How to Succeed at Winter Growing Without Really Trying

Posted on November 30, 2011 by Noelle Wyman

A couple of weekends ago, I had the good fortune to attend the 26^th annual Sustainable Agriculture Conference hosted by the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association.

This conference is the social event of the year for farmers and foodies in both the Carolinas. A couple thousand people gathered in Durham to talk about topics ranging from federal policy to commercial fruit production to making your own mead.

The workshops were as informative as they were diverse. Here are some interesting tidbits I picked up:

Artichokes are a perennial plant developed in Italy.
Chicken eggs are naturally covered in an antibacterial coating right before the hen lays the egg.
The basic tenets of biodynamics include observation of cosmic rhythms and ritual substances.

Although I enjoyed all the workshops I attended, I’m most excited by what I learned in the session on winter growing in high tunnels. A high tunnel is another term for hoop house, or essentially a greenhouse set over beds in a field.

The speaker at this session, Paul Wiediger from Au Naturel Farm in Kentucky, uses his 5 unheated high tunnels to grow greens, root vegetables, and jumpstart warm season crops.

Through the infamous (but highly useful for farming) greenhouse effect, passive solar energy heats the high tunnel enough to grow throughout the winter season. Even with daytime temperatures in the teens, Farmer Wiediger said that temperatures in the high tunnel will reach into the 70’s and 80’s on sunny days.

High tunnels provide minimal protection to the crops at night; according to Farmer Wiediger, his crops will occasionally freeze. But once the sun comes up, even delicate lettuce performs a miracle recovery.

Winter growing using high tunnels isn’t a new idea. Eliot Coleman is known as “one of the granddaddies of can-do, intensive organic farming” for his ability to grow crops year round at his farm—in Maine. Coleman runs Four Season Farm, and has written several books that extol the virtues of hoop house growing and promise that anyone can grow year round. He has done wonders to popularize the idea that no matter your climate, you CAN grow food.

So why am I so excited about high tunnel growing? Because the DCF faces a fundamental problem: the season in which we’re most productive (summer) is the season in which there is the least demand at dining halls.

High tunnels would allow us to shift the bulk of our growing to the fall and winter. With careful planning and timing, we could have new potatoes in November (typically harvested in the spring), and tomatoes as early as April. We could provide lettuce, kale, chard, radishes, turnips, beets—the list goes on—throughout the coldest winter months.

If Mr. Coleman’s farm can be productive year-round in Maine, then so can the DCF in North Carolina. We’ve got our first high tunnel up and running with chard, broccoli, raab, kale, spinach, arugula, and lettuces.

If all goes well, we’ll build more high tunnels and be able to produce even more food in the off-seasons. And that’s how we’ll succeed at winter growing with just a high tunnel and a plan.

Full Circle Farming

Posted on November 21, 2011 by Noelle Wyman

This post is about dirt. Again.

Actually, it’s about more than dirt – but dirt is where food starts and ends, so I think it’s fitting that this post follow the same pattern. I’ve spoken about the importance of soil health in several previous blog posts (see here and here).

I’m at risk of becoming a broken record, I know; just in case you didn’t already know enough about the DCF’s dirt, you’re about to learn more. The chemical composition of soil is crucial to a healthy crop, if my hammering away on the subject weren’t a dead giveaway.

Farming is about people, too. What’s a farm without someone to feed? Not to mention all the volunteers that have helped us grow over the past year.

By now, most people at Duke know about the DCF. But here’s a newsflash: did you know that just by eating at the dining halls, you’re helping us grow food?

It’s true. Through a veritably magical process known as composting, the food waste at Duke is transformed into a rich, dark, fertilizer. We pile shovelfuls of the stuff onto our beds, which provides vital nutrients that help our plants grow big and become tasty.

The composting itself is done offsite. Brooks Contractor hauls away pre- and post-consumer waste from all Duke eateries that compost. The waste then decays under specific conditions (here’s a good introduction). After a couple of years, what was once rotting food has become beautiful, fine, black soil.

