Let's Get Fresh: Julie Mallow of The Vegetable Garden Talks Unexpected Success
By Bob Workman on September 01, 2019 from Let’s Get Fresh
This week, I asked Julie Mallow from The Vegetable Garden to chat with us about the unique stone milled flours and spice mixes that she and her husband Jay offer each week. Read on to see how a crop failure has lead to success for these farmers.
How did The Vegetable Garden get in to milling flour and making a salt-free seasoning mix? Well, here are the stories. Two years ago, we had a crop failure on some of our potatoes. Instead of wasting the fertilizer we decided to plant a cover crop to help keep the weeds out. It was the beginning of July, the best crop that we could plant at that point was buckwheat. At first, we weren’t sure what we were going to do with the buckwheat, we had talked about milling it in to flour but didn’t know how we could do it.
After some phone calls my husband Jay was able to reach out to Tom McConnell and found out that he had a stone burr mill. Once we harvested the buckwheat, cleaned it and got it dry enough to mill we headed to Terra Alta to mill our first round of flour.
Fast forward to present day, The Vegetable Garden now offer a number of stone milled flour that we process ourselves such as wheat, rye and oat flour. We have purchased a grain cleaner, a stone burr mill, and a sifter with multiple screen sizes, which is how we can off Corn Meal, Corn Flour and Corn Grits.
Now, let’s talk about the seasoning mix. I give all the credit to this product to my husband Jay Mallow. After filling all of our bushel orders for peppers a few years ago, we had lots still hanging on the plants. Jay says “Let’s try to dehydrate them and see what happens.” Well after adding dried onions and garlic we found ourselves a wonderful dry rub for meats, then we tried it on eggs for breakfast.
A few more tests and Jay has the idea that we should try and sell it at the winter markets. Again, fast forward to present day The Vegetable Garden offers Mild, Hot, Smoked Sweet, Smoked Jalapeno, and Super Hot seasoning mixes. We also have 3 different versions of garlic: Garlic Flakes, Garlic scape Flakes, and the newest one to join the mixes, Smoked Garlic Flakes. This spring we also dug and dried ramps for Ramp Flakes.
The Vegetable Garden is happy to be able to offer these items at the Bridgeport Farmers Market during both the winter and summer markets! Stop by and see us, to try any of our products.
See this blog with additional photos at the Bridgeport Farmers Market Web site: Let's Get Fresh HERE
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