Early summer eating at the urban farm

After cultivating, planting, and then spending a few busy weeks weeding, now is the fun time of summer before the tomato plants become large and unruly and the flurry of canning has started. This is the sweet time when you can really begin eating something besides salad.

Due to my locavore tendencies, I've also been thinking more about reducing food miles where I can and eating what is in season and available in my region. Many of the veggies and fruits we now eat are grown in our own plot of land, and if not here, then purchased from local growers. And food miles aside, this food is ripe and tastes better than much of the produce trucked in from some other time zone.

Things we've been enjoying this week: green onions, broccoli, broccolini, basil, cilantro, parsley, and Swiss chard from the urban farm, and homemade bread made from local wheat and homemade sourdough culture (a real treat toasted and smeared with last week's strawberry jam). I also made my raspberry millet muffins (recipe from February 24) and subbed in local sour cherries. (I may now need to plant a cherry tree!)

Some other foods in photos...

Local bread cheese (Juustoleipa), warmed up on a hot griddle.

This is my second week of enjoying local strawberries. These were frozen on a cookie sheet and then stored in baggies for wintertime smoothies and shortcakes.

On a bike ride with my daughter today we found a patch of wild blackberries. They are tiny but perfect (maybe even more perfect because they were a gift from nature with no work involved).

Our cultivated raspberries are starting to ripen. There were only enough red ones today to pick and eat immediately, still warm from the sunshine, but I'm hoping to be freezing and making jam out of an abundant berry harvest soon.

Until our chickens start laying eggs, we're very lucky that a neighbor is selling eggs for a local farmer this summer.

Our first harvested kohlrabi (German for "cabbage turnip"). Very easy to grow and tastes a little like broccoli.

The community garden plots are producing some very nice beets, which I like roasted or pickled.

Sunshine in a jar

This week at the urban farm I had my first taste of canning. I have always frozen some fruits and veggies (raspberries are my favorite freezable) because freezing is fairly straightforward, even for a novice like me.

We are looking forward to a good raspberry harvest this year. Netting will keep the birds from taking too many!

Reusable netting is good for all kinds of fruit crops.

The world of Ball jars and canning lids has been a big mystery to me. When I was a kid my mom and dad would buy boxes of Concord grapes from the local grape growers and make jelly. The popping of the lids as the jars cooled made my mouth water for a slice of toast with homemade jelly. But that was many years ago, and we now all live far away from the Concord grapes of Tontitown, Arkansas (with its fun and delicious grape festival that feeds festival goers some of the best Italian food around).

In my mind I had originally thought that food preservation would all take place at one time in the fall, but now that I think about it more, canning and freezing and drying will happen at many points throughout the year when we will put away food from whatever plant is producing in abundance. As a food and farming meditation, I have been slowly re-reading Barbara Kingsolver's book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life and really thinking about each chapter. This week I'm contemplating her ideas of local eating.

What is local in the upper Midwest?

Here in Wisconsin, if you don't can/freeze/dry some of the harvest, over the winter a local meal will consist mostly of meat and milk products with root veggies. By early spring even the root veggies will likely be gone. Preserved foods are like packets of sunshine in a jar, ready to take out when the days are cold, reminding us that we do produce beautiful food here in the summertime, and giving us faith that the long, warm days of summer will indeed return.

Strawberry season

In the future I hope to have a strawberry patch of my own, but until them I am enjoying the fruits harvested by my local farmer's market growers. I bought two quarts of perfectly ripe, local, organic, berries at the downtown Middleton farmers market (conveniently located at Capital Brewery) and brought them home to make jam while they were at the peak of ripeness. My mom and I canned them using water bath canning, and I'm excited about pressure canning the less acidic foods later this summer!

Starting the process of filling up my pantry for winter.

And just because I like to know the monetary value of things, a half pint of local, hand-made jam goes for 8 bucks at the farmer's market (this seems expensive to me, though I have been known to pay this on occasion because it is so much more delicious than the grocery store variety). For $10 worth of berries, $2 for pectin, and $2 for new lids (I already owned the jars) I produced $72 worth of strawberry jam.

Chickens and compost

Just for fun, here are a couple of pictures of the pullets enjoying the strawberry tops!

It took a while for them to warm up to the berries.

But they figured out that they are delicious and begged for more scraps.