Of course we’re growing the stalwart Red Russian Kale, with it’s pretty purple stems and wavy edges. We are also growing White Russian, which has nice beefy pale ribs, and the lovely, sweet, almost-black Nero di Tuscana Lacinato Kale.

New this year to us is Beedy’s Camden Kale, released by Fedco Seeds, who promised: “Juicy and sweet in the spring, satisfying even when people are looking forward to lettuce.” The leaves are ruffled, like Winterbor Kale, which we are also growing.

Most thrilling is the Rainbow Lacinato, which is extolled all over the internet this spring. With curly edges, red stems, and variations on purple and blue-green leaves, Rainbow Lacinato should look great in both salads and bunches. Transplanting these beauties into rows is going to be a treat!

And so is finally getting to eat all these pretty and tender Kale varieties. Even if it is in a decadently rich Zuppa Toscana. Enjoy it while the weather is still so cold and chilly!

Zuppa Toscana a la Circle M

• 1 lb ground Italian sausage (Circle M Berkshire is best, but work with what you’ve got!), bulk or sliced links
• 1/2 tsp red pepper flakes (add more to taste)
• 1 tsp smoked paprika
• 1 large diced white onion
• 4 slices bacon, fried and chopped into bite-size pieces: reserve fat
• 3 cloves garlic,  pressed
• 3 cups of chicken, veggie or pork stock
• 1 cup water
• 1 cup heavy cream
• 1 lb Russet potatoes (about 3 large potatoes), large cube
• 3 cups kale, chopped, leaving the big stems out

Brown sausage in a large saucepot, add pepper and paprika. Add chicken broth and water. Saute onion, potato and garlic in bacon fat in a large skillet, cover.  Cook on medium until potatoes are slightly tender. Add bacon and onion mix to saucepot and simmer for about 20 minutes.  Add kale and cream, heat over low until warmed thru and kale and potatoes are tender. Add salt, pepper and hot pepper flakes to taste. Mangia!

This is Bernice, our little house lamb, staying warm by the woodstove.

Most ewes do a great job of birthing and raising their lambs. Sheep generally have twins which miraculously tend to each find their way to one of their mother’s two teats and happily drink their way to sleep several times every hour.  But some sheep breeds (like my primary wool breed, Finn-Rambouillet) regularly have triplets, quadruplets and quintuplets. And this is where things can get complicated.

Not only is it tricky for a ewe to keep track of more than two as they drop, get licked off, stand and start to toddle off, then get pushed back to the udder; it is tricky for more than two to share those twin teats if and when they do find them.  So some lambs get lost, get rejected or get weak. And some ewes get weak or depleted from the effort of birthing and feeding multiple lambs.

Shepherds like to be around to supervise both the births and the important hours afterward to make sure all lambs and moms are thriving.  Hence the lack of sleep – here we do barn checks every 4 hours, day and night.  (Some farms have barn cams and baby monitors with alarms for this purpose.)

Lambs that don’t do well are supplemented with baby bottles of frozen goat’s milk or powdered lamb milk. Especially weak ones are brought into the house to get warm and get bottles laced with molasses and a tiny bit of coffee.  All ewes are immediately offered molasses once the births conclude, and weak ewes continue to get it for a week or so after delivery.  In addition to providing the quick energy that any sugar source imparts, molasses has lots of B vitamins, which also provide energy and boost overall vigor.

This is our bottle-baby pen. These little ones can see my knees and they know food is coming!

After a week of round-the-clock barn checks, this shepherd craves some sweet energy and vitamins, too, and the smell of molasses going into those warm bottles of milk becomes irresistible. So I made up these molasses people treats for the marathon that is lambing season. I hope you’ll enjoy them, too!

