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Farm Table in Winter

January 12, 2016 by Mark Dewey

images-1Seems like a cosmic lesson: I’ve just fallen in love with eating food right out of the ground — that broccoli! those beets! — and now there isn’t anymore?

Seasonalism is a great adventure in nourishment and discovery, moving from the May rows of the garden through the November rows like a progressive dinner party where you want the recipe for everything they serve: Oh, the asparagus of it! Fundamental cauliflower! Blissful conjunction of sun and soil and purest water!

And then it all just stops. January comes and I’m supposed to eat, like, Swanson imagesfrozen dinners? My large intestine isn’t down with that. Not to mention my idealism. Talk about a slap in the self-image!

But wait: you live in Virginia. Even normal winters here aren’t very cold, and this year? My daffodils are coming up already.

Turns out that eating in the neighborhood doesn’t have to mean a winter of potatoes. Here are three ways to keep your love alive in winter:

images-3Cover your garden. Spinach, kale, chard, turnips, beets, carrots, and parsnips will all defy the power of frost without your help, and with a cold frame or a floating row cover, they’ll grow right through January nights with temperatures in single digits. In fact, freezes actually sweeten kale and spinach so you hardly even have to dress them in a salad — just add walnuts and a little feta.

Farm in your living room. Germination unleashes enzyme activity that no other stage of images-5development can match, and it doesn’t last very long, so new-born plants are like the veal of veganism. Sprouts, shoots, and microgreens grow easily in jars and trays that don’t require annexes or dedicated thermostats. A few square feet of floorspace near a window or a corner of your kitchen counter will keep you in tender delicacies all winter.

Support intrepid farmers. Some small growers in Northern Virginia work their beds all year. With high tunnels, green houses, and carefully-scheduled planting, they can fill the truck and go to market even in January and February.  The Leesburg Farmers Market operates straight through the winter, and stalwarts such as Quarterbranch Farm, Shenandoah Seasonal, and Honey Brook Farms are there every Saturday, keeping the love alive with fresh neighborhood food.

So take courage, give thanks, and keep eating. There’s still food out there.

Filed Under: Big Pictures, Local Farming Tagged With: Cold frames, cold weather gardening, Honey Brook Farms, kale, Leesburg Farmers Market, Quarterbranch Farm, Seasonal eating, Shenandoah Seasonal, Winter farming, winter greens

So long, Farmhands

January 8, 2016 by Mark Dewey

Kia Ora, as we say in Maori — meaning ‘Be well and healthy.’ We being me and the New Zealanders I’ll be meeting soon.

Some of you may recognize my name from school tours, CSA emails, or

1601270_10153101800878066_8872876924936642014_n

This me after a long day of broccoli.

visits to the market. I have been a part of Great Country farms since 2013, when I began doing summer internships. This past season, as I graduated from Virginia Tech, I began my third summer on the farm and my first fall… what an experience that was!

Now, with my love of farms and the outdoors, I have decided to WWOOF my way through New Zealand. WWOOF stands for Willing Workers On Organic Farms. This is an international organization that puts you in touch with farms (your host families) where you work five or six hours a day for food and accommodation. Some may think this sounds crazy,  but if you have the chance to go half way around the world and learn tasks that you have always dreamed of, then why wouldn’t you do it?

imagesI am going to be in New Zealand for five months, beginning in January. I plan to wwoof my way around the country. The first farm I will be staying is on the , an area called Thames. This farm is “establishing continuous cover native forest from eco-sourced seed that is grown on the farm.” They also have home vegetables and fruit growing. The second farm I am visiting, only a 30 minute drive away from the first, has beekeeping as well as basic garden management. The third farm that I will be arriving at towards the end of February is located in the South Island near the Nelson area. This farm includes orchard trees, basic garden work, and some wine making. The rest of my farms are to be decided along the way.

So for now, I can only hope that I will come back from New Zealand with knowledge not only of new trades, but also of the Kiwi culture as a whole.

Cheers,

Meredith Roberts

Filed Under: Big Pictures Tagged With: New Zealand, WWOOFING

Dirt Farm Hits the Bottle

January 8, 2016 by Mark Dewey

IMG_1667On Tuesday, Janell, Bruce, Nick, Wes and I gathered in the tap room to generate label content for the two beers we’ll be bottling soon. We sniffed and sipped and savored and threw out all the words we could think of. Here’s the result of that brainstorm: 

Work Session IPA

We call it “Work,” but it goes down like a long vacation. Consider it a tribute to our way of life here on the farm: we work and play surrounded by our family and friends, and this beer honors both of those activities. Cascade and Chinook hops give this all-day beer a floral nose and a grapefruit note in the mouth. Clean and refreshing, with low ABV so it won’t dull your senses — no wonder it’s our best seller!

