1. This is an interesting story that provides some insight into the length of time it may take produce to reach your grocery store from the farmer’s field. One of the details in the story tells us that “after 16 days green beans have lost 45 per cent of nutrients, broccoli and cauliflower 25 per cent, garden peas up to 15 per cent and carrots 10 per cent.” After 16 days???? Come down to Magicland Farms to get your produce. I guarantee that you will not find green beans for sale that are 16 days old, let alone a week. Read the full story – Frozen vegetables ‘more nutritious than fresh vegetables’, says report
2. It’s about time small farmers get some support from the government. Locally grown food is the most affordable and nutritious food there is. The government would do well to support the efforts of the small local farmers. Although from my pre-Magicland past working with government programs, I know that they can create a lot of hoops and obstacles that would kill anyone’s interest in getting support of any kind from the government. Hopefully the programs will be simple and useful. USDA Deputy Secretary touts fed support for small farmers
3. You live and die by the weather when you farm. Last year the cool weather combined with the scourge of late blight created tons of problems for farmers all across the Northeast. This year things are starting early down in the Southeast. Hopefully things will improve in their neck of the woods. Tomato Supplies Low Due to Florida Freeze and Wet Weather Hurting Vegetable Farmers in South Georgia
4. Lately it has become what seems to be a full time job doing the grocery shopping. I have become way more conscientious about reading labels that I ever have been. It started out with my aversion to buying food products from China and now it appears that you could end up paying a whole bunch more for a product just because the company decided to relabel it and sell it as a more healthy alternative.  Zero Nutritional Difference Between Campbell’s “Healthy” Tomato Soups And Regular, Just Higher Price .  Stay tuned to this blog because we are going to do our own taste test in the near future and see whether there is any flavor difference that justifies the higher price.
5. RECALL ALERT! I probably should have posted this on top of the list but I am just learning about blogging using Wordpress. So until I get more experienced, I am leaving this post as is. (I lost several versions of this post at various times today due to my ignorance.) Anyway, here are a few stories on food products that have recalls associated with them.  Foods with flavor enhancer HVP recalled due to salmonella contamination, Recalls: McCormick mixes, spinach dips, soup, and More Pepper Recalled in Salmonella Outbreak.

Hope you find these stories useful!

Sorry, just doing some admin work right now. I am trying to hook up the blog to our Facebook fan page as well as our Twitter page. Cross your fingers that this works!

Thanks to our daughter, Catherine, we now have a new website and blog for Magicland Farms. By using the links at the top of this page, you can explore our website.

If you are interested in subscribing to the blog either by email or in a reader, please see the sign up blocks on the right hand side of the page.  You can also fan us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter or subscribe to our weekly newsletter.

The newsletter is our main method of communication with our customers during the selling season. It is sent via email, usually arriving in your inbox on Sunday or Monday.  Not only does it give you information on what will be for sale in the upcoming week, you also get Magicland Farms’ favorite recipes and the always interesting Boss’s Corner column. Again, you can sign up using the subscription box on the right sidebar.

We hope you enjoy both the blog and the website. Please let us know if we can do anything to improve either one.

Thanks for your interest in Magicland Farms.

Looking south toward southeastern part of farm from the southern portion of our 20 acre woodlot.
Photo taken by Catherine Fox.

First off, everyone at Magicland Farms (Tom, Annemarie, Mark, Matthew, Bernadette, Rebekah, Catherine and Kelly) wants to wish you and your family a joyous and Blessed 2010!

A New Year has started and along with a new year we will now have a new web host – FatCow.  Yes, that’s right!  No joke!  Our old web host, Geocities/Yahoo, has eliminated their geocities division and wanted us to switch to Yahoo.  Well, we decided against that and they have not allowed us to update our website any longer.  In fact, we couldn’t make any updates after October 24!

While we are switching over to FatCow, our website might be offline for a short time.  We just want to let you know we are still here even if our website will perhaps disappear for a time and, in fact, we have already ordered most of our seeds for the next growing season!

In addition to having a new website host, we plan on having a completely new website design.  Catherine is scheduled to design this new website and if you have any comments or suggestions you can contact her at webmaster@magiclandfarms.com.  By the way, our address for our website will remain the same- www.magiclandfarms.com

The apples we have in storage are keeping well and we plan on opening our door sometime in late March or early April for apple sales.  Nearly all long range forecasts are for a relatively early spring so we thought we might as well take advantage of it and open things early!  Shortly before we open up for apple sales, we will be sending out a newsletter to let you know what we have for sale and their prices, where they will be for sale and when they will be for sale.

