Aug
10
Fighting Late Blight
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Late blight — Phytophthora infestans — better known as the cause of the Irish potato famine of the 1850s, has spread throughout Pennsylvania.
Every other gardener and farmer I know is suffering from Late Blight and expects to lose, or has already lost, most, if not all, of their tomato crop. We’re closely monitoring our own plants.
I’ve heard from friends in Philipsburg who lost most of their plants and salvaged only a few dozen tomatoes. I’ve heard of one farmer who lost 300 plants in a day. One of the gardeners at Penn State’s Community Garden tells me late blight has wiped out nearly everyone’s tomatoes there, too. We’ve now heard that Full Circle Farms has been hit as well.
We’re all hoping the Farm Tour, with its record turnout, hasn’t spread the disease even further afield, but with that many people walking around and moving between farms it is almost unavoidable.
We’re still fortunate to have healthy plants in our own garden. I have nonetheless ordered a bottle of Soap-Shield copper fungicide from Gardens Alive to be applied as a preventative measure. Organic gardeners are strongly encouraged to apply this or something similar before we see any lesions.
Jul
18
2009 Local Foods Week and Farm Tour
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Central Pennsylvania’s 4th annual Local Foods Week and Farm Tour are coming up the first week of August. This year’s Local Foods Week runs from Saturday August 1st through Saturday August 8th. The Farm Tour is Saturday, August 8th from 12:30pm through 5:00pm.
I’m planning to visit a few sites. I’ve been out to Full Circle Farms about once a week this season and will probably stop in during the tour. I’m also planning to visit a few other local places I haven’t yet visited, but I haven’t had a chance to look at the map closely enough to figure out which ones.
Jun
11
Full Circle Farms CSA Blog
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Our friends at Full Circle Farms have resumed blogging. They’re at fullcirclefarmscsa.blogspot.com.
Jun
3
Locally-Sourced BLTs
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I really need to start taking photos of these meals before we eat them.
Last night we made Bacon, Lettuce and Tomato (BLT) sandwiches for dinner. It was a very “local” meal. The bread was from a local baker who buys her grain from a local farmer and grinds it herself. (If I knew her name, I’d share it, but my mother buys the bread when the lady comes to her office and I’ve never met her myself.) The lettuce came from our CSA through Full Circle Farms. The bacon was from a 4-H hog bought by my wife’s boss at last year’s Grange Fair Junior Livestock Auction. The only non-local ingredient was the tomatoes, which were from a pack of vine-ripened, hydroponically grown tomatoes I picked up at one of our grocery stores.
We also made fried potatoes with some of the spuds we picked up at the Boalsburg Farmer’s Market last Tuesday. Those came out surprisingly well. I sliced the potatoes, with skin on, into 1/4″ pieces and fried them in oil in a skillet on the stove.
May
28
Tomatoes in the Ground
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We planted the tomatoes (ten Romas, two Sungold, two Rutgers), two Peppers, and two Basil plants last evening. The Basil plants were included with our first CSA pickup on Tuesday.
We should get enough tomatoes from the Roma plants for a decent batch of sauce. The Rutgers should give us tomatoes for sandwiches throughout the season, and the Sungold should be perfect for just snacking. Hopefully all of the plants will make it, but we definitely had them indoors too long. Next year I’ll do better and won’t start them nearly as early.
We still have eight plants that we didn’t put in the ground because they are too spindly or we just didn’t have the space. We may plant the best ones in large pots on our back porch at the townhouse.
More pictures are available in the Garden 2009 Flickr set.
May
28
First CSA of the Season
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We picked up our first CSA of the season Tuesday evening at the Boalsburg Farmer’s Market on the grounds of the PA Military Museum. As I’ve mentioned previously, we subscribe to the Full Circle Farms Community-Supported Agriculture program. We pay several hundred dollars in the early spring and receive a basket of fresh fruits and vegetables each week throughout the growing season. This first basketful included spinach, mixed seasonal greens, spring onions, rhubarb, and garlic greens. Sabine also had basil plants available and gave us two to plant in our garden.
We’re going to make a few things with this first batch. The rhubarb we will freeze until fresh local strawberries are available, probably in mid-June. I’m planning to make a spinach and garlic greens quiche for dinner tomorrow night. As for the rest, they’ll probably end up in salads this weekend.
