Livingstone Farm Stand: Garden & Field Produce

rosemaryhorwood
May 24
3 min read

We initially started exploring the woods and property when we bought the farm and have loved having the bounty of garden and foraged produce available throughout the year from preserving and curing our farm grown products. There are a few things that we produce on the farm that we make enough to share with our farm stand clients and some that we'd love to share more of.

The challenging part of sharing our garden and field produce is the seasonality of it. A few items that we grow can be preserved (ie. garlic stores well, apple cider, garlic scape salt to name a few) and then we have the very short season and very perishable items like morel mushrooms, wild ramps, fiddleheads and puffball mushrooms that are good one day and gone the next. More on that in another post on foraging on the farm.

Here's a little more about the items we grow on the farm.

Garlic - We have grown garlic since our first year on the farm and absolutely love it. We plant one garlic clove in October and harvest a whole bulb in July. The bulbs come with lots of greenery attached to them and need a few weeks to cure in the fresh air in our barn before we can store them. We will be offering garlic bulbs, garlic wreaths (a year's worth of pantry ready garlic), and garlic powder starting in July until sold out in our farm stand. We often keep our cured garlic over the winter and enjoy it into the spring. The longer we sit it out to dry, the better it keeps into the winter.

Garlic scapes - Our garlic plants produce a scape, a twirly green shoot off of the garlic bulb that would turn into a garlic flower if left intact. We remove the scapes to allow additional energy into the bulbs for the final push of the plant growth before harvest. Our garlic scapes are available fresh for a very short time. This year, we are freeze drying our scapes to create a savory seasoning salt perfect for use with our rainbow eggs & pastured chicken. Keep an eye out for more.

Quince - Quince is a bush and tree fruit which has a floral yet bitter taste to it. The fruit has the consistency of an unripe pear with a citrus smell and grows like an apple. We love quince for making our farm grown Quince Jelly, a beautiful ruby orange jelly, perfect with cheese boards in the fall and winter.

Apple cider - Our heritage apple trees have produced tons of apples every year and we send them off to a farm that turns our apples into cider for us. Our cider is self stable in a 3 liter food grade bag with a pour spout. This apple cider process gives us fresh apple cider for fall and winter and an opportunity to store it on the shelf and pour directly from the bag into a smaller juice jar, jug for the kids or warm spiced cider pot for fall and winter. No sugar or water added, just pure heritage apple goodness from our 1860s apple trees.