Recipe: Cabbage Buns

This is a favorite in our family, handed down from Mark's Austrian great-grandparents.  Perfect for lunch or dinner, eat warm or cold, great for on-the-go - we even eat them for breakfast!

Cabbage Buns

Ingredients:

• white or wholewheat bread dough
• green cabbage, chopped coarse
• sweet or yellow onion, chopped course
• carrot, chopped coarse or shredded (can also use turnips, potatoes, peppers, most any veggie)
• salt and pepper to taste
• optional spices/additions: cinnamon, raisins, crushed almonds, hot or sweet sausage (ground)

Instructions:

Use any white or wholewheat bread dough recipe.  As dough is rising prepare the stuffing.
Saute onions on medium heat until soft. If using sausage, cook this next in the onions until nearly done, add cabbage and carrots on top, stir and continue cooking covered on medium heat until cabbage is soft but not mushy. Add in any other spices, raisins, nuts etc... at this time and mix completely. Let cool until not too hot to touch.

After dough has risen, punch it down and roll out with plenty of flour to keep it from sticking. Cut into 4"x4" squares.  Place cabbage mixture in center of each square and fold up corners to center, sealing all edges so stuffing is completely encased in dough.  Turn over onto a baking pan.  Arrange buns onto a baking pan as you would if baking cookies.  Bake at 350F until golden brown.

Dinner at the Farm

Dinner at the Farm

Sunday August 17th
5 pm appetizers and cash bar, 6 pm dinner seating 

We're teaming up with Chef Doug Paine of Juniper Restaurant to bring you a special dinner featuring some of the farm's best food in a beautiful place for a great cause. Proceeds will benefit the Richmond Elementary School Farm to School Program, which Jericho Settlers Farm has partnered with for several years to bring good food and agricultural learning into the school (as well as to bring the students to the farm). Tickets on sale now here.  

View the full menu

Fresh Chicken Available Now!

Starting this weekend we'll have fresh, delicious chicken available! We raise our chickens in the open pastures where they thrive on fresh air, grass, insects, NON-GMO grain, soil and sunshine. The end result is lean, healthy, and delicious chicken. 

How to buy:

Fresh chickens are available for individual purchase at our Farmstand Friday afternoon-Monday afternoon and at our booth at the Burlington Farmers' Market. You can also buy a share of 6 chickens and pick them up as you want them.

If you already purchased a share:

You can start picking up your chickens anytime starting this Friday afternoon at our farmstand or at the Burlington Farmers Market on Saturday. You can pick them up all at once, one at time over several weeks, or anything in between.  We'll have a list of chicken share members and will record how many you pick up to help you track your shares. It's that easy!

Get A Share:

Garden-Fresh Tomatoes in June!

Tomatoes Growing in our New Hoophouse!

At Jericho Settlers Farm we are committed to year-round growing of fresh organic vegetables for your table.  This means we have a lot of hoophouses, most of which are unheated, to grow salad greens during the winter and to coddle our tomato plants during the summer.  Still, without a heat source we really can't push the tomato envelope too far, especially in a cold spring like this one.  So this past season we invested in a larger hoohouse that is well-insulated and holds a lot of solar heat due to its shear size.  In addition we installed a biomass furnace that burns wood pellets or corn to heat water, which is pumped into in-ground lines to heat the soil in the hoophouse. This allows us to start growing tomatoes at the end of March, with anticipated harvest in June.  This project is particularly exciting for us because it came to fruition with the help of several great partners, including The Farmhouse Group, Vermont's Working Lands Enterprise initiative and Efficiency Vermont.  It's a cool private/public partnership to bring Vermont closer to feeding itself, no matter the weather!

It takes more than some added heat to grow early tomatoes.  It also takes bumble bees.  We have a hive of these handy pollinators living right in the hoophouse, so they can pollinate the early tomato flowers in April, when the native outside bees are still hibernating.  Bumble bees are particularly good at pollinating tomatoes.  The tomato flower needs a lot of buzzing to vibrate the pollen off the anthers and onto the stigma inside the flower to achieve fertilization and fruit development.  We love working alongside the bees in the tomato crop.

 Bumblebees pollinating the early tomato crop at Jericho Settlers Farm.

Open Farm Day

Open Farm Day & Gardening Workshop!

 

Sunday 5/4, 12-4 pm, Jericho Settlers Farm

We're participating in the Northeast Organic Farming Association of VT CSA Open Farm Day and invite you to come and tour our farm! Whether you are considering joining a CSA, are already a member, or are just interested in getting to know a farm in your community, please join us for an afternoon of farm tours and activities. We'll have fun events going on all day:

• Organic Gardening Workshop (2pm)
• Tours of our hoophouses
• See baby lambs and chicks
• View our new biomass furnace
• Kids' seed exploration (bring home a potted seed)
• The Emile A. Gruppe Gallery, our historic barn and art gallery, will be open too

We will have fresh vegetables, eggs, and meats available for purchase in our farmstand and information about our CSA programs.

