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!

* * *

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!

Ali is not drowning our new chicks, promise!  But he is teaching them how to drink.  They never did that before this morning!

Our batch of 60 Cornish Rock broiler chicks (meat hens) arrived this morning.  You really do get a phone call, bright and early: “Hi there!  This is the post office.  Were you expecting some chicks?”  And you drive down and — if you live in a town as tiny as Pamplin — you knock on the back door, and there they are, peeping away inside a cardboard box, making more noise than you’d think day-old chicks possibly could.

They’re now in their brooder — a nice safe box in a corner of the greenhouse, with all the food and water their little bellies could desire (and these boys can eat), and a heat lamp to keep them warm until they’re big enough to regulate their own body temperature.  After a few weeks we’ll move them outside onto pasture, where they’ll spend the rest of their days eating lots of grass and clover and bugs.

These chicks are for home use — for our bellies — and not for market or the CSA.  But for those of you who eat meat … there really is nothing that compares to the taste of meat raised gently on grass and nearby.  Please seek out a local livestock farmer!  You can find delicious meats at both of the farmers markets we sell at.  Or try searching online — Local Harvest and Buy Fresh, Buy Local Virginia are both great resources.

And we’d love to hear from current and prospective CSA members: we’ve chatted with a good neighbor of ours, a farmer who raises meat on pasture, about the possibility of offering his meats (pork, lamb, chicken, and possibly beef) as an optional add-on to the CSA shares next year.  We have no idea yet about the logistics, but what do you think?

Sometimes, the only way to beat the heat is to embrace it.

We’re talking trips to the river, dinner outside at the picnic table, burgers and squash and corn on the grill, peach juice dripping down your arms, sweet tea and margaritas, the ice cream truck, ceiling fans, sprinklers, naps. And cucumbers!

Here at Frog Bottom we grow four kinds, enough to help you stay cool for a few weeks at least. We often sample the different varieties at market. If you’re a member of our CSA, be sure to try all the varieties before the season is through. The strange bumpy ones (see below) are our favorite.

About Cucumbers

Cucumbers are a member of the Cucurbitaceae family, which also includes summer squash, zucchini, watermelons, muskmelons, gourds, winter squash and pumpkins. Cucumbers originated in India and have been cultivated by humans for at least three thousand years, and possibly much, much longer – carbon dating places some seeds found near the Burma/Thailand border as being from 7750 BC! It’s said that the ancient Romans soaked their cucumber seeds in honeyed wine before planting them, in an effort to combat their fabled bitterness. In the Book of Numbers, the Israelites complain during their long exodus from Egypt: “Remember how in Egypt we had fish for the asking, cucumbers and watermelons, leeks and onions and garlic. Now our appetite is gone.”

Cucumbers spread slowly to Northern Europe, where the climate was not particularly suited to growing them, but they were readily adopted by native North American Indians when seeds were first brought by the Spanish conquistadors. Throughout the 1500s European trappers, hunters, and traders bartered with North American tribes for their fresh vegetables and fruits, including cucumbers. Letters from people who visited colonial New England in the 1600s praised the cucumbers and other kitchen garden vegetables there as being bigger and better than what could be grown in England at the same time.

One thing is certain: throughout all these millennia of cultivation, the bitterness has been almost entirely bred out of cucumbers. At Frog Bottom, we’re very careful to pick them while they’re still young – crisp and sweet. Their high water content and mild taste are what make them so refreshing on these hot, sticky summer days.

We grow four varieties here at the farm.

Here’s a pickler:

It’s called a pickler because it’s the perfect length for a canning jar, but this is a great all-around pickle for salads as well. In the bins at market and at CSA pick-ups, you can distinguish the picklers by their short, plump shape and their slightly bumpy skin.

This one, just slightly longer and smoother than the pickler and with slightly tapered ends, is our American slicer:

It’s another versatile cucumber, great on salads and sandwiches or just eaten out of hand.

This is a European burpless:

It’s very long and fairly thin, with smooth skin on the outside and almost no seeds inside. Very tasty!

Our favorite is the Asian cucumber:

It’s the ugly duckling of the bunch, with its wrinkled bumpy skin and funny shape, but what it lacks in classic beauty it more than makes up for with its crisp, sweet flavor. Try one!

Storing Cucumbers

We don’t wax our cucumbers – which means you don’t need to peel them! It also means they won’t keep as long as some store-bought varieties. Stick them in the crisper drawer of your fridge as soon as possible after buying them. Leave them there for up to a week but use them as soon as you can.

