Tomatoes!!

Its been a strange cool dry spring so far, but things are now starting to happen fast. The spring greens are coming along nicely. We've been busy planting, especially tomatoes, for about a week now. The photo shows you one of our tomato rows. There are 600 plants in this row. At a conservative estimate of 10 pounds of tomatoes per plant, this row should produce 6000 pounds or 3 tons of tomatoes. We have some really great varieties for this year including, Celebrity, Early Girl, Supersonic, Roma, Glamour and some nice heirloom varieties including Cherokee Purple, Brandywine and Old German. Many of the tomatoes have blossoms on them already so with any luck the Early Girls will be available in about a month. Stay tuned.

Preserving Fossil Fuels and Nearby Farmland by Eating Locally

Preserving Fossil Fuels and Nearby Farmland by Eating Locally -- NY Times

This article was in the NY Times today and discuss those devoted to eating local products, called "locavores" . The article also mentions several new books coming out including Barbara Kingsolver's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle".

FDA Was Aware of Dangers to Food

Today's Washington Post has a fairly worrisome article which states that the FDA knew of numerous food related problems including the latest ecoli outbreaks for years, and simply did nothing about it.
They don't have the staff or resources to really enforce anything related to food safety. Read it and worry. Make your best efforts to source your food locally to avoid this contamination which is now pretty much unavoidable in the industrialized food processing system.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/22/AR2007042201551.html?hpid=topnews

Daisy's New Little Sister, Zoey

Zoey is a new addition to the farm as of yesterday. We got her from the shelter in Morgantown, WV. I think we drove though every climatic condition on our trip there yesterday: snow,sleet, rain, fog, sun... you name it. She was apparently just too much energy for her senior woman owner and she was surrendered to the shelter. The owner was a widow and her son thought a pet might be good company for her. But it was likely a case of just too much energy in too little space. Daisy took to her right away and will look after her. We believe Zoey is a pure bred border collie, a great country dog. Although she came with no papers. Not that it matters to us. She seems to really like the farm, she'll have the room to roam that she needs, and she'll have plenty or work to do. She just 11 months old but her genetics is apparent as she was very anxious to round up the lambs.

View of the Farm

I was thinking this morning that many of the blog readers and some of our customers have not actually ever seen the farm, or perhaps may have not even been to West Virginia. The other day Ruth snapped this photo of the farm from the front road. You can see the house, garage, shop and barns. You can see that the area is a very nice pastoral view of basically woods and fields. At this time things have just started to get green again. Just behind the small grove of locust trees you can just make out our bee hives. In a few weeks when the trees all have leaves on them, it will be difficult to see the house from the main road. Our pasture begins at the fence line in the lower middle of the picture. Just off the frame to the left are the three churches of Three Churches, WV, and thus our farm name, Church View Farm. We'll try to get a photo of that view for the blog also. But for now, we'll say welcome to West Virginia by way of this photo of the farmstead.

Easter Eggs

Just a reminder that we have green eggs from our Easter Egg chickens, the Aracaunas. These are green but can also be light tan or even pick. So you don't even have to color the eggs for your Easter egg decoration. Just let us know if you need some. Happy Easter prep!

Bush Cherries

Its the start of cherry blossom season! Here are a few photos of our bush cherries. These are small bush type cherry trees originating from Asia. For example, one of the varieties is called Nanking. The famous cherry trees in Washington DC are of course Japanese. The ornamental cherries bloom first. Our sweet cherry full sized trees have not yet blossomed nor have the local wild cherry trees. The bush cherries seem to bloom just slightly later than the pure ornamental cherries, about the same time as forsythia. So they a good early spring sight. The bush cherries are a slightly tart cherry but they are loaded with Vitamin C. The honey bees are of course enjoying these blossoms.

Maple Syrup

We recently visited Indian Water Maple Camp in New Creek, WV. They were getting ready for the annual Potomac Highlands Maple festival held every year in mid March. We bought some of their fresh maple syrup to try. We bought several taps and pails then came home and began tapping our maple trees. This is something I've always wanted to do.

Orange Tomatoes Pack Bigger Antioxidant Punch

We grew orange tomatoes last year. But no one seemed very interested in them. Perhaps that will change this year as more info is now coming out on orange tomatoes. An interesting article follows:

Food scientists at Ohio State University in Columbus have grown a special variety of orange tomatoes that may be healthier than garden-variety red tomatoes. The orange tomatoes contain a type of lycopene that is more readily used by the body than the type found in red tomatoes, they report.

Lycopene -- an antioxidant thought to have a number of health benefits such as reducing the risk of cancer, heart disease and age-related eye problems -- is what gives red tomatoes and other fruits and vegetables their rich color.

Dr. Steven Schwartz and colleagues had 12 adult volunteers eat two spaghetti test meals on separate occasions. One meal was made with sauce from the orange tomatoes and the other with sauce from red tomatoes. For 13 days before the test meals, the volunteers avoided eating tomatoes or food made with them.

Blood samples taken from each subject right before the spaghetti meals and every hour or two up to 10 hours after the meals were analyzed for lycopene content.

Results showed that lycopene absorption from the orange tomato sauce was 2.5 times higher than that absorbed from the red tomato sauce. Blood lycopene levels spiked about 5 hours after the orange tomato sauce meal and at this time the levels were some 200 times higher than those seen after the red tomato sauce meal.

"While red tomatoes contain far more lycopene than orange tomatoes, most of it is in a form that the body doesn't absorb well," Schwartz, a professor of food science and technology at Ohio State, explained in a university-issued statement.

"The people in the study actually consumed less lycopene when they ate sauce made from the orange tomatoes, but they absorbed far more lycopene than they would have if it had come from red tomatoes," he noted.

The orange tomatoes are not readily available at grocery stores; they were grown at an Ohio State-affiliated agricultural research center. Schwartz and colleagues suggest that interested consumers could seek out orange or gold-colored heirloom tomatoes as an alternative -- although they haven't tested how much or what kind of lycopene these varieties contain.

SOURCE: Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry 2007.

Eating Better Than Organic

Local food has made the cover of Time Magazine. A real nice article. A link to the article follows.




http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1595245,00.html