This is a typical day in June....It is just before 6 am and the little blue tractor is loaded down with everything planned out for the day's work. 

You'll find 350 tomato and pepper transplants, 150 pounds of green sand and rock phosphate (soil amendments for the new bean garden, and pumpkin patch), stakes for flowering sweet peas, and a seeder to plant a 150 row of snap beans. Inside the blue bucket are hand tools, seeds, gloves and lunch.

And, like a typical day in June, my "best laid schemes" went awry when the farm presented other, more pressing work to do. So while the tractor sat loaded up and ready to go, my friend Joseph and I weeded the blackberry patch, tracked down and pulled thistles to keep them from spreading their seeds, weeded the onion and garlic garden, and hilled up 240 feet of potatoes. Then the day was done.

The tractor and transplants did return a few days later and that job too was eventually accomplished. It seems that, when farming, having a plan and being able to let go of the plan are equally important.

Garlic is really an amazing plant. While I think it can be overused in cooking, there are some places in the kitchen where it really shines. One of my favorite ways to prepare it is to roast in with some salt and olive oil. The buttery soft, sweet cloves then slip out of their papery skins and go deliciously with roasted chicken and in mashed potatoes. The roasted cloves can also be spread on a crostini with some warm goat cheese and herbs of your choice.

Because it provides us with much more than its food value, garlic certainly has its place as one of the all time greatest gifts from nature. It is well known for its antimicrobial and healing properties. And along those lines it can be brewed into a "tea" and sprayed on fruit trees as an immune booster and pest deterrent.

These garlic scapes are actually the flower buds of the garlic plant. They come up in June as the days lengthen (it is almost the summer solstice now) and need to be picked so that the plant does not expend its energy on seed making. We want the energy to go to the developing bulb below ground. 

So with all these scapes, what can you do? We tossed them in olive oil and sea salt and roasted them with some Parmigiano- Reggiano and red pepper flakes. Along with some rustic bread and assortment of cheeses, they made a delicious early summer lunch and disappeared quickly.

It has officially been 1 year since we planted our first crop of strawberries (see earlier post for that). The strawberries really like our soil and are bursting with beautiful juicy berries this season. I really have never seen so many.

Organic strawberries in New Jersey? Yes! We do not spray them with any chemicals but rather grow them by building a healthy ecosystem. They seem to thrive. Each berry is picked by hand and walked up to our stand at the road. This is as "local" as you can get. We thank all of our customers who have been enjoying the fruits of our labor.