High Dry Farm, Sultan, Washington….Certified Organic
I can’t decide whether foraging food or growing food is more satisfying. Our horse pastures sprout meadow mushrooms this time of year, and this year the crop has been huuuuuuge.
A few of these will become a side-dish for steak tonight. The rest go into our dehydrator.
The cucumber and pepper crop in hoophouse #1 was ripped out, and replaced with transplanted spinach, arugula, and romaine lettuce and direct-seeded lettuce for salad mix a couple weeks ago. They are doing well, despite nighttime temperatures of 28 degrees.
If cherry tomatoes tasted nasty we would still grow them because they are so beautiful. It’s just a bonus that they are delicious.
One of our farm’s biggest sellers, to restaurants and at the Farmer’s Market, is salad mix.
New for the farm this year, padron peppers. These early ripening peppers are a stock item on the menu of Spanish tapas bars. Sauté them in smoking hot olive oil until they brown and blister, sprinkle with salt, and pop them in your mouth! They have just a touch of heat, but every tenth one is a little hotter – Russian roulette with food
The hoophouses are now in full production. Tyria English cucumbers and Corinto slicing cucumbers are producing fruit at the rate of about 30 lbs per week of each variety.
Here are two varieties of arugula – Esmee on the left and Astro on the right.
Half of the bed of potatoes was harvested last night. The bed was rototilled, covered with 200 lbs of compost mixed with 1 lb of bone meal, and planted with transplants of lettuce, various members of the cole family, endive and kale (lacinto and red Russian varieties). To help the young plants along I laid down new drip tape.