By using composted food waste from Duke, the farm is that much closer to becoming a closed loop system. Someday, we hope to require zero inputs outside of the farm. That means no gasoline and no trucked in horse manure; everything we need will be produced either onsite or by the Duke community.

We’ve even already started our own compost pile.

Sometime in the near future, we’ll be using compost that includes DCF food waste. In the meantime, many thanks to Brooks Contracting for donating the compost. And thanks to all of you for helping us grow delicious produce and simultaneously become more sustainable. Just keep eating, and we’ll keep growing.

From www.gonzaga.edu

Fall Fest Food

Posted on October 31, 2011 by Noelle Wyman

First of all – thanks to everyone who came out and helped to make our first (annual?) Fall Harvest Festival a success. We hope you enjoyed our home-made corn hole set and, most importantly, the food.

Because that’s what this post is about – the food! The party planners (that’s the DCF staff) thought long and hard about how to make our fall festival unique to the Duke Campus Farm. We decided the best way to show off the fruits of our labor was to eat it.

Saturday’s meal was centered on the crops that have or are currently growing on the farm. Nearly every dish featured an ingredient growing on the farm lovingly cooked by your favorite farmworkers. That’s right – the DCF staff made a good portion of the food at the event.

For the appetizers, we made baba ghanoush with our eggplants and caprese salad skewers with farm tomatoes and basil and Chapel Hill Creamery mozzarella.

We also presented our homemade pepper jelly, dill pickles, and pickle relish (made with cucumbers harvested this past summer). DCF radishes and green beans, harvested in the days before the party, were in the salad.

Main dishes ran the gamut, from beet and arugula salad with Celebrity Dairy goat cheese to fried okra, generously cooked by Bon Appétit onsite.

We also made honey-roasted root vegetables, which included carrots, parsnips, kohlrabi, and rutabagas—all of which are currently growing on the farm but are not yet ready to be harvested.

We stewed our mustard and radish greens Southern-style, with ham hock and bacon bits from Fickle Creek Farm.

Dessert was a rainbow of sweet potato pies made with the DCF sweet potatoes.

The pies were orange, white and blue-purple, and all of the potatoes came out of the field next to the Harvest Fest.

The pièce de resistance: venison stew.

Why venison? Well, we thought that the best way to represent the farm was to use meat we have on the farm. We don’t have farm animals, but we do have a lot of deer. (No, we did not kill the deer ourselves. Farmer friends generously gifted the meat.)

Venison also showed up in Asian-inspired venison tacos, made by our favorite farmer-chef, Josh.

In case you were at the Fall Fest and enjoyed the food as much we did, some of the recipes are below.

PS: Happy Halloween!

Sweet Potato Pie

Filling:

3 cups of mashed sweet potatoes
2 eggs, beaten
1/3 cup butter, melted
½ cup milk
1 cup white sugar
½ teaspoon of salt
1 teaspoon of vanilla

Topping:

1 cup brown sugar
1/3 cup flour
½ cup butter
1 cup chopped pecans (optional)

After boiling the sweet potatoes, mash and let cool slightly. Combine with other filling ingredients. Cut topping together with pastry blender or fingers until it resembles a crumb. Bake in a casserole dish at 350 degrees for 30 minute (until topping is melted and bubbling).

Baba Ghanoush (from The Pioneer Woman)

3 whole medium eggplants
4 tablespoons tahini
4 garlic cloves, peeled
¼ cup lemon juice
3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

Prick the surface of the eggplant with a fork. Either grill or broil eggplant for 25 minutes until very shriveled and soft. Allow to cool slightly and remove the skins.

Purée eggplant in a food processor with other ingredients until relatively smooth. Serve with pita or crackers.

Leaves, Fruits, Roots, Legumes, (Flowers), Cover, Repeat.

Posted on October 12, 2011 by Noelle Wyman

In case you didn’t learn enough about dirt in my last post, you’re going to learn more in this post! Soil is that important. In fact, soil is more important than two measly blog posts –some argue that soil is the foundation for life on earth.

