This is our second winter of growing food in our own unheated greenhouse and it has been an amazing experience. Last year at this time, we had had over 47 inches of snow, it was so much colder, and we shoveled heavy snow to keep the greenhouse from collapsing, at least 6 times. The small amount of greens we planted in there all got harvested by Christmas. We started some carrots, and several plantings of other hearty veggies, beginning at the end of January, planting several successions through March.

We moved the hoophouse off those crops in April once they could survive outdoors and then planted tomatoes in there a whole month early. All of these crops thrived, pointing the way to our successful future. We got an extra month on either end of the season with the tomatoes, and the early planted carrots and romaine heads gave our CSA customers a gorgeous first couple of shares in mid-June, way ahead of what we were able to do in earlier years. We have already bought the steel to build a second, larger hoophouse.

This year’s unusual temperatures has kept everything alive in the hoophouse much longer, and with much less snow shoveling (yay!). Yesterday, January 26, I harvested spinach, mache, arugula and leeks to sell at a local food event  in Manchester-by-the-Sea tomorrow. I’ll be one of several vendors selling for a couple of hours. Afterward, I’ve been invited as the farmer representative, to speak about local food on a panel, followed by Q & A. A late January market is a first for us, and I’m so grateful for the opportunity.

But first, I must show you my daily commute. A far cry from my former life as an administrator at a local college, my commute now requires no gasoline to be burned. I’m so happy about this! That’s Charger, my son Michael’s dog, who spent the morning hanging out with me. Since he doesn’t have any sheep to herd, his job of keeping the sticks in order around the farm is taken very seriously.

 You can see how he got his name…

Zoom zoom!

Ha ha! Here I am!

Here we are at last, nearing the hoophouse, about a two-minute walk away…

Inside, the crops are protected under hoops covered by a second layer of Reemay cloth. This protection gives us conditions that are a couple of zones further south to grow in.

Peeling back the cloth is an easy, one person task. We’ve already been eating glorious fresh salads, so there doesn’t appear to be much left…However, appearances are deceiving!

The temperature inside, and out, as well as the relative humidity when I began harvesting at noon. It was a little cloudy.

And of course, the coat comes off right away!

Here was the day’s high, at around 2:30 p.m. after the sun had come out. Note the drop in humidity due to my comings and goings through the open door.

The day’s harvest.

Later, I will show you how we kept the carrots fresh in a deep hole in the ground covered with hay. I will be harvesting those this morning for tomorrow’s market…

…to capture an interesting cloud formation…

… to record the pinks of a setting sun through the maple tree……or an intimate moment…

To record artfully, our more ordinary workday activities…

…the mundane tools of our daily toil…

from another perspective…

The creatures on our farm keep us endlessly amused and entertained…

All of this reminds us why we love what we do here!

We’ve really enjoyed the extended season (and extra vegetables) afforded by the unseasonably warm weather, up to and including New Year’s Eve Day when it was pushing 60 degrees here!

Unlike last year at this time, we are still harvesting from the greenhouse. Here’s mache and fresh arugula we harvested, for our Christmas salad, served with gorgonzola crumbles, candied pecans and a lovely maple basil balsamic vinaigrette. So delicious!

Last night the mercury dipped to 6F Ouch! But more like January. (Couldn’t we at least have some snow? Please? I know, be careful what you wish for…but I so want to go snowshoeing in the woods behind the farm…)

Our old friends Karen and Ralph (Ralph prefers “good friends,” to “old”, sorry Ralph…) drove up from New Jersey to help us welcome in 2012. We’ve known each other since “before…” before kids, before marriage, before granchildren, all of which proceeded for us in tandem over the past 30+ years. Now all of our respective kids are married, or are about to be. Grandchildren have arrived or are arriving soon. Truly “old” friends are the best kind!

As I said, it was pushing 60 on New Year’s Eve day and we took full advantage of the lovely weather for various pursuits on the farm. Karen and I visited the greenhouse to harvest another salad for our New Year’s gathering.

