Um… those aren't potatoes

On Sunday morning, we were digging up red potatoes when the potato digger unearthed these soft, ping-pong ball-sized eggs. They’re the handiwork of a snapping turtle mama.

We’d unknowingly met the likely mother about two months ago. She was trapped inside the deer fence, and we had to use a shovel and wheelbarrow to gently relocate her to the woods.

Now, you’ve probably heard the saying “meaner than a snake.” Well, it could be meaner than a turtle. She was a fierce lady. When I tried to nudge her on the shovel with a hoe, she grabbed the metal in her curved, beak-like mouth and nearly yanked it from my grasp. And when we flipped her on her shell, to better scoop her up, she flipped herself upright with one powerful flop. She weighed around 20 pounds, and was tougher than a little armored tank.

The tractor wheels and tines of the potato digger had went over the potato row about three times before we discovered the nest. We planted the potatoes in the spring, and she must have slipped in and dug a hole for her babies right under our noses.

From what we read, when relocating snapping turtle eggs, you should move them as little as possible, and try to keep them oriented the way you found them. So don’t turn them. It has to do with how the embryo is positioned.

We transported about 40 eggs to a patch of woods down near the farm pond. We dug a hole, and then put soil and compost over them and tried to hide it with leaves. Hopefully, at least a few of them will get a chance to grow up and be as mean as their mama.

We’re wondering if this was the mother turtle. We relocated her from inside the deer fence about two months ago.

~ Stella

Tomato season is here!

It’s. Tomato. Season. Woooohoooo!

After deer debacles of days of yore, we’re pretty darn excited around here. And the lean and lower system in the Big Tunnel is working so well that the vines are climbing for the ceiling! It made this short farmer snort in puzzled amusement as to how she was going to get them down.

Click here to see what we have now. We’ll continuously add varieties as summer marches on. (Our Romas are not ready yet.)

We LOVE fresh tomatoes with balsamic and ranch, and a crumble of feta. How do you like them?

Here’s where to find all of the produce we have to offer each week. Orders are ready any time after noon on Mondays. Click here to order.

The season is short - let’s enjoy it!

~ Stella

Come along for a photo tour of the farm!

Our actual farm tour was rained out, so let’s at least take a zip through the gardens with pictures. Come along, friends!

First up, the Big Tunnel. This tunnel was built thanks to a grant. We knew this would be our only shot at a tunnel of this size, so we contributed farm money to go a little bigger. We grow in this unheated tunnel year-around.

The new lean & lower system for vining crops is working in the tunnels. The cherry tomato harvest just started this week. What a difference! Neatly hanging tomato vines let air flow through the plant and make harvesting MUCH easier.

Those are bell peppers on the left. It’s pepper harvesting time in the tunnels now. This is the first season in several years that deer have not completely destroyed the peppers. This is all because of a new 7 1/2-foot deer fence that encloses the gardens. Our home county, Crawford, opened up funding received during the pandemic, and we applied for and received a grant that paid for the fence and landscape fabric. This fence saved our farm, and we’re so grateful.

Here’s the Big Tunnel from another angle. On the right is celery. Since this photo was taken, we filled in the spaces between the celery with fennel.

Here’s the tunnel from the front. The soil rows are seeded with carrots.

This is one of our parsley patches. Many of our CSA newsletter recipes call for parsley, so we like to have a good supply. As you can see, random kale pops up everywhere.

This is Caterpillar 2, another unheated high tunnel. We have a total of four unheated tunnels on the farm, and one at home for baby plants. This tunnel has tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant. The tomatoes in here need clipped to the string, but they aren’t the kind that must be pruned.

Here’s the same tunnel, but the other side. Those are eggplants. The flea beetles did a number on them, but they seem to be recovering. This whole tunnel has been covered in straw and grass clippings, twice in some places. As you can see, the grass still pokes up, but this is so much better than past seasons when weeds were unmanageable.

This is one of two potatoes patches. They’re doing very well. We’ve had good luck with potatoes.

Here’s the inside of the other Caterpillar tunnel. That’s squash and kale. There’s another parsley patch in the back, and a few rows of green beans that you can’t see in this photo. We used a combination of straw and landscape fabric in this tunnel. We put the landscape fabric down too early in the spring, and voles kept eating the kale and broccoli transplants. The lesson we learned is to skip landscape fabric in March and April, and use straw. When there’s nothing else for the voles to eat, the landscape fabric just makes it too easy.