Tart 31 Cherry Ale

Secondary fermentation with Montmorency cherries — 31 pounds per keg — gives this ale the clear red color of Dorothy’s ruby slippers. You taste this one fast, with the cherry note popping at the front of your mouth — not the syrupy flavor of added cherry extract, but the fresh burst of tart spring juice. This farm-to-pint brew offers a new way to enjoy the bounty of our prolific orchard, and the Chinook hops in this ale grow here on the farm as well, so it really delivers the taste of home that Dorothy hopes for when she clicks her heels. 

Filed Under: On Foggy Bottom Road, Uncategorized Tagged With: Bottling, Cherry Ale, Craft Beer, Dirt Farm Brewing, Tart 31, Work Session IPA

Why Do We Love Them?

May 12, 2015 by Mark Dewey

Photo by My Tiny Plot

Photo by My Tiny Plot

The simplest way to answer that question is to put one in your mouth, like the guy in the photo to the left just did. The answer is the red stuff running down his chin.

Maybe part of the reason we love them is that we can get that red stuff only for a few weeks every year.

It’s true that Modern Americans can buy things called strawberries whenever we want, but none of those objects will make your face look like that guy’s face. Only a strawberry can do that.

A strawberry is the same color on the inside as it is on the outside. The skin on the objects you can buy whenever you want may be that color, but beneath the skin those things are white, like the color of cucumber meat. That’s because they weren’t allowed to fulfill their destiny; instead, they were turned into commodities that we can buy whenever we want.

These are berries, not commodities.

These are berries, not commodities.

Eighty percent of the strawberries eaten in America are grown in California’s central valley, where an average strawberry field may produce ten times as many berries as the average field in Virginia or Maryland. But strawberries are fragile. If the berries in a California field are picked at their red best, they’ll be too soft to sell when they get to Wegman’s in Ashburn, so the California berries we buy around here left the field before the conversion of starch to sugar had softened their flesh and before the sun had finished catalyzing the production of the powerful antioxidant anthocyanins that make the berry red — before the berries become what they were meant to be, in other words.

Once strawberries reach the ripe stage, their window of viability is short: they can stay on the plant for about three days before they start spoil, and once they’re picked they have maybe two days before flavor and nutritional value start degrading rapidly. Unripe strawberries will hold their shape and texture a little longer, but they won’t continue to ripen: they belong to the non-climacteric class of fruits, which means they ripen only in the presence of the ethylene produced by the leaves of their mother plant.

That’s part of why it’s hard to say when we’ll start picking strawberries at Great Country Farms, or how long the strawberry season will last. One thing we can say, however, is that you’ll be picking strawberries here, not berry-shaped commodities.

And we can say they’ll make you feel like that guy looks, even if you don’t let the juice run down your chin.

If you want to monitor the progress of our berries, please sign up for U-pick alerts.

Filed Under: Eat, Local Farming, On Foggy Bottom Road Tagged With: anthocyanins, California strawberry growers, Strawberries, Strawberry ripening, Strawberry shelf life

Sit Stay Training Featured at Dog Days Festival

April 29, 2015 by Mark Dewey

My dogs don’t follow instructions. They’re smart guys who understand English pretty well, but they generally do what pleases them, not what pleases me. When I tell them to get off the bed, for example, they do this:

Meghann Weller-Redmer, owner of Sit Stay Dog Training, says there’s a simple reason for that: I praise them at the wrong time.

That’s probably true.

Meghann Weller-Redmer and one of her well-trained friends.

Meghann Weller-Redmer and one of her well-trained friends.

Sit Stay’s motto is “Because they don’t come trained,” and apparently they don’t absorb training from the hopes I harbor for them, either: they have to be taught.

Which is something Meghann Weller is really good at doing.

Meghann is a graduate of The National K-9 Learning Center, which was established in 1975 by Scott Mueller, who “is credited with revolutionizing support dog training when he trained a dog to aid a client who suffered from Muscular Dystrophy,” according to the Center’s website. For nearly 40 years, the Center has been considered “a leader within the field of training dogs for family and service.”

Meghann comes to her love of dogs through her mother and her grandmother, both of whom were breeders and trainers.

1150335_10151793084214185_2019203082_nOn May 2 and 3, Meghann will be at Great Country Farm’s Dog Days Festival with an obstacle course designed to challenge ordinary house dogs without frustrating them — or their owners.

“Our goal is to help owners become confident and comfortable in handling their dog,” Meghann says through her website.

So if you’d like to build the confidence it takes to make your dog jump through a hanging tire — or at least get off the bed — come out to the farm this weekend and introduce yourself to Meghann. Bring your dog.

Filed Under: Big Pictures Tagged With: Meghann Weller, Meghann Weller-Redmer, Sit Stay Dog Training, The National K-9 Learning Center

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