Newsletter week #10

Red Springs Family Farm
July 30, 2009, Week #10

Vegetable medley:
Tomatoes Lettuce Beets & Carrots
Patty Pan Squash Green Pepper Cucumber
Garlic Watermelon Sweet Corn
Herb bag: Basil Celery Sorrel

We’re half way through the main season. It’s so hard to believe. So, we’re celebrating the mid-point with watermelons and sweet corn. It was a shock to us to find the melons ripe in the fields. A couple of them burst after the last rains. We weren’t sure we’d have enough for everyone this week, but as we thumped our way through the patch, relocating the ambitious butternut squash branches back to their row, peering through the dark jungle of vines, the melon pile grew to an astounding degree. If we hadn’t pulled these ones when we did, the winter squashes might have just dug in with their tendrils and eaten them instead.

Most of the melons we’re bringing this week are called Cream of Saskatchewan. Their flesh is crisp and white. They will be lovely cubed and sprinkled with cinnamon. Or tossed in a simple fruit salad with blueberries and lemon juice, maybe?

Sweet corn this week is Ambrosia. Please, try to eat it tonight. There’s not too much, so we’re pretty sure you can manage. Next week, there will be quite a lot more. Dessa handed down a good tip for sweet corn last year – cook it the first night, then refrigerate or freeze it, on the cob if you’d like, for later use. The natural sugar in corn changes very quickly to starch. We notice the different within a few hours. Cooking it fresh helps hold the flavor. We pick your corn the day you receive it – as late as we possibly can – in the hopes that you will enjoy the authentic sweet corn experience.

Tomato blight is eating our tomato plants from the ground up. It’s particularly bad this year, we suspect because of the moisture and temperature fluctuations. The tomatoes are hanging in there, and we’re working to keep them afloat as long as possible.

Finally, cucumbers this week! Next week there will be many more. If you have a funny looking white egg shaped-something-or-nother in your basket, it’s a Dragon’s Egg cucumber. We took a chance on them from one of our favorite heirloom seed catalogs, and so far they are proving out to be a winner – so tender, and burpless, to boot! The long, sometimes curvy cucumbers are called Suhyo Long – a Japanese heirloom, one of our long time favorites. You may not see as many of these this year as last, and that’s because we’re saving seed from them.

We save as many of our own seeds as possible. Those of you with gardens of your own may have noticed the price of seeds skyrocketing in the past couple years. We’re at a good scale now to have the genetic diversity we need to get a good set of seeds from several of our favorite plants. This season we’re selecting several lettuce varieties, a favorite kale, a brilliant yellow sweet pepper, Suhyo cucumbers, a special dry shelling bean, and of course, butternut squashes. We even grew our own seed potatos this year, which is truly an experiment. We have yet to dig (it will have to dry out abit), but we’re very curious to see how the spuds turn out. It has been our experience in the past five years that the more we carefully select seed from our own plants, the greater their vitality and yield from year to year. Just like gathering our electricity from the sun instead of the grid, it is such a wonderful feeling to create abundance from the resources at hand, and untie ourselves from the grip of the Monsanto/Seminis seedhouses.

This celery needed thinning, so here it is. It’s not the sort of celery to eat by the stalk with peanut butter. We love it in soups, stocks, and stuffings. It is full of flavor – use the leaves too. To your good health!

Oh well, this is not the year of the carrot. We have one more summer planting to pull, so we’re still hopeful to find some nice long straight carrots under here somewhere, but not this week. What they lack in beauty they make up for in character, and intensity of carrot flavor.

Beets are not so prone to misshapen-ness, and we’re so glad. Here’s a nice simple recipe if you’re wondering what to do with them. Most likely this treatment would work with carrots as well.

Sweet Steamed Beets (from The Ayurvedic Cookbook) serves 4-6

4 cups raw beets (5-6 medium beets) 2 Tbsp. butter or ghee
2 Tbsp. lemon or lime juice 1 Tbsp. coriander powder
Wash and slice beets to 1/8 to ¼ inch slices. Steam until tender (20 minutes or so). Drain.
Melt the ghee or butter in a small pan. Put steamed beets into a serving bowl and drizzle the ghee or butter and lemon juice over them. Add the coriander powder and stir well. Serve and enjoy.

