It’s the season of changes around here. Tomatoes are starting to slow down, pickling cucumbers are done, broccoli should be back in a couple weeks and we will have Kale for the fall season. 

We loved getting all that rain last week.  There were big cracks in the ground, but that slow rain fall did a lot of good. Now that the sun is back, it’s a little easier to work in the field and even the cantaloupe look a little happier.

On The Farm

The rain slowed us down a bit over the last week, but we’ve been able to get a few bins of squash onto the yard, get organized in the shed, and of course, stop irrigating!  It’s already dried off enough on top to where Ryan has been doing some tractor work.  Much of fall is about cleaning up the farm, shredding things that need to be shredded, and preparing of a new year to come in the spring.  All the work that goes into fall ground preparation makes a huge difference next spring.

One of those fall preparation things (and other times of the year too) is getting our cover crops planted.  Most of the farm already has this sorghum sudan grass wherever crops are not actively growing.  The goal is to get a bunch of organic matter, stop the wind erosion – because it is verrrrrry windy out here, and hold or build some nutrients for the next year.  So we have seeded vetch and clover into our actively growing sorghum sudan grass.

Sweet Dumpling Squash

What a cute name for a nice little plump squash – Sweet Dumpling. It’s pretty and striped, and gets cooked just like an acorn squash.  My family’s cooking preference is the brown sugar and butter method:

1. Cut the squash in half, scoop out the seeds and place in a baking – cut side up.  Pour 1/2 inch of water in the bottom of the pan so that the squash doesn’t burn or get dried out in the oven. (You can cook these seeds just like you would pumpkins seeds, if you want)
2. Add 1/2 T butter and 2 T brown sugar to each half.
3. Bake at 400°F (205°C) for about an hour to an hour 15 minutes, until the tops of the squash halves are nicely browned, and the squash flesh is very soft and cooked through.
4. Remove from the oven and enjoy.

It’s hard to overcook squash, it just gets better with more caramelization. But don’t undercook it.

Alternative – I am the only one in my house who isn’t a huge fan of this method. I find that stuffing the squash with some sort of savory mixture is more up my alley.  Think pork sausage (from one of Margret’s pigs), brown rice, kale, onion, and apple.  The options are endless.

Housekeeping

Next week (9/23) is the last week of the vegetable subscription. The Fall 2020 Vegetable Subscription will begin November 4th.  If you are interested in learning more, please visit the Pekarek’s Produce Website.

THIS WEEK’S PRODUCE

Bell Peppers
Sweet Dumpling Squash
Yukon Gold Potatoes
Tomatoes
Kohlrabi
Onion

Shop Pekarek’s Produce Online

Week 16 of Pekarek’s Produce Weekly Vegetable Subscription

On The Farm

Hooray for rain! We are so excited to see some of that wet stuff coming down. As I sit here writing this in the early morning hours, its pitch black and I am listening to the rain come down!

We hope you all had a lovely Labor Day! Around here, Ryan jokingly says “Labor day is for laboring.” But it’s not really a joke. He typically gives the crew the day off and then the family works a half day with him, then we go take a break but we’re pretty sure he keeps working!

On The Farm

You don’t always know what the weather is going to give you, but with the predicted rain for Tuesday and Wednesday, we figured we should get a few things out of the field. Sunday, we harvested the last of the zucchini and yellow squash – they were starting to get a virus. Monday we harvested the last crop of sweet corn. By Monday afternoon, Ryan had the plants shredded down and cleaned up for the fall.

We had lot’s of fun picking the first load of pumpkins and winter squash for the season. There will be several more loads that come out of the field, but this crew did a great job getting the first 5 hayracks out of the field.

Fall is Here!

Fall is no longer “coming soon,” it’s here!  I was downright chilled yesterday being outside and the rest of the crew is having to adjust to the weather too.  Reminder that the last day of the weekly vegetable subscription pick up is September 23.  We will take a short break from the weekly vegetable bags to transition into fall crops.  The Fall 2020 Vegetable Subscription will begin November 4th.  If you are interested in learning more, please visit the Pekarek’s Produce Website.

Enjoy!

Your Farmers,
Ryan, Katie, Jacob, Margret, Michael, Lukas, and Grace

Week 15 of Pekarek’s Produce Weekly Vegetable Subscription

On The Farm

We’ve heard lots of people loving their watermelon and cantaloupe in the last few weeks.  Not to brag, but Ryan really does grow the best melons around!  For those of you that have asked how to get more, you can visit  PekareksProduce.com/shop to add a melon, or anything else, to your weekly vegetable bag. 

