Many Farmers Markets Open this Winter

Farmers markets abound during the growing season. There is no doubt that the search for fresh local foods is easy from May to November. But when the sun sets at 4 a lot of farmers markets close up for the winter. However there are a growing number of markets open year round. They just move indoors to warmer climes until spring arrives again.

 

Speaking of farming indoors, there is no reason to give up on gardening just because the snow is flying. A grow light or sunny window can provide a nice assortment of fresh herbs and greens this winter. Want tomatoes, cucumber and peppers this winter? A high intensity grow light and simple hydroponics set up can provide frsh tomatoes and more for the winter dinner table  Although it is still fall gardening seminars for January and February are already being planned by myself and other garden experts at Adams

 

Here is a list of farmers markets open this winter throughout the region:

 

New York Winter Farmers Markets 2009

Dutchess County

Beacon Farmers Market

Beacon Sloop Clubhouse, near Beacon Train Station (indoors)

Sundays 10am-4pm, Year round

Simone Williams (845)440-8530

simplyvalley@optimum.net

www.beaconfarmersmarket.com

Red Hook Winter Farmers Market

Elmendorph Inn, Rt. 9, btw the IGA and Stewarts Shop (indoors)

Saturdays 10am-2pm, Dec. 13, Jan. 10, Feb. 14

Miriam Latzer (845) 943-8699 Miriam@heartyroots.com

www.heartyroots.com

 

Orange County

Indoor Winter Farmers Market at Pennings

161 S. Rt. 94 & Warwick Turnpike, Warwick, (indoors)

Saturdays 11am-4pm Jan 10-March 28

Steve Pennings (845) 986-1059 or 5959 info@penningsfarmmarket.com

www.penningsfarmmarket.com

Rensselaer County

Troy Waterfront Winter Market

Uncle Sam Atrium, Fourth St. & Grand Ave. (indoors)

Saturdays 10am-2pm, November 3-April 7

Erica Veil (518) 708-4216 troyfarmersmarket@yahoo.com

www.troymarket.org

 

Saratoga County

Saratoga Winter Farmers Market

Salvation Army Bldg., 27 Woodlawn Ave. (indoors)

Saturdays 9am-1pm, November 1 - April 25

Liza Porter (518) 638-8530 dport@spa.net

www.saratogafarmersmarket.org

Schenectady County

Schenectady Green Market

Robb Alley, off Proctors Theatre box office, 432 State St. (indoors)

Sundays 10am-2pm, November 2 - April 26

Barbara Blanchard (518) 374-1956 bjblanch@nycap.rr.com

www.schenectadygreenmarket.org

 

Saratoga County

Saratoga Winter Farmers Market

Salvation Army Bldg., 27 Woodlawn Ave. (indoors)

Saturdays 9am-1pm, November 1 - April 25

Liza Porter (518) 638-8530 dport@spa.net

www.saratogafarmersmarket.org

Schenectady County

Schenectady Green Market

Robb Alley, off Proctors Theatre box office, 432 State St. (indoors)

Sundays 10am-2pm, November 2 - April 26

Barbara Blanchard (518) 374-1956 bjblanch@nycap.rr.com

www.schenectadygreenmarket.org

 

Westchester County

Briarcliff WinterMarketplace

Briarcliff Congregational Church, Elm St. and South State Rd. (indoors)

Alternate Saturdays. 8:30am-2pm, January 10 – May 16

Miriam Haas (914) 923-4837 mhaas@communitymarkets.biz

www.communitymarkets.biz Mamaroneck WinterMarketplace

St. Thomas' Episcopal Church, 168 W. Boston Post Rd. (indoors)

Saturday 8:30am-12 Noon, January 17 – May 23

Miriam Haas (914) 923-4837 mhaas@communitymarkets.biz

www.communitymarkets.biz Westchester Center Winter Farmers Market

Westchester Co. Center, Lower Level, 198 Central Ave. (indoors)

Sunday 10am-3pm, Jan. 4, Feb. 8, Mar. 15

Kevin Cook (914) 864-7064 kdc2@westchestergov.com

www.westchestergov.com

 

 

So there you have it! A detailed list of farmers markets open all winter in the Hudson Valley for Locavores and locals alike.

Window Farming? Yes Window Farming.............

