Sprout Anniversary

This week marks two years since I started growing and selling sprouts to the co-op.   I have come a long way since then.  I  can now recognize one sprout seed mix from another. I've learned the specific challenges of growing during  hot, humid summer and during cold, dry winter.  I have developed a pretty efficient and reliable system.  A dedicated sprout-growing room. Three wholesale organic seed suppliers.  A fancy scale and lots of other sprout-growing gear.  Restaurant customers.  I'm growing 20+ pounds of sprouts a week.  That doesn't sound like much, but it adds up -- it's more than half a ton of sprouts a year!

Micro-greens Micro-entrepreneur

Friday I  harvested my first batch of microgreens for sale, both pea shoots (top photo) and sunflower shoots (bottom photo).  I have been  experimenting with growing peas and sunflowers as sprouts and shoots for  a couple of months now, and after many unsuccessful attempts,  I finally have a workable system.

There are still so many kinks to be worked out, though: Will they sell? At what price? Can I cover my costs and time at that price? How long can they be stored and stay fresh and crispy?  Can I grow them fast enough to meet demand if they take off?
The good thing about raising sprouts and micro-greens is that  if I grow too many, we love the healthy little greens in our sandwiches, salads  and soups, and if I end up with more than we can eat, the chickens, ducks and turkeys also love them.
The downside of raising  sprouts and micro-greens is that they need care  twice a day--they are as demanding as milking a dairy cow!

Since the last full moon...

According to my digital camera, I took this photo of the beautiful moonrise over our yard on August 15th --but the lunar phase calendar says the full moon wasn't scheduled until August 24th, so I don't know what is going on with that. But, in looking through photos from the past couple weeks, I  noticed that we have been working pretty hard and have accomplished a lot of projects that haven't made it to a blog post. Since this blog is serving as our Squash Blossom Farm journal,  here are some blogworthy accomplishments since our last full-looking moon:

When Cadence left for Mexico, besides  having to milk the cow solo, I also had to deal with all the milk.  Meaning, I had to learn to make cheese!   I have now made Monterey Jack,  traditional cheddar, manchego and gouda.  Here is my second wheel of lovely gouda, just out of the press. (All those little round bumps are where the cheese tried to press through the holes in the mold where the whey drains.) At this point, the cheese is air dried for a week or so before being  waxed.

Here I am waxing my very first wheel of cheese, Monterey Jack.  The wheels have gotten a bit prettier since this first one. 

We used up the last of Cadence's fresh  mozzarella and some of her awesome parmesan on a yummy pizza featuring Rog's sourdough crust and tomato sauce, veggies, garlic and herbs from our garden. Other than the pepperoni, which we purchased at the Farmers Market,  all the ingredients for this pizza came from our farm.

On one of our evening walks, we harvested the wild elderberries growing along the road and Rog made elderberry wine.  After simmering the berries to make juice, he pressed them through the chinoise with the wooden pestle to remove the skins and seeds. (That chinoise has been one of my most rewarding thrift store finds!  )

The wine is now fermenting. It will be ready to bottle in about a month, ready to drink in about 7 months.

Rog helped me deal with our cow's relentless milk supply by making yogurt.  Now that we have let LaFonda go dry, this will be our last gallon of yogurt from our own cow until next spring. We have been enjoying a bowl of it every morning with nectarines, raspberries, walnuts and a drizzle of honey--a concoction that a friend titled "Bucolic Breakfast of Bliss."

It's tomato season.  Last year I planted 100 tomato plants and had to deal with 1000 pounds of tomatoes. I learned my lesson and only planted 50 plants this year. 

However, because of burgeoning life demands, I did not get the tomatoes properly staked this  summer, so they are sprawling wantonly all over the place. It has been so rainy that most of the fruit has split, some tomatoes have virtually exploded. And then there is the slug infestation.  Long story short, the turkeys and chickens are feasting on the half of the tomato crop that is split and slug-nibbled and I have many fewer to preserve this year. Nevertheless,  I have roasted and frozen quite a few tomatoes--with plenty more batches yet to go.