Here’s one of our basil patches. This year we’re growing traditional basil and Thai basil.

THIS is Silas’s garden! He’s checking out his cucumbers and jelly melons.

He’s got carrots next to his collards.

Here’s his basil, Swiss chard, and tomatoes. He has his own CSA with three members (his two grandmas and Chef Jason, of ZEST - thanks, Chef!). He says his first share will be going out soon.

Just wanted to show that vole issues aren’t limited to spring. Any empty hole was a vole’s meal. Jason’s transplanted lettuce in these rows a few times. We’re looking into getting a dog who specializes in rodent control.

Here’s one lettuce row. We seed 800 lettuce a week, and transplant the same number.

Here’s Swiss chard.

This is one of our big kale patches. The other patch is in a tunnel, and new kale transplants are a few rows over. We have green curly, red Russian, white Russian, purple, and dinosaur.

The garlic harvest has begun. The wet weather isn’t helping. Hopefully, we’ll have a dry couple of days soon.

The onions are doing well in their straw. We’re very excited for a good onion crop.

Here’s the broccoli. It was one of the first crops put under straw. At the time, we were trying to conserve straw because we only had so many bales. As you can see, these needed more. The plants still did fine. The little bit of a jump on the weeds made a big difference. However, the high temperatures we had before this rainy spell caused them to bolt, meaning they went to seed. Worms and other pests make growing broccoli difficult.

Showing you this in the interest of full disclosure. So, those are peppers under there. We put down straw, but clearly they needed another layer. Under that jungle, the peppers are doing alright, but if we want them to actually produce anything, we need to free them from the weeds. We didn’t put fabric down because we were worried about voles. Well, the voles didn’t find them, and right now, neither can we!

Here’s one squash patch. You can see the fence in this photo. We plant summer squash in several places around the farm to try and evade squash bugs.

Here’s what we call the New Orchard, with apple, nectarine, and cherry trees. The tree line in the background is the Old Orchard. It has towering apple trees. The fruit falls from so high it tends to smash on the ground. Below the Old Orchard are the ruins of an old homestead. There’s a stone spring house and a creek that’s always washing up old crockery.

Here’s the tomato patch in the back corner of the farm.

Buckwheat cover crop - very pretty but needs mowed.

These are watermelons. There’s a third row on the right edge of the photo. Must be a strange gust that cuts through there, because no matter how much we stapled down the fabric, the wind kept whipping it loose.

These rows are seeded for a fall crop of green beans.

We leave the entire southeast corner of the farm wild for pollinators. Nature does amazing things with golden rod, ironweed, and Queen Anne’s lace here.

This isn’t exactly the geographic center of the farm, but it serves as the main entrance, and that strip of grass down the middle divides what we call the Upper Farm from the Lower Farm. The Lower Farm is on a hill.

Here’s the Big Tunnel and the two Cat tunnels.

That row along the tunnel is sunflowers.

This is the Lower Farm. Jason does some direct seeding, but almost everything you see in all these photos was started from seed in our basement and tended to under grow lights by Jason. The process starts for him in early February. I always feel like I should note that he’s worked a full-time off-farm job for all seven seasons. Gardens are a wondrous combination of Mother Nature and man’s own will.

That’s me!

The summer produce is just starting up.

I thought this looked like a stained-glass window!

We have a whole family of garter snakes that call our straw stack home. The other day, I accidentally tipped over the stack and two snakes rained down. Thankfully they didn’t land on me and they weren’t hurt. When the straw stack is gone, maybe they’ll finally go eat some voles!

Thanks for coming along on this tour. And thanks for supporting the farm and taking an interest in what goes on up here. It means a lot to us.

~ Stella

Tomato progress & seeing things through

On any given day, on any given farm, and probably in your day, too, there’s a list of things to do that just never quite seems to shorten. The curse of the list. You may be familiar with barreling from one task to the other, and getting nothing done well, or completed fully. I say “you” because here at the farm, we’ve checked off our to-do list and have our feet up on the porch railing, drink in hand, by 6 p.m. Ha! If you’ll buy that, I’ve got some oceanfront property in Arizona for you. (Hi there, fellow George Strait fans.)

