I found this story in the Phildelphia Citypaper online (story here). The author explains why buying your produce from your local farmers is the best choice you can make which almost goes without saying. But the reason I link this article is her list of some early produce and its nutritional benefits for the consumer. Here at Magicland Farms, we will soon be having strawberries and peas available for sale. Below are her comments on those two crops:

Peas

With 134 calories in a whole cup of peas, these seasonal beauties are delicious examples of why we eat veggies. A great source of calcium (43% of your daily requirements!), potassium, magnesium and phosphorus, fresh peas contribute fiber to our diets, folic acid for strong blood and immune-boosting vitamins A, C and K for all you antioxidant lovers out there.

Strawberries

With a harvest season that can seem like just minutes, when you see local strawberries at a farm market, grab them – especially if they are not sprayed or are organic! Their sweet-tart flavor is just one bit of their allure. With only 49 calories in a cup, these vitamin C-rich berries give us all the immune-boosting power we need, in a delicious way. A great source of fiber, magnesium and potassium, strawberries go a long way towards helping us feel balanced. And once you have tried locally grown, you’ll understand: they are worlds away from the flat-tasting, out of season, ripened-under-grow-lights versions you find at the supermarket.

So be sure to check back for the announcement of the start of the strawberry/pea harvest. Come on out and get some of the goodies for yourself; you won’t be sorry.

Sorry about the lack of posts; I will try to one update to cover the last few days and then will start posting daily again.

Last week we worked on fertilizing the peach trees; there are tons of tiny peaches on them which means that we need to thin the fruit.

We also worked on the electric fence last week. Pretty soon it will be difficult for the deer to get into the crops and do damage (at least we hope so.)

Since it was rainy last week, we did more transplanting:

Tomatoes:

• Big Beef

Peppers:

• Giant Marconi – an 8 inch long Italian type sweet pepper
• Telica – a large jalapeno
• Bianca – an ivory bell pepper
• Vivaldi – a bell pepper
• Mandarin – an orange sweet bell pepper
• Ariane – an orange sweet bell pepper

Eggplant:

• Zebra – a purple and white variegated eggplant
• Hansel – a deep purple finger shaped eggplant
• Millionaire
• Machiaw – an Asian type eggplant up to twelve inches long and slender
• Vittoria – a purple eggplant

Today marked an important event–we planted tomatoes in the high tunnel. Planting in the high tunnel allows us to get ripe tomatoes earlier than we would by just planting them in the field. We planted Mountain Glory, Mountain Spring, BHN 189 and our ever popular SunGold cherry tomatoes.

We can’t wait to have that first taste of vine ripened tomatoes!

It was way too rainy to even think about doing field work so we concentrated on transplanting tomatoes from seed flats to peat pots. The following varieties were worked on today:

These ones we have tried

• Our secret delectable Magicland Farms variety
• Aunt Gertie’s Gold – a heirloom variety that produces very tasty tomatoes

These are new varieties for us

• Stump O’ the World – a large pink heirloom
• Delicious – developed by Burpee from their Beefsteak tomato
• Rocky – a heirloom paste or sauce tomato
• Virginia Sweets – an heirloom gold/red bicolor tomato
• Giant Belgium – a large dark pink heirloom variety
• Aunt Ginny’s – a purple heirloom variety

We also transplanted some eggplant:

• Primetime
• Cloud Nine – a white eggplant
• Vittoria
• Night Shadow
• Nadia

Taking advantage of the decent weather today, more vegetables and herbs got planted today. We planted cabbage, carrots, parsnips, cutting celery and dill.

Yesterday, we finished transplanting the onions – Riverside variety. Matthew made a new door for the high tunnel which also got installed. The old one gave out and couldn’t be repaired so he constructed a new one.

The crew also pruned the new fruit trees.

Tomorrow might be the day the next patch of sweet corn gets planted.

We have been trying to take advantage of the weather to get some of the early crops planted. Last week, we got the ground ready for planting the cabbage, for example, but then the rains came and made it impossible to plant.

Well, today’s weather was much more cooperative so some planting got done today. The kohlrabi, broccoli, cabbage and beets were planted. I believe that we are going to try to get another patch of sweet corn planted this week, weather permitting.

Even though the weather wasn’t good for planting yesterday, the crew managed to clear out the rest of the brush from the orchard. Pruning the trees over the winter leaves quite a bit of brush to clear and it is not one of the favorite things to do in the orchard. So everyone was quite pleased that this task got completed fairly quickly.

This morning some tomatoes were transplanted from seed flats to peat pots. Among the varieties transplanted were Big Beef, Black Prince, Green Zebra, Cherokee, Mortgage Lifter, Martin, Sun Sugar and our secret variety that provides a lot of the delicious slicing tomatoes you find at Magicland Farms during the summer. If you haven’t tried any of our heirloom tomatoes yet, make sure to give them a try; they are a tasty treat!

One of our crops that has been steadily growing in sales year, these last few years (hey, we never grew them before 2004!), has been heirloom tomatoes. A few years ago, few customers even knew what they were and we were even less knowledgeable about the matter. Now we have customers seeking us out because they want to try them.

