Naomi

• • 

    House in the Woods Farm What are the odds, considering there are hundreds of heirlooms to be coveted. But really, Green Zebra is a magic tomato, with two stripes of green that blushes to yellow. How great is that? Now I’m gonna have to post a photo of one. Happy Gardening!

Please bring a box to carry home your plants. I’m happy to collect extras for other customers, if you have a couple to spare! I’ll have some here too.

http://blog.houseinthewoods.com/2012/04/30/heirloom-tomato-sale-varieties/

Here are more details about the Heirloom Tomato Plant Sale this week! We have a few CSA shares left too, check in with me if you are interested. These two days are a good time to peek in on the garden progress and the baby goats.

Friday May 4 and Saturday May 5, 10am-5pm

At the farm, see below for more details.

House in the Woods Organic Heirloom Plant Sale 2012

$4.50 per tomato plant. Return pots to our mailbox, we’ll re-use them!

            REDS AND PINKS————————————

____ Brandywine–Pinkish red, most popular heirloom originated in 1889.

____ Black Krim–Dark red beefsteak with rich sweet taste from Black Sea of Russia

____ Cherokee Purple—A favorite, from Tennessee cultivated by the Cherokee Tribe. Plants loaded with beefsteak tomatoes. Deep red interior flesh, rich, complex flavor.

____ Rutgers– From 1934 “the Jersey tomato”, red tomatoes great taste for fresh slicing or cooking.

____ Black Prince– From Siberia, one of the most popular black tomatoes. Rich taste for cooking or fresh. Smaller fruit.

UNIQUE COLORS————————————-

____ Old German/Pineapple—a mild sweet fruity tomato, with red-yellow streaks to skin and flesh. Low acid, as are most yellow, orange and green tomatoes.

____ Hess–German heirloom producing large yellow fruit with red marbling, a beautiful bi-colored beefsteak. Mild, sweet, fruity flavor. Like Old German above.

____ Green Zebra–A magic tomato, green with dark green stripes, skin blushes yellow when ripe. Green salsa or even green sauce! A hit for contrast on a potluck platter. Also have some Cherokee Green.

____ Wapsipinicon Peach–named after the Wapsipinicon River in northeast Iowa. Heavy producer of 2″ round fuzzy  yellow fruits. Sweet, juicy, well-balanced flavor. Replacing Garden Peach for us.

PASTES for cooking and saucing————————————————

____ Speckled Roma–Paste tomato, red with a hink of orange and wavy yellow streaks, a beauty! And sweet, good enough for salads. My kids’ favorite. 

____ Orange Banana –another unique paste, this one is orange! Plum-shaped orange paste with pointed ends and a good sweet-tart flavor.  An all-purpose plum tomato with good disease resistance.

____ Amish Paste–reliable traditional red roma with thick skin and less juice, ideal for cooking and canning, but sweet enough to eat fresh.

____ Bellstar—early plum, fresh or for processing. Compact plant with a concentrated early set. Larger and earlier than other sauce tomatoes. (Not an heirloom.)

CHERRY TOMATOES————————————————

____ Matt’s Wild Cherry–Mini red wild cherry tomatoes, prolific. Cute little stems with six bite-size tomatoes on each. Kids love ‘em!

____ Sungold Cherry–Orange, super sweet mini tomato. A rare exception to our heirloom rule in our tomato collection, this hybrid is worth it. Our CSA members eat them all up on the car-ride home.

 OTHER PLANTS————————————————

 ____ Basil–Three kinds this year! Sweet basil, thai basil, and beautiful red basil. 

____ Parsley, Oregano, Chamomile, Sorrel

____ Sorry, not much in peppers and eggplant this year. Maybe a tray or two. 

***USE OUR FARM LANE ON SALE DAY, on PARK MILLS ROAD***

For GPS purposes but there is no mailbox: 2225 Park Mills Rd, Adamstown, MD.
Take 270 to Rte 80 West, go two miles, take a left on Park Mills Road, go about three miles, pass Mt Ephraim Rd and Bear Branch Road. Watch on your left side–you will cross over Bennett Creek, pass a house, then immediately look for our farm lane with a sign for “House in the Woods Farm.” Drive up the lane and follow signs for parking. Gone too far if you get to Lilypons Road.