A light rain was falling, but we went around to the few stalls that were still open at 5:45 anyway. I don’t know if there were so few vendors because of the rain, the earliness of the season, or because the market closes at 6:00. Most of the stalls just had baked goods or frozen meat, but we did find some nice potatoes. Overall, we were unimpressed and I think I still prefer the Millheim Farmer’s Market on Saturdays.
Aug
25
2008 Centre County Farm Tour
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[Note: This entry is delayed by roughly two weeks, but only because of a scheduling mishap. I'm still working out how to use WordPress for delayed posting. This entry (and the Mt. Nittany Winery review) were lost in the shuffle.]
We began our Farm Tour in Millheim at the Farmer’s Market for our weekly produce shopping. We had not intended to begin the tour so early — before ten o’clock in the morning — but the festivities were clearly underway. Parking was at a premium at the American Legion so we parked along the entrance road. Only a few of the usual vendors were there, with most of the stall space taken up by information tables on local farming and sustainable agriculture. There were also several guitarists playing folk songs. Overall, it was much more crowded than usual. I don’t deal well with large groups of noisy people, so we opted to buy a few items and head home. We had tickets for chicken dinners at the Pleasant Gap American Legion.
I don’t know if this is a Pennsylvania thing, and we didn’t see any of it in Michigan, but pretty much every fire department, church, and youth group will have at least one chicken barbecue fundraiser in the summer. If you wanted to, you could eat chicken every Saturday from May to October. The chicken is often hit or miss, but if the group doing the fundraiser knows what they are doing, it’ll be amazing. Unfortunately, everyone in the area knows which groups do the best chicken, so when those groups have their sale you have to get there early.
After a chicken dinner that couldn’t be beat, we headed off for the farm tour. We began by traveling back over Centre Hall Mountain to Full Circle Farms. We were met by Daisy the sheep, a farm pet who was showing Marie, an exchange student from France, around the farm. Located in Spring Mills, and owned and operated by Sabine and Thomas Carey, this organic farm also has its own Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) Farm Share program. We hope to participate in this next year, and it was nice to see where they grow their food. We were able to see most of their operation, including free-range chickens, ducks, and turkeys. Among the turkeys were several of the somewhat rare Red Bourbon turkeys they raise. Unfortunately (or fortunately for the birds), these are all raised as breeding stock to be sold to other farms and are not available for sale to the general public. (The quest to taste a Red Bourdon continues!)
We then went back to our car and headed to Mount Nittany Vineyard & Winery, which was to be the last stop on our abbreviated tour and is detailed in the next entry.
Aug
8
3rd Annual Centre County Farm Tour
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I’m firming up my schedule for Saturday’s Farm Tour. I am currently thinking about visiting three sites on the tour.
First, I plan to start with the Millheim Farmer’s Market at 10 a.m. The Tour doesn’t officially begin until 12:30 p.m., but the Market is open earlier. I’ll do the week’s veggie and meats shopping and probably stick around for the cooking demo by High Street Pub from Bellefonte, PA.
Since I’ll have a cooler and the weather looks to be mild, I’m not running my purchases back home right away. Instead, I’m heading to Spring Mills to visit Sabine and Thomas Carey’s Full Circle Farms. The Carey’s run a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) Farm Share program. I didn’t have my act together last winter in time to become a member, but I’m planning to participate next year and want to check out the farm. This is also the farm that raises Red Bourbon turkeys, which had me terribly excited earlier this week when I discovered it.
I’m looking for one more site to visit after Full Circle Farms, but I plan to round out the day at Mount Nittany Winery near Boalsburg. I’ve had several of their wines and have been impressed by what they’ve managed to achieve here in Centre County. I don’t expect the sort of accomplishments I’ve seen in Michigan, and I admit I was spolied by Michigan’s Old Mission and Leelanau peninsulas, but I do anticipate quality winemaking. Expect a full tasting rundown early next week.
If you are planning to attend any of the farm tour, leave a comment or email me, cg AT this domain name. Maybe we can put together a piece detailing everyone’s experiences since no one person can visit them all! I know I’m looking forward to it.
