Farmer's Market - 01 July 2012

[crafty_packrat]

Bought apricots, plums, nectarines, snap peas, and two pepper plants yesterday at the SS market. Went to the Takoma market this morning, and got 2 dozen eggs (smalls and extra-larges), bread, raspberries, blueberries, chicken feet (stock!), quark (plain, but I can add herbs), a small sweet pepper, and a quart of whole milk. Fruit at the Takoma market is 50¢ to $1 cheaper per pound, so if I buy enough to eat for a week and to make ice cream, it makes sense to pay the $3.20 round trip to get there by bus.

I also picked up a pot and saucer and two tomato plants at the Ace Hardware. When I got home, I planted the tomatoes in the ground and transplanted the Labrador violet into the pot and brought it inside. The violet was looking fried, so I'm thinking it might do better inside. Hopefully I ripped up enough mint that the one tomato plant will be okay; one of my neighbors planted spearmint in the flower bed, and now it's taken over a 2' by 4' block. It'll be a pain to eradicate, but that's my plan for this fall and (probably) next spring. You can't let mint go in the ground, since mints are allopathic and will kill everything in their path.

I'm going to make raspberry ice cream this afternoon, because the raspberries got smushed. I need to make something with the Montmorecy cherries from last week -- maybe I'll pit them and save them in batches, because it looks like cherries are done for the season (which is ridiculously early, but we had because in mid-June, instead of mid-August). I also have gooseberries from last week, that I could make into pie or crumble or fool -- fool would be the easiest, but least likely to travel well to a 4th of July party.

Comments

[laughingrat]

It all sounds so appetizing. I always thought I had to worry about the zombie apocalypse, but it turns out the mint apocalypse is much more of a threat!

[crafty_packrat]

Plants are incredibly vicious organisms, as they tend to poison each other when competing for living space. Mint is pretty ferocious -- I can understand someone making the mistake of planting it, once, but trying to protect it once its taken 8 square feet of flower bed is something else.

[madripoor_rose]

Ugh, when we moved here we had peppermint that damn near took a flamethrower to get rid of. I remember drinking a lot of mint tea and putting it in potpourri.

[crafty_packrat]

The guy I bought the pepper plants from suggested that I might have to dig up the bed and throw the soil out. Given that mint roots at least 4 inches down, that'll be miserable work. Not to mention how expensive it would be to replace the bedding soil.

[madripoor_rose]

Yikes, yeah, that's going to be tough to get rid of. I wish I could remember more of what Mom had to do with the peppermint....luckily it was confined to one of our rockeries. I think we were stripping all the leaves off to start killing it....

[zana16]

Which vendor do you get the chicken feet from? The farmer I used to get them from no longer delivers to my area.

[crafty_packrat]

North Mountain Pastures -- they don't always have them, but even if they're not out in the display containers, ask for them. I did, and they had 4 packs in the cooler (I bought 2). At $2 a pack, that's not bad.

[twistedchick]

Seriously? I would *love* some mint. I have been trying to get rid of the angelica along the border for years, and only mint might survive against it.

[crafty_packrat]

We might have to do some surreptitious gardening, but if you want some, I'm sure I can pull up some roots for you.

[twistedchick]

That would be terrific. Just plop the roots in a glass of water until I can get them, and that will keep them going. I scavenged my first mint plants out of a drainage ditch, but the angelica killed them (yes, killer angelica) so maybe some stronger mint will be able to do a job on them.