We’re always learning methods to improve our soil health at the Duke Campus Farm. If our soil is healthy, our crops are correspondingly the healthier and more abundant. Moving to no-till is part of that effort, as is our crop rotation plan.

Crop rotation has been practiced since the Roman era. Until the mid-20^th century, when industrial agriculture phased out crop rotation in favor of chemical inputs, farmers rotated crops from field to field.

Different crops take various nutrients from the soil—and some actually add nutrients back into the soil. Crop rotation plans vary from simple to highly complex, but the goal is the same: maximize soil fertility and minimize disease and pests.

Like many first-time farmers or gardeners, attempting to create a crop rotation plan daunted the DCF farmers. Our good friend and neighbor, Larry, gave us a simple and memorable plan that we’ve begun to put in place.

Our plan goes like this: leaves, fruits, roots, legumes, (flowers), cover crop.

This system is based on the nutritional requirements of each type of crop. (And to be sure to give credit where credit is due: this crop rotation comes from an article entitled “Yes, You Can Practice Crop Rotation” by Cynthia Hizer. Yes, we were encouraged by the title.)

Leaves are the first and last crop in a growing season, and their nutrient of choice is nitrogen. Leaf crops, such as lettuce, herbs, and mustard greens, are also first in the rotation because nitrogen is highly soluble—in other words, if nitrogen in fertilizer isn’t taken up by crops, it tends to react with water and wash away. (Nitrate pollution in drinking water is a big problem in major industrialized agricultural areas, like Iowa.)

Fruits are next up in the rotation, which include tomatoes, melons, squash, peppers, and eggplant. These plants need phosphorus to produce fruit and nitrogen less important.

After fruits are root crops, like carrots, beets, onions, and turnips. Roots need even less nitrogen than fruits; rather, they need abundance of potassium to develop their root structures.

Legumes are next, namely green beans and peas. These plants are technically fruits, but are capable of fixing atmospheric nitrogen. In layman’s terms, this means that legumes replenish nitrogen in the soil.

After legumes, the DCF plans to grow flowers, primarily because they’re pretty and we like them (thus the parenthetical around “flowers”). Finally, cover crops fill shorter rotations, replenish nutrients, and give the soil a chance to rest.

Furthermore, as I mentioned above, rotating crops also minimize pests. Imagine bug is drawn to a certain crop. If that crop is planted in the same space year after year, that bug can just hang out, make babies, and attack that crop. Crop rotation also reduces the risk of a crop contracting a disease that may have developed in that bed or field. In fact, certain crops can be planted that discourage pests and disease that may affect the next rotation.

Rotating crops takes advantage of inherent properties of a given plant to the collective advantage of the farm. Not only is this crop rotation easy to follow, but it improves yield through no additional inputs—so it’s sustainable too.

In summary: crop rotation is a great idea. Yes, it takes a bit of planning, but that’s a small price to pay for the benefits. When you’re out on the farm and see which crops are growing where, now you have a much better idea why.

Happy Soil, Happy Farm

Posted on September 9, 2011 by Noelle Wyman

This past summer, the DCF crew visited nearby Frog Pond Farm owned by Larry and Libby Bohs. Larry is a part-time professor at Duke University and a part-time farmer – an enviable career path, in my opinion.

This visit in early summer, which I wrote about here, has been the source of inspiration for the Campus Farm workers. Larry and Libby have a gorgeous, productive, innovative and highly sustainable farm. Frog Pond models many of our future plans for the Duke Campus Farm: incorporating permaculture such as fruit trees and bushes, integrated pest and weed management, and practicing no-till.

Now that fall has arrived and it’s time to plant our fall crops, we’ve begun to implement no-till on the DCF. (I described how we have been preparing beds here.)

What’s so great about no-till?

Tilling is the conventional practice of preparing land for crops to be planted. Traditionally, farmers and gardeners use a tiller (like this one Scott is using, or this industrial-sized one) to overturn the earth, remove weeds, and shape the soil for bed-preparation.

