Our apologies for the light posting ’round these parts — and to anyone who’s had a hard time reaching us — over the last week or so.  Half this farm family was out of town for several days.  The other half, along with our wonderful crew, had their hands quite full under early July’s blazing sun: picking, washing, sorting, picking, loading, mowing, picking, irrigating, staking, picking, weeding, seeding … and picking.  All hands are back on deck, so check in here at the farm blog often for news and recipes and a couple new features as well!

And now, the last week (or maybe two) in pictures!

Let us rejoice!  Summer is here!  How do we know?

Was it yesterday’s record high of 102° and the accompanying sweat in our eyes, grime behind our knees, and grumpy baby in our arms?

Is it the wild blackberries turning deep purple and plump along the edges of our fields?

Is it the hum of the fans, the buzz of the flies, the pleasant cracking and clinking of the ice in our sweet tea?

It is all these things — but mainly, we know it is summer because of this:

and especially

especially

especially

especially because of this:

Sure, when they’re bunched they look like some wacky offspring of an octopus and … a Martian?  Tuck them (with some skillful maneuvering) into a mason jar and they make a striking centerpiece.  And I was half tempted to wear some as jewelry at our wedding a few years ago!  But behind their whimsical exterior lies a seriously delicious vegetable.  We’re talking about garlic scapes.

We’re pretty garlic crazy around here.  Rare is the evening that doesn’t begin with mincing a few cloves of garlic and tossing it into the cast iron skillet.  We hope the same will be true for you this summer too.  We grow a variety called Music, with beautiful purpley-white cloves and strong perfect flavor.

Sadly, we didn’t offer it last year.  We plant our garlic in the fall, and in the fall of 2008 we were still farming full-time on rented land in Northern Virginia, and we just weren’t able to get away long enough to plant garlic down here at Frog Bottom.  But we’re settled here now and we hope neither you nor we will ever have to go without garlic again!

While there are hundreds of garlic varieties, all of them are either softneck or hardneck.  Garlic from the grocery store is almost always softneck.  The cloves are small and grow in concentric circles.  Most softneck varieties have excellent shelf life, which makes life much easier for produce department managers.  But we think hardneck varieties just cannot be beat for flavor, and the kind we grow keeps quite well.

Hardneck garlic has one layer of large cloves which grow around a tough central stalk.  This stalk sends up a flower shoot in the spring: the scape!  We pluck these right off so the plant continues to put its energy into developing a large bulb.  And then we head right to the kitchen.

Garlic scapes have a pretty strong garlic flavor and can be used in any recipe that calls for garlic. Chop or mince them and throw them in a skillet with some olive oil or butter.  Cook until they begin to soften, and then add more vegetables and cook until the vegetables are tender — perhaps diced beets or roughly chopped chard from this week’s share??

Scapes are delicious in egg dishes like scrambled eggs and frittata.  Or try mixing sautéed scapes into ground beef or other ground meat for burgers or meatloaf.  They’re also great in stir-fry and soup!

We haven’t tried pickling scapes yet, but this recipe (scroll down once you click through) in the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange summer newsletter has us itching to!

Perhaps our favorite thing to do with them?  Garlic scape pesto!  Garlic scapes and basil don’t grow at the same time, so you’ll have to either freeze the scapes and wait for basil season, or get creative.

Here’s how we did it last week:

In a food processor or strong blender, combine one bunch roughly chopped garlic scapes, a good squeeze of lemon juice, a couple pinches of salt, a good glug of olive oil, a small handful of pine nuts or any other nuts, and a good handful of something green and leafy — this would be an excellent use for your beet greens, which are delicious!  Chard works too.  Process until it gets to a consistency you like — the scapes can be a little tough so I prefer to process the pesto till it’s fairly smooth.  You might need to add more olive oil, or a little water, to thin it out.  Taste it and see if you want a bit more salt or lemon juice.  Pesto is a very forgiving sauce, so don’t be afraid to experiment!  Put it in a bowl and stir in a half cup to a cup of grated parmesan cheese.  Et voila!

(You can make this pesto without a food processor or blender.  Just mince those scapes as finely as you can!)

Pesto is so versatile and will keep for several days in your fridge or almost indefinitely in your freezer. In the last week and a half or so we have put it on pasta, stirred it into scrambled eggs while they were cooking, spread it on top of salmon before sliding it under the broiler, stirred it into sautéed vegetables, and used it as pizza sauce.  It would also be great stirred into soup, or any kind of egg, potato, or pasta salad.

Tell us about your garlic scape adventures!

Nearly everywhere we look these days, we see that the earth is preparing to rest.  Our frost-hardy crops are green and gorgeous still, but bare trees sway sleepily against a crisp early December sky.  The summer crops are all gone, either already plowed under or standing shriveled and forlorn after so many cold nights.  The chickens are molting and their egg production has dropped to almost nothing.  The goat is still giving lots of milk, but her coat is thick now, and every morning she gives a loud “MAAAAA!” as if to say, “Hey now!  What’s with all this rain and mud?  Give me August!”  Saddest of all, our crew have all gone home, to Rhode Island and DC and Oklahoma, where they’ve traded their rainboots for fireside slippers and are planning their next adventures.

But we know it’s all part of the cycle of a farm year.  We know it because the garlic told us so.

Remember this?

Now it looks like the picture above.  We’ll let it do its work underground all winter and early spring, while we huddle close by the wood stove with seed catalogs and hot cocoa and tax forms and our gorgeous, gorgeous new baby.

Goodness!  Between preparing for the Winter CSA and preparing for this new baby, posting has been a bit light around here!  Here then are a few recent scenes from the farm to tide you over till we get back on track with the daily photos.

Our days are full and lovely, and we cannot thank y’all enough for making this life possible for us.

Yes, indeedy!  Garlic is one of our very favorite things to grow and to eat, but we didn’t grow it this year — we were still farming full-time up at our old place in Northern Virginia during garlic-planting time last year.

But Claire and Shannon spent the better part of this gorgeous, gorgeous autumn day putting 150 pounds of beautiful seed garlic in the ground.  We’ve tried out a few varieties over the years, and our very favorite is a hardneck variety called Music.  It’s the only kind we grow now.  It has beautiful purple-white cloves and a strong perfect garlic flavor, and keeps very well.

We’ll have lots more to share about garlic next spring and summer!  And it will start appearing in CSA shares sometime in July — if all goes well, it will be a weekly staple till the end of the season.

As someone who would sooner give up the air she breathes than give up garlic, this is a very good thing.