Meanwhile, Ralph got out his metal detector and Bill grabbed a shovel to see what they could find under the newly turned earth. Ralph was wishing for an old pocket knife or watch, or ring, or a buried cache of coins under the old stone walls…

Dave, our friend from Parker River Alpaca Farm joined the fun.

Nothing but a few coins were found…but cameraderie and exercise trumps treasure any day, don’t you think?

Meanwhile, Karen and I wandered around the farm and found Desiree out back with her bunny, “Inigo Montoya.” Sadly, Inigo’s friend, Wesley died last week, so until a new friend arrives (soon!) Inigo has “Pony,” his stuffed animal to snuggle with. Sometimes Suchi (Desi’s mini-Pom) gets into the cage to snuggle with the bunnies.

Then, Karen and I took a good long walk in the woods. Life indeed is rich, isn’t it?

In addition to planting garlic, we’ve also been pulling out tired and frost-bitten plants and taking down the electric fence. Yesterday, Michael plowed up more ground in the garden, adding many feet to our existing rows, which will give the sod a chance to break down and compost over the long winter months. We have decided next season, in addition to CSAs, that we will explore selling to local restaurants. We have one new corporate chef client, our friend Jackie, who cooks for a company in Lexington. The extra room in the garden will give us room to plant more successions of broccoli, cauliflower and other crops we can sell during the season.

Last weekend we got the greenhouse squared away for colder weather. Just in time for this week’s heat wave! hah!

Hearty cold-tolerant crops were planted in the front greenhouse bed in late August, to reach full growth by mid-November. In the greenhouse’s summer position, an early planted (April) tomato crop thrived, avoided late blight and other perils, and kept pumping out delicious red ripe tomatoes until nearly the end of October. We’ve never seen such tomatoes!! Once this crop was done and cleaned out, the greenhouse got moved to its winter position, over the baby late-season crops.

Here you see we’ve installed hoops, (1″ PVC electrical conduit) over two rows over which we’ve draped Reemay. This will protect the crops under a double layer, giving them a couple of zones advantage during colder weather. We also stopped watering when the greenhouse was pulled over. This keeps the plant cells from bursting during the freeze-thaw cycles they go through in the colder months.

Not so. Not here.

Our Late Season shareholders will tell you different.

• Here’s what their second share looked like last week:

But surely, you say, in the meantime, we got 5 inches of snow and all kinds of cold weather! Of course the garden is gone now!

Nope!

Lots of things are still growing and thriving under the hoops and inside the greenhouse, not to mention what’s in the root cellar.

Cold-hearty crops such as beets, lettuce, rutabaga, kohlrabi, mache, spinach are all doing very well thank you, under here:

And carrots here!

And take a look in the greenhouse! These crops will be ready for harvest in December.

Developing your own garlic crop takes great patience. It’s a very expensive crop to grow if you’re buying new seed stock. And when you love garlic as much as we do, it takes steely resolve and discipline to save the biggest bulbs year after year, to replant.

I don’t think I could live without garlic in my kitchen, and nothing tastes better than our own home grown garlic. After the July garlic harvest it’s a garlic bonanza here. In the beginning, it seems like we will have plenty. It goes into all our marinaras, salsas and savory dishes that we preserve and freeze for the winter. It flavors our omelettes and stews, and adds pizzazz to our pizzas. We give it out to our shareholders. We sell some at the farmer’s markets. It doesn’t take long before our supply starts to dwindle and we begin to look longingly at our seed crop. But we hold back. You see, we have to save the best of our harvest to put right back into the ground in October, or early November. It’s hard, but we are strong because we know there’s a huge reward for our stewardship. What’s a large enough garlic crop? When you have to go to the supermarket to buy more, you don’t have enough, and we’re not quite there yet…

Hardneck garlic is the crop of choice in the Northeast, and it needs to be planted in the fall for a mid-July harvest. It takes time and experimentation to discover which varieties will do best in your own soil. Finally, after three years of holding back our best bulbs, this year’s harvest yielded us a 1/2 bushel basket brimming with very large and beautiful Music bulbs. Clearly, this is the variety for Mehaffey Farm– great big fat heads averaging 6 or 7 huge cloves each. Each clove will produce another whole head. We carefully stored the basket high and dry up on one of the beams in my house where they sat, mocking us with their plump perfection for three whole months. (Eat Me!) It’s a good thing we get a generous supply of the smallish, and in the least bit less than perfect heads to use in our kitchen!

