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From Field to Table
What's Happening Now at Magicland Farms
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Issue Number Eight
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Monday - September 7, 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 September 6th. 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 - September 7th to September 12th
We will still have several types of sweet corn including the new gourmet MIRAI
sweet corn and genuine Silver Queen corn. Also freshly picked Mollie's Delicious, Summer Treat, Zestar, Gravenstein,
Paulared, Tydeman's Red, Earliblaze and other late summer apples, watermelon,
green beans, tomatoes (including heirlooms), sweet and jalapeno peppers,
eggplant, sand-grown potatoes, various types of winter squash, fresh jumbo red and
yellow sweet onions, beets, cabbage, zucchini and cut sunflowers.
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From The Kitchen
Stuffed peppers are a favorite meal around here. However, it is one that doesn't get made during the summer for various reasons. However, I found this recipe recently, gave it a try and found out it really does taste like stuffed peppers. It is quick and easy plus it makes use of fresh peppers and onions. But the best part is that it tastes delicious!
Stuffed Pepper Skillet Dinner
1 pound ground beef
1 medium onion, diced
2 carrots, diced (these are optional)
2-3 large green peppers, cut into chunks
Salt & pepper, to taste
1 15 ounce can tomato sauce
1/3 cup water
1 teaspoon Italian seasoning
2 1/2 cups fully cooked rice
1. Brown ground beef and onions in a large
skillet. Drain. Add carrots and green peppers. Season with salt and
pepper to taste. Cook for 2-3 minutes. You want the peppers to stay
somewhat crunchy.
2. Stir in tomato sauce, water, Italian seasoning and cumin. Bring to a slow boil, reduce heat and simmer for 10-15 minutes.
3. Stir in cooked rice until heated
through. Top with shredded mozzarella cheese. Serve and enjoy. (Or
refrigerate and reheat in oven or microwave just before serving.)
Note from my husband who frequently helps me out with the the chopping and dicing: The Giant Marconi peppers that we sell are exceptionally easy to clean making them a natural for all recipes that call for diced peppers.
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Specials In The Spotlight
UTILITY GRADE APPLES (MIXED VARIETIES):
$3.00 for a half bushel
Perfect for pies or applesauce
YELLOW OR RED JUMBO SWEET SPANISH ONIONS:
$3.00 for a half peck
YELLOW JUMBO SWEET ONIONS:
$10.00 for a half bushel
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The Boss's Corner
Hi,
The Jury Is IN
regarding Mirai Sweet Corn!
At roughly a 10 to 1 ratio our
customers think Mirai is a great corn and worthy of being planted again. The only objection to Mirai, among those who
didn't rate it favorably (only 3 out of dozens), was that it perhaps was a bit
too sweet. Those who are really regular
customers-those that come several times a week-know we actually grew three
types of Mirai. We personally prefer
Mirai 301 since it not only is very sweet and is great tasting, it has the
largest ears and has grown exceptionally well for us. This brings us to a different topic.
Last fall we planted winter
rye in the field we planted the Mirai corn in this year. (Winter rye not only looks nice and green
from late fall to early spring (when there is no snow on it) it makes great
green manure, especially in heavier soils.
However, one must use a moldboard plow to bury it. This spring while plowing, we noticed a Western
Meadowlark nest (could possibly have been an Eastern Meadowlark-both types are
found in Michigan) with eggs in the middle of the field and with the
noisy mama running around and trying to protect her eggs against a 85 hp
tractor! Well we made every effort to avoid the nest and left an area around it
untouched. Whether the mama moved the
eggs later we are unsure but we didn't plow them in-that's for sure! Well anyway, the patch of Mirai corn did
better than our other corn despite the fact Mirai is notoriously hard to
grow-especially in heavy soils-and its yield is usually quite poor. To put it short, it was a shock how great the
Mirai corn did! One other point. While we had little corn borer or ear worm
damage throughout our sweet corn patches this year, the Western Bean Cutworm
devastated many of our mid-season patches.
