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!

Here at Frog Bottom last Friday:

Miles and Katie and Shannon and Ali hunched over the cucumber rows, plucking the mature ones from the undersides of the vines and filling their buckets for the weekend farmers market and CSA pick-up. It was a sticky sticky day, like all the days have been of late.

I ate my first cucumber salad of the season: two or three cucumbers halved lengthwise and sliced, minced scallions, minced parsley, olive oil, lime juice, feta cheese, salt and pepper.  Easy, fast, and unbelievably delicious.  We eat some iteration of this salad as often as possible during the summer!

And Arlo tried his first cucumber.  Tasty enough, he decided, but also really fun to squish between your toes.

* * *

Last July we wrote a post called “How to be cool as a cucumber” — definitely worth another look during these sweltering first days of summer.  Hie thee!  Learn a bit about the cucumber’s origins, learn about the different varieties we grow, and get some recipe ideas, including our go-to cucumber salad recipe, easy fridge pickles, and even a cucumber cocktail!

(Here’s Shannon showing off an Asian cucumber.  It’s a bit funny looking, to be sure, but it’s our favorite. Read all about it!)

It may not be obvious from our farm blog, since the focus is on vegetables, but it’s best I come clean now: I have a serious sweet tooth.  And when I grated too many vegetables for today’s lunchtime frittata, I knew exactly what to do with them.

I baked a cake.

Now, we’re not purists around here: our diet is so heavy with beets and chard and grassfed beef and eggs from our own chickens and milk from our goat that we don’t fret too much about some processed sugar and flour in our desserts.  But we like dessert so very much we’ve started experimenting with more whole grains.  And our recent bumper crop of summer squash and zucchini means it’s time to get creative.

There’s no way around it — y’all will be getting a lot of squash this summer.  So let’s just get right to it, shall we?

Chocolate Cake with Zucchini and Beets
adapted from this recipe at Chocolate & Zucchini

1 1/2 cups (180 g) all-purpose flour or whole wheat pastry flour
1/2 cup (60 g) whole wheat flour or spelt flour or other whole grain flour
1/2 cup (40 g) unsweetened cocoa
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
1 cup (160 g) brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp instant coffee granules or 2 tbsp strong coffee, cooled
3 eggs
2 cups zucchini, summer squash, and/or beets (any combination), grated
1 cup (170 g) chocolate chips or roughly chopped chocolate

Preheat the oven to 360°. Butter an 8″ or 9″ springform pan or 9″ cake pan.  Or try an 8″ cake pan, but proceed at your own peril — this is a fairly big cake!  If you have it, line the bottom of the pan with parchment paper and butter that as well.  Put a tablespoon or so of flour or cocoa into the pan and tap the pan from all sides to coat the butter with the flour or cocoa.

Put the flours, cocoa, baking soda, baking powder, and salt into a large bowl, and whisk to combine well.  Remove about half a cup to another bowl.

Using a food processor, stand mixer, electric hand mixer, or a spoon and some good old fashioned elbow grease, mix the olive oil and brown sugar well.  Add the vanilla and the coffee and mix.  Add the eggs one at a time, incorporating each one thoroughly before adding the next.

Add the wet ingredients to the large bowl of dry ingredients, and mix.  Add the grated vegetables to the reserved half cup of dry ingredients, and toss with your hands or a spoon to coat them lightly. Add them, along with the chocolate chips, to the batter.  Stir with a spoon until you can’t see any more dry flour.

Pour the batter into the prepared cake pan and smooth the surface with a spoon or spatula.  Bake for 40-50 minutes or until a cake tester comes out clean.

Cool for half an hour on a wire rack, and then unmold or turn out of the pan.  Let cool completely or just dig in.  Best enjoyed in a rocking chair while your partner and baby nap, with a cup of coffee and a view of the goldfinches partying at their feeder.  Also delicious shared.

(Additional notes below.)

Some notes:

This recipe is an old favorite of mine, but I played around with it just a bit to accommodate those extra beets and zucchini from lunch.  They didn’t quite add up to two cups, so I rustled around in the fridge and surfaced with half a sweet potato — how long had that been in there?  Anyway, I just grated that and added it to the beets and zucchini. Any combination of beets, zucchini, summer squash, and sweet potato will do.  They disappear almost completely into the cake and make it moist and sweet but not at all cloying.