Raccoons….. grrrr. Did you know raccoons love sweet corn?  We’ve known this for years.  They will go through all of the planted varieties, skip the ones that are over grown, pass through the ones that will be ready in a week, and then select the corn that is at it’s peak of perfection.  They do this each, and every year – so we’ve known this for a while.  But did you know that raccoons are also playful?  The sweet corn is less than 200 yards away from the pond.  Apparently, the raccoons prefer the cold water pumped through drip tape (all the sweet corn is drip irrigated).  But, they don’t just go to the end of the drip tape and get a drink.  They don’t make a nice, neat little hole and take a sip.  They take their little claws and scratch and pull, yank it out of it’s home, twist the tape into little knots, and then drink.  I imagine that they run through the sprays of water that they created, while eating ears of sweet corn, and laughing at the humans!

On The Farm

This week has been about getting things caught up and cleaned up on the farm.  The amount of paper work that has to be done would probably surprise you, but it might not surprise you that we get behind on it – especially in the late summer/early fall. Produce is in a transition again.  Watermelons probably only have a couple of weeks, which is shorter than normal.  Yellow squash and zuchinni are starting to take on some disease from the aphids so we are pulling plants as we find it.  Patches of sweet corn have been shredded under. We finally have a nice glut of tomatoes for canning.

Coming Soon…. Fall

The last day of the weekly vegetable subscription pick up is September 23.  We will take a short break from the weekly vegetable bags to transition into fall crops.  The Fall 2020 Vegetable Subscription will begin November 4th.  If you are interested in learning more, please visit the Pekarek’s Produce Website.

Enjoy!

Your Farmers,
Ryan, Katie, Jacob, Margret, Michael, Lukas, and Grace

Week 10 of Pekarek’s Produce Weekly Vegetable Subscription

It’s hard to believe that it’s almost August. We are all enjoying a little reprieve from the heat. Much of our crew is looking forward to school starting (very weird). And our minds wander to fall when we see the pumpkins turning colors. 

On The Farm

I’m still excited for these summer crops that we are starting to pick. This week you will get the first cantaloupe of the season. Yum!  We often get the question “how do you pick a good cantaloupe” – the answer is, of course, you get it from Pekarek’s Produce!  Ha!  But really, when cantoloupe are picked, they should “slip” off the vine.  So, when your looking at a good one, most likely there is an indentation where the cantaloupe was pulled off the vine (instead of a bit of vine sticking off the end when it is cut).  Where that indentation is, you should get a strong smell of melons. At our place, there are only a couple of people that are actually allowed to pick the melons… the rest catch and load what gets thrown at them!  (Yes, we pick the melon and then toss them to the person outside the row.  It’s a fun game when the melons are small, but every once in a while, a melon goes ker-splat. I find this game much less fun when it comes to watermelons!)

A few other summer crops are coming along nicely too.  We’ve got the first few eggplants that have made it into the house.  We’ve just started digging potatoes, but with the recent rain and mud, that has been put on hold.  Pickling cucumbers are starting to produce nicely. Another nice part of summer is that it is canning season – or freezing at my house.

If you are interested in half bushel or bushel quantities for canning or freezing, please call Ryan (402) 641-3305.  We can have these ready for one of your weekly vegetable subscriptions or for a weekend.  Think frozen corn, pickles, canned beets, etc!

I’m still excited for these summer crops that we are starting to pick. This week you will get the first cantaloupe of the season. Yum!  We often get the question “how do you pick a good cantaloupe” – the answer is, of course, you get it from Pekarek’s Produce!  Ha!  But really, when cantoloupe are picked, they should “slip” off the vine.  So, when your looking at a good one, most likely there is an indentation where the cantaloupe was pulled off the vine (instead of a bit of vine sticking off the end when it is cut).  Where that indentation is, you should get a strong smell of melons. At our place, there are only a couple of people that are actually allowed to pick the melons… the rest catch and load what gets thrown at them!  (Yes, we pick the melon and then toss them to the person outside the row.  It’s a fun game when the melons are small, but every once in a while, a melon goes ker-splat. I find this game much less fun when it comes to watermelons!)

A few other summer crops are coming along nicely too.  We’ve got the first few eggplants that have made it into the house.  We’ve just started digging potatoes, but with the recent rain and mud, that has been put on hold.  Pickling cucumbers are starting to produce nicely. Another nice part of summer is that it is canning season – or freezing at my house.

