Market Maestros

We sold out of nearly everything last week at the Coral Gables Farmers’ Market, so we recommend arriving early for limited items like cherry tomatoes and multicolored baby carrots. For latecomers, there will be lots of greens, fennel, scallions and herbs. Pale yellow-striped pineapple mint is just one of our varieties that piques foodies and gardeners alike. Once you cook with our oyster mushrooms, you’ll forget all about meat from then on. We swear!

See you Saturday, Jan. 30, from 8 a.m. - 1 p.m. at City Hall.

Clean and green

Check out our new showers! Anyone can make one in his backyard. We cut bamboo from the farm to assemble walls atop a foot of pea rock for drainage. They’re much roomier than our previous set-up, not to mention allow us the luxury of showering under the stars.

The above picture is a view from the outside.

Ben and his bike

Not to be confused with Benjamin our oyster mushroom expert, Ben is a WWOOFer who arrived in November. Most of our volunteers come by car or plane, but Ben rolled up on this sweet ride, a customized motorcycle with parts from several models including a Honda Shadow Spirit and a 1984 Harley. Describing the project as an artistic collage, he wrapped the gas tank with turkey wing feathers and attached a boar’s skull under the headlight. A bona fide biker, Ben even rode through Hurricane Ida, holding on so tightly that his handlebars came off!

A native of northern Wisconsin who grew up on a dairy farm, he hunts professionally and responsibly to protect farms and to control wildlife overpopulation. After teaching high school and working in an art gallery, Ben began a cross-country adventure that’s taken him from a winery in California, where he studied under Standing Bear, a Hupa storyteller, an apple orchard in North Carolina, and a farm in Georgia, where he milked cows and goats, and learned sacred food blessings from nearby Cherokees.

Ben is also a published poet whose work can be read at Theconcertjournal.com.

Bundle Up!

You may have been following the news coverage about how the freeze of 2010 decimated much of Florida’s agriculture. Luckily we were at the southern tip of the state, but temperatures still plummeted to 29 degrees here. We prepared by covering at least a quarter acre of the farm with swaths of a gauzy polyester (as seen in the picture above). The vegetables and herbs pulled through, but unfortunately we lost a lot of our edible flowers like wild petunia and clitoria that will take a few weeks to rejuvenate.

To market, to market

After years of requests, we’re finally participating in a farmers’ market. Please join us for our debut outside Coral Gables city hall (405 Biltmore Way) this Saturday, January 16, from 8 a.m.- 1p.m. Please arrive early to our booth in case we run out of items including romaine lettuce, fennel, carrots, scallions, parsley, kale and more. See you there!