I’ve heard some folks wanting help with the use of basil. Oh my. We put basil in almost everything these days. We chop the leaves fine for salad. We use them to season stir fries. Of course, there’s pizza, and one wonderful way to use, and store, basil, is to make pesto. I threw a pesto recipe into a newsletter a few weeks ago – scroll back through the blog to find it. Easy to make in a food processor, and freezes with ease for fresh basil taste all winter.

For a simple pizza:

1 heaping Tbsp active dry yeast 1 ¼ cups warm water
Stir together in a large bowl until yeast is dissolved.

2 cups flour 1 cup whole wheat flour 1 tsp salt
Add enough flour to make a soft dough. Knead 8-10 minutes until smooth and elastic. Place in greased bowl, turn to grease both sides, cover with a damp cloth and let rise until doubled in bulk, about 45-55 minutes. Generously grease pizza stone or baking sheet with olive oil. Roll of press dough onto pan.

Make pesto, then spread it on the pizza crust. Top with sliced tomatoes and a couple cups of shredded mozzarella cheese. Bake in a hot oven for 5-8 minutes and there’s one easy way to use up a lot of basil. Yummmmmmmmmm.


What a basket this week. We hope you will pile through with gusto and enjoy every bite.

Thanks for sharing our harvest. So far, so good.

Next week – eggplants!

Yours,
Paul, Coree, and Lulah Entwistle

"The ambition for broad acres leads to poor farming, even with men of energy. I scarcely ever knew a mammoth farm to sustain itself; much less to return a profit upon the outlay. I have more than once known a man to spend a respectable fortune upon one; fail and leave it; and then some man of more modest aims, get a small fraction of the ground, and make a good living upon it. Mammoth farms are like tools or weapons, which are too heavy to be handled. Ere long they are thrown aside, at a great loss."
Source: Abraham Lincoln, Sept 30, 1859, Wisconsin State Fair

Newsletter Week #9

We forgot to bring in the garlic this week - sorry - we'll have it next week.


Red Springs Family Farm
July 23, 2009, Week #9

Vegetable medley:
Tomatoes Lettuce Green Beans
Patty Pan Squash Green Pepper Swiss Chard
Garlic New Potatoes
Herb bag: Basil/Purple Ruffles Parsley Fennel

Head’s up! If you ever get home to find that you are missing a crucial item from your basket, please let us know. If we still have it at the drop off, we can leave it at the store for you, or we will make it up to you next week. It’s not hard for us, in the midst of a rush, to miss a green pepper, a bulb of garlic, even a sack of herbs or chard. PLEASE – make sure you get what’s due!

This season is turning out so stunningly. We’re grateful for the rain and cool nights, for the blooming of cucumbers and heavy vines of tomatoes. We may have sweet corn next week. What a thrill.

Let us know what you think of fennel. It’s a new one for us – new to grow, and new to taste. A farmer we worked with on Maui grew it as a salad green, and we enjoyed that a great deal. Cut off the feathery leaves and store them separate for salad use. I enjoyed the fennel bulb roasted, buttery, lightly breaded, in Italy one summer, but have not experimented with it since. The unwashed bulb (stalks and leaves trimmed off) will keep in a plastic bag in the refrigerator for at least a week. Cut the bulb in half lengthwise and check the inner core. If it’s tough, remove the inner stem with a paring knife. The knife will guide you as to what is tough and what is tender. The long flowering stalks are usually tender and yummy, even if the bulb has gotten a little tough. Fennel should be washed carefully, because dirt can lodge between the layers of the bulb. Chop or mince the leaves.

Here’s a nice recipe, for BLT, or tuna fish sandwiches, as you like:

Fennel Mayonnaise, from The Real Dirt on Vegetables by Farmer John Peterson
2/3 cup mayonnaise 2 Tbsp. orange or lemon juice
4 tsp finely chopped fennel leaves 4 tsp very finely chopped fennel bulb
1 small clove garlic, minced
1. Mix mayonnaise and orange or lemon juice until smooth.
2. Add the fennel and garlic; mix thoroughly, store tightly covered in the refrigerator for up to 1 week.

It’s time for tomato salads. Chop some basil leaves, a little fresh garlic, salt and pepper, oil and balsamic vinegar, a sprinkle of feta cheese. Soooooooo goooooooooooooooood. We hope next week to give you a cucumber to add to the salad.

Our thanks to Long Hungry Creek Farm for the new potatoes. Like fresh garlic, fresh new potatoes are a rare taste in the world of supermarket produce. We hope you will savor them.

