I hope you are staying warm in this cold snap! Our ginger and sensitive herbs are bundled up under blankets or tucked in the greenhouse as needed. This guy is enjoying the tropical environment among the ginger foliage, too!

Now that autumn definitely seems to be here, the kale and collards we planted for the fall are coming on and we will have our first small harvest this week! We will also have dandelion greens and romaine in the next few weeks.

We have another exciting new offering: upon popular request, we are now offering a very limited supply of Dandelion Ridge Farm dried herbs and pepper flakes! We carefully dry the best of what we grow for your enjoyment year-round. We’re offering epazote, thyme, sage, oregano, and rosemary, as well as ground jalapeño peppers and crushed habanero flakes for you heat-lovers out there!

We’re staying active with events this week, too! Kevin is on his way to New York’s Hudson Valley to present at the Hudson Valley VegFest, where he will hopefully inspire folks to move along the continuum from passive consumers to active food producers, whether it be starting a farm, learning to cook, or growing a few herbs on a kitchen windowsill.

We were also pleased to be part of a World Food Day celebration at Community Action Council’s Wilburn Center in northeast Lexington on Wednesday. Community members got to watch food demos, taste dishes from diverse cuisines, and take home fresh vegetables, including Dandelion Ridge Farm sweet potatoes.

Hope you’re enjoying this break from the heat—we are, and so are our plants at Dandelion Ridge Farm. We hilled up the soil around our ginger this week to give the rhizomes more room to grow, and the plants are looking beautiful (as you can see in this picture)! We plan to harvest the ginger in the fall. We harvested our small garlic crop and have it drying in the greenhouse  for use in our canned sauces. Our kale and collard plants are feeling the heat and reaching the end of their lives, so we took them down for the season.

Our edible flowers—marigolds, nasturtiums, and bachelor’s buttons at the moment—are starting to bloom and we’ll bring a few to market this weekend. They add a touch of elegance and a pop of color to any special dish!

We’re still harvesting tomatoes and tomatillos every day, and canning them every chance we get! We’re unveiling our Roasted Tomatillo Salsa this week. We make this Southwestern salsa verde using Dandelion Ridge Farm tomatillos, jalapeños, and parsley. We roast the tomatillos until slightly charred to deepen their bright, tart flavor. Related to the tomato, tomatillos grow inside elegant paper husks and have a tangy, slightly fruity flavor. You’re most likely to find tomatillos in Mexican and Central American cuisines, but you can also stir-fry them, use them in curries, or even try them in a Bloody Mary! Try a sample of our salsa at the market this weekend, and take home a jar or some tomatillos to make salsa yourself!

Our okra is now in full swing, and we’re harvesting a pound every day or two. If you’ve never seen okra growing, the plants are beautiful and tropical-looking, with stunning pale yellow flowers with burgundy centers . Okra, a relative of the hibiscus plant, was brought to the Americas by enslaved Africans. It is popular in Indian, African, Caribbean, and Creole cuisine. While I know some people object to okra’s texture, try roasting or grilling it to avoid any sliminess, or use it in soups and stews, where it can add a silky texture.

We’re in the thick of tomato and tomatillo season here at Dandelion Ridge Farm, and the delicious fruits have taken over our lives! When we’re not harvesting, we’re canning or drying our harvests to last throughout the year. There isn’t much time for other garden work right now! Here are our towering tomato plants reaching for the sky!

But we’re excited to start unveiling some new canned goods this week, starting with Sweet Abundance Green Tomato Jelly. Kevin developed this recipe years ago when we were living in Asheville, NC, and a bad tomato blight left us with dead tomato plants and tons of green tomatoes. Our tomato plants are thriving this year, but we harvested some green tomatoes so that we could share this unique and delicious jelly with you! It has a beguiling sweet and subtly tart flavor that is excellent on cornbread—our favorite use! Try some at the Franklin County Farmers’ Market this weekend!

Check out this recipe for Sun-Dried Tomato Sauce--it's a delicious pizza sauce recipe Kevin developed  using our Principe Borghese sun-dried tomatoes—little power packs of intense tomato flavor so sweet and tasty that some of our customers eat them like candy!— and fresh paste tomatoes, as well as fresh herbs. Top your pizza with summer veggies like zucchini, eggplant, basil, or even more tomatoes!

What a wet week! The garden—and everything else—is saturated with rain, weeds and insects are out in full force, and it’s a challenge to even get out into the garden to get anything done in the mud. We’re very thankful for the protection of our agricultural high tunnel over our tomatoes, tomatillos, and some herbs, but could use a dome over the whole farm!

But weather aside, it’s been a good week! We were happy to contribute to the Franklin County Farmers’ Market’s first monthly South Frankfort Food Share program of the season. The Food Share is a cooperative buying program that allows people to buy a box of assorted vegetables on a sliding scale based on their income. In addition to food access, the program seeks to educate participants on how to use fresh vegetables that may be new to them, and to build community. Dandelion Ridge Farm was proud to contribute parsley and collards to this month’s variety of veggies. The next food share will be July 16; you can sign up for a share starting July 3 if you’re interested.

We’re also bringing some new items to market this week! We’re harvesting our first heads of red cabbage and first bunches of celery this week! The cabbage is a variety called Integro, with a beautiful pearlescent color and succulent, sweet leaves, and it is featured, along with green tomatoes, in our new Lizzie’s Chow Chow relish! This chow chow recipe was passed down from Kevin’s maternal great grandmother, Elizabeth Jenkins, an active subsistence farmer and food preservationist in rural east Texas. Her cooking skills—and the dishes she fed her loved ones--are family legends, and we’re excited to share her chow chow with you! We love it best over a big bowl of black eyed peas and cornbread for an extra dollop of luck and deliciousness!

I used to think of celery in the same category as onions and garlic; they add flavor and crunch to dishes, but other than raw celery sticks with a dip, I didn’t really think of them as a vegetable in their own right. I would buy a bunch of celery for a recipe, then only use a few stalks and the rest would sit in fridge until it got limp. But this year, I’ve gotten into roasting celery and eating it as a side dish, and this has totally changed my relationship with what is now one of my favorite vegetables! I don’t typically follow a recipe when roasting celery, but here is basically what I do. The flavors of thyme, tarragon, and fennel complement the celery really well. I hope you’ll try it and fall in love with celery like I did! Find the recipe for Roasted Celery and Fennel here.