Maidmarion’s Marvelous Lambing Season Molasses Cookies

• 3/4 cups butter, softened
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1 egg
• 1/3 cup molasses
• 2 1/4 cups white whole wheat flour
• 3 tsp ground ginger
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp cloves
• 1/8 tsp salt
• 1/2 cup raw or coarse sugar, for rolling

In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in egg and molasses. Combine flour, ginger, baking soda, cinnamon, cloves and salt. Gradually add to creamed mixture and mix well. Shape into 1 1/2 inch balls and roll in raw/coarse sugar. Place on ungreased baking sheet in 350 degree oven for about 13 minutes. Check these at 10 minutes! They should be pulled when still very soft. They’ll firm up quickly out of the oven. Remove to wire rack as soon as firm enough. Eat warm if you can – they are amazing that way. But they hold quite nicely for several days, too.

Want to see pictures of all the babies as they are born here at Circle M? Pop over to the facebook page!

One of the reasons I ended up keeping sheep is because I once visited a farm and got to see them out on pasture. My favorite thing was listening to them talk – they have so many different voices. I love my sheep!

Here they are waiting for me to feed them in the morning…

The little black speck in the forefront of the picture is a seed coat. The growing onion plant cracked the seed open, but the coat stayed stuck onto the single leaf as it stretched upward.

While we were talking via cellphone recently, a friend asked me what was going on at the farm. When I told her I was standing inside my walk-in cooler tapping shallot seeds into black plastic plug trays she said, “You should write about that! I bet very few people know how it all works.” So here goes: The Story of a Seed from Plant To Plate at Circle M Market Farm.

Seed box 1 of 3.

A market farmer’s garden year starts quite bit earlier than a home gardener’s might, so first of all, don’t panic if you don’t have seeds in the ground yet. Our CSA Farm Members will be getting Shares delivered the first week of June, so we start planting inside in mid-February so we’ll have lots of different veggies to put in the boxes by then. But there are plenty of things you can start now if you want to,  if you have the right set-up (sunny window or shelves with lights) to take care of them. And certainly, there are things you have to start now if you want to grow them from seed in our somewhat short northern growing season. If you want to see a complete seed-starting table for all possible garden crops, see this great one at Johnny’s Selected Seeds, one of our favorite seed catalogs.

Our earliest starts are onion family members because they need at least 100 days of full sun before the days start to shorten in August. You can plant onions from little bulbs, called “sets,” in May and still grow nice big bulbs by August, but you can’t buy sets for the tasty heirloom varieties we like to grow. So February 15 we seeded Walla Walla, Cippolini, Red Torpedo, Rossa Milano, New York Early and White Wing onions. We also seeded Red Prisma and Yellow Saffron shallots on that day. March 1 we seeded King Richard leeks.

Our next earliest starts are parsley family plants like, well, parsley, but also celery and celeriac. These have to get in early because they take up to 3 weeks to germinate and they need a long season to grow. We seeded these February 16 along with a few edible flowers we like to have ready early to add to our salad mix: pansy, violet and calendula. Finally, on February 28 we seeded broccoli, head lettuce and kale because we want them to be big and ready to transplant outside a few weeks before our last frost in May.

All of these “starts” are, of course, transplants. We don’t actually seed these things into the outside ground at this point – we can’t even see the ground! We drop them onto the surface of small cells in plastic plug trays filled with our homemade seed-starting soil. (Way back in the fall, we made up nearly a ton of this soil mix from peat moss, perlite, compost, sand and various rock powders and minerals. And thank goodness we did – our compost and sand are too frozen to dig now.) I’ve been doing this seeding, messy as it is, in the walk-in cooler in which we store our harvested veggies during the growing season.

This is what the farm looked like outside the day we started seeding inside. Pretty sweet to work inside an 80-degree germination chamber!

This is where the seeds rest in the warm, damp, dark until they POP! They are placed in plastic bags to keep the surface of the soil from drying out. I’ve been in a room with seeds in flats and actually heard them pop, by the way. True!