The deep dark purple leaves in your herb bag are a variety of basil – Purple Ruffles. Their licorice aroma and pungent taste are distinct from sweet basil. To make a gorgeous basil vinegar: fill a jar with half white wine vinegar, half cider vinegar, then stuff it with purple basil and let it steep for a week. Strain it and pour the resulting gorgeous magenta vinegar into a pretty bottle with a few sprigs of fresh basil. Lovely in red tomato sauce, carrot salad,

Short on time today, so we won’t linger… Have a great weekend!

Your gardeners,
Paul, Coree, and Lulah Entwistle

Newsletter week #8

Red Springs Family Farm
July 16, 2009, Week #8

Vegetable medley:
Tomatoes Lettuce Green Beans
Patty Pan/Zucchini Green Pepper
Swiss Chard Garlic
Herb bag: Basil Sorrel Tulsi


The weather! What can we say? Wow. Wednesday night rains make for muddy Thursday veggies. Wash them well and pour the nutrient rich organic rinse water on your houseplants.

Sunday’s rain was most welcome, but the wind preceding it was abit much. We’re conjecturing that we had something like a “micro-burst” in our hollow. It was dark dusk when the wind came, and we could barely see the corn twisting in the field. The gust was sudden and strange, and we knew that the corn had fallen. Often, corn gets blown down, but gradually stands back up again after a windy storm. This was not the case. This storm flattened about 2/3 of the Indian corn patch, leaving the remaining 1/3, and its sweet corn neighbor, nearly untouched. It looked like someone dropped a pick up truck in the middle of the corn patch, then drove away without leaving tracks. Fortunately, we had a very good crop of Indian field corn last year, so we’re not crushed by the loss. The unfortunate consequence of this weather event is that we won’t likely want to sell any cornmeal this year.

Most of you will be receiving a Paul Robeson tomato today. This is one of our all time favorite heirlooms. It’s technically called a black tomato – coloration being a stripey dark orange with green shoulders – deep red inside. Paul Robeson was an athlete (15 varsity letters at Rutgers), actor (played Othello in the longest running Shakespearian production in Broadway history), singer (world famous for his vibrant baritone renditions of Negro spirituals), orator, cultural scholar and linguist (fluent in at least 15 languages). He was blacklisted during the McCarthy Era, and in his testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee on June 12, 1956, when asked by one senator why he hadn’t remained in the Soviet Union, Robeson said, “Because my father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay right here and have a part of it just like you. And no fascist-minded people will dry me from it. Is that clear?” An extraordinary tomato for an extraordinary man.

Most of you are receiving 1 ½ lbs of green beans this week. Larger bags are about 3 lbs each. If you want to freeze a couple bags, just wash and trim the beans, then submerge in boiling water for 4 minutes. Quickly cool them in ice water, drain, and bag them up for the winter. Here’s a creative use, with gratitude to Barbara Kingsolver’s excellent book on local food, Animal Vegetable Miracle.

FRIJOLE-MOLE
½ lb. trimmed green beans Steam until tender
1 coarsely chopped onion 1 tbs. olive oil
Sautee onions over medium heat until they become slightly transparent.
3 hard boiled eggs 2 cups fresh basil leaves
1 tbs. lemon juice (optional)
Combine beans, cooked onions, eggs, basil and lemon juice in food processor and blend into a coarse puree.
Mayonnaise or yogurt Salt and pepper
Remove puree to a bowl and combine with enough mayonnaise or yogurt to hold mixture together. Add salt and pepper to taste. This spread is fantastic served on crusty bread, crackers, or rice cakes.

The basil is really popping out now. The day is coming when we may have some extra to sell. We’ll keep you posted. This week, here’s a little pesto recipe:

Pesto
1 bunch of basil, to yield about a cup of lightly packed leaves
In a mortar and pestle, pound to a paste:
1 garlic clove, peeled, and salt
Add and continue to pound:
¼ cup pine nuts, lightly toasted
Add: ¼ cup grated parmesan cheese.
Transfer this mixture to a bowl. Coarsely chop the basil leaves and put them in the mortar. Pound the leaves to a paste. Return the pounded pine nut mixture to the mortar. Pound the leaves and pine nut mixture together. Continue pounding as you gradually pour in:
½ cup cup extra virgin olive oil
Taste for salt and adjust if necessary.

Now, all of this can be done in a food processor as well, and much more quickly, but the sensory experience of pounding your own pesto may be worth it from time to time. Also, you could pick the leaves of the entire content of your herb sack this week and make a mixy pesto. You could also substitute walnuts for pine nuts, if it suits you.