A quick suggestion – use the signup box on the right sidebar to  receive our newsletter – blog posting gets very sporadic during harvest season and the newsletter, which goes out weekly,  will keep you up to date with what’s happening at Magicland Farms.

The folks at Magicland Farms

Today we have a guest post by Magicland Farms’ resident weather guru AKA The Boss:

If you look back at my 2009 summer forecast you might think I goofed big time but I forgot to mention the forecast was for Texas and not Michigan! Just teasin’. By the way Texas did have one of the hottest summers ever although if you took a leisurely summer afternoon’s drive north you might have shut off your car’s A/C just as the sun got low in the sky.

Let’s look again at the few sentences that form the heart of my summer of 2009 forecast:

The point here is that I assumed when I made the forecast that sunspots were about to reappear. This was what was forecast to happen based on hundreds of years of observation. But the sunspots never appeared all summer and fall. Just didn’t happen.

Even though the lack of sunspots was really weird, I did mention this possibility in my forecast. Here is a sentence I copied from that 2009 summer forecast:

While no one knows for sure why this occurs: hot summers being associated with the return of the sunspots and not by the actual number of sunspots, one possible explanation follows:

Think of the sun as a pot of very hot water near its boiling point, say 205F. If you keep the heat on low to keep the water on at 205F nothing seems to happen. Then you turn the knob on the stove to medium and as the water rises to near boiling (212F at sea level) bubbles of water vapor will start at the bottom of the pot and float toward the surface. Probably a similar thing happens to the sun when there are no sunspots. The temperature is a bit below some critical point (which must be somewhere around 100 million degrees in its center although the sun’s surface is a relatively cool 10,000F) Then when the sun’s internal temperature increases, bubbles start forming deep down and rise to the surface, creating the sunspots.. Exactly how long it takes from the time the sun’s internal temperature rises to the time the sunspots form is a guess, although it’s probably closer to days or weeks rather than minutes and hours. A hotter sun of course usually means warmer land temperatures especially during the summer in areas north of the tropic of Cancer or south of the tropic of Capricorn, which includes all of the continental United States.

While there are other factors to consider, such as the El Nino which looks right now it will turn into a whopper (however, El Nino’s significance regarding summer weather is an unknown quantity), my 2010 forecast is for another return to the summers of the mid 1950s. Hopefully, the summers of the 1930s won’t ever return. This isn’t simply hope, since the summers in the mid 1930s likely were so extreme because of the farming practices that helped create the dustbowl which caused a drought or perhaps vice versa. Excessively dry soils, as meteorologists know, are associated with above normal air temperatures because the sun doesn’t expend its energy in evaporating water all it needs to do is warm the ground and air which uses quite a bit less energy than changing water from liquid to its gaseous state.

The bottom line. Look for a hot dry summer throughout the Midwest including Newaygo County Michigan and Magicland Farms. Of course, if the sunspots fade away in spring and summer, which would be truly startling, forget my forecast.

FYI: The latest NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center’s June, July, August (Summer 2010) prediction is for normal temperatures in Newaygo County, Michigan and the Midwest in general. Joe Bastardi from Accuweather hasn’t publicly issued a forecast yet and it is hard to determine yet what he thinks.

I want to apologize to anyone who made a comment on my summer 2009 post and I failed to respond. One of my New Year’s resolutions is to look over any comments to the blog and respond in a timely manner. I do greatly appreciate any comments and I want to encourage them.

(Sour Cream Apple Pie)

Well, now that the farm season is winding down, we will be posting more on the blog again. Over the winter and spring, we plan to post information about the farm, our plans for next year, recipes you might be interested in and anything else that comes to mind. Once next summer arrives, please subscribe to our newsletter as that is where the most up to date information is provided. (Look on the right hand side of this blog for subscription information.)

For this post though, I am going to stick to the recipe theme. These two recipes make excellent use of the apples we have available now. The first is the traditional apple pie and the second is one with a sour cream-apple combination that makes an excellent change of pace.

One note about making apple pies: Recipes often call for adding lemon juice to the apple slices while making the pie. If you are using one of our recommended pie apples (Northern Spy, Calville, Gravenstein, Idared, Stark Jumbo), any lemon juice or lemon peel is unnecessary. These apples have just the right amount of tartness for baking up a wonderful apple pie. I have been making pies for almost ten years here and haven’t had to use lemon juice once. Of course, if you are using an apple like a Red Delicious, you will probably want to add the lemon juice.

Fresh Apple Pie

• 6 cups thinly sliced peeled pie apples (about 2 1/2 – 3 pounds)
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/4 cup packed brown sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1 recipe Pastry for Double-Crust Pie (your favorite recipe)
• 1 tablespoon butter
• Milk (optional)

Directions

1. Combine granulated sugar, flour, brown sugar, nutmeg and cinnamon. In a large mixing bowl combine apples with sugar mixture. Toss until apples are coated. Set apple mixture aside.

