve posted or linked to here on the farm blog.  In the meantime, you might enjoy just browsing the posts with recipes.

Enjoy your holiday weekend!  What will you be eating?

It’s with gratitude that we’ve been enjoying some fine roast chicken on these recent chilly nights.  We eat this chicken and think of the good weather, the uninterested predators, our kind neighbors, our rockin’ farm crew, and this lifestyle which allows us to produce so much of the good food that nourishes us.

If you feel up for it, follow a bit of the journey these chickens made by clicking here.

Are you looking for some good folks to buy good meat from?  For now we’re only raising enough meat for our own little family and workers, but here in Pamplin we’re lucky to live near two great families who raise pastured animals on a small-scale commercial level.  Check out Ault’s Family Farm & Apiary and Consider the Lilies Farm.

We got started in farming by first spending several years working for other farmers.  This is definitely the path we recommend.

(You can read a bit more about our thoughts on “good, on the ground, in-the-mud-and-the-muck training” over at the profile Serious Eats did on us last month. We were honored to participate in their Meet Your Farmers series and I can’t believe we’re only remembering to share this with y’all now!  Can I blame pregnancy brain? Winter CSA preparations? Learning how to milk a goat?)

After learning from some incredible folks who had figured out how to make farming a viable and sound career choice, we started our own farm in 2006, on land we leased from Susan and Chip Planck of Wheatland Vegetable Farms.

(Since we’re sending you all over creation today, why not read this Washingtonian article, which profiles the Plancks as well as some of our other good farm friends from Northern Virginia?)

We sold at DC area farmers markets for three years before buying Frog Bottom.  I suppose we thought we’d always make our living this way, by growing for market: working those fields in all kinds of weather, rising before dawn on weekend mornings, laughing and learning with our customers, packing up the truck again at the end of market, and heading back to the farm to do it all over again.

We love doing that, and thank goodness farmers markets are still a big part of our lives!

What we didn’t know back in our Northern Virginia days was how much we’d also come to love the CSA approach to growing vegetables and getting them to folks.  We decided to add a CSA to our farm when we moved because it seemed to make good business sense.  We were leaving a major metropolitan area for a region with smaller cities, and it seemed smart to offer different ways for folks to access our vegetables.  But we’d never actually run a CSA before.

Well: we love it.  We love being able to plan well in the winter and spring.  We love the security.  We love the sense of adventure and fun our CSA members bring to eating.  We love how connected we feel to y’all.

We love it so much that we decided to offer a Winter CSA this year, and a much bigger Summer CSA next year.  And that’s what Ali is up to in today’s Daily Farm Photo.  We’re going to be renting some extra land from some wonderful neighbors (and CSA members!) next year, and we’ve just started the process of preparing that ground.  We’ve plowed it and tilled it, and we’ll probably till it once more before putting in a winter cover crop of hairy vetch and rye.  This cover crop will do all kinds of good things to protect the soil and get it ready for vegetables next year: prevent erosion, maintain moisture, suppress weeds, and turn atmospheric nitrogen into nitrogen our crops can use.

Beyond the new field you can see one of our current fields, growing some of the delicious cooking greens that have already started showing up in your CSA shares.  The weather is turning, and those greens only get better after the frost — yum!

This here is one gorgeous Small Wonder spaghetti squash.  Cut it in half, scoop out the seeds, and bake it cut side down in a casserole dish with a little water until it’s yielding and soft, about an hour.  Then take a fork and scrape through the flesh to get long spaghetti-like strands!  It’s good with olive oil, parmesan cheese, salt and pepper — and delicious with tomato-based sauces.

This here is also an invitation.  When the 2009 growing season began, we anticipated throwing a monthly potluck for CSA members, market customers and friends.  Well, somewhere between endless rows of tomatoes, hundreds of feet of irrigation pipe, thousands of pounds of potatoes, many miles of road driven to and from market and CSA pick-ups, and this whole fixin’-to-have-a-baby thing … that didn’t happen.

But we’d like to get at least one potluck in before season’s end!  This is late notice, but you are all very warmly invited to come on out on Sunday, September 27, at 1pm, for an informal potluck and farm tour.  Please bring a dish to share.  Little ones are of course very welcome!   No pets, please.  Please call or email to RSVP.  We’ll email directions toward the end of next week.

It’s a great weekend to explore the whole area, too!  Ride in the Heartland is an incredible event happening that Saturday and Sunday in Charlotte County, with bike tours for folks of all abilities, and lots of options for non-riders as well.  And on Saturday afternoon from 1-4, our friends Copeland and Christoph are holding an open house to share the incredible work they’ve done building an off-the-grid prefab house just down the way from Frog Bottom.  Consider making a weekend of it!

We’re still in short sleeves around here, and the tomatoes are still on the vine.  In fact, click here to see a video of St. Stephen’s market manager Erin Wright sharing loads of recipe ideas for these last weeks of the tomato season, on Virginia This Morning!

But the mornings are cool and the days are shorter and shorter, and we’re doing lots to gear up for the changing seasons.  Here you can see part of our winter squash harvest, curing in the greenhouse.  And Shannon is headed over to grab some flats of lettuce and mei qing choi — which she and Claire are diligently transplanting into the ground for y’all this very second!

I didn’t post the second photo I’d promised yesterday.  Such is the way of things when old farm friends, setting off on a new farming venture of their own, pass through town.

Yesterday was a day for new friends as well!  It was our real pleasure to host the first in a series of Local Foods workshops organized by the Virginia Cooperative Extension for farmers and other artisanal food producers.  We gave a tour of the farm, spoke some about how we ended up at Frog Bottom, and talked about the CSA model which is working so well for us here.  Other speakers talked about assessing risks, assets, and market demand.