Free Organic Gardening Workshop:

Come learn the secrets to organic vegetable gardening from the local experts at Jericho Settlers Farm! Mark and Christa will discuss the varieties of plants that grow the best here in Vermont and offer advice on ways to get the most from your garden. They will cover tips for maintaining your garden: soil basics and fertilization, transplanting vs. direct seeding, weeding, pest management, season extension, and vegetable harvest and storage techniques. Visitors will have the opportunity to tour the farm, explore the hoophouses, and ask their hot-burning gardening questions.

This event is free and open to the public. Please register so we are sure to have enough space. It will happen rain or shine in our historic barn / art gallery at 2pm on Sunday, 5/4. 

Organic Gardening Workshop Registration

Special Event: Dinner at Guild & Company

An Evening Out at Guild

On Thursday June 27th Guild and Company is preparing a special dinner honoring our farm. We have long partnered with Guild & Company, the Farmhouse and El Cortijo, delivering grass fed beef, eggs, pork, and all sorts of wondrous produce. This dinner will feature our farm fresh foods and promises to be a great night out. 5 p.m. to close.

No reservations are required, but if you'd like to make one you can call 802-497-1207 or reserve a table online through Guild & Company's website. 

Meet Our Staff: Gem and Hazel

Gem is our youngest farmer at Jericho Settlers Farm. She was born at the end of the winter in New Hampshire, and came to our farm just a few weeks ago. This Border Collie comes from a long line of working dogs. Throughout her first year on the farm, Gem will get to know the lay of the land, all of the animals, and the other farmers. Christa will be training her with the help of a long time farm friend, Sally, who has been training Border Collies to run our very own sheep for years! Gem will learn to herd sheep, chickens and cattle, but hopefully not farmers.

Right now, Gem is enjoying life as a beloved puppy. She likes to chew on old pots, and sometimes Hazel. She also loves to carry the dustpan around the greenhouse, which is a great help when it’s time to clean up! She loves to play tug of war, so we’re thinking of teaching her to pull weeds out of the ground. Rewarding her for pulling up plants could be a dangerous path, however...

Hazel Fasching is now a 3 1/2 year veteran at Jericho Settlers Farm. She loves to work in the greenhouse, making mudpies and helping us seed. She is the comedian of our crew, and keeps everyone’s spirits high whenever she’s around. She likes to transplant greens down at our Richmond field on sunny warm days, especially when she can kick off her shoes to squish her toes in the mud! Hazel says her favorite vegetable is Blue Spinach, and while we don’t have that, you can enjoy our Baby Spinach in this week’s share instead (which she also loves very much).

5 Tips for Making the Most of your Garden

Get the Most from your Garden!

Love to garden? We know the feeling. Our expert growers, Mark and Christa, have put together 5 quick tips for maximizing your garden this season.

1. Supplement the soil, but first SOIL TEST!

Soil testing is easy and the most important thing you can do for your soil and plant health.  It’s cheap ($14) and easy!  Just download the form you need from UVM Soil Lab here: http://pss.uvm.edu/ag_testing/?Page=soils.html

You’ll get your results back in two weeks and can use them to guide how much compost, manure, or other organic fertilizers your plants may need.  Most gardens benefit from adding organic compost or aged manure before planting, and then following up with a little extra nitrogen when the plants are about to set fruit (like a tomato plant) or bulk up their roots (like a beet plant).  One of the best way to provide this extra nitrogen is with an organic fertilizer blend.  Again, this is the most important thing you can do for your garden – and you can do it today.

2. Planning for Succession Planting

Make the best use of your space by planting early crops now (peas, lettuce, radishes) and when they're done in June plant something else (squash, zucchini, more lettuce).  Planting lettuce once per month provides young tasty greens all summer.  Same with cilantro and dill, if you love these herbs plant them often, as they will always bolt trying to set seed.  Leave in the older plants if you have the space and harvest the seed.

3. Space it out

It's tempting to cram it all in and over crowd your garden, but if you give plants enough room they'll actually grow better because they're not competing for light, water, and soil nutrients.

4. Weed it Often

No one really likes to weed, but it's important or your garden can become overrun with unwanted plants that out compete the plants you do want. Our motto is early and often - if you weed the plants out when they're young it's quick and easy and can usually be done with a hoe standing upright, verses down on your knees yanking out weed “trees”.