2. Prepare Pastry for Double-Crust Pie and line pie plate with 1 crust.

3. Transfer apple mixture to pastry-lined pie plate. Dot with butter. Trim pastry even with pie plate. For top crust, roll out remaining dough. Cut slits in top crust. Place top crust on the filling. Seal and flute the edge. Brush with milk, if desired.

4. To prevent over browning, cover the edge of the pie with foil. Bake in a 375 degree F oven for 25 minutes. Remove foil; bake for 20 to 25 minutes more or until the top is golden brown and apples are tender. Makes 6 to 8 servings.

Tip: For taste reasons, it is better for the crust to be a little more overdone than underdone.

Sour Cream Apple Pie

• 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 3/4 cup white sugar
• 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1 egg
• 1 cup sour cream
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 4 cups apples, peeled and chopped
• 1 recipe pastry for a 9 inch single crust pie
• 1/3 cup white sugar
• 1/3 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 2 tablespoons butter

Directions:

1. Stir together 2 tablespoons flour, salt, 3/4 cup sugar and nutmeg in bowl. Combine egg, sour cream and vanilla in another bowl; mix well. Add egg mixture to dry ingredients; mix well. Stir in apples and spoon mixture into unbaked pie shell.

2. Bake in a preheated 400 degree F oven 15 minutes.

3. Reduce temperature to 350 degrees F and bake 30 minutes more. Remove pie from oven. Increase temperature to 400 degree F.

4. Prepare cinnamon topping and sprinkle over pie. Return to oven and bake 10 minutes more. Cool on rack.

5. To Make Cinnamon Topping: Combine 1/3 cup sugar, 1/3 cup flour and 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon in bowl. Cut in 2 tablespoons butter or regular margarine until crumbly, using a pastry blender.

These both are favorites in our house and we hope you enjoy them.

The harvest season is in full swing now at Magicland Farms.

Some of the items we have available now are:

Sweet Corn – BiColor and Yellow are in now. We do have white sweet corn coming a bit later in the season.

Snap Beans – We have both yellow and green varieties, picked at the peak of tenderness and flavor

Tomatoes – Sun Sugar Cherry Tomatoes and our Little Red tomatoes are in and as always delicious. We just started picking slicing tomatoes and hope to be regularly harvesting them soon.

Apples – Quinte and Vista Bella are the two summer apples available now. We also have 1/2 bushels of utility apples for $3.

Peaches – Candor and Early Red Haven are the varieties available now – however not by the bushel.

Potatoes – Our delicious red potatoes and Yukon Gold potatoes are available now in quart, 1/4 peck and 1/2 peck quantities.

Kohlrabi – Try this unusual vegetable in cole slaw; it makes a great one!

Cabbage – Just started picking this today.

Cucumbers, pickles, beets, carrots, broccoli, zucchini and summer squash are available every day while supplies last.

We picked the first sweet corn of the season today. 11 bushels were picked and are available for sale at the stand. Hurry on down and get some!

With all the hustle and bustle around here since harvest time has arrived, it is often difficult if not impossible to keep our blog updated daily. As a result, we have come up with another way to keep in touch with what is going on at Magicland Farms. A weekly newsletter is our solution! I will try to update the blog as much as possible but the newsletter will go out every week late on Sunday.

With this newsletter, you can find out what is available for sale, what is coming up in the near future, and some interesting information from the Boss himself with his perspective on what he sees while out in the fields.

I also plan to include recipes and tips for enjoying the produce we have.

In the side bar to the right, we have a signup block for the newsletter. Why not give it a try and see how you like it? We promise not to sell our email list to anyone so you won’t receive any spam from signing up for the newsletter.

• Green Beans – available by the bag, the peck and the half bushel
• Garlic – Our German Extra Hardy garlic is excellent for your cooking needs. The aroma is just wonderful.
• Zucchini and Summer Squash – The zucchini has take off. One day there wasn’t much and now we have a lot. Summer squash is also coming on although slower.
• Lettuce – This year we have Freckles (an heirloom romaine) and Bibb lettuce available.
• Beets – Looks like there will be plenty available.
• Broccoli – This is a new item for us and we are harvesting quite a bit of it right now.
• Potatoes – Red potatoes are available in the quart, 1/4 peck and 1/2 peck sizes. They are delicious.
• Cucumber/Pickles – We just started picking these and hope to keep up the supply in the days to come.
• Kohlrabi – Lots of great looking Kohlrabi available. Be sure to try it in cole slaw instead of cabbage, YUM!