However, tilling has some not-so-great side effects. Particularly when used on the industrial scale, tillers compact the soil, exacerbate erosion, disrupt the soil ecosystem and result in the loss of organic matter. Furthermore, tillers rely on gasoline to run. Tilling actually degrades soil health and makes the farm less productive.

Although the Duke Campus Farm tills sparingly, our soil needs all the help it can get. The land we’re farming was formerly a tobacco farm—a highly intensive form of farming that essentially destroys soil fertility. Although our land was fallow for roughly a decade, we still have a long way to go to restore our soil to health.

This past week, we constructed our first permanent bed. First, we tested the soil to determine the amount and type of soil amendments to add. Then we added lime, rock phosphate, and green sand, which provide needed nutrients for our crops to grow. Next, we tilled to incorporate the amendments into the soil.

Then we added a lot of compost and nitrogen—in our case, composted horse manure and chicken feather meal—and tilled again (for the last time ever!). Finally, we laid five layers of wet newspaper for weed control (as it breaks down, the newspaper will provide organic material as well), covered the bed heavily in more compost, mulched the walkways, and laid the drip irrigation line. Voilà: permanent bed.

Once we construct the permanent beds, we will try to disturb that soil as little as possible for the life of the farm. When we plant, we cut holes into the newspaper (aligned with the drip emitters to maximize water efficiency) and dig small holes for seeds or transplants. When we turn that bed over to another crop rotation, we’ll lay another layer of newspaper and compost rather than tilling.

In time, if we’re lucky, our soil will become dark, spongy, and full of beneficial microbes and other organisms (like worms). Although preparing a permanent bed is more labor-intensive than the methods we have been using, it’s easier to maintain in the long run. The icing on the cake: except for transportation, the farm uses zero petroleum products.

Thanks to Larry and Libby, the farm is on its way to becoming a model of sustainability. We hope that our use of no-till will educate the Duke and Durham community about the importance of truly cultivating the soil. In other words, happy soil means a happy farm. And a happy farm means happy farmers!

Community Workdays

Posted on August 25, 2011 by Noelle Wyman

So let’s say we have you hooked. You’re interested, and you want to get involved and learn more about farming. But how?

Lucky for all you wanna-be farmers out there, the Duke Campus Farm holds community workdays twice a week. Everyone is welcome at the workdays: students, faculty, friends and neighbors. No prior gardening or farming experience required, just an interest in food.

The workdays are a chance to get your hands (and clothes) dirty. There’s always something to do on the farm; it’s true that a farmer’s work never ceases.

During the summer, at the peak of the growing season, volunteers get the chance to do a lot of weeding, watering, pest control and harvesting.

As we move into fall, we’ll be rotating out summer crops for fall ones, preparing beds, starting plants in the greenhouse, and continuing the fight against pests and weeds.

Since we plan to grow year-round, we’ll be planting and harvesting throughout the winter and into the spring. We’ll also be working on a number of small construction projects to improve facilities at the farm.

The farm has been holding workdays throughout the spring and summer. Participants have included Duke University deans, undergrads, grands, PhDs, family and significant others, community members, and the occasional dog (leashed, please!).

The community workdays are a great way to meet others who share your interests and to learn about how food is produced. If don’t think you’re interested, remember that everything you eat begins its life on a farm. And if you’re a Duke student, chances are that you’ll be eating something off of the DCF this year.

Come out to the workday and find out what the farm’s about! Here’s when you can catch us on the farm this fall:

Thursdays 4-7 PM

Sundays 10 AM – 2 PM

The farm is located 6 miles from campus on Friends School Road. For more detailed directions, visit our website. Transportation from the Duke Campus is available, please emaildukecampusfarm@gmail.com to arrange.

PS: If you’re really interested in getting more involved on the farm, we have an undergraduate federal work-study position available. Visit our website for more information and to learn how to apply.