Because a lot of the baking around here gets squeezed in during Arlo’s naps, I didn’t have time to wait for butter to soften.  I used olive oil instead to delightful results.  But feel free to use softened butter if you prefer.

This time, I just sprinkled powdered sugar on the cooled cake.  But it’s also great with toasted chopped hazelnuts, either stirred into the batter or mixed with a little brown sugar and sprinkled on top before baking.

And finally, if you have a kitchen scale, measuring the dry ingredients is a breeze!

Just a quick peek into how we’ve been keeping ourselves busy these last few months.  We’ll try to start every week in similar fashion here on the blog — a photographic look back at the week before. Hope you’ll join us!

* Thanks to Margaret Atwood for the reminder.

My word, Richmond!  You really pulled out all the stops this weekend.  That weather!  Those irises in your front yard gardens!  The heady scent of paulownias along the Powhite!

Best of all, of course, were the smiling faces and open arms at the opening weekend of our farmers market.  We could not be more delighted to be back in the swing at St. Stephen’s.  And introducing Arlo — now a hefty six months and grinning ear to ear! — to our community there was nothing short of joyful.  Thank you so very, very much!

For those of y’all who are market customers: we’re just doing the Farmers Market at St. Stephen’s this year.  This market is in its second year and is loads of fun.  It’s expanded quite a bit since last year and if you’ve never been, come see us next week!  We’ll have vegetable, herb, and flower starts for your garden.  A bit later in the month we should have some lettuce and maybe scallions.  More vegetables start coming in around the first of June.  There’s loads at market to tide you over until then, though: meats, cheeses, eggs, preserves, pastries, granola, coffee, ice cream, prepared foods, jewelry, handmade clothes, and lots more.

If you’re considering joining our CSA, St. Stephen’s is a really fun spot to pick up.  It’s our biggest CSA site so you’ll meet lots of other members, and you can make a whole morning out of a visit to the market!  (We’ve also got pick-up sites in Ginter Park, Church Hill, and Midlothian.)  We’re accepting registrations for just another few weeks; forms can be had here!

And like THAT!, our winter’s rest is over and the farm has come alive again.  Here’s a little bit of what’s been filling our days in recent weeks.  We have lots of things in store for the blog this season, so come visit often!

There are no tomatoes hiding under that snow, and even our cold-hardy crops like kale and collards have succumbed to the fiercest of winter’s frosts and geese.  But — after a gloriously warm and lazy trip to the Gulf Coast — we’re keeping pretty busy around here nonetheless!

For us, winter means seed orders and crop plans.  It’s a really creative time in our year: what crops are our stand-bys, reliable in production and taste?  What didn’t grow well?  What have we always wanted to try?  What varieties do our farming friends recommend?  Should we grow more melons this year?  Fewer turnip greens?  A new kind of tomato?

Winter means repairs and maintenance.  Our hoop house collapsed in that first big snow in December, and we’ll need to repair it before the season begins, since that’s where we put our vegetable seedlings to harden off before transplanting them into the fields.  We started construction on a small tool and repair shed last year, but found ourselves sidetracked by our busy CSA schedule and unexpected irrigation difficulties.  We’re hoping to get that built early in the season this year, before things get too busy.  We wrote a bit about those irrigation issues last year; that’s another big job to finish before the vegetables start growing.

Winter means doing our books, making sure we understand well how the business did last year, and using those lessons to make smart decisions about what directions to go this year.

Winter means finding the new season’s work crew.  Reading applications always fills us with excitement and hope.  Who will we spend our days with this year?  How will the farm change with their energy?  And ain’t it grand, that there are folks out there who want to do what we do, grow delicious food and get to know the people who eat it?

Winter means lots of planning and preparation for market and for our Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) subscription program.  Spots are filling up; have you sent in your registration form yet?

Winter also means lots of hot chocolate, lots of snuggles with Arlo, and lots of time by the wood stove.

We hope these last months have been good to you all, and we can’t wait to see you again.

This is Arlo, and he’s been filling our days with wonder since his arrival on November 5.  At 12 days old he’s already checking the fields for crop growth and deer damage with his dad, and milking the goat twice a day with his mama.  We think he likes it here.

We apologize if you’ve had trouble reaching us in the last couple of weeks.  We’ll do our very best to get back to you as soon as we can.  If you need to get in touch quickly, giving us a call is probably your best bet until we settle into our new routine!