Spring Inspiration

Winter is over?

I am super excited about the release of this documentary by the Greenhorns about young farmers in the US. The work they do and passion they exude is such a huge inspiration for young and new farmers beyond their borders...

Their blog is always filled with good stuff too. http://thegreenhorns.wordpress.com/

Enjoy!

Amy

GH_Peek in Progress from The Greenhorns on Vimeo.

We Want You to Join Our CSA!

We have been hinting for some time that we would be introducing a C(ommunity) S(hared) A(griculture) program for this season. The program will build on the wildly successful harvest box program that we introduced in 2009, with some slight changes.

What is this CSA you say? Check out what Wikipedia has to say on the matter:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community-supported_agriculture#Distribution_and_Marketing_Methods

For more details about our CSA program click on the poster below to make it bigger.

There are limited spots available to folks in the Lower Mainland (Abbotsford & Vancouver) so sign up now, or get in touch with us skeeterfarm (at) gmail.com for more info.

Happy eating!

Come farm with us!

Given that we will be growing a variety of new crops and expanding our marketing efforts this year, we have started the search for an additional farmer.

If you are energetic and have a strong work ethic and a desire to farm, contact us! Although we all help out with every farm task, we are looking for assistance with vegetable production/field work in particular. We would also welcome anyone interested in leading value-added product development (e.g. pickle production) and/or special events and promotions for the farm. Given that we all have jobs in addition to our work with Skeeter Farm, we are flexible about work arrangements. Previous experience in agriculture is not required.

So, have you been thinking about giving farming a try? Excited to get your hands in the dirt? Send us an email by March 31st, 2010 at skeeterfarm (at) gmail.com with some information about your background, availability, and the type of commitment you are interested in.

Soups to ward off the scurvy

Anyone else out there have a hard time buying vegetables at the grocery store this time of year? Especially since we started our little farm last year, it just seems strange to walk into a store and spend $4.99 on a pound of tomatoes shipped fresh from Spain.

Lately I have been noticing that my diet has changed significantly with the change in seasons. I eat much less fresh leafy greens and have switched over to root crops, namely potatoes but also beets, sweet potatoes, rutabagas and all that good stuff. Roots are great, but there are still a whole lot less veg in my diet compared to the summer months...and to be honest, its a lot harder to come up with things to eat when you feel a little pang of guilt every time you buy an pricey and not so great tasting imported vegetable. I wouldn't consider myself a hardcore locavore by any stretch of the imagination but I am trying this winter to be smart about what I am buying. Perhaps some of you readers feel the same way and might appreciate a couple good soups that you can make from mostly or entirely local ingredients. I shop mostly at Thrifty Foods and they happen to carry quite a bit of BC product in the produce department, even in February!

The following are a couple of lunch/dinner ideas which we fall back on frequently around our house. I have attempted to write recipes, but you'll have to just go with your judgement on quantities as I rarely measure.

1. Potato and leek soup: You will need - potatoes, leeks, yellow onion, some vegetable stock, butter and other seasonings like salt and pepper. I dice the potatoes and slice up the leeks and onion. Sautee the leeks and onion in butter til the onions are clear. Then add it to a pot of vegetable stock (although any stock will do) with the potatoes, add your seasonings. Bring it up to a simmer and cook until the potatoes are soft. Run it all through a blender and top it with some fresh chopped rosemary.

2. Pear and parsnip soup: This one came from a cookbook demonstration night that my friend took me to back in November. I had never cooked parsnips prior to making this soup, but now I'm hooked. I even eat them raw - they are like a sweet, earthy carrot. Another cool thing I learned at this cookbook night is that pears (which we grow a lot of in BC) keep for months in the fridge. Also, they ripen from the inside out, so when you are selecting from a tree or from the store, you can pick them really hard and they will ripen with time. So load up on pears while you still can. Okay so for this soup you need: 1 pear, a yellow onion, 2 large parsnips or more if they are small, about 4 or 5 cups of veggie broth, butter, flour, rosemary, seasonings like salt and pepper. I start by sauteeing the onions and parsnips (which you chop up) in butter in a large stock pot. Do this for about 5 minutes until the parsnips start to get soft, then add a few tablespoons of flour and cook a couple minutes more. Add the stock, and then the pear (cubed) and chopped rosemary. Simmer for about 15 minutes until parsnips are soft, then run it all through a blender and eat.

Both soups are pretty hearty so we just serve with bread and its a pretty good meal!

We are alway looking for new recipe ideas so please send us yours if you are willing to share.

-Amy

We are doing something special

Winter is the time for...banking! This year, we have decided to establish leads for each category of farm task in order to increase our efficiency. Under our new structure, I am leading our business management and marketing activities. So, I've been working on various spreadsheets and documents as well as talking with banks about business banking. It may sound boring, but I am loving it!