Yalies for a Weekend

Posted on August 8, 2011 by Noelle Wyman

A couple of weeks ago, three of the Duke Campus Farm (DCF) farmhands headed north to visit one of the most well-established campus farms around. We hoped to learn (or gain by osmosis) about how Yale’s highly successful project got off the ground and to take these lessons back with us to our own farm.

Here are the basics: the Yale Farm was established in 2003 with help from Alice Waters and planned by Eliot Coleman - two highly prominent figures in the local food movement. The Farm is managed by the Yale Sustainable Food Project (YSFP), whose mission is to provide Yale students with opportunities to experience and learn about many dimensions of food production and consumption. The Farm is roughly the same size as the Duke Campus Farm (DCF), and is located a 15-minute walk from Yale’s campus in New Haven.

Like the DCF, the Yale Farm practices sustainable and organic cultivation methods. The Farm grows as many varieties of crops as possible, and is even experimenting with growing mushrooms. Five full-time summer interns are employed by the Farm (and a number of full-time staff).

The Yale Farm strives to embody and incorporate New Haven and the University. Numerous innovative structures characterize the Farm: a retrofitted shipping container stores tools, and an insulated shed as a walk-in refrigerator (known as the “Cool-bot”).

A pavilion overlooks the farm, providing shade and community space.

New Haven is known for its pizza, and the Yale Farm makes some of the best at its on site, wood-burning pizza oven.

Every Friday, the Farm provides pizza to Yale students – we were warmly welcomed to join – made with ingredients from the farm. The pizzas we enjoyed featured beets, hearty greens, and summer squash.

The Yale Farm’s pizza rivaled that of some of the best-known pizzerias in New Haven (at which we made a point to eat).

We learned a great deal in the two days we spent at the Yale Farm – from organizational branding to engaging the student population to how to make truly excellent pizza. We’re grateful to the YSFP staff, especially Jacquie, and the Farm interns who made our visit both fun and informative.

Now, for the best part: putting all that new knowledge into action. We have big plans for the upcoming year, which include a pig roast this fall and pick-your-own strawberries in the spring. We’re looking forward to engaging Duke students with food, agriculture, and the myriad of associated political, scientific, technological, and health issues (to name a few).

In the meantime, visit us at farm.duke.edu (check out our new logos!), and view more pictures of our visit to Yale. See you on the farm!

Tomatoes and basil and melons, oh my!

Posted on July 17, 2011 by Noelle Wyman

One of the many perks of working on a farm is that the farmworkers get to eat the slightly damaged produce – the stuff that’s not quite good enough to sell.

We’ve had a lot of rain last week, meaning that a lot of tomatoes have cracked from the extra water. The basil is positively exploding, and no matter how much we harvest we never seem to make a dent.

Melons are a fickle fruit. Even seasoned farmers play a guessing game to figure out when melons are ripe and ready to be picked. Here’s what we’ve learned: smell is the best way to tell. If it smells like a melon, then you can be fairly certain you’ve got yourself a ripe one.

Between the melon guessing game and basil bushes, the farmworkers have been eating a lot off the farm!

And THEN, this past Saturday, we visited a neighboring farm to pick our own blueberries… and came home with pounds and pounds of blueberries.

So here are some of our favorite recipes for making use of our extra produce and berries. We hope you enjoy them as much as we have!

Basic Tomato Sauce (adapted from How to Cook Everything)

Ingredients: fresh tomatoes, onions, garlic, olive oil, and basil

Score then blanch tomatoes in boiling water for about 10 seconds, then put them directly into an ice water bath. Peel, seed, then roughly chop.

Chop up 1 large or 2 medium yellow onions for every 8 cups or so of chopped tomatoes (you really can’t go wrong). Sauté in olive oil with chopped garlic, salt and pepper, until onions are translucent.

Add chopped tomatoes, salt to taste. Allow tomatoes to cook on medium heat until cooked down to a sauce consistency; time will depend on the amount of tomatoes. Be sure to stir occasionally. Add basil and other herbs, if desired, just a few minutes before serving.

