Garlic Scape Soup

I love garlic! It’s hands down my favorite crop. I think the garlic bed is so lovely, from early spring to mid-summer. The plant has 2 harvests and a farmer friendly schedule. The first harvest is what I’ll explain here today, the scapes! Not scrapes or stakes, scapes! Like “Escape" minus the ‘E'. Each garlic clove I plant, tries to send up a flower stalk. I cut it off, to force the clove into bulb production ASAP. That cut off flower is the scape!

A harvest of the curly garlic scapes, green garlicky goodness.

When you buy a bag of scapes from me, you’ll get a half pound of them, about a dozen curls. Most recipes only use 2 or 3 curls. You can cut and freeze scapes if you need.

Saute scapes and onions with oil.

For my soup, I use 4 or 5 scape curls with a pound of new potatoes. Cut the scapes into a rough dice, discard the actual flower bit at the ends. Saute the diced scapes with an equal amount of diced green onion, with oil in a pot. Stir frequently, have the potatoes cut into 1” cubes. When color and scent are at max in the pot, add the potatoes, salt and black pepper to taste. Add enough water or vegetable stock to cover the potatoes with an inch over. Simmer until the potatoes are tender. At this point I do one fancy step. It really takes this soup up a notch to fantastic. You can serve the soup without it, or adjust to a non dairy substitute, you do you.

The potato and scape soup after water is added.

When the potatoes are tender, scoop out 2 cups or so of the soup, into a big mixing bowl. Add a half cup of whole milk. Using an immersion blender, blend potatoes down and mix in milk. Add mixing bowl contents back to the soup pot, stir to combine. Serve warm.

Give your body the gift of good food. Grab a bag of scapes today!

Jennie

Soup serving suggestion.

Planting Season at Daystar Harvest

We are one week past our last frost date at the farm. I am planting as fast as I can get dirt turned to do it. I have a bed full of onions, cabbages and broccoli, and one full of herbs like cilantro and sage and borage. Both carefully mulched in straw and covered with row cover. My beds are framed by grassy strips I call Beetle Banks. Untilled, and only lightly weeded, these provide year round housing and feeding for all sorts of beneficial insects. The roots of the banks are in the soil year round, keeping the fungal networks fed. In last year’s super rain events, my beetle banks became the only way to walk around my field, for a few weeks. The tall stems help break the winds a bit and provide perches for passing bug eaters. I see snakes and toads in them, and scoot them in that direction when they are in my tiller path, keeping those amphibious helpers safe.

A farm plot, with covered rows next to onion rows. Framing the bed are two of my beetle banks.

The big 60 foot row of cucumbers has gone in! 3 different varieties, Tokiwa, English Burpless, and Japanese Climbing. Straw mulch again, but cages to climb instead of row cover. My cucumbers get companion plantings of little flowers, Alyssum, which funny enough is edible, but I put it there to tempt in pollinators, so my cucumbers get good pollination.

A cucumber seedling and an Alyssum seedling nestled in straw, with cages above.

This weekend will start the massive plantout of nightshades. I grew something like 400-500 tomato seedlings, mostly heirloom varieties that I save seed from. I have at least a hundred spicy pepper seedlings, and a few dozen sweet pepper seedlings. This was my first year growing my own peppers, I’ve always asked a dear friend to do it, to ease space constraints in my grow room setup. I was pleased with the successes.

4 Tomato Seedlings out of the greenhouse. Roughly %.01 of the total available.

Spring won’t be the last planting I do. I will seed summer greens and fall roots. But spring is always massive, and since I’m always increasing the beds, I never quite get everything done. It keeps me striving and growing.

In a different sort of planting, the first of our chicken flock is being established at the farm. The second wave of chicks will join their sisters in a couple weeks. Initially, the flock will keep the farm team in eggs. Ideally of course, we get the hang of it, and expand into production for customers as well.

I had hoped to have more of you come up to help plant, it can be so much fun to do it as a team, in the nice spring sunshine and warm dirt. But with the virus still rampaging through Iowa, I mostly plant alone. Perhaps this summer we can have some tomato picking parties. Or a garlic harvest get together.

Wishing you good health and beautiful plants,

Jennie

Vegetables in the time of Covid

We are committed to your health here at Daystar Harvest. In addition to all the food safety protocols we follow, we are closely monitoring best practices for safe sales during the Covid-19 outbreak. At this point we are not planning to go to any farmers markets this summer. We will keep you informed as the situation changes.

I have an A-frame sign up in the yard.

Jennie here, I have put together our No Contact pickup point at the Windsor Heights location. There is a fridge in the garage, dedicated to Daystar Harvest vegetables. I am sanitizing it frequently. As I have vegetables ready for this option, I will post them in the webstore.

When you place your vegetable order with Daystar Harvest, I will harvest your food and wash the dirt off. I will place it in the fridge, in a bag with your name if there are several orders. You can come during the daylight hours and grab your vegetables. It’s as close as you can get to growing your own, with no weeding involved!

Our food system will continue to be strained by this pandemic. Your local farmers are here to help. As the season goes on I will offer delivery of vegetables as well as this No Contact pickup option. I also have vegetable seedlings almost ready to harden out of the greenhouse, for those with garden to fill. Those will be available for pick up or delivery.

Chives and green onions are available for pick up now! Head over to the webstore!