Contact: ilene@houseinthewoods.com or 301-607-4048

Our tomato plants are also available at The Common Market www.commonmarket.com

Sale Hours —

Friday May 4th, 10am-5pm
Saturday May 5th, 10am-5pm

***USE OUR FARM LANE ON SALE DAY, on PARK MILLS ROAD***

For GPS purposes but there is no mailbox: 2225 Park Mills Rd, Adamstown, MD.
Take 270 to Rte 80 West, go two miles, take a left on Park Mills Road, go about three miles, pass Mt Ephraim Rd and Bear Branch Road. Watch on your left side–you will cross over Bennett Creek, pass a house, then immediately look for our farm lane with a sign for “House in the Woods Farm.” Drive up the lane and follow signs for parking. Gone too far if you get to Lilypons Road.

Contact: ilene@houseinthewoods.com or 301-607-4048

Our tomato plants will also be available at The Common Market (www.commonmarket.com), coming very soon.

The male has a pink nose!

We have some chickens that like to lay eggs in the goat shed, in the hay. The boys collect the eggs and call these “goat eggs”.  This is funny…now we even have goats that lay on the eggs!

Here’s the good momma, tending to her babes.

This is April, one of last year’s twins. Yearlings? Ready for breeding this fall. She is a beautiful pure-bred Alpine milk goat and is available for sale.

This is Hazelnut, the goofball. This photo just makes me laugh every time.

I love all the seed packets, some are cracked open early to germinate in the greenhouse, some wait til the soil is warm. Seed packets represent all the hope of the garden. We’re working on saving our own seed, but some is always ordered from our favorite cooperative seed company.

Fun Jen Cabbage seedlings, a new crop for 2012: Napa Cabbage. Here’s your botany lesson for the day–the heart shaped simple leaves are the cotyledon leaf, the baby leaf; and then curvier one is the first True Leaf, and is the first to look like cabbage leaves.

We’ve been busy, and the greenhouse tables are quickly full. As quickly as they fill up, we begin planting them out into the garden rows, making room for tomatoes to be potted on to bigger pots and demand more table space.

This blog posting is brought to you in honor of the bok choi we planted in the fall, in the greenhouse. We enjoyed the bok choi but also had some hang out too long and lose their crispness. Good thing I am not quick to pull old crops up…it started shooting up these delicious spring sprouts. The sprouts look and taste a bit like broccoli. The leaves are delicate and delicious! I stir-fry them, put them in my green smoothies, splash dressing on them as a leaf salad. Along with the winter kale we planted, they have been a healthy blessing to me this winter and I am so grateful! I usually crave greens this time of year and this is the first year that I feel like I ate enough greens throughout the winter.

This is Sitka, the farm dog, who dug himself a bed in the greenhouse, to hang out with me and help with the seeding. He is dedicated to our greenhouse work and spends many afternoons seeding with me.

Spring play in the garden at its best. The funny part is that this young lady came by with her mom to drop something off… and this is what they got into! Doesn’t she look perfectly into it? Noah gives me a perplexed look when he discusses kids who are scared of the dirt. It’s foreign to him. You can see here, where his comfort zone lies. If you have a child that is hesitant about getting dirty…send em to me for an afternoon and we’ll see what we can do. And tell me, is it a mixed message that I give a little groan when they come to me with muddy grins, then I make them all stand for a photo op before we head to the bath??

Well, I have this Ilene counterpart cousin in Texas who has some cautionary words for you as you embark on your gardening, dare I say Farming, endeavor. She’s an Ilene too, and for the record, she became an Ilene a year or two before me, but she’s nice so she shares. We also share the namesake of our mutual great-grandmother Ida. Here’s where it flip flops.

We are trying on each other’s hats: She spent some time off the computer screen trying her hand at farming, as I take breaks from the fields and try to kickstart a growing season of blogging about the farm. While I’m busy planting seeds in the field, she is out west winning awards in the social media field for her #ATX blog-a-thon and leadership in mobilizing the bloggers of Austin. And she’s a fine read.