Preparing Cucumbers

We’ve chosen non-bitter varieties and we pick them young. So at our house, we never salt the cucumbers and rarely peel or seed them. It seems a waste of time and flavor when there are so many good things to do with them! We love them as a snack right out in the field while we’re picking. And of course they’re wonderful sliced or diced and added to salads and sandwiches. But we like them so much – and we’ve had such a bumper crop these last two weeks – that we love to dress them up a bit too.  Here are some of our old favorites, and a couple new approaches.

Ali’s Cucumber Salad

We make some variation on this salad two or three times a week during cucumber season. Don’t be afraid to play around with ingredients and quantities. It’s wonderful with wedges of fresh tomato and corn sliced right off the cob, both available at farmers markets now!

Several cucumbers (2 Asian or European, 3 American, or 4 picklers), chopped or sliced
3-4 scallions (minced) or half an onion (coarsely diced)
Handful basil leaves, chopped or torn
Handful feta or goat cheese, crumbled
Juice of half a lemon or a few glugs of your favorite vinegar
A few glugs extra virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste

Combine all ingredients in a medium bowl. Chow down!

Serves two with leftovers. Easily doubled.

Fridge Pickles

If, like me, you have been meaning to make your own pickles for what seems like a decade now, I am here to tell you: Get up from your computer this very instant and go to your kitchen! It takes about nine minutes! You make a simple brine of water, vinegar, and salt. Then you pour that over cucumbers, garlic, and herbs. Leave the jars alone for a few days, and voila! Pickles! I made them for the first time just last week, using this recipe from Donalyn Ketchum, and they are, in a word, perfect. Crunchy, garlicky, and just sour enough, I can’t stop reaching for them. These pickles aren’t canned, so they need to be stored in the fridge. They’ll keep at least a couple months there, but I doubt they’ll last that long! Also, you can use just about any herb. I meant to use dill but saw, as the brine was coming to a boil, that my dill had gone slimy. So I used fresh thyme instead. Yum!

Gordon’s Cup

If your work day has been relentless and nobody likes what you made for dinner and the A/C is broken, here’s what you need to do: make yourself a Gordon’s Cup. Cucumbers, lime, simple syrup, gin, and a pinch of salt: really, how can you go wrong? You’ll have to plan ahead just a little bit, to make and then cool the simple syrup, but that’s very easy. Make some now and it’ll last you through many of these drinks! Oh, and don’t skip the salt. Just a tiny pinch is really delicious. This recipe from Molly Wizenberg has everything you need to know.

Sautéed Cucumbers

The truth is, we haven’t tried this yet. I’m really eager to know if any of y’all have! Larousse Gastronomique includes several variations. Mark Bittman, author of the accessible, encouraging, and comprehensive How to Cook Everything, and writer of the weekly The Minimalist column in The New York Times, notes that a cucumber is “a vegetable that is rarely cooked but ought to be – at least occasionally.” He suggests a simple sauté of butter, onions, and cucumbers, finished with cream or yogurt and a handful of chopped dill. It’s next on our list; has anyone tried this?

* * *

And you? What are y’all doing with cucumbers this summer? At market and at CSA pick-ups, people have told us about cucumber soup and tzatziki. We’d love it if you’d post those recipes – and everything else you’re making with cucumbers – right here in the comments section.

Hi there!

Just popping in for a moment to remind y’all to pick up your CSA veggies this Wednesday and Saturday.  It’s Week 2!  The cucumbers, fennel, and eggplant are all beginning to come in — you should see at least one of those items in your share this week.

This rain doesn’t seem to be letting up, and we’ve lost some plants to the wet wet fields.  But the rest are looking great.  Remember that your shares will slowly increase in size over the next month or so.  Sometime in July, depending on the weather, the summer vegetables will be in in a big way!

Tomorrow morning we harvest for tomorrow afternoon’s CSA pick-ups.  Other work this week includes stringing tomato plants and weeding the carrots.  We’re glad for our mud boots for both these tasks!

I’d also like to point y’all to The People Who Feed Us, a lovely website with stories and short videos about small scale food producers and artisans.  We’re especially big fans of Nina Planck’s common sense approach to eating tradtional foods — the stuff people have been eating for a very long time, the stuff that tastes good and keeps you strong and healthy.  She’s profiled here.