For instance, I remember picking 10 ears of Sugar Pearl corn and finding that each ear was infested with the
brown striped caterpillar. (By the way,
to the untrained eye the Western Bean Cutworm caterpillar looks like and acts like
a corn borer!) So in some fields we had
to throw out 75% of the corn we picked (we dropped the corn right in the field we
were picking if we noticed the damage) because it obviously had a worm (actually caterpillar) in it. However, the Mirai corn had only 10 to 15%
ears damaged! Did saving the nest have
something to do with it? Another
story: Shortly after I purchased the north 38 acres (the one with
the orchard and woods) I decided to plant a good sized patch of Blue Hubbard
squash. (This field now has good sized
apple trees growing on it.) The soil in
our apple orchard is heavy bluish clay (almost identical to the type of soil in
the Ridge area north of GR). At the
time I used a Howard Rotovator to till the ground and I noticed several Meadowlark
nests scattered in the field. I worked
around these nests. I had the best
darned Blue Hubbard Squash ever! And
they were of great quality-keeping in perfect shape into April! And they were really good. Are these two happenstance coincidences? Is there really such a thing as a
coincidence? It's something to
ponder. This brings us to a similar
topic--Hubbard Squash.
One of the problems with
growing Hubbard Squash is deer. They
love to nibble at them, taking just
enough out to ruin them Well, since we
now have a electrified deer fence covering 25 acres, I decided to plant a good
quantity of Hubbards-Blue, Golden, Green, Warted. Well they grew wonderfully this year and we
have a great crop of them coming. We
also have a great crop of acorn, butternut (both regular and jumbos) and
buttercup coming. We will again be
selling them by the ½ bushel and bushel at very reasonable prices.. Our favorite squash is the buttercup. Unlike many vegetables, buttercup taste even
better a couple of weeks after picking than freshly harvested. They get so sweet that they exceed sweet
potatoes in sweetness. This brings up
another point - we have made a test planting of sweet potatoes this year and they
grew fabulously. However, we haven't dug
any up yet. We hope to be able to sell
some but we shall see. We are in the
learning stage here. The primary reason
we grew them was so that growing sweet potatoes can be included in my book Grow With a Pro.
Watermelon Are Now IN!
Several issues back I wrote
about our watermelon. Well, we are now
picking them and they are in good supply.
Since we have two patches, we should be able to keep our market supplied
for several weeks.
We planted three varieties of
watermelon:
Jadestar (nearly
round with dark green skin)-this is an ice box watermelon and usually weighs
less than 10 pounds. It has dark green
skin and is similar in appearance to
Sugar Baby. However, it is sweeter and
better tasting. It has deep red flesh.
Crimson Sweet
(nearly round with dark green and light green striping)-this delicious melon
averages 15 to 25 pounds but we do have some less than 10 pounds. Its flesh is pink and only gets really red
when it is overripe. This is our
family's favorite because of its flavor, sweetness and crispness.
Allsweet (elongated,
with striping similar to Crimson Sweet)-this is our latest ripening melon and
we are just starting to pick them. They
get quite big (sometimes over 30 pounds).
The quality is similar to Crimson Sweet although the flesh is a bit
redder.
Note on ripeness:
We try to pick only ripe melons.
This is usually done when the tendril next to the melon turns brown. It
is not possible to tell a ripe melon from an underripe melon by thumping. We know we have tried dozen of times and it
just doesn't work. We do thump them
because we sometimes can figure out that the melon is overripe if the sound is hollow. A ripe melon has seeds that are
dark or at least starting to turn dark.
If you are disappointed with your melon, let us know and pick up another melon of the same cost, free
of charge. Please taste the melon before
you decide it isn't ripe. There is no
need to return the melon-just let us know you weren't pleased with it and why.
Hoping the sunny dry weather
will continue this week.
Nashle!
Tom
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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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