This is a totally incredible idea on using hydroponics to grow amazing amounts of food in a window!

www.windowfarm.org

 

This system can churn-out a salad per week. The window farm described in this How-To is a reservoir system. A water pump on a timer periodically pumps water and liquid nutrients from the bottom reservoir to the top reservoir. There are small holes drilled into the underside of the top reservoir. Small drip emitters with valves let out a constant drip of water and nutrients into a column of plants. Each plant sits in a grow medium in a net cup (a perforated plastic cup commonly used in hydroponics), within an inverted plastic water bottle. The cap of each water bottle has a hole in it so that the water and nutrients can drip from one bottle to the next, from the top to the bottom of the column of plants. The bottom-most bottles are connected to tubing that takes the water and nutrients into the bottom reservoir, where it sits until the pump turns on again.

Flu Flighting Foods

This I found in the Daily Guide from Waynesville, MO

 

"TOP 10 FLU FIGHTING FOODS." The first five were presented tonight and the last five next week:

n  Green Chile Peppers. They contain vitamin C, a powerhouse antioxidant, which help fight colds and flues. Foods rich in vitamin C are hot chili peppers (1/2 cup contains 182 milligrams of Vitamin C), guava, bell peppers, kale, broccoli florets, papaya, oranges, strawberries, cantaloupe and Brussels sprouts. The food with the highest amount of Vitamin C is acerola or  West Indian cherry. It has in one cup 1,677 milligrams of Vitamin C.

n Sunflower Seeds: It has vitamin E which is crucial in maintaining your immune system and it helps the activity of the white blood cells that protects us from viral (colds and flues), fungal and other infections.
Foods which are rich in Vitamin E are almonds, hazelnuts, filberts, peanut butter, spinach, greens (mustard, collards etc.) avocado, guineo, seeds, olives, spices and vegetable oil.
A tip on whole sunflower seeds: Put seeds in a bowl of an electric mixer and pulse until shells break but do not crunch seeds. Pour seeds in a bowl of cold water. The shells will float and then skim them off with a slotted spoon. Sunflowers are good in salads (greens, chicken or tuna) and ground they can replace flour in coating meat or chicken.
 
n Carrots, Carotenoids — Carotenoids and beta carotene is a class of nutrients that help regulate or enhance the immune functions. Beta-carotene and other carotenoids are made into vitamin A which helps cells fight infections. Foods rich in carotenoids are sweet potatoes, carrots, kale, pumpkin, winter squash, greens, broccoli, rabe, parsley, red peppers, cantaloupe, apricots and spices.

n Cod Liver Oil, Vitamin D — Vitamin D helps regulate the immune system so it is not under active or overactive. New research implicates vitamin D in the prevention of cancer and diabetes. Foods rich in vitamin D are: Cod liver oil, salmon (canned), herring, mackerel, oysters, sardines, tuna (canned), beef liver, eggs, cheese, clams, shrimp and milk enriched with vitamin D.

n Yogurts— Probiotics are good bacteria that live in all healthy digestive systems. They guard against microorganism attacks and improve immune functions. Foods high in probiotics are: Yogurt, kefir, buttermilk, tempeh and miso soup. Note, when probiotics are heated, they can easily be destroyed and become ineffective.

The Best Loser with the most "fresh" weight was Kathy. She won the fruit basket and signed her name on the "gift." Randy's name was drawn from the incentive jar and he won $1. Kathy's challenge for the week was to bring in a recipe using tomatoes and/or zucchini squash. Kathy also won the Dollar contest. The Best Loser with the most weight loss was Nancy and she won a gift from the "box." The Best Loser for the month of October was Kathy and she won the "fine" money.
Randy closed the meeting with, "The less we look with our eyes, the more we will see with our hearts."
For more information on TOPS, call Randy at 573-793-6782, our national toll free number is 1-800-832-8677, or attend our meeting on Monday. Weigh-in is from 5 to 6 p.m. and our meeting is from 6 to 7 p.m. in the Pulaski County Health Department.

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Composting In the Cold

I use obscure econometrics principles in my garden. One that always works is the chile pepper plant and composting corollary. This connection simply states that when your chile plants succumb to frost your plumbing goes haywire. No that's the "away on business trip chile plant corollary". The chile plant composting pairing simply states that when your chile plants are done in by frost your compost pile stops working as well. Meanwhile there is all that plant debris and leaves to get rid of.

 

Enter indoor composting. The garden debris leaves and such will have to remain outside and wait until spring to compost but you can still get rich soil indoors. Home made indoor composters are easy to build out of plastic storage bins.  Ready made bins are available specifically for indoor composting but are quite expensive for what you get.