This Swiss Chard is standing thigh-high in the field. It desperately needed chopping back. Some of the leaves are speckled. The damage is purely aesthetic. We hope you will enjoy it anyway. It’s re-growth will be more beautiful. Here’s another idea, from the same source as the pesto recipe above, Alice Waters’ The Art of Simple Food.

Chard with Parmesan
Pull the leaves from the ribs of one or more bunches of chard. Discard the ribs (or save them for another dish), wash the leaves, and cook until tender in abundant salted boiling water, 4 minutes or so. Drain the leaves, cool, squeeze out most of their excess water, and chop coarse. For every bunch of chard, melt 3 tablespoons butter in a heavy pan over medium heat. Add the chopped chard and salt to taste. Heat through, and for each bunch of chard stir in a generous handful of freshly grated Parmesan cheese. Remove from the heat and serve.

The corn is tassling now, a mouthwatering sight. We’re waiting for the ground to dry so we can mulch the late season tomatoes. The next planting of squash looks promising, and the cukes are blooming nicely. Lulah swears there are watermelons ready to be picked, but we’re holding off, just to be sure.

Next week, more tomatoes, beets, fennel, and maybe some new potatoes on the way.

Thanks for sharing our harvest.

Your gardeners,

Paul, Coree, and Lulah Entwistle

“When you see that you’re making the other things feel good, it gives you a good feeling, too.
Opening a barn door for the sheep standing out in a cold rain, or throwing a few grains of corn to the chickens are small things, but these little things add up, and you can begin to understand that you’re important. You may not be real important like people who do great things that you read about in the newspaper, but you begin to feel that you’re important to the life around you. Nobody else knows of cares too much about what you do, but if you get a good feeling inside about what you do, then it doesn’t matter if nobody else knows.
~Terry Cummins, Feed My Sheep

Newsletter Week #7

July 9, 2009, Week #7

Vegetable medley:
Swiss Chard Lettuce Garlic
Patty Pan/Zucchini Green Pepper Green Beans
Choice: Tomato or Cucumber
Herb bag: Basil Sorrel Catnip/Mint


We’ve rarely been so glad to see a rainstorm on a holiday as we were last week. The gardens really went “BOOM” with the moisture, and we’ve been busy ever since doing what we can to keep that moisture IN and pull the weeds OUT.

Raggedy basil is sure sign that the Japanese beetles have hatched. They are just about the only bug that bothers basil, and fortunately, they only bother it for a couple weeks, and then the basil resumes full beauty. Bear with it.

The tomatoes are so close! We still don’t have enough for a real harvest, but we were surprised by a flush of green peppers, and this little picking will help stimulate another bloom.

Think healthy cucumber thoughts. It’s almost as if our garden, after last year’s cucumber extravaganza, has rejected the first planting. They’re trying, but barely succeeding, to grow. The second planting looks good. It will just take awhile to mature.

Corn is tassling, strong and green. We had a little corn marathon, thinning an exuberant stand of corn before last week’s rain. We were amazed to find how much moisture the corn holds. It’s as if the leaves are perfect funnels to catch and preserve each twilight’s dewfall.

Red Springs Family Farm is searching for a couple of farm improvements. Many of you are better connected in Cookeville than we are. Please let us know if you have any leads on the following:

BREAD TRAYS – stackable, durable, just the right size to hold the hundreds of tomatoes (uncrushed, in single layers) that are about to come rolling in. We’ve got a few that stack, and several that don’t, but we’re definitely not prepared for the harvest this year.

A DELIVERY VEHICLE – some of you may have noticed that we’re tooling around in our old Ford Ranger – single cab, standard bed, pick up truck. It was our best option after retiring the Kia from its several years of good service. It’s dubious that the Ranger will suffice through watermelon season, and it’s an extremely uncomfortable ride for us (all three, in the front, standard shift and no AC). We’re thinking along the lines of a Suburban, or maybe someone’s well kept church van. We are on a farm budget, but we expect to pay for quality.

Any leads or ideas are welcome.

Care and handling of summer squashes:
Refrigerate unwashed zucchini and summer squash for up to a week and a half in a perforated plastic bag or in a sealed plastic container lined with a kitchen towel. Rinse zucchini and summer squash under cool running water to remove any dirt or prickles; then slice off the stem and blossom ends. Slice the vegetable into rounds, quarters, or chunks according to the specifications of your recipe.