It was really a lovely morning.  Farmers can be busy folk, sometimes too much so, and one of the best things about yesterday was meeting some of our neighbors for the first time.  It’s good to know good people!

Future workshops will look at issues of liability and food safety (Thursday 9/24) and different marketing and distribution models (Thursday 10/29).  Learn more or sign up by contacting Scott Baker at the Bedford County Extension Office: 540-586-7675 or scbaker@vt.edu

One more farm photo coming later today!

Richmonders, do you know the little slice of heaven that is Jimer’s Frozen Custard, just a half hour southwest of y’all on 360/Hull Street Road?

As a once-upon-a-time Pennsylvania gal who spent many a summer down the Jersey shore, I can say with considerable authority that this stuff is the real deal!  It’s rich and creamy and cold and delicious.  There’s no better treat at day’s end, after a hot and sticky afternoon delivering vegetables, than a chocolate/vanilla twist on a wafer cone — particularly if you’re seven months pregnant, particularly if the humidity finally breaks as you sit at the picnic table slurping at the cone, particularly if Jim the owner has time to come out and chat with you about mountains and road trips and good neighbors.

So wonderful.  Click here for directions.  Coming from Richmond, it’s in a gas station parking lot on your right, just after the turn-off for Chesterfield Berry Farm, and just under a half mile before the Chesterfield Berry Farm Market.

Hie thee!

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I was in Richmond all day yesterday and didn’t post a photo.  So check back for a second Daily Farm Photo later today!

When we heard news of the late blight that swept much of New England and the mid-Atlantic this summer, our hearts just about fell out of our chests for the farmers up there.  Late blight is a fungus that destroys tomato plants and can also spread to potatoes; it spread like wildfire in the Northeast this summer.  It’s awful to imagine a summer without tomatoes.  And tomatoes are quite often a vegetable farmer’s bread and butter — a summer without tomato income is a very, very scary thing.

Luckily, Virginia seems to have been mainly spared, and we’ve got some gorgeous ones for you in the CSA and at market right now.  I always say you should eat tomatoes like there’s no tomorrow.  Nothing tastes like a vine-ripened tomato in the thick of summer, and their season comes but once a year.  This year, I’m eating them with an extra grateful heart.

We’re growing eight kinds of tomatoes at Frog Bottom this year, a mix of heirloom and home garden hybrid varieties.  All are thin-skinned and delicious.  I really am hard-pressed to pick a favorite — but if I must, I’ll always reach for a Cherokee Purple first.  That’s the purple one I’m touching in the photo above.  Let it ripen as long as you can stand it (at room temperature — never in the fridge), till it’s a deep dusky purpley-pink.  It’s amazingly sweet but with a nice balanced acidity.  It’s a natural for slicing and eating as is or in a sandwich.

Stop by the farm any day at lunchtime and you’ll likely find Ali and me both with sticky tomato juice running down our forearms and a bit of a homemade mayonnaise mustache.  Can you think of a better way to celebrate the season?

Here are our favorite ways to eat tomatoes right now; all require pretty minimal preparation and let the natural intensity of the tomato shine through.

Sliced and doused with olive oil, balsamic vinegar, sea salt, and freshly ground black pepper. When we want to gild the lily we add basil leaves and fresh mozzarella.

Sliced and stuffed into a simple sandwich of toast slathered with homemade mayo. We haven’t bought mayo in ages.  It’s fast and easy to make your own, and once you start, you’ll wonder who kept this secret from you your whole life.  To make your own mayo: Blend one room temperature egg, some dried or jarred mustard, the juice of one lemon or a roughly equivalent amount of vinegar, and a bit of salt in the blender or food processor for a minute or two.  Then add oil (we usually mix equal parts olive and canola, but experiment to see what you like) — usually about 3/4 cup — in a very slow stream while still blending, until everything is emulsified.  Our mayo tends to be thinner than storebought, but you can add more oil if you’d like it thicker — or a bit of water or milk or cream if you want it thinner.  You can also stir in more lemon juice, mustard, salt, or pepper at the end to taste if you want.  Put whatever you don’t use right away into a tightly sealed jar in the fridge and use within a week.

Coarsely chopped and roasted in the oven with olive oil and salt for an hour or two or three. It can be hard to turn on the oven these days, but we’re always glad we did.  Slow roasted tomatoes are like candy.  Toss them with pasta, add them to a salad, smear them on toast with goat cheese, or just stand there at the stove and eat them all right out of the roasting dish.  Roasted tomatoes freeze very well.

Tomato bread salad. Tear or slice some chewy, slightly stale bread into rough 1-inch chunks, toss with olive oil, and bake until crispy.  Toss with halved garlic cloves, chunks of tomato, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt, pepper, and some basil or other fresh herbs.  Let the whole thing sit for about ten minutes and then dig in.  Avoid the garlic cloves.  Or not.  We first started making it when we read about it several years ago on Molly Wizenberg’s food blog Orangette.  We can’t recommend this website heartily enough for its wonderful storytelling and its no-nonsense, always-delicious recipes.

Panzanella. Tomato bread salad’s slightly fancier cousin — a bread salad that originated in central Italy.  Here are two delicious versions, one at Kitchen Parade and one at Chocolate & Zucchini.

And if you can’t eat  your way through all the tomatoes: freeze ‘em!  They’re slightly more accommodating when you use them later, if you blanch, peel, and coarsely chop them first.  But when we don’t have time for that we throw them into Ziploc bags whole.  Then we use them in sauces and casseroles in the winter.

And what about y’all??  Please leave a comment and tell us how you eat your tomatoes!