On Thursday evening, after a round of CSA deliveries, we headed up to the farm to squeak in another hour or so of work. The tomatoes in the high tunnels were getting unruly, and while Jason was most certainly aware of this on his own, I made sure to repeatedly mention it in casual conversation. “Boy, those tomatoes. Really taking off. Whew.” “Have you seen those tomatoes? Wow.”

Jason is very good at graciously ignoring my annoying habit of stating the obvious of what needs done around the farm. So while he was working on the cucumbers in the Big Tunnel, he glanced over at the tomatoes and said, “I suppose you want me to prune those?”

“Oh, well, you know, if you’ve got time…”

While Jason has a farm to-do list that stretches from the tips of his fingers to his toes, he knew the time had come to push those things aside in his mind, and tend to the tomatoes. We’ve already invested hours and dollars into these rows, and with continued proper care, each plant should be worth a lot. So while he could go in a thousand directions, he needed to just sit in the tomato row with the clippers and a bucket. It can be so hard to remain relatively still on the farm, taking care of a task that’s so slow going. It feels like there’s a marathon going on all around you, and you’re just sitting in the middle of the pavement. But when he was done, the tomatoes looked healthy and cared for. The time he spends pruning will have a huge ROI.

We’re both learning to take the time to see tasks through. After weeding the high tunnel peppers the other night, my first impulse was to spring up and head to the other peppers in one of the caterpillar tunnels. Those are in need of serious care before it’s too late. But I stopped myself, literally, mid stride. Wait. You just crawled along on your hands and knees, weeding this whole bed. It wasn’t very fun. Take the time to get straw and lay it down on that row. Then walk away from it for good until you’re carrying a harvest bin and collecting peppers from it.

So, I did, and that meant I didn’t have time to get to those other peppers that night. But right now, one pepper row is fully cared for. I can check it off my mental list and truly move on to something else.

This is tomato tar. When you handle tomato greens a lot, it builds up on your fingers, arms, and clothes. Tomato tar is what makes a tomato plant smell like a tomato plant. The plants have hair-like structures called trichomes that secrete this oil. When you wash your hands, this black residue turns the sink yellow.

Silas and Jay, in the thick of it.

Clipping a tomato plant to the string.

One row pruned. This is in the Big Tunnel, June 17, 2021.

~ Stella

The farm with all the weird stuff

A few years ago, sitting at the farmers market, a woman said to me, “You’re that farm with all the weird stuff.” Guilty as charged.

A delivery of Dinosaur kale will arrive at Core Goods in Oil City Wednesday, June 16. How about that color?! And that texture!

Rainbow radishes will be delivered to Core Goods and Edinboro Market this week. We’re also pulling Rainbow radishes for Week 2 of the CSA.

~ Stella

A nice night off the farm with ZEST Kitchen & Pantry

Every season, Chef Jason Puryear hosts Farm Talk & Tasting nights, when he invites local farmers to speak, and he creates dishes featuring their ingredients. It’s a way to connect growers to the community, and it also forces shy farmers to get off the farm for a night, take a shower, and go socialize.

When we eat a meal out, or pick up carry-out, it’s from Chef Puryear’s ZEST Kitchen & Pantry. Unlike so much restaurant food, his lunch bowls help you get through the second half of your day full of energy, and with a pleasantly full and content stomach. You can order from the chef here. Chef Puryear is a grower now, as well, and operates Orange Dot Homestead, so he’s not only the host on farm talk nights, he’s a part of the conversation.

For our farm talk, Silas, who astoundingly has almost zero fear of public speaking, told us he wanted to present about Lil’ Plot Twist Farm, so we put together a mini slideshow for him. He walked in with his “fancy” shoes on and his straw sheriff’s hat, to greet the always friendly small audience of friends and neighbors. Afterward, Chef Jason and Silas worked out a sales deal. On Silas’s way out the door after dinner the other night, he called over his shoulder, saying to let him know if any of his CSA members (his grandmas) or Chef Jason calls and needs anything. Take a message for him. And if we let the machine pick it up, let him know.

Thanks, as always, Chef, for a nice night in Meadville. Keep an eye on ZEST’s Facebook page for the July farm talk with our friends from Strawberry Lane Produce.

Here are a few photos of creations by Chef Puryear:

Pasta salad with radish green pesto and sun-dried tomatoes and green onions.

Fruit salad with a maple butter glaze.

Fairy garden salad. Aw, Chef! :)

Iced tea with lemon balm leaves.

~ Stella