Here’s one of our easy family meal additions:

Vegetable Fritters from Simply in Season
(serves 4, but we usually double this recipe)

½ cup flour ½ tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt pinch of pepper
2 eggs, beaten
Mix to form a smooth batter. Add
3 cups shredded summer squash 1/3 cup onion, or 2 cloves garlic minced
1 Tbsp chopped fresh parsley or basil
Mix gently. Heat a lightly oiled frying pan to medium heat. Drop large spoonfuls of batter, cooking until golden on both sides.


Spicy Summer Squash Soup with Yogurt and Mint
From The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters, makes about 2 quarts

Heat in a heavy bottomed soup pot: ¼ cup olive oil
Add and cook stirring often, over medium heat:
1 large onion, sliced fine pinch of saffron threads
1 tsp cumin seeds 1 tsp coriander seeds
¼ tsp turmeric 1 tsp sweet paprika
½ tsp cayenne 2 garlic cloves, peeled and sliced
Cook until very soft but not browned. If the onions or garlic start to stick, turn down the heat and add splash of water to the pot. While the onions are cooking, wash in cold water:
5 medium or 3 large green or yellow summer squash
Cut into thick slices. When the onions are done, add the squash to the pot with salt.
Cook for 2 minutes, then pour in:
3 cups chicken broth 3 cups water
Bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer, and cook until the squash is tender, about 15 minutes. Meanwhile, make the yogurt and mint garnish. Cut into julienne: 4 mint sprigs, leaves only.
In a medium sized mortar, pound half of the mint to a paste. Stir in the remaining mint and:
2 Tbsp olive oil 2/3 cup yogurt salt
Let the soup cool a bit, then puree in a blender until very smooth. Take care when blending hot soup to leave a vent for the steam to escape. Reheat, thin with water if desired, adjust seasonings, and serve hot with a spoonful of yogurt and mint. A lime wedge can be a pleasant garnish as well.

We hope you enjoy your veggies this week. We look forward to bringing you more and better as the season progresses.

Please remember, we love to return these clamshell blueberry boxes to Hidden Springs. We also appreciate your clean shopping bags for bagging lettuce. Recycle what you can’t return, please.

Thank you for sharing the harvest!

Paul, Coree, and Lulah Entwistle

“Like reeds in a basket, human life is interwoven with the life of the earth. All our food, water, clothing, and shelter come from its body, and arise with her natural rhythms. Our skina dn bones are likewise formed of its stuff. Our moods, thoughts, and capacities are not wholly independent of this relationship.
One gift that CSA gives to individuals, to families, and to culture in general, is a vehicle for re-establishing a conscious connection with the rhythm of life, the rhythm of the seasons, and the rhythm of the farm that gives rise to the food which eventually becomes the molecules and cells of our bodies. Thus, joining a CSA is an act not just of economy or ecology, but also of health at its most fundamental level.” ~Steve McFadden, Farms of Tomorrow

Newsletter Week #6

Red Springs Family Farm

July 2, 2009, Week #6

Vegetable medley:

Cabbage Lettuce Garlic Patty Pan

Zucchini Carrots/little Beets Kohlrabi

Herb bag: Basil Oregano Tulsi, for tea

What a beautiful break in that hot weather. We’ve been able to enjoy our work so much more this week in the drier air and cooler nights. Beautiful sparkling days!

Big news around here is that we’ve eaten the first two standard sized tomatoes from the big patch. Sorry not to share them, but there will have to be at least thirty before we bring them into town. Tomatoes will be coming soon. The little yellow watermelons are fattening and beginning to feel more like water balloons. Eggplants sport their flirtatious purple flowers. Butternut and Acorn squash plants are robust, sending tendrils out to explore the neighboring rows. All’s well in early summer.

We got home last week to find that we had left a basket of summer squash under the house. Oops. It was an exciting week. Besides the tomatoes, we enjoyed some company. Emily and her husband Bill braved our rough gravel road and creek crossings for a garden tour. We passed some pleasant time over iced mint tea and surveyed the ever changing landscape of our small homestead. A couple days later, one of my old college friends passed through town with her seven year old son (whom I had never met!) and we felt the strangely satisfying sensation of catching up with time’s passage, and seeing our children play together around the garden. All the while, we were in the process of tearing out the spring’s detritus to make room for summer glory. Your company here is encouraged. Give us a few days notice of your visit and we’ll welcome you to our humble hollow.