Anyway, I was recently in a conversation with a friend of mine who is a financial advisor. I spent a long time explaining our business model. Although we are a for-profit business, our plan is to slowly sell our equipment to the Barrowtown Agricultural Development Society so that it can be shared with other new farmers. We also have to think about succession planning so that our land is shared, either through incorporating new business partners or by welcoming other farm businesses onto our site. After awhile she stopped me and said, "You guys are doing something really special!" I had to agree. Even if it is challenging to set up, at the end of the day it will be worth it.

I feel very lucky to be part of such an exciting and unique project. This year feels much less scary to me and I can't wait to get seeds in the ground again!

Like Kids in a Candy Store

Last week Hannah, Jamie and I sat down for a planning meeting over some pizzas and managed to plough through our 2010 seed order.

There's something about doing a seed order that gives me that kid in the candy store feeling (or perhaps more appropriately, the Amy loose in an online shoe store type feeling). Its January, and it seems like the possibilities are endless as to what we can do this year. Last year we literally did not get seed in the ground until after June 1st, and we still managed to pull off 10 weeks at the market and even more for our CSA customers. This year, the seeding has already started with the garlic in the ground last October, and the first of our transplants will be started sometime in February if all goes well.

With the addition of a hoop hoop house on the site we have expanded our crop selection quite significantly to include things that should grow well under plastic, as well as added many more crops that for us will be experimental. Our main train of thought(s) when going about deciding what to plant is first, thinking about what we, and our foodie friends, want to eat. Then we reflect on what have seen at the markets in abundance, and what (if anything) we thought was missing from farmers markets. Jamie then adds in fancy knowledge about industry trends and new and unusual crops, and then we also consider that we have several different marketing streams - CSA, farmers markets, and bulk sales to customers for pickling and other needs. Lastly we take into account our previous growing experience. What crops did well on the site, held up well at the market and were worthwhile, financially, to grow.

I wont go into the varietal details of what we have decided to grow this year, otherwise this blog post would be far too lengthy, but for those who are interested here is a run down of the crops we have decided upon for 2010.

Lettuce, greens, beans, swiss chard, summer squash, scallions, storage onions, cabbage, carrots, peas, cauliflower, potatoes, beets, broccoli, kale, cucumbers for slicing and pickling, corn (eating, popping and decorative!), some lovely oriental vegetables like choi and daikon, spinach, winter squashes, pumpkins (this time ones that are good for eating and carving), brussels sprouts and sweet potatoes

and for the new stuff

eggplants (we only managed to grow a few last year), garlic, tomatoes, tomatillos, cape gooseberries, hot and sweet peppers, fennel, parsnips, celery, okra, collard greens, watermelons! cantaloupes! honeydews! turnips and leeks.

We are also doing cut flowers which are great at the market, but also for the bees and several varieties of herbs.

The list is long...and somewhat daunting. But this year already seems so much less scary than our first year and I am pretty confident that we will be able to pull it off. The beauty of starting off is that everything is one big experiment, so if we screw up somehow, we can just chalk it up to a learning experience and do differently next time round.

The pic is of Hannah diligently taking notes which no doubt helped us in our planning for this year. (Photo by Dave P.)

-Amy

Wintery Farm

I haven't been out to the farm at all in the last month so it seemed like a good idea to head out there yesterday to check things out.

It looks so different with all the leaves off the trees, but still beautiful.

Still some food left - kale, carrots, cabbage and broccoli

Jamie has been busy tapping some of the maples on the farm. He is hoping to make some maple syrup and I am hoping to eat it.

December was a bit of a lull in our farming year with Hannah away and both Jamie and I taking a break from veggie planning. Come January the work starts up again and we are hoping to have more of a head start than last year. More updates then.

Happy Holidays!

Amy

We Are Gourd Enthusiasts

So I have to make a confession. We planted WAY too much squash in our first year. So much that some of it has ended up in a compost pile. I know...I know. It's embarrassing, especially when we know that there are people who would want and need it. Anyways, what's done is done for this season and we will smarten up next year, I promise.

To be honest with you I didn't know all that much about winter squash this spring when we were planning what to plant. Gourds, to me, were somewhat mysterious vegetables that pop up for awhile at the grocery store in the fall and mostly old people ate them. The only winter squashes I think that I have ever eaten were spaghetti squashes, which my mom forced on us as an alternative to pasta when she went through a Suzanne Sommers diet phase, and butternut squash, which I liked mostly because I imagined they tasted like butter.

So this year turned out to be a big squash experiment. It turns out that one squash plant produces A LOT of squash. And you can imagine what that translates to when you plant over 1000 square feet of winter squash. Although we did our best to sell, give away, pawn off, and eat all the squash we had, we just couldn't get it off the field in time.

Needless to say, next year our strategy for squash will be much different. For one thing we certainly won't plant as much. I am thinking one or two 100' rows per variety.

