News and Blog
The feast begins. In April the vegetable growers start to come back with Spring greens and other cool weather vegetables. The cornucopia continues through the warm Summer months with peppers and tomatoes culminating with the abundant Fall harvest of Winter squash in frosty November.
Visit us from 8 AM to 6 PM every Saturday of the year.
The flagship Greenmarket in Union Square is world-famous. What began with just a few farmers in 1976 has grown exponentially over the past 33 years, transforming this once dangerous, crime-ridden area and into a dynamic and vibrant public space.
The Union Square Greenmarket currently operates on approximately 2 acres of parkland and hosts over 140 Producers each week: these two acres of market have directly preserved over 12,500 acres of regional farmland.
As our biggest market, the seasonal bounty is unparalleled with hundreds of varieties to choose from during any given season. From just-picked fresh fruits and vegetables, to heritage meats and award-winning farmstead cheeses, artisan breads, jams, pickles, a profusion of cut flowers and plants, wine, ciders, maple syrup and much more.
Located in one of New York City’s great public spaces, Union Square is a wonderful place for people watching too – catch local chefs from the city’s top restaurants shopping early in the morning for the freshest ingredients; take some time to chat with your local farmer and learn about their growing practices; taste what's cooking during one of our many cooking demos; and don't be surprised if you rub shoulders with the odd celebrity as you reach for those garlic scapes!
From http://www.grownyc.org/unionsquaregreenmarket
Laurie
Thanks Laurie for knitting a Hat for Haiti: it's big to cover the neck & ears with a chin strap. As the weather warms and becomes un-hatlike here, and the dangerous rains begin in Haiti—to be timely—I made a donation, "From the sheep of Catskill Merino and the knitters of Hats for Haiti" to the Jenkins-Penn Haitian Relief Organization (JP HERO), set up by Sean Penn to bring relief to the Haitian people quickly and effectively.
Why JP HERO? Simply because when CNN's Anderson Cooper interviewed Penn last night, he was in Haiti and not somewhere else. His concern is hands on, like knitting hats is hands on.
Thanks to all of you, Anne-Katrin, Ien, Galen and everybody else.
There's not a lot of bacon on lamb breast; we must wait until we have enough to justify the expense of kindling the hickory wood. But enough is enough and this week we've been smoking the house down and tomorrow the New York wait is over.
"Ahh, there's nothing to eat here," farmers often complain when looking week to week at the same baked goods, almost the only ready-to-eat food at market. But you won't hear that from me tomorrow; for lunch I'm having Andouille Lamb Sausage: it's smoked, it's nitrate free and it's ready-to-eat and I'll be dipping it in a good old fashion mustard to have with a mesclun from Windfall Farms, well washed and also ready-to-eat.
The Lamb Andouille recipe is from Quaker Creek: the major flavors are the smokiness of smouldering hickory wood, onion, garlic and crushed red pepper.
Ahh, there's something to eat here.
Yesterday, from the tannery I picked up 24 Saxon Merino sheepskins that I will bring to Union Square tomorrow. Plush & soft. Prices: $150 for medium sheepskins, $175 for large sheepskins.
How 120 broke her leg, we don't know. At birth her mother wouldn't accept her; maybe it happened when 120 was butted away in the jug. The ewe was a first time mother and was so crazed that to help calm her I gave her 1 cc of Oxytocin which among other things* assists maternal behaviors and is sometimes called a "love potion" because it facilitates relationships. After the injection the ewe slowly became caring and finally let her lamb to the teat.
Baby was saved.
But in the yard several days after her birth, I noticed 120 limping along on 3 legs and picked her up to find a broken leg.
It had to be set.
I wrapped the leg in one of our knit wool hats that we found laying around the shepherd's room, cut two splints from oak and wrapped everything tightly with duct tape. I gave the lamb 1/2 cc of Banamine, an analgesic, and put her on 1/4 cc of penicillin a day for a week.
120 is doing well, getting fat on mama's milk and peg-legging around like she's looking for a white whale; when she can put weight on the leg, in 2-3 weeks, we will cut the splint off.
*Oxytocin is a hormone active in female reproduction. Recent studies have begun to investigate it's role in various behaviors, including orgasm, social recognition, pair bonding, anxiety, trust, love, and maternal behaviors...from Wikipedia. Generally, I have Oxytocin on hand at lambing to assist milk let down in recently lambed ewes that are dry.
Or a Poem in garlic. I wanted to shoot the garlic coming up and I wanted to get Poem in the shot; I told her to sit and I lay down in the garlic bed with a Nikon 14-24mm zoom lens, at a focal length of 14mm, on my D700. Here, the camera is almost on the ground and the lens about 14" from Poem's nose. At three frames a second, in several bursts, with Poem always in motion, I took 79 exposures to get one I could work with. Back at the computer in Adobe Lightroom, I used a graduated filter on the sky to bring out the moodiness of the day.
Last Saturday, a guy asked me if I had any garlic yet. "It's coming," I told him, "when it's in, you can order it from Garlic Department of the General Store if you can't get to the stand."
Kelly models a hat from our Undyed Saxon Merino knit by her daughter Emily, who taught herself how to knit when she was 9.
Rain or shine, the ewes have their lambs outside in the barn yard. We let them bond there before we bring them into the barn, and usually place them in jugs; 4'x4' plywood cubicles (numbered to 26) with a water bucket, hay free-choice and grain twice a day; there, they will not be distracted by other sheep.
They stay in the jugs for a day or two where we make sure they're eating well before we release them into a communal pen with other mothers and newborns to begin socialization. After a day in the communal pen, but only if the lambs are strong and playful, we put them outside to mingle with the other lactating ewes and lambs.
Between Friday night (with me at market Saturday) and Sunday morning Dominique brought 25 lambs into the barn. That's a lot of work: the room service bell never stops ringing, "Warm milk for a weak twin in 5, baa..."