In your basket this week, you’ll find the best remnants of our intended brassica crops: a head of cabbage and some kohlrabi. Now that we’re pulling out the last of the spring’s struggles, we’re almost ready to plant more kohlrabi, broccoli, cabbage, and kale for the fall harvest.

In a more perfect spring, we would like to have sent you the fixings for cole slaw as well as potato salad. Finding dry time to plant potatoes proved more difficult than usual, so they’re running late. We’ll make do with some cabbage and kohlrabi, which can both be grated into slaw. (Peel the outer skin off the kohlrabi and julienne or grate the white interior.) The carrots add color and sweetness. We wish you all a very safe and happy Fourth of July.

I’m not one to advocate much sugar-eating, but that heat spell did a number on our lettuces, so I am growing more curious about this variation that we read about in the Little House books:

From The Pioneer Cookbook, via The Little House Cookbook

Lettuce at Its Best

Lettuce, 1 full head fresh garden variety

Vinegar in a cruet

Sugar in a bowl

Large serving bowl; kitchen towels, 2

Wash lettuce by dipping leaves quickly in a basin of cold water (a running spigot wastes water; soaking leaves wastes vitamins). Drain on kitchen towels; pat dry. Arrange in bowl and take to the table with cruet and sugar bowl. At the table, take a leaf in your fingers, sprinkle it with some vinegar and sugar, roll it tight, and eat it as you would a celery stalk.

And how about these blueberries? It’s exciting to us to be able to offer more of a “one stop shopping” experience. We’re grateful for the cooperation of Brinna at Hidden Springs, and hope you will relish the fresh sweetness of these blueberries. Wow. Consider taking on a standing order (How many blueberries can you eat in a week? How many do you want to stash in your freezer for blueberry-less times?). As the season progresses, we will have offerings of blackberries, raspberries, and those amazing little kiwis. We’ll keep you posted.

As a tribute to the blueberries, we’ll include this recipe, also from The Little House Cookbook:

Blueberry Pudding

1 dry pint (10 oz.) blueberries 4 Tbsp. soft butter

1 egg ¾ cup homogenized milk

½ tsp baking soda 1 ½ cups unbleached white flour

1 cup sugar 1 tsp. cream of tartar

Sauce (recipe to follow) Pudding mold with lid, 1 ½ qt, or the like

Wash, drain, stem, and sort the blueberries. Generously grease the inside of the mold or can and its lid with some soft butter. In a smaller bowl, beat the egg; stir in milk and baking soda. In a larger bowl mix flour, sugar, and cream of tartar; work in remaining butter with fingers until mixture is uniformly coarse. Stir liquid into dry mixture until all is moist. Stir in blueberries last with a few strokes, taking care not to crush the berries.

Pour blueberry batter into mold or can and cover tightly. Set the container in the kettle and fill kettle two-thirds full with boiling water. Cover and simmer for 1 ½ hours or longer. As long as there is plenty of water in the kettle there is little danger that the pudding will overcook. Unmold the finished pudding on a platter and serve with the sauce.

Sauce

1 cup sugar 2 Tbsp. butter

Pinch of salt pinch of nutmeg

2 Tbsp rose water (substitute lemon juice if needed)

1 qt saucepan

Simmer the sugar with 2 cups of water until it begins to thicken into syrup, about 10 minutes. Remove from heat and stir in remaining ingredients. Serve warm in a pitcher.

Other notes on your basket: the sweetly fragrant little purple blooming twigs in your herb bag are tulsi. Tulsi is also called “holy basil” and many households in India keep a plant indoors to maintain a pleasant quality to the air. We’ve found it to be a wonderful tasting tea, but you could also dry it for a sachet or potpourri. The longer twigs with occasional white flowers and smaller leaves are oregano.

We hope the blog veggie directory has been helpful to you. I know some of the headings are off abit – I’ve not mastered the spacing of these things. However, I’ve now posted a photo album of vegetables and garden pics on Facebook – if you’re on there, look me up and you’ll be able to browse those (along with some embarrassing old pictures posted by a high school friend of mine).

Next week – maybe we’ll have tomatoes? We’re hopeful. A good rain (again, wishing, hoping, praying) will bring on the next flush of green beans, and freshen up the chard and sorrel.

Enjoy your veggies. Thank you for your support.

The Entwistles

“Whatever may be one’s condition in life, the great art is to learn to be content and happy, indulging in no feverish longings for what we have not, but satisfied and thankful for what we have.”

~Edmund Morris, Ten Acres Enough, 1864