Pesto

Ingredients: olive oil, parmesan, lots of fresh basil, garlic, salt, and nuts (pine nuts or walnuts work well, but you can use any nut you like).

Remove basil from stems. In a food processor or blender, combine basil leaves, a couple tablespoons of nuts, a couple of peeled garlic cloves, plenty of parmesan cheese, and a good amount of olive oil. Process until it forms a thick paste. Taste and season with salt (or other ingredients) as desired.

Melon and Arugula Salad

Ingredients: a handful of fresh arugula, melon of choice, salt, vinegar of choice (we used balsamic)

Chop melon and toss with chopped arugula, salt, and vinegar in a bowl.

BLT Spaghetti (adapted from NPR)

Ingredients: 1/4-1/2 lb of thick sliced pancetta or bacon, 1 box of spaghetti or long pasta of choice, a couple cups of (cherry) tomatoes, garlic, a couple handfuls of arugula, olive oil, parmesan or pecorino romano

Halve cherry tomatoes or chop tomatoes; leave skin on. On a rimmed cookie sheet in a single layer, drizzle with olive oil, scatter a couple cloves of sliced garlic, salt and pepper. Roast at 275 for 2 hours or until tomatoes have collapsed and are still moist.

In a skillet, cook cubed pancetta until somewhat crispy (8-10 minutes). Add roasted tomatoes and cook for about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. When pasta is finished cooking, drain and reserve some pasta water. Toss pasta with tomatoes and pancetta, stir in arugula. Add a bit of pasta water to bind. Serve with generous parmesan or pecorino romano.

Blueberry Cobbler (adapted from How to Cook Everything)

Ingredients: 4-6 cups blueberries (or other fruit), 1 C sugar (or to taste), 1 stick of butter, 1/2 C flour, 1/2 tsp bakin powder, salt, 1 egg, 1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Toss the blueberries with 1/2 C of sugar and spread into baking pan (recommended 8 in square but be sure to leave some space at the top of the pan so it doesn’t boil over).

Combine flour, baking powder, pinch of salt, and 1/2 C of sugar. You can either do this by hand in a bowl with a fork or pulse in a food processor. Cut up the stick of butter into manageable chunks. If working by hand, use a fork or a pastry cutter to work the butter into the flour mixture until it forms a paste. If using a food processor, process for about 10 seconds until well blended. Beat in vanilla and egg by hand.

Drop this mixture by hand onto the blueberries by tablespoonfuls, like cookies. Don’t spread it, it will bake down. Bake until golden and beginning to brown around the edges at 375, about 35-45 minutes (the bigger the cobbler, the longer this will take). Serve warm.

Welcome to the Farm!

Posted on June 6, 2011 by Noelle Wyman

Welcome to the Campus Farm virtual tour! Click on the image above for more pictures of the farm, and read on for information about how we grow those delicious veggies.

Roughly one third of the plowed acre is currently in production. Our summer crops are green beans, potatoes, watermelons, cantaloupe, honeydew, cucumbers, tomatoes (heirloom and cherry), basil, peppers (hot and sweet), okra, sweet corn, edamame, arugula, sweet potatoes, zinnias and sunflowers (just because they’re pretty).

We’ve also begun to plant our winter crops, which so far include: butternut squash, acorn squash, spaghetti squash and pumpkins.

As a small organic farm, we use as little machinery as possible and most of the work is done by hand. We don’t use synthetic fertilizer or pesticides; instead, we use organic alternatives.

When it’s time to plant a crop, we first have to prepare the bed. Bed prep involves weeding (if needed), an application of composted horse manure, feather meal (for nitrogen), and wood ash (for pH and other nutrients). Once applied, we use a tiller to incorporate the amendments. Finally, we smooth a bed with a rake.

After the bed is ready, we can plant our seeds. We measure, dig, plant, and cover the holes by hand. Most of our rows have a drip irrigation system; for those that don’t, we water by hand as well.

