October Newsletter: The Graze Event, and Prep for Spring

We are finally getting down to some more reasonable temperatures, which means time to stop some things, start new ones, and even do a wonderful chef/farmer event at the Orion.

Delivery day.

For starters, we joined up with the Huntsville Food and Farm Hub. These folks are great, I can’t say enough good things about them, but I’m going to try. First of all, their shopping website is clean, quick, and super organized. Second, they have the personnel, the expertise, the crew, and the talent to make shopping with them a breeze. One would go to their website Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, place an order, then pick it up at The Lumberyard in historic downtown Huntsville on Tuesday afternoon. They will have your order all boxed up and ready, full of the produce, meats, baked goods, eggs, etc that YOU selected from the website. It is very much like an a la carte CSA! For us as growers, this has opened up an entirely new way to promote our farm and orchard, reaching so many more people than we could have met on our own.

The Huntsville Food & Farm Hub

We also joined the Farm Food Collaborative, a part of the North Alabama Food Bank which is another great group of people who will actually come to their members’ farms to pick up orders and then make the deliveries. This is another great way to expand our reach, and it gets food to the hands of people who wouldn’t ordinarily have access to locally produced fruits and vegetables.

Last Sunday night, we shared table space with Pizzelle’s Confections at a wonderful event at the Orion Amphitheater. We have known the owners of Pizzelle’s, Michelle and Caitlin, for more than thirty years, they have been huge supporters of our farm. They get the first pick of our peppers, grapes, blackberries, figs, and passionfruit all for use in their chocolate, ice cream, pate de fruit, even soda pop. They even get edible flowers from us, too!

The Pizzelle's/Ironspring Orchard Team!

The event was called “Graze” and was put on by the Alabama Sustainable Agriculture Network. This event brings local restaurants and their farmers together for a smorgasbord where the public has a chance to taste a little bit of the creativity that great chefs and great farms can come up with. We brought flowers from our cut flower rows, passionfruit that we are cultivating, pumpkins and gourds that we grew on our farm, and even our very first (tiny) harvest of chestnuts.

We had a blast introducing hundreds of people to the native passionfruit that Pizzelle’s will be using to make something wonderful. It was also a great chance to meet other farmers and chefs, and to make new contacts with you, our faithful readers.

Northern Maypop Passionfrui

Besides our friends at Pizzelle’s, we also provide fruit and veggies to a restaurant in Guntersville called Old Town Stock House. This month we got them to try some of our squash, eggplants, herbs, peppers, and tomatoes. Let’s just say their enthusiasm has made us rethink how many plants we are going to expand into next spring.

Fried andouille, braised leeks, roasted di Rossi eggplant, cherry tomato salad, lemon balm tea, sweet pepper chutney.

Here on the farm, the work is always still ongoing. This month we will be planting our fall crops of broccoli, radishes, and cabbage. These are cold - hardy and almost foolproof to grow, so look forward to those fresh bites in the coming months.

We are going to be composting the remains of the flower farm this month. In those cleared out rows we are now planting snapdragons, campanula, bells of Ireland, nigella, larkspur, and poppies. We plant them now so they have the fall and winter to develop good roots and they will come rocketing back in spring, just in time for you-pick and early weddings.

The behind the scenes - the new snapdragons!

Also to be planted this month are The Bulbs. Most of the bulbs will not be in the you-pick field, but when they start to flower, they will be available for sale as well. We’re talking ranunculus and daffodils by the hundreds.

Daffodils!

This isn't even the biggest part of The Plan. The Plan also includes hundreds of peony roots. Hundreds. They may not flower for two years, because they need time to acclimate and make strong roots, but we’re going to be up to the waist in flowers in a couple of years. You gotta plan these things in advance!

Lemon Chiffon Peony

Speaking of advance planning, we just closed a deal to plant smokebush, weigela, four varieties of hydrangea, and two japanese maple varieties at our farm. These are going to become shrubby plantings that we can take decorative cuttings from for wedding decor, floral display, and even some bonsai trees. It definitely takes long-term planning for these shrubs and trees, but hey, it has been something we have wanted to do for decades. We already have a grove of trident maples which we planted three years ago that we will be able to use for bonsai stock and also just an awesome place to just be surrounded by beautiful trees.

Tuff Stuff Hydrangea

And finally, we are going to start harvesting fresh willow withes (branches) this month. In the spring we planted fifty each of three different willow varieties. If you were at the Graze event, you saw some of the withes that night. Besides the decorative use in flower arranging and decor, these are also being grown for use in willow basket weaving and as living fencing. Some of these willows have reached heights of twelve to fifteen feet in a single year! Technically, I should dry the withes before weaving a basket with them, but I can’t wait that long so I will be trying it out with some of the smaller branches.

Thanks for joining our newsletter, thanks for being a fan. Go sign up for the Hub, pick and choose from almost fifty farms. It has taken us three years to get ramped up with this farm in earnest…stay tuned, this is just the beginning.

Thanks,

Stacy & Dan