Here are some links to Ileenieweenie’s hilarious farming renditions and the results, beginning with a Cautionary Tale:

http://ileenieweenie.com/blog/ol-macweenie-had-a-farm-a-graphic-designers-cautionary-tale/

http://ileenieweenie.com/blog/farming-newsflash/

http://ileenieweenie.com/blog/miracle-on-south-second-street/

http://ileenieweenie.com/blog/bad-news-in-the-garden-of-eatin/

Also, this great poster and more are part of a series called The Lexicon of Sustainability.

This is Ira Wallace, here on the right. She is posing with Sarah Kelsen, Frederick friend of ours and House in the Woods apprentice/workshare. Thanks for the introduction, Sarah!

Ira Wallace is the founder of the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange which is a member of OSGATA, the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association. OSGATA and other collectives of organic farmers and organizations are joined together in a lawsuit against MONSANTO. The lawsuit asks for protection for organic farmers whose crops have been contaminated by GE crops. OSGATA is the chief plaintiff in the case.

I am so glad I had a chance to meet Ira and put a face to the politics–a real human being and a wonderful one at that! to personalize the issue and remind us that there are real people out there doing real hard work for the cause. She has tireless energy on this important cause. She is humble and heartfelt and just trying to do her good work of preserving heritage seed. I so very much appreciate Ira’s commitment to the issues and those of all the people involved in the case. We need to do what we can to support them.

Ira invited their lawyer to come from New York for the workshop about the case and he did! He is such an asset to the case, he really gets it. He is a patent lawyer and pulled together the parties involved to bring this case together. He said to a room full of farmers: In about seven years, I hope to never meet with you people again. You and I should not be meeting together except for me as your customer.

What he’s saying is that patent should not be in between him and his food, or between organic farmer and their seed, or certainly genetically-modified seed. We’re not trying to use this product. We’re trying NOT to use this product. But it flies in the wind and transforms the life spirit of nature’s seeds…and to me, I do not understand why they can claim ownership to transformative life that contaminates other life forces. That’s polluting. This idea “can a company patent life?” was taken all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada in a previous Monsanto case, and I’m sad to say that they decided yes its patentable. However, it was considered a win for the farmer as well, because Monsanto settled out of court and “agreed to pay all the clean-up costs of the Roundup Ready canola that contaminated Schmeiser’s fields” instead of the other way around. I heard him speak on the case 4-5 years ago at the PASA conference, you can hear his voice on the subject in a recording on his website. That’s Percy Schmeiser.

But I digress. So many farmers have been sued by Monsanto since Percy Schmeiser was sued, and now we’re onto this new case, to protect farmers from the company in the business of suing farmers..

This from an OSGATA press release:

The case, Organic Seed Growers & Trade Association, et al. v. Monsanto, was filed in federal district court in Manhattan on March 29, 2011, on behalf of 60 family farmers, seed businesses and organic agricultural organizations, challenging Monsanto’s patents on genetically modified seed. On June 1, 2011, we amplified our OSGATA v. Monsanto complaint by bringing on an additional 23 Plaintiffs to bring the total to 83. Our plaintiff group now represents over 300,000 members.

300,000 people are suing Monsanto! It is about time we collectively find a way to stop Monsanto. This is a beginning. Its a bit of their own medicine:

“In fact, between 1997 and 2010, Monsanto actually filed 144 lawsuits against American family farmers. In addition, another 700 were settled out of court for unknown amounts. Monsanto has an agenda to take out American family farms and dominate the agricultural industry with their own mutant seeds. This is the same kind of practice that Monsanto operates outside of the United States as well, driving thousands of poor farmers to suicide by ruining their family farming practices.”  http://www.activistpost.com/2012/02/farmers-issue-lawsuit-against-monsanto.html

HOW CAN YOU HELP?

I asked Ira what we can do. She said public comment on the issue really makes a difference, and that our numbers need to add up quickly. Sign those petitions that are going around, it all helps. She is too sweet to say donations help, but I know they do. Donate toward the case Here. Another good organization to support is The Center for Food Safety, they are also plaintiffs in the case. They are leaders in the advocacy against GMO. I would add–stop buying products that include GMO. 98% of all corn products are GMO, and processed foods. Make a pledge to get it out of your diet and stop supporting Monsanto products, and you will be healthier while taking down the giant with your buying power.

Want to get to know Ira a bit more? Check out this bio from Mother Earth News:

http://www.motherearthnews.com/biographies/ira-wallace-southern-exposure-seed-exchange.aspx