Much of our week has been dedicated to getting ready for next spring. Of course, this continues to involve clearing land. As well, we have been forced to prepare for new rows of canes or vines. This means more weeding. Regrettably some of those weeds are very persistent and have required some serious old-fashioned tools such as the pick ax.
In his haste to clear some of our front lot, Tristan was also rather embarrassed this week. Somehow he managed to back up the tractor in the portion of the forest that encompasses a swamp. The result was not pretty. He was seriously stuck and the more he tried to get out....the deeper he got in!
So how do you get a tractor out of a swamp? You call another farmer with a larger tractor for help. In this case, we called Bryan, our tenant farmer. He was kind enough to drive his Kubota over and Tristan was seriously thankful....but still more than embarrassed.
In anticipation of next Spring, we also took the opportunity to clean up one of our Arctic Kiwi rows. Although you can get a lot of information from the Internet on everything from trellises to planting and pruning, the difficulty here is that there are no directions on taming vines that have been left wild for well over ten years. Our problem is that since we weeded the Kiwis from grape vines and very thorny bushes, we were still left with what resembled a massive "ball of twine" (even though the Fall meant that the vines lost their leaves and we could see things a bit more clearly).
Our solution to this mess was simply to retain one very healthy vine from every root. It took a lot of cutting and sorting through the jumbled mess, however knowing what we will need for trellising we thought this our only hope. In the end, we just hope we have not been overly aggressive and killed these plants.
Our plans for next spring also include more raised beds. The small success we have had in growing our own food has us determined to do more (we're thinking of a family competition). To do so, we decided to pull together at least 3 more raised beds with the wood remaining from our first efforts.
Our success with the raised beds has not been limited to the green tomatoes we reported on last week. In fact what has been truly a surprise is our celery. It is tender, and much more flavourful, less "watery" and much less "stringy" than what you would normally find in a grocery store.
The problem with such a crop is what to do with it. Luckily, one simple recipe has become a family favorite over the years. It involves sliced celery and grilled Portobello mushrooms. Simply salted to taste and tossed in virgin olive oil, they are served with coarsely shredded Parmesan cheese. Now that I have found out that celery is apparently a perennial, I have to say, we will never buy celery again and enjoy this combination many more times in the future.
As a PS, last week we talked about the versatility of green tomatoes. I forgot one more thing that can be done: leave them on the window sill to ripen! The results will definitely not be any worse than grocery bought tomatoes that have likely matured under similar circumstances..
Our experiments with preserves for the Tea Room and Country Market have continued. This week was an expansion of the "confiture de lait" effort we reported on last week. This time, we added a farm product and part of our "wild harvest". Prior to finishing the jam, we added ground hickory nuts which had been previously pan roasted. The results were delectable.
Now our problem for next season is that we are completely out of Hickory nuts. Regrettably, we think that it will now be 2014 before any guest can have the experience of Ridge Berry Farm Hickory Nut "Confiture de Lait"! We now know what to do (and how to do it) so we hope to gather many more Hickory nuts next Fall.
On the home front, renovations to the Victorian manor continue and are progressing well. We have also started the "gutting" of our Victorian barn. The hope is to transform the Tea Room kitchen into a proper and safe cooking environment (one in which we can also produce our preserves).
We also expect to transform what are effectively 2 garage bays into a country market (Opening Day if all goes well: 1 June 2013).
We have had some beautiful and warm autumn afternoons this week. Now that the Milk Weed pods are splitting and shedding their seeds, we will leave you this week with the Fall colours of the farm.
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