Farm News, October 19, 2021
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Please note our Fall Farmstand Hours:
Tuesday & Thursday: 2 - 6 PM (closing a half hour earlier)
Saturday: 9 am - 12:30 pm (opening 1 hour later)
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It finally looks like the “after-summer” may be winding down, as more seasonable temperatures rolled into Connecticut over the weekend. We had our first sub-40 degree night, which was the first time we even thought about frost this season. In the past 20 years that we have been farming at Fort Hill, average first frost date has been early October. We had some farmer friends over for dinner last week who have been farming for 44 years, and they said when they started farming, frosts routinely occurred in mid-September. It’s a tiny data point in a drumbeat of data that says we have dramatically changed the world’s climate in a very short period of time.
Shell and Emma bunch herbs in the early morning light.
We’ll clean out the last of the field lettuce this week and have started to harvest the lettuce crop from the big high tunnel out in the field. It reminded me how the whole farm expands and shrinks each season. Rebecca kicks off the year in early January in a 10 X 12 foot cooler. We heat this small space and start greenhouse tomato seeds under grow lights and root the ginger in moist, warm peat moss. One month later the cooler has become a crowded jungle, so we open a portion of the first greenhouse, and then expand into new greenhouses as the farm begins to warm. After we re-skin the three-season high tunnel in late April, we plant in the field and then begin to prepare planting beds all over the farm. By August we’ve planted about two thirds of our 38 acres, and then we begin to put fields to sleep, one by one.
Faye pulls some parsnips with a carefully gloved hand to avoid a rash from their toxic foliage. Good thing these roots taste so good!
At this stage we still have parsnips, carrots, Gilfeather turnips, and potatoes in the field waiting to be dug by mid-November, and a nice patch of cold hardy kale, collards, and spinach that we will be cutting from into early December. Miraculously, the flower patch is still in full glory, and we will do everything we can to keep it going through light frosts. But inevitably, we are contracting and moving back into the greenhouses. There we have a beautiful lettuce planting to keep the salad harvest rolling through December, plenty of winter spinach sown, and even a warm spot so the crew can move away from our open-air processing shed off the barn into a heated space when the really cold weather finally sets in.
Dana sports some sweet yellow Italian peppers, which have come in strong on the late end of the season.
For Rebecca and me, the seeds of the new season are already rolling around in our heads. We’ve had an incredible crew the last two years, but some of them are moving on to new adventures, and we’re talking with folks who are interested in taking their place. We’re thinking about better ways of managing our crops and our soils, adjusting our crop plantings, and considering new varieties. It’s a challenge because farming is a moving target, but one thing for sure, it’s never boring.
We hope you enjoy the farm and the harvest,
Paul and Rebecca for the Fort Hill Farm Crew
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BRING YOUR MASK! Due to the everchanging pandemic conditions, we are requiring masks for all individuals, regardless of vaccination status, while visiting in the barn. Masks are not required outside the barn. Thank you!
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Featured veg:
Parsnips: This quintessential fall New England crop and white member of the carrot family has a candy-like sweetness when roasted. Also yummy shredded raw into slaws or cubed into soups. It’s not widely grown because it takes nearly a month to germinate, giving the weeds a big head start, needs exacting thinning to produce a nice root (crawling on hands and knees), and also has phototoxic leaves! This means a full body suit is required for harvest, notably on cloudy day. We hope you enjoy! Stores for over a month in fridge crisper drawer.
Red Radishes: A beautiful fall crop, with the warm weather giving them a nurturing kick, so we put them are on SALE this week in recognition of all of this. Slice, chop, or shred into your salads. Radishes are wonderful in Asian slaws. It seems that radishes take a big back seat to the autumn heavy hitters, like sweet potatoes and squash, but they are quite tasty and surprisingly mild when cooked (see recipe below, and full disclosure, I sautéed them in butter last night). The greens can be sautéed just like any mustard green, which it seems more and more folks are taking advantage of these days.
Also available:
Salad mix, arugula, head lettuce, pea shoots, French Breakfast and red radishes, salad turnips, Red cabbage, savoy cabbage, red, Chioggia, and gold beets, curly and lacinato kale, rainbow chard, parsley, chives, oregano, sage, thyme, rosemary, radicchio, Dark Red Norland, Satina Gold, Blue Gold, Magic Molly, Kennebec and Fingerling potatoes, German Extra Hardy garlic, limited tomatoes, escarole, assorted sweet peppers, mixed Italian and Asian eggplant, hot peppers, leeks, celeriac, baby boy chow, collards, Brussels sprouts, butternut and Kogi Nut squash, sweet potatoes, fresh young ginger, fresh turmeric, limited apples from our certified organic, no-spray orchard
Coming Soon:
Gilfeather Turnips
Pick Your Own:
Flowers: * They survived our first mini-frost! SALE! BOUQUETS are STILL HALF PRICE ! please get a flower ring from the barn for bouquet size.
