Kitchen Garden Journal

Preparations are underway at the farm for this year’s Garlic & Arts Festival in Orange, MA. This year marks 5 years we have been selling our garlic and other produce at the festival!

The Garlic & Arts festival is so much more than a garlic festival. Over the years, Deb and Ricky from Seeds of Solidarity farm, along with an army of volunteers, have turned this festival into one of the great gathering places for people in this part of the world. For me, the best part about it is being there with so many awesome people. Lots of people look forward to this weekend all year, myself included.

For us as a farm, it’s a great departure from our normal routine. It’s such a refreshing feeling to put our products and our faces in front of a new audience. And we get to really geek-out about garlic –varieties, flavors, growing techniques—with garlic lovers from all over the region. 

The Garlic & Arts Festival is special for us because we are primarily offering our garlic as planting stock for amateur growers. We have people coming back year after year saying how amazing their garlic crop has turned out. It's really a great opportunity to be part of that.

We take immense pride in the way we’ve multiplied our particular strains of garlic over the years. Growing garlic requires a different and more thoughtful approach than most crops we grow (except perhaps tomatoes, for which we grow our own seed as well). The festival reminds us every year to celebrate and appreciate this special plant, without which, the food I eat every day would simply not taste as good.

Another great thing for about this festival is that over the years it has given us the opportunity to interact with the public not just as growers but as cooks. We've demonstrated some of our favorite garlicky comfort foods over the years. We'll be doing our cooking demo at 2:30pm on Saturday; this time it's hand-cut fries with aioli using our own potatoes, garlic and eggs.  

We hope to see you there! Saturday and Sunday 10am-6pm in Orange, MA. For more information see garlicandarts.org. 

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We're not talking about winter spinach or salad mix. We wanted to let you know about Emmet's evergreens.

Our crew member Emmet van Driesche manages a beautiful grove of balsam fir trees in Ashfield and will be offering sustainably grown Christmas trees, holiday wreaths and trimmings this season. It's well worth a trip to the Pieropan Christmas Tree Farm on Pfersick Rd in Ashfield to saw your own You-Cut tree. They're open the day after Thanksgiving through Christmas Day.

Pieropan trees are grown without herbicides or pesticides in a natural forest setting instead of sterile rows. Emmet manages the woodlot by hand using a method called "stump culture." Instead of cutting trees down to the ground they are cut at waist height and two or three new trees are allowed to re-grow from the remaining branches. He carefully prunes the trees' exuberant growth to thin the new trees sent up from the stump, producing a sustainable alternative to conventional Christmas trees. 

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Thanks to everyone who came out to the Garlic and Arts Festival in Orange this weekend. The crowds were huge, our garlic sold out, and a good time was had by all. Business was booming, but truthfully, the real reason we go is to get the maple cotton candy. We killed a whole bag on the couch last night and then collapsed. 

A big, big thanks to Ricky and Deb from Seeds of Solidarity and all of the organizers and volunteers that make the festival possible. There is simply no other event that brings the whole region together to celebrate the best of everything, and we feel honored to be a part of it, year after year. 

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On Saturday night, the Kitchen Garden farm was transformed into the Kitchen Sink supper club. Heather, Candace, Julia, Dan and Brian invited 30 of their friends and family to dine on the fruits of their labor. I was thrilled to witness and partake in this five-course celebration as a guest while Tim stayed home with the sleeping babies.

Tiki lamps and handcrafted paper lanterns lit the path to the greenhouse where our farmers' market tables and cloths were re-purposed as a long row of communal seats. Miles Davis played on the turntable and red wine was passed in milk bottles.

Plate after plate paraded down from the farm kitchen, where the same people who've worked so hard to grow the vegetables prepared a magical and memorable meal. Arugula salad with grapefruit-glazed chioggia beets. Creamy potato leek soup. Two kinds of handmade ravioli with gorgeous green and red striped dough, lovingly colored with kale and beet juice and stuffed with butternut squash or spinach and ricotta. Cipollini onions roasted with balsamic and thyme. And, finally, a phenomenal apple pie.

This was the first event of this kind at this farm. But perhaps not the last. Thank you to our fabulous crew not only for all your tireless work but also for your creative energy and inspiration!

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Our friends at Wheatberry Bakery & Cafe just announced that shares in The Pioneer Valley Heritage Grain CSA are now available. 100 lbs of heritage wheat, heirloom dry beans, spelt, rye, heirloom dent corn grown in Shutesbury, Hadley, and Gill, MA. Check out their great blog, Fields & Fire, to see what they're writing about farming, baking and more.

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The sap’s running and while it’s too early to tell what the maple season will be like this year, I can tell you that the pancakes at Gould’s Sugarhouse on Route 2 in Shelburne are fantastic no matter what’s happening up in the sugar bush. Our Saturday morning visit was the third for our daughter, Lily - an annual tradition we started when she was one month old - and the first for our 5-month-old, Oliver. Even though we got there at exactly 8:30 a.m. when they opened the doors, the wait was about an hour. Perfect timing is probably more like 8:15.

 The wait, however, is truly part of the experience of the New England sugarhouse pancake breakfast. It’s the only dining experience I know of where you can chat with real farmers doing real farm work in real time while you wait for your table. A friendly chat with the man working the evaporator about his firewood gave me some insight into his business.

There are two major external factors that determine the success of a maple crop, or of any crop, for that matter: the weather and the economy. Since the economy is bad, the local sawmills aren’t churning out as many boards, so there aren’t as many cast-off end pieces to burn. Luckily, though, last winter’s ice storm took down a bunch of hardwoods on the Gould property and they were able to split and season their own windfall crop of wood. Adding hardwood to the mix buys them more time to chew the fat with customers; instead of stoking the boiler every 5 minutes with an all pine fire, they only have to do it every seven minutes to keep the sap at a fierce 220 degrees. 

So in this case, the negative effects of the economy were offset by the positive effects of bad weather.

In other good news, local demand for pancakes seems to be stronger than ever, and Gould’s serves the best around. The secret? Good luck finding it out, but the essence of the Gould’s pancake is moistness. There are no crunchy fried bits on the outside, but who cares? Their perfect batter, whatever its makeup, is perfectly cooked, not at all raw, and when you dive into a triple stack it’s like taking a bite of birthday cake. And if that wasn’t enough, the homemade sour pickles are the perfect foil for all that syrup.

That’s what’s so great about Gould’s: the traditions. More than at some other places where they have propane boilers or reverse osmosis or lots of Bisquick, this place seems like the real deal. No one’s forcing them to spend the summer making all those pickles for the following spring. They do it out of a sense of pride in what they do, and of doing it right, and that sense carries all the way though the process from sap to syrup to service.

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