Why seed in a cooler? Well, I’m using this very-well-insulated room as a “germination chamber.” Right now, I keep it warmed to 80 degrees with a very small space heater and this is where almost all of our seeds rest until they pop up, or germinate, from the soil. Most seeds just need warmth and moisture to get rolling – they don’t need light until they actually emerge from the soil. So I stack the seeded flats on top of each other on shelves in this warm chamber until I see the tiniest little plants poking up. The flats need to be checked every day, though, because once the seeds have germinated they start growing and they grow fast. Every flat with a few sprouts visible goes immediately into my glass greenhouse.

Our sweet little greenhouse has three glass walls and a polycarbonate roof. The northerly wall is insulated and painted white, to passively increase the heat the house collects from the sun during the day. We do have a propane heater and and a little electric heater to keep the plants above freezing on super-cold nights. The house is full from February through August – we start transplants the entire growing season to enable us to succession-plant crops for the whole year.

If at home you want to start some seeds now, the top of your fridge is a nice warm place to put flats until they germinate. Simply put seeds in the soil, water very well, and stick the flats in plastic bags to hold the moisture in. Check every day and once you see some sprouts, put the flats in a very sunny south-facing window, or put the flats in shelves with fluorescent lights hung over them.

The sprouted seeds will need water and light, and perhaps a bit of fish emulsion/kelp fertilizer, for the duration of March and April. These first-seeded alliums will go into the ground sometime around the first of May. At that point, they’ll be planted next to irrigation drip tape and weeded faithfully through June and July. The leeks will be heavily mulched with straw to create long sections of white, tender, root. In the meantime, the onions will begin to bulb up and take their final shape. We’ll see this happen because onions force themselves out of the ground to grow half out of the soil.

Leek harvest!

Sometime in August, we’ll see the onion tips getting a bit brown and a few of the beefy leaves will fall over. Then we’ll go through the whole crop and knock their leaves over with a rake handle. This will signal to the plants that growth is over and it’s time to cure. The curing process will create firm, dry skins on the onions that will keep them fresh in storage through many months. (We’re still bringing last year’s cipollinis and shallots up out of the root cellar.)

Finally, sometime in late August or early September, we’ll see that the onion leaves have dried to thin wisps on the surface of the soil, and we’ll pull all the onions up out of the ground. They’ll be spread out in a single layer on wooden flatbed haywagons to dry fully in the sun for a few days. In case of rain or heavy dew, the wagons will get pulled into the barn. Some will go into CSA Boxes at this point.

Fresh Walla Walla onions coming in from the field on trays.

Finally, the rest will sit on open trays in a well-ventilated shed for about a month until the dried leaves can be easily pulled off. At that point, we’ll put them in perforated buckets for storage in a cool, dry spot. CSA members will get lots of these in September and October boxes to store at home and use throughout the winter.

So that’s the story of just one of our seed families – from Plant to Plate. Oh! I forgot about the plate part. Here’s a recipe. Bon Appetit!

Sweet Cipollinis With Balsamic Glaze

1 lb cipollini onions, carefully peeled (this can be a pain!) but whole
2 TBSP olive oil
1 1/2 TBSP balsamic vinegar
salt, pepper and fresh thyme

Place onions on a parchment-covered baking sheet. Drizzle with olive oil and balsamic. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, toss around fresh thyme. Roast them till tender and caramelized in a 400 degree oven. If the glaze seems to be cooking down too fast, lower the oven to 350. Prick to test and remove when tender. Serve next to a luscious steak or crisp salad.

Can’t get enough? Visit the Folklore Village website for a list of upcoming barn dances – they happen pretty much once a month.

This tiny ram, Hero, is the lone lamb on the farm right now. His mama, Mille, got pregnant somehow before we put the ram in with the ewes. (We know how she got pregnant, of course, it just wasn’t part of our plan. The wacky weather last summer caused some of the baby ewes to cycle early, and she ended up being bred by one of the baby rams before we separated them out. Ah, the joys of animal husbandry!) He’ll have company soon enough, though, since the rest of the lambs are due to arrive in mid-March. March madness indeed…