Birdsfoot Farm

Dear All,
the most fantastic thing has happened:  Truffle s back!  After three weeks of roaming I found her in the path , just outside our house eating grass.  She let me pet and catch her and now she is inside with the other two guinea pigs Alley and Carmel for the night.  We are so happy.  I had lost all hope to see her again .  Alley follows her around and nuzzles her, Carmel does not seem to care.  I fed them an extra portion of lettuce for the party.
Kira has just left to visit her grand parents in Maryland for three weeks.  I told her on the phone.  Seba (age 17 is traveling in Europe for three more weeks.  This is the first time in 17 years that we are without any kids!  What are we gonna do with ourselves?

Well, we are eating lots of peas, as a matter of fact, we have 50 lbs. of peas for wholesale this Friday at a wholesale price of $2.90/lb, for 5lbs or more.  If you are interested, call the farm before 3pm at 386 4852 and we will send them with your Friday box .  We are also coming to Potsdam on Saturday for the Potsdam Summer Festival.

All the fall roots ave been seeded and the carrots and beets are already up, the beans are flowering and so are the potatoes.

We are weeding parsnips and tomatoes this week (there are green tomatoes hanging on the plants), if any of you want to help, Thursday afternoon or Friday between 10am and 3pm is good.   Wednesdays is also a good day.

This week we have the first beets and zucchinis.  You can eat the beet greens.  Steam them like spinach and you can use last weeks sesame dressing on them.  The first zucchinis I like just steamed or baked (rubbed in olive oil with a little salt on a cookie sheet) just by themselves, to get the tender first of the year zucchini taste, delicious...

See below for some of Brandi's recopies for beets and for you. Extra leafy fans recopies for kale.
If any of you have more kale recopies , please  e-mail them to me, so we can keep up with the yummies.

Two new workers joint us in the garden last week.  Matt Bowman a friend of Seba's on college break and Christoph, Katie's boyfriend , who moved to Birdsfoot from Binghampton.  There is a lot of wonderful young people energy around.  (Not that I am old ) and the work is carried by many shoulders.

So long for now, hope to see you at the garlic festival July 23 and Sunday July 24 , 10am-6pm.

peace, Dulli

Dear All,
it's Wednesday and rainy, a good day to check the many e-mails.  Thanks for all your feed back on the newsletters.  We got all the winter squash, melons and beans planted with some potatoes, carrots and beets still to go,  and weekend work.  After next week all the big fall root plantings will be done and we can focus on weeding, trellising tomatoes and plowing up grassy fallow to put in buckwheat.  Buckwheat is the cure for quack grass, because it grows so fast that it shades out all weeds.  So, the plan is to get all fallow ( land not used this year) into buckwheat  so that next year will be easier and not endless hours spent on forking, sifting through the fields and fields and fields.  At night I see quack grass, too much.

Truffel has not returned and we have to just love the other two guinea pigs more.  Ella duck is still sitting on her four eggs.  At times there are up to six eggs in the nest, because the ladies share and sit together in one nest.  We marked the sitting eggs, so we don't try to cook them.

The gardens look great. The zucchinis are flowering the tomatoes are growing the peas are rolling in.

Flowers:  It is not too late to get in on the flower share, $77 for 12 weeks.  The flowers are coming on and the bouquets are getting fancier every week

We have seen a little swede midge on some broccoli.  I pulled the plants out and cooked the leafs for dinner, quite tasty.

Leafs... for the Extra Leafies we have lambsquater this week.  I know it is a weed, but it is so tasty, cooked like spinach and high in protein.  I thought since it is growing in the spinach field where there should be spinach I try it with you.  If you don't like it, we will go back to kale.

Kale:  So in the chapter of the yummies of kale this weeks recipe is my favorite sesame dressing that works on all cooked greens ( spinach, kale, lamsquater, collards chard).  I have sent it other years, but here it is again.

Birdsfoot Sesame dressing:

1/2 cup of olive oil
1/2 cup of nice vinegar
1/2 cup of water
1/4 cup or less of soy sauce
1-2 cloves of garlic or pureed garlic scapes
1/4 cup of tahini or toasted sesame seeds
pepper)
1/2 minced onions
a little honey or maple syrup

mix all and marinade coked greens for some time.  ( I like my kale cooked soft and gray,  not green and crunchy that's German)

Please share your kale recipes for future newsletters.

 Please mark Saturday, July 23 and Sunday July 24 for the garlic festival where we harvest all 12000 garlic in two days.  They get the outer skin peeled and hung in the barn to dry.  We need lots of help that weekend.  We serve food and garlic and you get to take garlic home.

So long
Dulli