If you are interested in half bushel or bushel quantities for canning or freezing, please call Ryan (402) 641-3305.  We can have these ready for one of your weekly vegetable subscriptions or for a weekend.  Think frozen corn, pickles, canned beets, etc!

This Week’s Produce
Sweet Corn
Green Beans
Zuchinni or Yellow Squash
Cucumber
Cantaloupe

Your Farmers,
Ryan, Katie, Jacob, Margret, Michael, Lukas, and Grace

Week 5 of Pekarek’s Produce Weekly Vegetable Subscription

On The Farm

As usual, the weather is the lead story on the farm.  We’ve had a couple of storms, a little bit of hail and a lot of wind.  The hole in the high tunnel has gotten bigger and the work days keep getting longer. It can be so easy to fall in a pattern of looking at all the things we have to get done, those many many daily tasks and not look at all of the good that comes with it.  Yes there is a hole in the high tunnel, but we took down the plastic on the sides yesterday, and will pull new plastic today if the wind stays down for the afternoon.  It’s more work, but the results will be great!

Yes the long work days get tiresome and we tend to get a little bit snappy – ok a lot a bit snappy.  But long work days means we get to spend more time outside and that our family is strong and healthy enough to do so. 

So this week – we want to say a big thank you!  Thank you for being a part of our weekly vegetable subscription.  Thank you for joining our family and crew on this crazy journey in vegetable farming. And thank you for the opportunity to share in the bounty of the farm.

The veggies in this week’s bag are a bit more of the standard midwestern vegetable fare than last week. This is the end of strawberry season, but the summer crops are just starting. You will have either a cauliflower or a cabbage this week, because neither crop produced enough for everyone. We will try to rotate through who gets what when this happens. If you have a little purple tinge in your cauliflower, consider yourself lucky – it’s what happens when we get hot weather! It tastes great 🙂

Sugar Snap Peas

These things are like hidden gems of the cooking world. We mostly eat them raw – but they are great in a stir fry or as a meal on their own. Try this: Put 1 Tbs of canola oil in a pan on high heat (I usually use olive oil but it burns on high heat). When the oil is heated up, add your peas, 1 tsp garlic powder, 1 tsp onion powder, 1 tsp salt, 1/4 tsp ginger. Cook until soft, stirring occasionally. This is a fun dish to flip the food instead of stir, but either works. Ryan really likes the peas to get a little black too.

Enjoy!

This Week’s Produce
Basil
Strawberries
Broccoli
Carrots

Your Farmers,
Ryan, Katie, Jacob, Margret, Michael, Lukas, and Grace

Week 4 of Pekarek’s Produce Weekly Vegetable Subscription

I’m sure you’ve see it before where kids are better at technology than the parents… well we’ve been in that stage around here a time or two! So Michael (9) and I had an adventure in making a video on my phone this week that helped me decide that we definitely need to use our children more for making farm videos (not me)! In that light, Michael made a strawberry syrup in less than ten minutes this week and made a video to go along with it!

On The Farm

The heat that we’ve been having is going to make for a much shorter strawberry season than we would like, so the next week or two is all about the strawberries! It’s time for strawberries on your salad, in your smoothies, and on your pancakes!  Picking strawberries is fun the first time or two, but I’m not sure the crew will mind a shorter picking season!

This week you will all receive a basil plant with your weekly vegetable subscription!  This is something that you can use over and over again.  Basil needs a really good sunny spot to grow.  You can either put it in a larger pot OR plant it in a sunny part of the garden for the best results.  To use it, you can cut the stem down to 2 or 3 inches, with 2 sets of leaves left.  It will continue to regrow from their all season.  You want to make sure you keep cutting those tops off to keep it from flowering.

As for basil’s uses, there are many!  We usually dry a bunch of it down in the oven, so we can use it all year.  Here’s my top 5 ways to use basil:

1. Dry it down for use all year round!
2. Top whole leaves onto pizza
3. Finish pasta with thinly sliced leaves
4. Blend it into sauces
5. Chop it up in a salad

This Week’s Produce
Basil
Strawberries
Broccoli
Carrots

Your Farmers,
Ryan, Katie, Jacob, Margret, Michael, Lukas, and Grace

The name of the game this week is heat! And while we are irrigating everything we can with drip irrigation (we have miles of black and blue drip tape going across the farm), irrigation doesn’t solve anything. Usually, we would be hoping for a 3 – 4 week season for picking strawberries, but given this weather, we are predicting the strawberry season will be closer to 2 weeks this year. So, if you are looking to put up strawberries, make strawberry pie, or make some delicious jams and jellies – get your strawberries now!