And then we wait! In this hot weather, seeds germinate fairly quickly. Once seedlings emerge, we keep a watchful eye out for pests, which have included birds and bugs, be sure water consistently, and prune if necessary. In a couple of months, presto: gorgeous veggies.

The process may sound simple, but there’s always something to take care of on the farm. Weeds grow like, well, weeds. We lost our summer squash crop to pests, and discovered that crows love digging up corn seedlings. As summer progresses, we’re planning for fall and even next spring.

The farm is always changing, growing, and producing beautiful and bountiful food. (In all honesty, I never cease to be amazed by how much food we harvest!)

The Campus Farm sells to the Duke dining halls. If you’re on campus over the summer, you’ve likely eaten some of our green beans, cucumbers, or potatoes. I bet they were delicious, too.

Cross-posted from the Nicholas School Insider blog.

Memorial Day Doin’s

Posted on June 6, 2011 by Noelle Wyman

At the Duke Campus Farm, we do everything from shovel manure to operating semi-heavy machinery to harvesting fresh veggies. We also get to enjoy the fruits of our labor by cooking and eating what we’ve grown.

Sometimes, however, we just grow too much good stuff. So, taking a page from the last century, we decided to try our hand at pickling and canning.

Last weekend, we pickled the very last of our sugar snap peas as well as some of our chard and beet stems. The idea to pickle the peas came from Bull City Burger and Brewery, one of the restaurants to whom we sell our produce, who pickled our peas and put them on burgers.

Pickling is a surprisingly easy process (click here for instructions for pickling sugar snap peas). All you need are mason jars, vinegar, sugar, garlic, water, and something to pickle!

Unfortunately, pickled vegetables have to sit for about 2 weeks to get good and pickled. So our peas didn’t make it on our Memorial Day menu, but plenty of other farm produce did!

The last of our radish crop became radish and apple salsa – we even used our own cilantro. To make your own, finely chop equal parts radish and apple, then onion to taste. Toss in lime juice and cilantro; chilies would be an excellent addition, but those are growing out on the farm!

We used our very first new potatoes for potato salad, and our broccoli found its way into pasta salad. And for dessert: chocolate beet cake. The cake came out less chocolatey and more like carrot cake, and it was surprisingly delicious. Who knew that beets and chocolate went well together?

Recipe: Chocolate Beet Cake (adapted from Straight From the Farm)

1 C. margarine or butter, softened, divided
1 1/2 C. packed dark brown sugar
3 eggs at room temp
2-3 oz. dark chocolate
5 medium beets (2 C. pureed)
1 t. vanilla extract
2 C. all-purpose flour
2 t. baking soda
1/4 t. salt
1/2 t. cinnamon
1/4 t. nutmeg
confectioners’ sugar for dusting

To make beet puree, trim stems and roots off beets and quarter them. Place in heavy sauce pan filled with water. Bring to a boil and reduce to a simmer for until the beets are tender and you can stick a knife through easily (roughly 25 minutes depending on the size of the beets). Drain off remaining liquid and rinse beets in cold water as they’ll be too hot to handle otherwise. Slide skins off and place beets in blender. Process until a smooth puree forms. Let cool slightly before using in cake.

In a mixing bowl, cream 3/4 cup butter and brown sugar. Add eggs one at a time, mixing well after each addition. Melt chocolate with remaining butter in the microwave on high in 20 second intervals, stirring each time until smooth. Cool slightly. Blend chocolate mixture, beets and vanilla into the creamed mixture. The batter will appear separated.

Combine flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon and nutmeg; add to the creamed mixture and mix well. Pour into greased and floured pans or a 10-in. spring form pan. Bake at 375 degrees F for 60-70 minutes or until a toothpick inserted near the center comes out clean. Cool in pan 15 minutes before removing to a wire rack. Cool completely before icing or dusting with confectioners’ sugar. (We used vanilla buttercream, but cream cheese frosting would be equally delicious!)