I have also been trying my hand at saving seed and collecting some different and unusual varieties of squash that will look beautiful on the market table. Thanks to my partner Bryce, who found this awesome little farm stand in Richmond, we have managed to collect Red Kuris, Shamrocks, Carnivals, Delicatas, Cinderella pumpkins and these gourds that when dried have a hard shell and are good for crafts.

This is certainly a tasty way to acquire seeds as we are eating our way through each squash and saving the seeds as we go. My favorite so far is the Delicata squash which tastes similar to a sweet potato when roasted and has a thin skin that you can eat.

The other awesome thing you can do with all winter squashes (not just pumpkins) is roast the seeds with a bit of salt and eat them. We have gotten really into this around the house lately, so much so, that Bryce made us take home a bunch of orphan pumpkins from the farm last weekend just so he can keep eating seeds throughout the winter.

If any of you happen to get your hands on some leftover pumpkins or end up buying any winter squashes I highly suggest you save the seeds and eat them! I soak mine in a salty brine overnight and then roast them on a cookie sheet for 45 minutes or so at 250 F. Delicious.

So it turns out that there is more to winter squash then we thought. Live and learn. Next year we will aim for less volume and more diversity. Hopefully by then more people will catch our gourd fever and give this awesome winter vegetable a chance.

-Amy

Giving thanks #2

We had our wrap up dinner for the 2009 growing season last weekend at Jamie's home. Our families, who have all helped us out a lot, and ourselves celebrated with a delicious menu that very closely resembled Thanksgiving dinner #2 (and dinner #1 for Hannah and Dutch, our US counterparts).

-a local turkey from a friend/farmer, skeeter farm butternut squash soup, skeeter farm delicious indian spinach, sweet potatoes (not from skeeter farm because we ate all of them already), stuffing, cranberry sauce etc etc and a chocolate zucchini ganache cake. The cake was one that I made many times throughout our growing period this summer and its definitely the most delicious way to eat zucchini that I have found. I felt pretty silly going to the grocery store to buy zucchini just so I could make it for this dinner considering the ridiculous quantities of zucchinis we had just a couple of months ago. Cake recipe here - try it next year when we start pawning off our squashes on you. http://www.mybakingaddiction.com/2009/09/chocolate-zucchini-cake.html

We certainly have a lot to be thankful for this year including success growing vegetables and flowers that most of us hadn't tried before. Our only crop that failed to produce was Okra (although we got some beautiful flowers), some crops had mixed results, but overall we were pleasantly surprised with our growing abilities.

Another thing to be proud of and thankful for is the financial success of our business. In our first year of business start up, we have almost broken even. We have done our best to keep our costs low, but still needed to invest in some critical infrastructure for the site including irrigation, hand tools, site clearing and preparation, etc. I think we were surprised at the amount of revenue we were able to pull from the field this year, and we certainly think that we will be in the black next year with the combination of enhanced growing and marketing techniques as well as reduced capital expenditures.

We are also very thankful for the amount of community support that we have received this year, from customers, farmers, and other community members alike. Most recently, the BC Healthy Living Alliance recognized Skeeter Farm by awarding us an Innovative Community Capacity Building Award. The award, which speaks to our efforts in trying to support and encourage new farmers just like ourselves, came with a financial award which will be put to good use in building up the infrastructure on the site. We are hoping to purchase a used hoop house which will allow us to extend our growing season, plant a wider range of crops, start some transplants and allow us to properly cure some vegetables like winter squash and garlic.

It is pretty clear that "wrapping up" one season just means that it is time to start planning and working on the next. This last week we put our heads together to work on planning for the 2010 growing season.

We have decided that it make sense to assign each farmer a lead on certain farm tasks so that we aren't all expected to be working on everything all at the same time. Some of the categories for leads that we came up with are: business management, marketing, communications, site maintenance, vegetable planning and field work, as well as value-added processing and events/outreach (the latter two categories would be a new area for us). It has become clear that the three of us won't be able to tackle everything that we want to see happen at Skeeter Farm and so we have made the decision to start looking for a fourth business partner for the next growing season. Stay tuned as we will probably have more to say about that in the near future.

There are many things that need to be accomplished between now and the start of the next growing season including: writing a business plan (we were just winging it for the first year), planning for our CSA program which we will be introducing in 2010, planning crops and making our seed order, revamping our market booth, creating new communications materials, hopefully conning someone into making us a website, and working on securing some equipment and more infrastructure for the site. I don't think we are going to twiddling our green thumbs too much this winter!

Hopefully we can continue to update readers about what is going on during our offseason but if you are curious, please don't hesitate to get in touch with us at skeeterfarm (at) gmail.com

Creative Work With Vegetables

Some of the results of our first pumpkin patch! Submitted by some of our more creative customers...