Farm & Garden
My Aunt Marie turned 70 this past August. She is still slender, young in most every way and very strong.
I spent Saturday in the garden with Violet and her friend Cesca Robinson. It doesn’t get any better than watching little girls wandering around the garden. They picked and prepared a salad. On a bed of large-leafed basil they arranged sun gold tomatoes. They put a tiny slice in each tomato and inserted some pea shoots, which only emerged a week ago. They garnished with double click white cosmos and sprigs of thyme. Don’t worry, they did not eat the cosmos. They ate several green peppers each.
Mushrooms are the richest and meatiest food I know of outside the animal kingdom. In the past few weeks, following a number of torrential rainstorms, mushrooms have begun popping up everywhere on the Island. On a visit to a friend’s house off of Middle Road two weeks ago, friends and I stumbled upon a yard filled with chanterelle mushrooms and the black trumpet variety. We harvested the chanterelles first that day from underneath a maple tree, leaving the black trumpets to grow larger.
How many ways can a person prepare and enjoy summer squash and zucchini? I don’t know the answer but am seriously working on it. Last night I sautéed some squash and onions and served it over red quinoa with Bragg’s liquid amines. I felt as if I’d been transported back to the sixties. There were years of brown rice and vegetables. Sometime in the eighties I stopped eating rice so much. Because of gardening and growing my own food, rice no longer appealed to me.
Nicolas Andre handed over a bag of fresh chicken livers to a customer at the West Tisbury Farmers’ Market on Saturday morning. After ringing up the sale, Nicolas, age 12, sent the customer on her way with a “Have a nice day” so sincere it could have only come from a child.
“It’s fun,” he said of growing up on his family’s Cleveland Farm in West Tisbury. “Local food is always around and we always have fresh meat.”
Meat is his favorite food group, he said.
With bouquets all around, the ownership of historic Tea Lane Farm in Chilmark was formally handed to flower farmer Krishana Collins this week.
Ms. Collins attended the selectmen’s meeting Tuesday to sign a long-term lease with the town for the farmhouse.
“Let’s make it happen,” said selectman Warren Doty. “Let’s give her the keys and let’s have her own the farm.”