Perennial Herbs: * please get an herb ring from the barn for bunch size.
Chives, Oregano, Thyme, and Sage for all of those fall recipes
PYO Hours: 1:30 - 7PM. (PYO begins 30 minutes before and goes 30 minutes beyond barn hours.)
Recipes
Suggested by Rebecca Batchie
For more recipes, check out the Fort Hill Farm Recipe Database
Chard and Parsnip Galette
From Caroline’sCooking
Ingredients
For the pastry
¾ cup all purpose flour 90g plain flour
½ cup whole wheat flour 70g
¼ teaspoon salt
⅓ cup unsalted butter 80g, cold
¼ cup sour cream 60ml
2 tablespoon lemon juice
2-4 tablespoon water
For the filling
10 oz parsnip 280g
1 onion
8 oz chard 230g (1 bunch) - I used rainbow but doesn't have to be
2 tablespoon olive oil approx
¼ cup raisins 55g
¼ cup pine nuts 50g
1 cup parmesan 55g (scant cup), finely grated
Instructions
First make the pastry by putting the flours and salt in a food processor and quickly pulsing to combine. Cut the butter into small chunks and ad them to the flour. Pulse until you have a breadcrumb-like consistency. Add the cream, lemon juice and 1-2tablespoon of water to start and pulse so that it mixes and starts to come together. If it's not coming together after a couple pulses, add another tablespoon of water (the amount depends on your flour), pulse again, then add another if still needed. Once it comes together remove from the food processor, flatten into a disk and wrap in plastic wrap/cling film and refrigerate for around 30min. You can prepare it a day ahead as well.
When ready, preheat oven to 375F.
Peel, remove the ends and coarsely grate the parsnips. Peel and halve the onion then finely slice. Remove the stalks from the chard, trim the ends and thinly slice the stalks and shred the leaves. Keep them separately.
Warm the olive oil in a large skillet/frying pan and add the onion, stir and cook a minute or two. Then add the parsnip, stir and add the chard stalks. Cook all for around 5-10min, stirring now and then, until the vegetables have all softened. Add a little more oil if needed eg if the vegetables are sticking.
Meanwhile roll the pastry out fairly thin - around ⅛in/3mm thick - and put either on a lined cookie sheet or in a pie dish.
Add the chard leaves to the parsnip mixture once everything else has softened and stir in so they wilt, cook another minute.
Remove the vegetables from the heat once soft then add raisins, pine nuts and parmesan and mix through well. Pour the mixture into the middle of the pastry, flatten out slightly and fold over the pastry edges so that it holds the filling in.
Bake approx. 40min until it's lightly browned over the top.
Roasted Hakurei (Salad) Turnips and Radishes
From JustaLittleBitofBacon
Ingredients
1 bunch radishes
1 bunch Hakurei turnips, or other mild salad turnips
3 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp kosher salt
Instructions
Move the rack in the oven to the lower middle position. Place the roasting pan in the oven.
Preheat oven to 425F.
Slice the greens off the turnips and radishes. Scrub the turnips and radishes well to remove all the dirt and grit from the vegetables, and rinse the greens repeatedly until they are grit free. If you left a little bit of the stem on the radishes and turnips, make sure you clean around it well since dirt collects there. I find scraping around the stem as I wash cleans it up nicely.
Cut the turnips and radishes into wedges. Halve the small ones, and quarter or sixth the larger ones. In a large bowl, toss the vegetables with 2 tbsp of olive oil and 1/2 tsp of salt. Pour the vegetables into the roasting pan, arranging them so most have a flat side down in the pan.
Roast for 15 minutes, stirring and turning the vegetables at 7 minutes.
Dry the washed greens to remove most of the water. Roughly chop the greens into bite-sized pieces, then toss them in the large bowl with the rest of the olive oil and the salt.
Pull the roasting pan out of the oven, turn and stir the vegetables again and then make a space for the greens. Spread out the greens in the space and return the pan to the oven.
Roast for 5 minutes more.