Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week Peter writes: Well, sad to say, the value-added farm products described in our April 1 bulletin were only a wonderful fantasy. Alas, we at Turkana Farms have no chocolate flavored eggs, no alcoholic melons, and not one single hanging lamb chop. We were gratified, however, to receive a few orders for these mythical products from a few hopefuls, as well as some very strong encouragement from a few imbibers to actually try raising infused melons.. The mythical chocolate eggs and projected other exotic flavors were suggested to me by my experience with yoghurt, to which I was introduced in the early sixties when I lived in Turkey. There the only choices were between sheep or cow yoghurt and home made or bought yoghurt. We mostly boiled raw cow milk (to deal with tuberculosis), put it in a clay pot with a dollop of yoghurt culture, wrapped the clay pot in a towel, put it on the floor in a corner of the kitchen and waited a few days until it was formed. Sheep yoghurt we bought from the street sellers (left) who, in those days, strolled around the Izmir neighborhood with a yoke over their shoulders from which were suspended two copper yoghurt pans. Their cry “Yohrrr Jou ou ou!” (‘Yoghurt Seller!’) was one of the most distinctive sounds of the day.
When I returned to the U.S. in the mid sixties, yoghurt was not readily available, still being a specialty at health food shops. I was excited and pleased when, eventually, it began appearing in supermarkets. But I quickly became disenchanted as, like our fabled Turkana eggs, yoghurt began to undergo a strange metamorphosis, becoming available as cherry flavored, pineapple flavored, chocolate flavored, vanilla flavored, ad nauseum. And I was really appalled when occasionally I could not find unflavored yoghurt at all, the shelf stocker insisting that vanilla-flavored yogurt was the natural unflavored yoghurt I was looking for. As to alcohol infused melons, this actually is practiced by Kurdish farmers along the Euphrates in southeast Turkey. But, sadly, Turkana has yet to try this experiment. Before we can go on to that, we have to master producing a really nice melon. As to the hanging lamb chops, there actually was such a query from a woman living in California, but it was something we read about rather than experienced. We are still awaiting that magical sheep mutation.
At the risk now of not being believed, I note that we are beginning to get greenhouse grown artichokes. This is the one exotic thing we seem to have going for us right now. Unfortunately, we don't have enough to sell. Originally, it was not my intention to produce greenhouse artichokes; I simply wanted to over-winter the artichoke plants (perennial in milder climates) in the greenhouse a few season ago, and then return them to the vegetable garden in the spring. To my surprise, before I could move the plants back to the garden, they began, in April/May, to produce abundantly. We were amazed at how tender and tasty these artichokes were compared to the rather disappointing California-grown ones we find in our supermarket. So discovering that artichokes transplant readily, producing happily in a greenhouse, we have continued the experiment. We have also discovered that once killing frosts approach, we can similarly move other vegetable plants from the garden to the greenhouse. We have successfully reestablished spinach, Swiss chard, lettuces, arugula, cutting celery, chives, parsley, coriander, rosemary, and other herbs. These, together with the straw-covered leeks, carrots, parsnips, and the weather-hardy Brussels sprouts over-wintering in the vegetable garden, as well as the potatoes, onions and garlic we stored in the basement pantry, have virtually fulfilled our vegetable needs throughout the winter and early spring. Given the price of bottled gas, the cost effectiveness of growing vegetables in the greenhouse throughout the winter remains to be seen. Probably not.
But we have taken a few measures to mitigate the heating costs. Applying a practice from colonial times, we have been partially heating with chicken manure, of which we have aplenty. The colonial practice, as we learned, was to dig a foot deep wide trench as a planting bed, then to spread about six inches of chicken manure, and over that about six inches of topsoil. The heat emanating from the manure warms the soil and the air immediately above it. This system of heating, of course, works even more effectively in a low cold frame, which is what was used in colonial times—less so in a domed greenhouse like ours. But, when we ran out of bottled gas on one of the coldest nights of the winter, enough heat was being generated to preserve our greenhouse garden With some modifications—putting cold frame-like structures inside the greenhouse; switching to a solar-powered heating unit—we may be able to make our winter greenhouse vegetable garden make sense economically. For now, it gives us enormous pleasure to sit down to our own vegetables and salads during the winter months. And to be able to wheel our shopping cart quickly through the supermarket vegetable aisles, stopping only briefly for fruits and an occasional vegetable. But now the vegetable traffic flow is going in the opposite direction—from the greenhouse to the vegetable garden. We have already gambled (there is always the danger of a killing frost) and set out the more cold-hardy seedlings that we started in the greenhouse in early March—peas, fava beans, broccoli, cauliflower, and lettuces. These newcomers join our garlic, already peeping up through the mulch, as well as clumps of young sorrel, burgeoning rhubarb, and the scallions, parsnips, carrots, and leeks that survived last year. We are moving from a season of satisfying only our own vegetable needs to once again supplying those of our loyal customer base. —Peter Davies
