Recipe: Butter Braised Radishes

Our first harvest goes out to our CSA members this week and so we're celebrating with our first recipe of the season. Hooray for radishes!

Butter Braised Radishes

The sharp taste of raw radishes is great in salads or for a snack. Cooking them lightly in butter (or fat of your choosing) softens their harsh bite and makes for a lovely side dish to accompany a late spring dinner.

Ingredients:

- 1 cup of radishes
- 1-2 tsp butter
- sprig of mint
- salt to taste

Steps:

1. cut radishes into quarters

2. coarsely chop mint

3. melt butter on low-medium heat

4. add radishes and cook for about 10 minutes

5. radishes should look softened and translucent when done

6. toss with mint and salt and serve

Serves two as a side dish or one hungry toddler as a mid-morning snack

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A Long Day

It might not look like much, but this bit of paper sums up a pretty long day for me:

It's only a quarter sheet of some pretty small notebook paper, but I've got eleven crops on there, with notes for the row-feet to plant and/or transplant, which ones still need micro-nutrient amendments, which ones still need compost, which ones have been tilled and raked, and finally a check to show it's done. I'm tired all over again just looking at it!

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C is for Cutworm

I've been dealing with these delightful creatures all spring:

They hide just under the soil during the day and at night they come out to feed on stems and leaves of young seedlings and transplants. The worst part is that they often curl around the stem and chop off the entire top of a newly planted transplant, effectively killing it instantly. So now I'm patrolling daily looking for damage and digging out the ones I can find, replacing the transplants (as long as I have enough backups!) As you can see, they curl into a 'C' shape when disturbed.

I suspect the population has been boosted somehow by the long cold winter and the wet early spring, since I didn't see any damage last year. But the real irony is that they are certainly taking a larger toll this year because of a management decision I made - planting earlier and smaller transplants - partly in response to pest pressure from a different caterpillar called the imported cabbage worm that I observed last year. It's been more work, but I thought it would pay off by mid summer...

“The farmer became too busy when people began to investigate the world and decided that it would be “good” if we did this or that. All my research has been in the direction of not doing this or that. These thirty years have taught me that farmers would have been better off doing almost nothing at all.”

— Masanobu Fukuoka, The One Straw Revolution

Simplify, simplify, simplify...

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Potatoes: A Family Affair

Last spring we planted a test patch of potatoes and it turned into a lovely family afternoon out in the garden, teaching Rose how to carefully place the cut and prepped potatoes in the ground to sprout and teaching Sylvia... how not to trample things. This year Eric said, "I really want to turn this into a family tradition," which sounded like a great idea.

Put the camera away, Mom, can't you see we're trying to fight over who gets to drive this thing?.

Not quite the fun family activity we were hoping for. Instead Sylvia continued her singular toddler quest to find the most dangerous activity at any given moment and Rose was mostly annoyed at me for trying to capture the magic on camera.

Good times aside, the work still had to get done. Props to Eric and Rose for getting every last potato planted while I chased Sylvia around.

Rose was happier not to have to share the mower.

Good job Team BarnCo!

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Mushroom totems

I'm trying out an interesting oyster mushroom production technique this year. In the early winter I cut some poplars out of the woodlot and dragged them to the driveway. The next step was to cut some short lengths that could be re-assembled into standing "totems":

Each totem is about 30 inches high and made up of three separate pieces - two larger on the bottom and one small on the top.

After taking them out to a shady spot, I re-assembled them piece by piece, with mushroom spawn (sterilized and inoculated sawdust) sandwiched in between each layer. Then I tied on a paper lawn waste bag to help hold in some moisture.

Re-stacked - one covered and one uncovered

If all goes well, we'll hope to see some oyster mushrooms in the fall or next spring. If it works out, I can see scaling up to include mushrooms in the CSA shares in a year or two.

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Spinach

With warm sunny afternoons the row cover comes off the hoops and the peas and spinach can bask in the sunshine. Here Eric is getting 3 different beet varieties planted.

Here comes the spinach!

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Eva Mae Farm