We found out about them from a doctor friend who gave us a Brandywine from his garden to try. The little gift started us off on our heirloom tomato adventure.

Below are some of the varieties we are hoping to offer this year, along with a brief description of each. And I say hoping because you never know what, if anything, we are going to end up with come this summer. This is not a complete list but just a tiny sampling of what we plan on growing.

The following varieties are ones we have planted in the past and love:

Mortgage Lifter – This heirloom was developed in the early half of the last century in West Virginia. The story goes that he made enough off of the plants to pay off the mortgage on his farm. (Happily, though our home is mortgaged, our farm isn’t.) These tomatoes resemble Brandywine in flavor, but present a much better appearance. This is an excellent full flavored tomato.
Green Zebra – This is a beautiful small green tomato with dark green stripes. It never turns red but has the best flavor of any tomato, in my opinion. The flavor is excellent with a sweet-tart tang to it.
Kellogg’s Breakfast – This is an orange beefsteak tomato, originally from West Virginia. It is meaty with a terrific sweet, tangy flavor.
Paul Robeson - This is one of the most highly regarded black tomatoes; the flavor is full, sweet and tangy with a full rich flavor typical of black tomatoes.
Aunt Gertie’s Gold – A yellow golden tomato that has a good flavor and balance of sweet and tart. I prefer Kellogg’s Breakfast but this is a very good tomato.
Brandywine – This is a large reddish pink tomato that is a legend among heirloom tomatoes. It produces large fruit with a superb flavor. The main problem we have with these tomatoes is the fact that they don’t produce much salable fruit. We are trying a new strain this year to see if it is any better than ones we previously grew.

New varieties we are trying this year: (descriptions are from the seed catalogs)

Red Rose - This is a cross between Brandywine and Rutgers (the original Campbell soup tomato) with the crack resistance of Rutgers combined with the flavor of a Brandywine.
Stupice - This is an early, cold tolerant tomato from Czechoslovakia. They are small (2 oz.) tomatoes with a sweet flavor.
Rocky - A plum shaped tomato that is sweet and tangy. Supposedly makes an excellent sauce.
Delicious - A large meaty beefsteak tomato. This is the variety that holds the record for the largest tomato ever grown.
Stump of the World - A bit smaller than Brandywine but more productive with excellent taste.
Virginia Sweet - A large red-gold bicolor tomato that is very productive with a sweet and rich flavor.

And of course, although not an heirloom, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that we are growing SunSugar/SunGold cherry tomatoes again. These tomatoes are wonderfully delicious with a sweet fruity flavor. These literally fly off the shelves when we have them available. One of our regulars is obligated to buy a pint everytime she comes to the stand as her grandson absolutely adores them. If you haven’t tried them yet, you must give them a try!

Above is a picture of the some of the onions we have growing in the basement in seed flats. These will be transplanted out in the fields in April.

The varieties we have started are all sweet Spanish types. However, we have added some red sweet Spanish types this year. We are growing: Ailsa Craig Exhibition, Riverside Sweet Spanish, Montero, Red Defender, Ruby Ring and Red Burgermeister.

Our famous Newaygo Newaygo (walla walla) onions are overwintering in the fields right now.

So, if all goes well, we hope to have a bountiful harvest of onions starting in July at Magicland Farms.

Last year, we grew onions at Magicland Farms – our world famous Newaygo Newaygo sweets and sweet Spanish onions. The Newaygo Newaygo onions were a huge hit at the stand – wonderful taste and nice size but they are not an onion that will store well. The sweet Spanish onions were also tasty and we brought home some to use over the winter and they have stored pretty well. Today, I was making a BBQ Meatloaf for lunch and we came up with some sad news. The onions are about done and pretty soon we will have to find somewhere to get some onions from.

The good news about this is that the onions lasted until almost March – we are quite pleased with that. The bad news is that we don’t exactly know what to buy to keep us going until our onions come in. We are hesitant to buy onions from a foreign country and, with the salmonella/e.coli scares of the past seasons, don’t exactly trust the produce we find in our local grocery store.

This is one of the big reasons that the “buy local” movement is so important today. If you buy local, you know where your food is coming from and in a lot of instances you can get to know the farmer who grew it.

Of course, buying only local produce also has the tradeoff that you only buy what is in season and right now for us, local onions are not in season. So, the big challenge is to find a decent onion that we can grow and will store a bit longer for winter use. Maybe one of the new ones we are growing this year will be the one that will solve our winter storage problem. Let’s hope so!

No, not the planting in the field but the planting in our basement and small attached greenhouse. In order to get the produce to our customers as early as possible, we need to start some of the vegetables inside. Right now, we have started onions, tomatoes and peppers in seed flats. The picture above shows one of the flats of tomatoes.

After they grow a bit, they are then transplanted into peat pots to await planting in the fields and the high tunnel. We wait until sometime around May 20th to plant the tomatoes in the field; the ones destined for the high tunnel can go in earlier, somewhere around the end of April.