Finally, after trying many less-than-satisfactory approaches, I have successfully raised two crops of micro-greens - pea shoots and sunflower shoots.  They are mighty tasty! This is an experiment to potentially expand my little sprout operation. Stay tuned to find out how it goes...

Something to Sprout About!

My sprout orders have tripled in the past few months, with sprouting taking over almost half of  the kitchen counter space--a big problem during Farmers Market baking season.  In addition, the weather has been so hot and humid, the sprouts are growing too fast.  So, this weekend we transformed the unused little bathroom in the nice cool basement into a sprouting room.
The spot where the toilet used to be makes a nice alcove for wire shelving  for the sprout trays.  We removed the door from the shower surround and set up the sinks inside.  The sinks drain into a pipe that will empty into a 5-gallon bucket so I can capture the  rinse water  for watering my plants (sprout rinse-water is supposed to be full of plant growth enzymes.)  If we ever move or I  discontinue c growing sprouts, it will be very easy to revert this space to a normal bathroom.
After sanitizing all the surfaces I painted the walls with scrubbable paint--bright alfalfa sprout green with white wainscoating.

The biggest expense for this project was the  sink.  I was delighted to find a stainless steel double sink that fit perfectly in the oddly-shaped shower stall, but it cost $350. We needed a way to support the sink, and  serendipitously, we had two stainless steel racks that that worked perfectly  to suspend the sink at the right height.
All I need now is a small work surface for spinning out the spouts and a radio to keep me company  during the rinsing hours.

Something to Sprout About!

I delivered our first edible sprout order to the Back Room Deli at the Good Food Store (food co-op) this morning. Alex, the deli manager seemed quite pleased with them.

They ordered the Italian Blend, but I didn't have quite enough of those seeds and my seed order hasn't arrived yet (aargh!) so I gave them a complimentary bag of French Garden Mix to try.

The Back Room Deli is a great vegan cafe--an undiscovered gem in Rochester--that serves delicious, nourishing soups and sandwiches. I heartily recommend my favorite item on the menu, the Cajun tofu wrap--and I don't even usually care for tofu. If you dine at the Back Room Deli now, you will be eating locally grown Squash Blossom Farm sprouts!

Sprouting - Our First Crop

We've been planning to sell our produce at the Rochester Famer's Market, which opens in May. Since we won't have a crop ready yet, we came up with a brainstorm idea: to grow sprouts to sell. Sprouts are fast-growing, extremely nutritious, tasty and nobody else has been selling them there.

I found a fantastic source of organic seeds and information at the Sprout People website and ordered several seed mixes to try. This batch of spicy mix seeds was my first crop. After soaking for 8 hours, the sprouts are rinsed every 12 hours. I purchased a large metal strainer at a restaurant supply store that is perfect for rinsing the small seeds before they have grown much.

For the final rinse, I soak the spouts in water in my salad spinner and scoop out the hulls. Then the salad spinner is fantastic for getting the water out of the mix -very important. For growing containers, I have experimented with deli buckets with holes drilled in the bottom, heavy-duty office in-boxes with a layer of plastic neede-craft mesh for drainage(my own ingenious but imperfect invention), and was finally overjoyed to find some large, plastic colanders which work the best so far. Here are the French Garden mix and the Italian Blend sprouts after their final rinse, set on the counter to green up a bit.

Starting with 6 ounces of seeds resulted in 3o ounces of finished sprouts. The chickens happily devoured the hulls and the stray sprouts that sneaked out of the colander during the rinses.

We have more sprouts now than we can keep up with eating, so yesterday I delivered sprouts in zip-lock bags to a bunch of friends to try. I drove up to one woman's house in my daughter's decrepit old car that was tagged with graffiti from when she was living in Chicago and carried two baggies to the door. When she answered she laughed that it looked like I was delivering marijuana. (I am sure that would be a more profitable crop than sprouts!)