Jennie

2020 Greenhouse Fun

We are growing in 2020! One of the choke points from last year was in transplant production. I was working with grow lights and my back porch and a strict schedule that used every last inch of space. The schedule exploded as the rains continued on and on last spring. At one point my entire back porch was covered in plants, waiting on a break in rain to go get planted in actual dirt. It was madness, and some things handled it better than others. The tomatoes never really recovered, even my back porch was too wet and too cold and they sulked the rest of the year. The peppers were the same, although a couple that I put in flower pots inside the house, out of desperation (I really needed some seed from them) did really well.

So I’m super thrilled that Becky found us a greenhouse to rent for half a year. It’s a 20’x100’ unheated tunnel. #29 is it’s current designation, but that sounds a little BORG-like to me. Help us come up with a good name!

It’s already toasty warm in there on sunny days. And as we pass the Spring Equinox this week, we should see more and more sunny days!

Some of the trays in the new greenhouse, lots of the onions and houseplants too.

What are we growing in the greenhouse?!

Well, so far I have some houseplant propagation going, so stay tuned for locally grown houseplant babies. I have taken two car loads of houseplant babies to the greenhouse. Do I still have more on my windowsills at home? Yes, yes I do. #CrazyPlantLady

I have a bunch of herbs seeded. Everything from culinary staples like thyme and sage, to more medicinal herbs like boneset and lemon balm. We’ll clear more ground at the farm and expand the bed spaces to allow us to plant more of these lovely herbal friends. Some of them are perennial, which is part of their appeal. Perennial plants help us to regenerate the soil as we sustainably harvest medicinal products from them.

I have flowers planted! So many flowers! Lots of annuals, we will offer some for sale this spring so you can brighten your beds. Like the herbs, I have some perennial flowers going in. Some are selfishly just for on-farm enjoyment, me and the pollinators. But I hope some of them are happy enough they grow into a nice patch, so we can offer flower bouquets. If I end up with way too many transplants, I’ll offer some of the perennials for sale too.

Of course there are vegetables planted. Onions are up already, leeks aren’t far behind I hope. The first of the lettuce crops are started. I started the first wave of broccoli and cabbage seed yesterday. As we stop dipping below freezing at night, I’ll start the peppers and tomatoes.

It’s good clean fun. Come visit if you find yourself up near Ledges or Don Williams parks over this long Spring Break.

Lots of infrastructure upgrades going on! I’ll try to keep everyone in the loop. Where are you growing this year? Let us know in the comments!

Jennie

Why No CSA Box for 2020?

First off, I love offering a CSA box for folks that want that no fuss guaranteed delivery of fresh veg. I will probably offer a CSA box again, in the future. But! For the 2020 season, I’m not going to offer a monthly box.

There will still be lots of vegetables for sale! I might put together weekly boxes! Salad subscriptions! I’m going to try all sorts of things. I’m also going to be digging deeper, and I want to spend 2020 planting perennial plants. We will enjoy the fruits of this labor in the coming years. Becky and I want to get more fruit bearing plants established, and more medicinal plants.

All these goals have us so excited for this year! It’s going to take a lot of work and a lot of learning. We have our Ford 8N tractor to get familiar with and learn how it can help in the big plans. We have some infrastructure to build out so we can handle more of this good food in a a graceful way. Some of the infrastructure will be so we can welcome more of you out to the farm. Big herb dryers, increased parking, more covered storage spaces for equipment. I’ll share all the details as we go along this year.

Our newest venture is a greenhouse space, near the farm, and unheated. We are renting from a farm neighbor. It will allow me to grow an order of magnitude more of the vegetable starts I need. It was a serious bottle neck last year. I had plantings drown or get eaten, and I couldn’t replant because my transplant starting areas were full already. We start March 1st with that fun! The earliest of the seeds will like the cool spring greenhouse. The onions and leeks, they will do just fine with our frosty nights and sunny days.

Early leeks and chives in a tray.

In addition to more vegetable starts, we are going to start lots of herbs and flowers and such for you! For garden additions, patio pots or windowsills, we will have some lovely plant babies for you to take home and love.

I hope you’ll stick around and see what we have to offer this year! It’s going to be great.

Meet Your Farmer Jennie!

My name is Jennie, I’m a beginning farmer here in Central Iowa.

I have been growing food ever since I came home from a study abroad in India in 2005. What started out in backyards and neighbor yards as a hobby has bloomed in the past few years into a vegetable farm. I’ve been so thrilled to grow good food for my CSA box families and for farmers markets.

I prefer to grow in systems that mirror nature as closely as possible. This is a constant struggle to find the balance and intervene enough to get good food out of the system without intervening so much that I send the system out of balance. In practice that means I don’t use chemicals for insecticide or fungicide treatments. I use all natural oils, and soaps, as well as good old fashioned hand work to keep insects and fungi in balance. I keep helpful bugs around with the use of beetle banks and pollinator plantings.

My favorite crops to grow are my garlic and my greens. I grow a couple different varieties of hardneck garlic. You’ll hear a lot more about this crop as the year goes on. It’s a customer favorite too! Greens I enjoy growing include everything from microgreens to kale. I love anything green and leafy!

Funny enough I majored in engineering in college, so if I talk about systems and inputs and seem overly excited by data at times, there’s a reason for that. I love the outdoors too much though, the cubicles couldn’t hold me, so here I am. Buy some of my food! Or invite me out to your garden, I can help with weed removal, plantings, design work or suppling transplants.

Thanks for all the support! I’m really excited for everything Becky and I have planned for 2020. Stick around here at our new web space and see what’s new and fresh every week!

Ask me anything in the comments! Or send requests.