Garlic planting time was a little late this year, partly because of the unexpected Halloween snowstorm, but also because October was a chaotic month filled with change at Mehaffey Farm. Ross and Casey and Shelby moved out and into their own place — a good move for them as every young couple needs their own nest! We miss having the baby around every day, and we loved having the baby and her parents here, but it is good for everyone to have more space and a home that’s refuge to go to at he end of the day instead of the Grand Central Station my house had become… And while I miss my morning coffee and newspaper cuddles with Shelby, we still get to see her every Monday and Tuesday when her mama goes to work on the evening shift, where she’s a nursing supervisor at Woodbrier in Wilmington.

Then, at the end of the month, Mike and Desi moved into the farmhouse with Grammie. This is a wonderful turn of events that the whole family is happy about. The old family house where Grammie has been living alone for 7 years is very large and very empty. The kids will breathe new life into the old farmhouse,  which was designed for a family to live in!

Also in October, we are finally getting our chimney fixed by our son Michael! It had started to crumble after living in our house for nearly 30 years, and it wasn’t going to make it through one more winter. Last week Michael signed papers to buy the masonry/construction business from his cousin Graham, who he’s been working with for the past few years.

Meanwhile, we are nearly half-way into our Late Season shares which consist of cold-hearty crops, root storage crops and canned goods every other week until Christmas. We’ve covered large crops of cold-hearty vegetables with hoops and reemay cloth, and we have lots of winter squash and potates in the root cellar. It may seem like the season is over, but our bounty continues. (Here’s a peek into our greenhouse of crops that will appear in our late season shares in December…a post for another day!)

August  2, 2011

Family shares burden of saving farm

Farmhouse chef offers recipe for Caesar Salad made with fresh eggs

Food for Thought

Heather Atwood

The Gloucester Daily Times

Maggie Mehaffey married into a farming story that dates back to at least 1718, so says the historic plaque on the Mehaffey Farm homestead in Rowley. She and the rest of the family — Maggie’s husband, their two sons Ross and Michael, respective wife and girlfriend Acacia and Desi, Maggie’s sister-in-law Marcia and husband, and the family matriarch Louise — have all pooled cash, time, muscle and heart to save this farm, where Mehaffeys and Tenneys have been born and buried for 300 years.

Mehaffey Farm sits in a knoll at the foot of a gentle slope of winding road and meadow. The white-shingled house, both stately and modest, has clean New England lines and grace. The barn across the yard is all beams and barn swallows. In the sunny front by the wide entrance, buckets of snap dragons, lilies and zinnias stay fresh for the community-supported agriculture pickup in a small refrigerator. Behind them in the shadows, wide trays of Mehaffey garlic lay drying on screens. One of the three Allis Chalmers tractors (a 1939, 1940, and the Mehaffeys’ recently purchased 1956) waits tuning up or its next orders in the center of all.

A classic story, the farm originally spanned 300 acres, including marshland and woodlots; saltmarsh hay was cut as winter feed for cows. Today, it’s been pared down to 90 acres of woodland, 15 acres of open field, and 2 acres of vegetables, herbs and a couple of bee hives. Where once the farm had no neighbors, now roads named Harrison Circle, Tenney Road and Isabelle Circle, all family names, carve the landscape into house lots. (Isabelle Circle was misspelled; Isabel Tenney, was grandmother to Maggie’s sons. She raked hay, I was told, but refused to milk cows, and was fondly remembered for, among other things, a great steamed blueberry pudding and a sense of playfulness.)

I sat on lawn chairs in the barn and visited with Maggie and Louise, 80 years old but going on 40, last week. Louise keeps the family archives — 300 years of Tenney names and dates, births and deaths — in her head.

