This Week at Ramsey Farms

This week was filled with Thanksgiving preparation!  Plus a few frosty nights we had to mulch-in and cover the garden crops with sheets!  I harvested all the lettuce Wednesday morning to both save it from the frost and eat it for our Thanksgiving salad!  I really want to thank my Uncle Jack from Goodnight Farms for his expert advice and guidance on protecting my fall garden from the frost.  I collected info from him, my local extension office agent, and good friends who've been gardening for many years to help me to know what to do.  I can learn a lot on the internet and from books, but experience is far more valuable and I love picking the brains of those way smarter than I am.

My  farmhand, Chris has an awesome system of stakes and supports to allow us to easily cover the plants with the old sheets while avoiding the sheet actually touching the plant.  I noticed the cauliflower leaves had frost damage where the sheet was on them.  Chris also split additional firewood to heat the house this week. (Thank you, sir!)

I learned that you can actually eat broccoli, cauliflower, and kohlrabi leaves!  (Don't ask what a kohlrabi is...we shall get to that in a post soon as harvest time is coming up fast!)  We used some of each plus some fresh organic kale from the garden in a soup last week and to make "kale chips" too.  My four year old and my friend Katie absolutely loved them - even though I over cooked them and to me they tasted like burned popcorn.  (Katie also ate my strawberry-lemonade-vodka cake, so not sure that she is a good example! haha) I will make the leafy green chips again, but keep a closer on eye on them while they're in the oven.

This year we prepared a veritable FEAST for our Thanksgiving meal!   The Executive Chef here at Ramsey Farms (okay, okay...it's just me) planned a mouth watering five course meal with all the fixings and a spread of seven wines for pairing!!  I will share our menu, some recipes, wine pairings, and wine notes with you over the next few days.

I also learned that sometimes the cauliflower needs our help.  If the white flower (the part you eat) gets too much direct sun, it can discolor or even ruin the vegetable.  Usually the leaves of the cauliflower plant will "self-blanch" but sometimes need our help.  I used wooden clothespins to ensure all the cauliflower heads were neatly and modestly closed.

We are coming up on harvest time soon for most of the fall produce, discussing removing a tree from the property, studying up on angora rabbits, drooling over the spring seed catalogs, learning about the USDA rural mortgage programs, figuring out new crop planting areas, looking at plans to build rabbit hutches, daydreaming of larger, more rural properties, and more preparation & research on the next leg of this journey: a real farm of our own!

Enjoy your week & get outdoors as often as you can! :) ~Ramsey