Michelle extracting honey

Michelle and her honey team of family, friends, and neighbors spent all Monday extracting honey from her bee hives.  This is a huge project–it took all day and in the end they got over 250 lbs!  Michelle tells me that tasting the honey from different parts of the hive they tasted many different flavors, reflecting the different flowers that the bees were taking nectar from at different times of the year.  Amazing!  Check out her beautiful pictures.

Beautiful Bees!

Out at the Farm, all is well.  The mosquitoes are still fairly fierce, but the harvesters have learned how to avoid them by using head nets.  There’s nothing nicer than seeing a whole cloud of mosquitoes on the *outside* of your head net, knowing they can’t bite you!  We had a good morning harvesting armloads of basil and hundreds of pounds of tomatoes.  Tomato picking is a big job that requires lots of boxes and garden carts to bring the tomatoes from the field to the barnyard.  This bounty challenged the harvest crew when it came time to squeeze it into the car!  At lunchtime the workers shared surplus watermelon and cantaloupe, as well as tomatoes that had been damaged but were still tasty.

As usual, details on this week’s harvest and menu are after the jump…!

Chopping Chard stems

Our farm haul was:

Melon (watermelon and canteloupe combo) – 1
Cherry tomatoes – 1 box
Hot peppers – 3
Parsley – 1 bunch
Greens – 1 1/4 lb
Sweet peppers – 4
Summer squash – 5
Basil – 1/4 lb
Corn – 7 ears
Eggplant – 1
Tomatoes -12 lbs (!!)

So, the menu plan is:

Oven-roasted Pork Steaks – Simple and delicious, our marinade will showcase the Old Pine Farm pork and set up the perfect summer dinner.

Lovely bottles of tomato juice from Tuesday

Stuffed Peppers with Ground Beef – The ideal combination of CFAA veggies and OPF meat in a tasty combination. Michelle found this recipe, and it looks great.

Ratatoille- Everyone enjoys this summer vegetable stew, featuring eggplant, summer squash, herbs, and tomatoes.  We love to use the Moosewood recipe for inspiration.

Michelle’s Stuffed Tomatoes – We made these on Tuesday, and they were definitely as good as they looked.  Featuring Calder Dairy cottage cheese along with chard, onions, and garlic. Mmm!

Tomato Juice – This is the simplest, most perfect taste of summer. Sorry–not enough tomatoes this week. Instead, we’ll have:

Melon Salad with Mint – this is just about the tastiest melon salad I’ve ever had. Freshen up the sweetness with mint and lime. Yum!

Everyone will also be getting a piece of melon, some sweet corn, and a fresh tomato to complete a delectable summer meal.

Hooray! See you Friday!

Mary