5. Involve the Whole Family

It's fun to watch plants grow and there's so much to discover in a garden.  Kids love checking in on "their" plants, counting the earthworms, and reaping the harvest – harvesting carrots and potatoes is particularly magical for kids, it’s like finding buried treasure!   And they love eating “their” vegetables.  Even if you don’t have room for a garden, a cherry tomato plant on the porch is irresistible to all who pass by.

Why Organic?

​You have probably read ten different versions of the top ten reasons to buy organic food.  But you haven’t read our list yet, and instead of telling you why you should buy organic we want to let you know five reasons why we choose to grow organically.  We grow all the vegetables, herbs, and flowers on our farm organically and are certified by Vermont Organic Farmers, a certification agency that ensures that organic producers are following the National Organic Standards. So why do we grow organically?

1. We believe that growing organically is an obligation, not a choice.  Growing organically means taking care of the soil, not just the crops, and utilizing ecological principals to produce strong plants that can resist pests and diseases.  We intend for the land we farm and the water sources we utilize to be suitable for growing food long after our time on this planet is over. 
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2. We don’t want to put on hazmat suits and respirators to apply chemicals to our crops for controlling plants diseases and insect pests. We don’t want our employees to have to do this either. By growing organically, toxic chemicals are not necessary to grow quality vegetables, herbs and flowers.  We can suppress insect pests and plant diseases through crop rotation, timing of crop planting, physical barriers (such as row covers), and managing the soil for plant health such that the plants can fight off diseases and insect pests with their own natural defenses.  To do this we have to learn about and pay attention to the needs of each crop, the needs of the soil, pest and disease life cycles, weather patterns and seasonal pest migrations.  We need to test our soil for crop nutrient needs, monitor for pests, and plan our production such that if a pest or disease does damage a crop the farm’s production as a whole does not suffer.
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3. We want to eat fresh tasty vegetables right out of the field.  Often I have heard a concerned parent say to their young child, who is about to pop a cherry tomato into her mouth, “wait, we need to wash that first”.  Well, in our opinion eating a cherry tomato right off the plant is the best way to eat a cherry tomato.  So by growing organically we don’t have to worry about pesticide residues on the plants, heavy metal build up in the soil, or raw manure contamination of crops.  We do not use toxic pesticides, we do not apply fertilizers (such as sewage sludge) that can contain heavy metals, and we follow strict composting protocols and waiting periods for use of manure as a fertilizer in our fields. We eat vegetables all day long as we work, nibbling beans as we pick them, wiping the soil off a freshly pulled carrot and crunching away, getting a sugar hit from sweet cherry tomatoes warmed by the afternoon sun.
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4. We love watching the life, both the big and the nearly microscopic, that lives in and around our farm.  Well, of course we don’t like watching the deer eat the lettuce, but the fox eating the vole, the snake eating the mouse, the toad eating the slug, the soldier beetle eating the potato beetle: these are all fascinating to observe, and more so these relationships are essential in our “agricultural ecosystem” to keep “pest” populations in balance. 
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5. We’re cheap and don’t want to buy a lot of expensive fossil-fuel based chemicals to feed and protect our crops.  That’s why we use cover crops! A cover crop is a grain and/or legume crop planted to cover soil when it is not being used to grow vegetables.  Cover crops are essential in maintaining soil fertility and tilth, reducing weed pressure, and preventing soil erosion. They can be planted any time of year and harvested and/or tilled into the soil at different times depending on what our goal(s) is for the field.  For example, we plant winter rye and vetch on many of our fields after we remove the last vegetable crop from the field in the fall.  We allow the vetch and rye to grow on the fields through the winter into the next spring.  Its fibrous root system helps to hold the soil together and prevent erosion and its growth is a way of storing any remaining nitrogen in the soil.  In addition, vetch roots can actually “fix” nitrogen from the air in the soil into a useable form that plants can use.  Rather than leaching out, nitrogen is stored in the tissue of the cover crop, and then when we till in the crop in the spring it’s just like adding truckloads of compost to the soil. Hence the other name for cover crops – green manure. 
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   ​The amount of fossil fuels used to grow food in the U.S. industrial food system is staggering.  Much of this fossil fuel use is in the form of fertilizers (natural gas) and herbicides (petroleum).  Neither of these types of products are used in organic vegetable production. Learn more about it here: http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/farmer-in-chief/

As farmers our intent is to provide you with real, wholesome food to nourish your body and mind.  Our aim is to share with you all we know about growing food and taking care of the land.  We love to grow food for you; and we love to answer your questions if you want to venture into growing your own food.  What is better than to be your own farmer!  But of course, we don’t all have the land or time to grow all our own food and keep up with the many other aspects of life.  Which is why having farmers in our community is so essential.  Having locally grown food in our community is essential.  Having fresh, nutritious, wholesome, real food to eat is essential.  Plant a seed, know your farmers, know your food.