Harvesting greenhouse lettuce

Harvesting customer lettuce orders inside one of my passive solar-heated small greenhouses. We've had temps as low as 0 degrees f this week... the lettuce outside the greenhouse is wilted... but inside the greenhouse it's perfect.

Yum, looking forward to a salad for lunch!

Our farm's shining star this week: Gourmet Salad Mix

What a difference a bit of rain makes!  It's rained steadily for the past 2 weeks - hooray!  The rain has absolutely popped all of our fall crops into action.

Our farm's Gourmet Salad Mix is pictured below.  How beautiful is this?!?!  Organically grown, 3 types of lettuce, arugula, and baby mustard greens.  Washed & bagged for our customers.

Delicious & beautiful!

Wishful Acres Farm rainbow

Greenhouse rainbow of purple & green.

Delicious spring greens are growing here at the farm!

We're already up & growing here at the farm.The season is coming! In just 2 months, the spring CSA begins!

Can't you almost taste these spring greens? We're growing the best tasting food in the world, right here at Wishful Acres Farm. Won't you join us in enjoying the feast?

Visit our web site at www.WishfulAcresFarm.com and click on CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) for details.

Salad crops are up & growing

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One of the many rows of lettuce growing here at Wishful Acres.  Planted by yours truly the last week of March and will be ready to harvest for sale in our wonderful baby greens salad blend in a few weeks!  Pictured here is a red romaine.  I don't know about you, but I can't wait to eat decent lettuce again!  The supermarket stuff pales in comparison, and it's been a long winter of eating it.

  (I don't know if it's just that the stuff in the supermarket is not as good because it's at least 1-3 weeks old??   Or is it the varieties they grow?  I'm betting on the freshness factor, because I grow many of the same varieties I see in the organic blends sold at the grocery store...)

Thanks for visiting Wishful Acres Farm blog!

A fresh salad from my garden in November !!

Planting seeds is not something you usually think of doing at the end of July / early August.

Yet, there I was.  Luckily, the summer had been cool and wet.  I wasn't sweating and swearing out in the fields on that early August morning.

It was enjoyable.  I was planting.

Fall vegetables.  Some vegetables grow best in cool weather, others will only grow in hot weather.  Some vegetables can even tolerate a frost or freeze, or even snow!

Veggies that grow well in fall are basically the same ones that grow well in early spring.  Lettuce, spinach, onions, radish, turnip, rutabaga, carrots, beets, and many, many more!

So there I was, on November 8, picking food from the garden at the farm.  Yep!  I live on the Illinois / Wisconsin border.  It gets cold here.  We had our first frost this year on October 5.  It snowed a bit on October 10.  We had a freeze warning in early October.  Yet these vegetables grew on.  These hardy few.  These wonderful few.

I picked many varieties of lettuce, some spinach, too many turnips to count, rutabaga, kale, and green onions.

So.... on November 9, my husband and I sat down to a lunch that came from our garden.  A delicious salad.  It started with the gourmet lettuce that we had picked the day before. So good.

Then I added some chopped green onion which we had also harvested the previous day.

On top of that came a yummy "watermelon" radish that had been chilling in our refrigerator since it's harvest in September.

I even had a garden tomato.  I wouldn't lie to you!  I had picked it green the first week of October and set it on my counter next to some winter squash.  I then, of course, forgot all about it.  Until today, when I was getting a cup of coffee and had to blink twice at seeing a red orb lying next to the coffee pot.

We topped the salad off with some leftover locally-grown, grass-fed beef in the form of a giant grilled steak.  Oh, yeah!

It was scrumptious.  Yes, it is possible to eat a fresh salad from your own garden in November.  I am now saying my thanks to myself for planting those seeds in early August.  And counting my blessings for such a great harvest!

Overabundance of lettuce

It just keeps growing, and growing, and growing.
Most of this is from the farmers' plot, though, not ours. So thankful for their "extras"!

First Harvest

The first harvest item from the 1/2 acre farm garden plot is lettuce.
Two heirloom varieties were harvested last week: "Martina's Sweet" (pictured above) and "Amish Deer Tongue".
We had the lettuce eaten quickly. Luckily, the farmers where I rent the land were kind enough to pass on a lot of their extra lettuce as well. They sell at a couple of farmer's markets during the week but sometimes have leftovers.
I prefer to wash lettuce in a sink full of water (clean your sink very well first). First I rinse it, then drop it all in the sink and swish it around a bit. I dry it on bath towels then place it all in a plastic bag (reuse your shopping bags here) in the fridge with a few towels (paper or cotton) thrown in to absorb the excess moisture (keeps the lettuce fresh longer).