The farm was originally Perleys and Tenneys. William Mehaffey showed up in 1943 looking for work after finishing at Essex Agricultural School in Danvers. Two horses were used to plant Louise’s father’s fields when the young Bill Mehaffey, a natural machinist, suggested a tractor. It took a while — a difficult time in Korea, but William married Louise Tenney in 1953. Beside Louise’s parents, they raised a family in the farmhouse; their son William married Maggie.

In recent years, it had become a family hobby to sit around the table and agonize about preserving this place so rich in history. Isabel Tenney’s small trust, which had allowed basic maintenance on the buildings, had been dwindling for years. But, Maggie Mehaffey, a buttery blond whose powerful smile and optimism alone could power the farm machinery, had been watching the local food movement gain momentum. She read Barbara Kingsolver’s book “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral,” about the author’s year feeding her family strictly on local foods, and Maggie passed it on to everyone in her family to read. Then, sadly Maggie lost her mother. She decided to leave her job at North Shore Community College and invest herself and a small inheritance into saving Mehaffey Farm. Teary, Maggie told me her mother would love knowing she was part of this effort. Maggie went to the Enterprise Center to get details about running a business, and started a blog.

Saving the farm is a patchwork effort built with muscle and heart. Bill, Maggie’s husband, supported his wife’s decision to give up a regular income to save the farm, but he works full-time for Mosquito Control for the state of Massachusetts.

“Everyone brings something different; we call my husband ‘the irrigator,’” Maggie says. Michael’s girlfriend, Desi, keeps a beautiful patch of herbs, her “Farmicy,” from which she’ll produce a line of all-natural balms and creams. Maggie, with a degree in communications, is public relations and business. Maggie’s two boys both have full-time jobs, but piece together, with their partners’ blessings, plenty of hours running the farm, hours that take away from other parts of their lives.

“The boys,” Maggie proudly tells me as I admire a beautiful new wash station standing in the field, built of reclaimed decking and an old sink, “do everything to perfection.”

The goal of all this work, and heart, is to pay the taxes, maintain the house and barn, and maybe support some family. Ross and his wife Acacia’s new baby, Shelby Ruth Mehaffey, begins seven generations of Tenney and Mehaffeys here.

This summer Mehaffey Farm is in its third year offering 27 families CSAs, and they sell at the Cape Ann Farmers Market in Gloucester on Thursdays and Amesbury Farmers Market on Sundays.

The day I visited, gold finches skimmed the fields. The last asparagus fronds toppled over in feathery bed by Desi’s fragrant clumps of herbs. Row upon row of vibrant produce grew like Findhorn, not a buggy leaf or weak seedling in sight (Mehaffey is not certified organic, but practices organic farming). Lettuces blossomed at all stages of baby to big. New radish seedlings peeked from the warm July soil. Thick, green foliage cradled plump heads of broccoli and golden crowns of romanesco. A hoop house protected an early tomato crop, while later fruit ripened in a distant field. A tumbling patch of melon varieties made me think to get to the farmers market early when they’re finally ready; local melons are treasures.

Three hundred years of this family sitting down to dinner together, and this Mehaffey generation’s commitment to preserving home, is the true fertilizer making this garden grow.

Here is Maggie’s recipe for Caesar Salad. She uses raw eggs, but promises the threat of salmonella comes from unwashed shells. The eggs at Mehaffey Farm are scrubbed.

Food for Thought runs weekly in the Times’ Taste of the Times section and is written by Heather Atwood, an author and mother from Rockport. Questions and comments can be sent to Heather at heatheraa@aol.com. And follow her blog at gloucestertimes.com/foodforthought.

Caesar Salad

Ingredients

1 large head of romaine lettuce

Parmesan or Romano cheese

For the dressing:

1 or 2 cloves of garlic, finely minced

3 tablespoons olive oil

Juice from half a lemon*

3 tablespoons corn or canola oil

1 egg

Dash of Worcestershire sauce

1 teaspoon (or so) of Grey Poupon, or your favorite spicy mustard

Anchovy paste or canned anchovy strips, cut up small.

