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From Field to Table
What's Happening Now at Magicland Farms
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Issue Number Five
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Monday - August 17, 2009
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Magicland
Farms
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Everything We Sell We Grow Ourselves
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Greetings!
Welcome to the Magicland Farms' newsletter for the week beginning August 17th. We hope to keep you up to date with the happenings at our farm, along with providing you with some of our favorite recipes and other information we think you might find of interest. If you know of someone who might be interested in receiving our newsletter, you can forward it to them by using the forward link at the end of this newsletter
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This Week at Magicland Farms - August 10th to August 15th
As I write this, we are in the midst of prime sweet corn season. As a result, we have plenty of sweet corn available, including by the bushel for those looking to can or freeze sweet corn. See our "In the Spotlight" information below.
We will also
feature freshly picked Jersey Macs, Viking, Melba and other summer apples, cut sunflowers,
golden Sun-Sugar cherry tomatoes, handpicked green beans, sand-grown LaSoda
(red), Yukon Gold (yellow), Norkotah (russet) and Megachip (white) potatoes,
spaghetti squash, fresh jumbo sweet onions, beets, broccoli, cabbage,
carrots, cucumbers, zucchini, garlic, dill and other herbs. Look for our free apple samples!
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From The Kitchen
We have been harvesting carrots for a few weeks now and recently enjoyed them as part of an all vegetable dinner (baked potatoes, carrots and cole slaw). Here is the recipe I used for the carrots.
GLAZED CARROTS
1 pound Magicland Farms carrots, cleaned and cut into 1/2 to 1 inch circles
2 tablespoons butter, diced
1/4 cup packed brown sugar
1 pinch salt
1 pinch ground black pepper
DIRECTIONS
Add 1/2 inch of water to pot and bring water to a boil. Place carrots in water, reduce
heat to a high simmer, cover and cook about 20 to 30 minutes. Do not cook the
carrots to a mushy stage!
Drain the carrots, reduce the heat to its lowest possible setting and
return the carrots to the pan. Stir in butter, brown sugar, salt and
pepper. Cook for about 3 to 5 minutes, until sugar is bubbly.
As a side note, the cole slaw we had was made with the cabbage we are harvesting now. It had to be one of the best cole slaws we ever had. The cabbage was extraordinarily good.
Harvesting some carrots.
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In The Spotlight - Sweet Corn for Canning or Freezing
UNBELIEVABLE SUPER SWEET CORN SPECIAL:
$8.00 a Bushel - Bi-color Sweet Corn suitable for freezing or canning.
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The Boss's Corner
Well, it's almost
watermelon time down here at Magicland Farms! The proof of this is that
we picked and ate our first watermelon of the season! It was as good
as I remember from last year, and that is saying a lot!
Watermelon time is
probably more exciting for moi and most of the kids than any other
harvest time. There is something about fresh, vine ripened
watermelon-preferably chilled-on a warm sweaty day that words
find hard to describe. Watermelons are an especially beloved treat
on days when we come back from the farm after a day of intense sun
draining all the sweat from our bodies-normally this occurs all
summer and well into September, although this year July was more
comfortable than usual, which was fortunate since watermelons weren't
ripe!
Another thing about
watermelon was that it was the first crop I ever sold-even before I
bought the farm. I used to grow them in a sandy, sunny spot near
Pickerel Lake. But watermelon won't grow there anymore since the
trees have gotten so large the sunny spot is now not so sunny.
Watermelon have not only
made us money by selling those juicy, luscious things, I have written
and sold three articles on growing watermelon. The hook for these
articles, which no doubt sold them, was the fact that I grew them in
Michigan! As you may know, Michigan isn't famous for its
watermelon. In fact, there are many people out there in areas of the
country outside Michigan that are convinced it isn't possible to
grow a crop of watermelons in our great state. I've heard this
from several sources the one that comes to mind first was from a monk
at St. Procopius Abbey near Lisle Illinois, in Du Page county west
of Chicago. I remember my late uncle, the Reverend Luke J. Ouska,
OSB, telling me about this monks experience in their huge garden
where they grew a huge variety of vegetables for the monks. He tried
many times to grow watermelon. After years of struggling he told my
uncle straight out, "It's impossible to grow watermelons where
they live, it's too cool." Well if you know about Du Page County
you know it gets hotter and stays hotter longer than Newaygo County
does. The monk's problem, I have little doubt, was the soil. The
soil we search out on the farm to grow melons in is just
right-actually it is a bit too sandy for a good crop of corn, so
things work out here.
This year we are growing
three types of watermelons, small ice box size dark green ones that
some call Sugar Baby (although they taste a lot better than the
original sugar babies), large 15 to 20 pound fairly round jobs with
dark/light green stripes (Crimson Sweet) and our largest, 20 to over
30 pound ones that are similar to Crimson Sweet although they aren't
only larger they are longer. We hope to have a few of the small
watermelons available for sale on Saturday August 22. Next week we
should have a good supply of all types and by September 1 we hope to
have huge piles of melons sitting there! Keep an eye out for them.
Our melons are a lot, lot better than supermarket ones since we try
to pick them ripe. You can pick a melon green and let it sit and it
will turn red inside-but it will taste like nothin'.
Have a nice, pleasant and
peaceful week,
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We appreciate your business and hope to see you this week at Magicland Farms.
Sincerely,
Tom and Annemarie Fox
Magicland Farms
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4380 S Gordon
Fremont, Michigan 49412
231-652-2368
Open 10AM to 5:30PM Monday through Saturday
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