 

They major difference in composting indoors is the composting "agent" itself. Outside one can simply pile up any organic matter and worms, bugs, beetles and other creepy crawlers will find it and digest it. I don't know many gardeners who wish to have creepy crawlers all over their house looking for something to eat. "Hey beetle, I am not done with that salad yet do you mind?" Indoor composting agents of action are red wiggly worms. They resemble small night crawlers or large earthworms. These hungry tilling machines have been bred especially for eating garbage.

 

A perfect sized container for housing your worms is a plastic storage bin measuring 1' high, 2' wide and 2-3' long. Any plastic container with similar dimensions will do fine.

Plastic storage containers with lids are perfect because they balance strength of the plastic with light weight thus being easy to move around. Next punch a series of holes along the lower sides of the container. Measuring about one third of the way down from the top punch holes through the container with sharp scissors and continue all the way around.

Two rows of holes should be enough. These holes will supply oxygen to the worms and are small enough to prevent them from escaping.

Next take shredded newspapers and wet them to the consistency of a damp sponge. Line the bottom half of your container with the shredded paper. You can also add shredded card board like toilet paper tubes to change the texture of the bedding. Now spread the little red wigglers over the newspaper bedding. After they get accustomed to their new home which should take about two milliseconds cover them with another two inches of all the news that is fit to print.

 

About one week later begin feeding your friends food scraps. The rules for indoor composting are exactly the same as for outdoors. No meat, fish or dairy. Egg shells are permissible as long as they are rinsed off before adding. They should be crushed as well.

 

Red wiggly compost worms are voracious eaters and you can easily add one to pounds of scraps per week for each pound of worms you buy. Plan on using one-half-pound of red wigglers for each cubic foot of worm bin; (one-half-pound of red worms is about 500 worms, depending on their size). A 1' x 2'x 3' bin is six cubic feet. So you will need three pounds of worms for optimum resource recovery. One thing to keep in mind is these worms cost on average twenty five dollars a pound. They also reproduce fairly quickly. If you think that spending seventy five dollars on worms is a bit steep purchase half as many and let them fill in the gaps for you.

 

After several weeks the newspaper and food you have added will turn to rich dark soil.

Harvesting the soil is simply a matter of moving all the newly created humus over to one side of the bin. Add newly shredded bedding and food scraps to the other side. Bury it deeply within the new bedding.  A while later all your wiggly friends will have migrated out of the finished soil and over to the new food supply.  The New York City Compost project web site says this migration can take four weeks. This little waiting step is a real time saver. This way you will not have to pick the worms out of the fresh compost you made. Do not wait too long to harvest the fresh soil however. As strange it may seem fresh compost becomes toxic to compost worms over time.

 

 

 

 

Peek at Weekend Posts on The Real Dirt

This weekend I will have an update on new additions (herbs) to the grow room and a test report on the "new easy to clean" Droll Yankee feeder now that it has been though two fill ups of seed and some rain and snow!

A Superb Composter.......on Wheels Even

We just received some new composters for use as holiday gifts. While there many tumbling type composters on the market this one, (from Compostumbler), is different. First off it is not black.While black is the ruling color for composting bins I often wonder if it gets too hot inside an enclosed bin on a hot summer day. The rest of the year black is a fine color for bins since solar gain is less during spring an autumn. Those times of year a compost maker (you the gardener !) can use all the solar gain one could get in this cloudy section of New York.But what about those hot summer days when compost activity is at its' peak? Could a 90* day cause the inside of an enclosed tumbler to "burn" those important soil microbes? Perhaps. The Compostumbler is a light green color with extraordinary well designed ventilation. Screens are built in to the walls instead of the normal slits or slots on most bins.The Compostumbler is also equipped with WHEELS making transpoting compost easy. The model is named "Back Porch" due to the ingenious inclusion of wheels. You fill it up neat the "BACK PORCH" and when the compost is done simply wheel it to the garden.The door on the bin is hinged. Many plastic tumbling models have a sliding door that sticks and expands when hot making it hard to slide open. The Compostumbler latches and swings down allowing easy access to the inner chamber.Another nice feature is there is no rod running through the center of the barrel making extracting finished compost with a scoop diificult at best. The door also removes. Nothing can get in the way of your removing the compost. (Except maybe a fellow gardener!)Makes a great gift to yourself or the gardener on your list!

Bring in the Basil

There is a freeze warning for the entire Hudson Valley tonight. Bring in the basil!!!