Strawberry Syrup Recipe

We are making use of all the strawberries on the farm right now.  Michael really wanted to make some strawberry syrup, so we made a quick video of the process.

Ingredients

1 Qt Pekarek’s Produce Strawberries
1 Tbs Lemon Juice
1/3 cup sugar
1 Tbs corn starch
2 Tbs water

We just topped one quart of strawberries, added 1/3 cup sugar and 1 Tbs lemon juice then put it on the stove to boil.  After that, we mixed 1 Tbs corn starch with 2 Tbs water, poured it in the strawberries and boiled.  That’s it!  We removed it from the heat and in less than 10 minutes had some fresh strawberry syrup!

Shopping with Pekarek’s Produce

We hope you can enjoy strawberry season with us!  We’ve expanded our on-farm hours this week to include Tue – Thu from 10-5, Fri 4-6, and Sat 10 – 12.  You can still pre-order online at pekareksproduce.com/shop and pick up on the farm Friday or Saturday. Visit us at markets at Wednesday (5-7 p) and Saturday (8-12) in Seward, Saturday (8-12) at the Lincoln Haymarket Farmer’s Market, Sunday (10-2) at the Lincoln College View Farmer’s Market.

Check out what we have available this week on the farm at pekareksproduce.com/shop

Week 2 of Pekarek’s Produce Weekly Vegetable Subscription

Wow, has it been WINDY this week!  When it is this windy, you can hear the plants saying “ahhhhhh.” And of course, we got 6+ inches of rain since Wednesday.  So it’s like the double whammy of dirty around here, mud everywhere and wind. 

On The Farm

The greenhouse benches are pretty empty right now and we are preparing for another round of seeding. We plant something every couple of days, either in the greenhouse or in the field from February through October.

Pumpkins and squash are coming up – except the delicata squash which were all picked out of the row delicately and eaten by the ground squirrels.  Carrots, broccoli, and cauliflower in the field are all coming along.  The peas in the high tunnel are producing, but not as much as we would like. We are waiting for the peas in the field to start producing a little bit more.  And truthfully, the summer crops are looking good, just wind blown – sweet corn should be coming around the second week of July, tomatoes should be here late this month, and cantaloupes and watermelons look nice.

It’s the end of the season for asparagus. Butler County Health Care Center did 3, that’s right – 3 great videos on asparagus for you…

**A Note About Our Lincoln Pick Up**

Given the proximity of our pick up site to O street and the protests that are ongoing, we are monitoring the situation closely with the Hub Café staff.  Out of respect and for safety concerns, we are requesting that you pick up your produce by 6 pm this week.  We understand this is earlier than normal. If this does not work for you, please let Katie know via phone call or text at (402) 560-3110.

Have Questions?

We can’t wait to see you!  If you have questions, please call Katie at (402) 560-3110 or Ryan at (402) 641-3305.

Your Farmers,
Ryan, Katie, Jacob, Margret, Michael, Lukas, Grace, and Crew

We are so excited that today is the first day of the 2020 Pekarek’s Produce Weekly Vegetable Subscription! By joining the Pekarek’s Produce Weekly Vegetable Subscription, you not only receive a weekly bag of fresh and delicious vegetables, but you are also helping to strengthen our local food security, contribute to the local economy and support a small family farm (that’s us!) – so THANK YOU.

The 2020 weekly newsletter will be available online at pekareksproduce.com and sent directly to your email.  If you have any questions, please call Katie at (402) 560-3110 or Ryan at (402) 641-3305.

This is the first week of the weekly vegetable subscription, so there may be some hiccups as we all get to know each other.  Each week you will go to pick up your vegetables at your designated location (On the Farm, Merle’s Garden Center in Seward, or The Hub Café via the Jane Snyder Trail Center in Lincoln).  At your pick up site, there will be a bag with your name on it.  Simply pick up your bag, take it home and enjoy! We have multiple people with the same last name, so you may have to look for your first initial as well.

Each week, we will have a short newsletter describing some aspect of the farm, from hilling potatoes to building cold frames and more.  As a sweet bonus, the Butler County Health Care Center Nutritionist will also be doing some short videos on how to prepare or eat the vegetables in the weekly vegetable subscription.  I will be sure to share those as they are available. For this week’s produce, I’ve got two suggestions: make a great salad with everything in your bag or take these early cucumbers and make a cucumber onion salad!

As Ryan is always covered in dirt or mud, your newsletters will come from me, but if you’ve ever met Ryan, you can be sure he won’t be silent.  We look forward to a great season!