Heirloom Harvest

Hmm...

Editor's note: And what did YOU do with your tat soi? Let us know. We have big plans. Big plans. We intend to Google that tat soi like there's no tomorrow.

Teach a Member to Google and He or She Will Eat Forever

When stymied by an ingredient, feel free always to turn to the cooking method your editor recommends, which is the use of Internet search engines to generate recipes that match your needs. What you do is go to any search engine blank and type

+ingredient1 +ingredient2 +ingredient3

and type in your ingredients instead of the variables above. So for example, if you have dill and carrots, your search would look like

+dill +carrots

and if you ran that search on Google, you would get this, which at least as of the writing of this post, would return a handy "Dill Carrots" recipe. If you ran it on Exalead you'd get different results, as you would on Teoma, for that matter. Tell us what you find!

Meadow In Summer

Editor's Note: When I went out to pick peas Thursday, I heard:

Tree swallows

Hermit thrush (in the woods)

Red-winged blackbird

Song sparrow

Green frog (I think - sounds like a long thick rubber band being plucked)

I hear birds, because I'm a birder. Joe, my 4-year-old son, also hears insects -- he's got a shorter horizon. Maybe you listen differently -- to small engines, to people's voices, to songs or to stories. What do you hear at the farm?

The Farm Be With You

Timely send-up of Star Wars with organic food as the beneficiary. (This is an editor's note: You can't blame John for this one.)

Blog That Frog

I haven't been down to the farm this spring (your editor speaking here) but John tells me that at night, he's hearing spring peepers. (That link will let you hear the sounds of spring peepers, too.)

I am, too, and tonight -- while I was taking out the trash in the apartment complex I'm living in for a while, with my family -- I heard them again. And so I took a flashlight around to the area behind the playground and temporarily borrowed a frog from the swamp. This is Shrewsbury, but the frogs are the same species that are calling down in the Great Cedar Swamp near the farm in Westborough.

Now, spring peepers are not quite the indicators of water quality that something like a caddisfly is. But they mean that free water is close enough to the forest so that the impossibly tiny frogs can overwinter in the woods' shelter.

This is the point of responsible farming, of good food in definitions that extend past taste. The peepers are next to the farm field; the spring is the time that the plants go in but not the time that planting establishes hegemony over the land. The farm is fit into the landscape; the landscape is not subordinated to the farm.

About the Blog

This is your editor speaking. Usually, I'm just writing up my conversations with John about what he's up to, but this post is straight from me. You'll see these from time to time, and I'll always note what's from me and what's from him. If this works out, then we might invest in a slightly more expensive account where we can add authors and improve the process some. Then he could write directly when he wants to, and I could, and others could to, and we could zip the process along without having quite so many obstacles.

Until then, feel free to use the "comments" feature to put in comments, which I see at least one person already is, so that's great. And feel free also to email me, whit@pobox.com, about the blog itself, or content you'd like to post. That includes recipes, pictures relevant to the farm (pictures you take there, pictures you take of your food you get from there, and so forth). I'm going to do my best to get that content up in a useful, meaningful fashion, although there are some limitations due to the fact that the farm blog right now is running on the account for my blog. (For example, I can't just select the option to "show photo albums" on this blog because then you all would have my Australia photos right there with the farm album, and none of us needs that, right?)

The hardest thing for me is going to be writing in John's voice, to the best of my ability, because I have my own voice and editing has never been my strong point. Speak up if I get out of line with his or your words.

So: Welcome. If only Proserpina hadn't eaten those pomegranate seeds, right? Yeesh. Spring has to be here someday. Let's hope for sooner rather than later. Send in the radishes! There ought to be radishes! Send in the radishes!