Homemade or storebought croutons*

Instructions

1. Wash the lettuce well and tear into large pieces.

2. Grate on a generous amount of a good Parmesan or Romano cheese.

For the dressing:

1. Finely mince the garlic.

2. Whisk together the garlic, olive oil, fresh squeezed lemon juice, the corn or canola oil, the egg (We use a raw egg, but you can also “coddle,” or cook the egg slightly in boiling water for about 1 minute before putting into the blender.), the Worcestershire sauce, the mustard, and the anchovy paste — squeeze in about 11/2 inches or use canned anchovy strips, cut up smaller. We prefer the paste which gives the dressing its signature flavor.

3. To finish salad, grate on a generous amount of a good Parmesan or Romano cheese, add croutons and mix well, coating all of the lettuce pieces.

For the croutons*:

Homemade croutons with this salad are well worth the extra effort.

1. Cut any nice, crusty leftover bread into 1/2- to 3/4-inch pieces.

2. Pour a little good olive oil down the sides of a mixing bowl.

3. Smash a garlic clove and rub into the oil. Allow the garlic to infuse in the oil for a few minutes.

4. Take out the garlic and toss in the croutons to coat with the infused oil.

5. Spread the croutons out on a baking sheet and toast them in the oven at 350 degrees for about 15 minutes. Keep an eye on them and turn them every so often so they don’t burn!

Recipe courtesy of Maggie Mehaffey, Mehaffey’s Farm, 2011 (Recipe adapted from: “From Asparagus to Zucchini, a Guide to Cooking Farm-Fresh Seasonal Produce,” by the Madison Area CSA Coalition, 1996.

So what if it was 98 and humid on Friday? It was time to extract the honey from the hive, and at those temperatures, the honey flows better! We now have about 35+ pounds of sweet, delicious, light-colored early honey. Meaning the nectar was gathered from the early blooms this year, often the best quality honey. We think it tastes better than anything we’ve bought. Maybe because it’s ours!

Michael  begins scratching the wax capping off the honey cells. The supers were heavy and thick with honey. Loaded!

We only scrape the wax off one side at a time. Less oozing and mess that way!

We spin two frames at a time. It takes a lot of manpower to crank the extractor one way, then the other. Centrifugal force, baby! 

The honey needs to sit in the bucket for a few days until all the bubbles rise to the surface. Then we can put it up in jars to enjoy.

Desi will use the wax to make lotions and potions from her “farmacy” herb garden…

Cooking with the Daily News – Bok Choy with Cashew Sauce Then click on the header: Ingredients, Vegetables. It’s under Bok Choy.

Click on the link to see the video!

Michael pries out the first frame from the super. The bees were remarkably unconcerned about our presence.

The box and towel are to prevent a “robbing incident.” As soon as the frames are pulled out of the hive, they are whisked into the box and covered with the towel. This is so the bees don’t smell the honey and try to get it back!

The brush in Michael's hand is to brush the bees off the frame as it is pulled out.

All frames are filled solid, both sides, and nicely capped.

Bees are such remarkable creatures! They create perfectly identical octagonal cells that are slightly angled down into which they deposit nectar which is regurgitated from their honey stomachs. Then they tend it so that the water evaporates from the nectar until it is the exact right specific gravity of honey, then they seal it over with wax. Did you know that honey is the only food found in nature that will never spoil? Sealed honey comb has been found in Egyptian tombs that’s still good. Amazing!

This week, we will scrape the wax caps off each frame and spin out the honey. By the weight of the frames, we anticipate more than 30 lbs of sweet, delicious, light colored spring honey! Our patience and persistence is finally being rewarded!

Today, Michael also began pruning all the excess foliage from the greenhouse tomatoes. This puts all the energy into the clusters of tomatoes, which are pruned to no more than six.  The top of the plant continues to grow, and in fact, once the tomatoes at the bottom are harvested, it is possible to drop the plant down to re-root. This causes the top of the plant to continue to grow and produce fruit. This ensures tomatoes for as long as the daylight length holds out, perhaps October.