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World’s Easiest Tomato Paste

Fill two lined baking sheets with tomato halves, cut side up, about 8 to 10 pounds. Sprinkle with salt and drizzle with olive oil. Roast in the oven at 425F for 2 hours, turning the baking sheets halfway through.
YAAAAAAAAASSS! See those brown bits? That’s flavor!
Cram it all into a food mill atop a bowl. Grind until the skins left behind in the mill look “dry” and your arm feels like it’s gonna fall off.
Transfer the milled tomato paste into ice cube trays. A piping bag or ziptop bag with a corner cut off helps. Tap the trays on the counter gently so that the tomato paste settles. Freeze until solid.
As Emeril would say, “BAM!”
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Operation: Add Greens To Everything

Farmer Jason says that adding chard to red chile stew makes it look like what Yoda ate while in exile in Dagobah. It’s also really tasty.
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Harvest spotlight: Rainbow chard

Here in Central NM, rainbow chard grows almost year-round; growth slows only during the coldest winters…and sometimes it gets a little nibbled by grasshoppers at summer’s peak (but we’re ususally too distracted by the abundance of calabacitas, cucumbers, and basil to notice).

The leaves are mild in flavor and can be used in all of the same ways you might cook spinach. Try it in creamy cheesy dips (or dairy-free with tahini). Large chard leaves can be softened with boiling water and stuffed, similar to grape leaf dolmas or cabbage rolls. Greens love eggs: quiche, frittatas, scrambled, or crack some eggs directly into a pan of sauteed greens and let them poach. And then there are soups, stews, stir-fries, casseroles, pasta dishes, grain salads, enchiladas, quesadillas, pizza, smoothies, and more.

The stems are sweet and earthy, so don’t throw them away. How many recipes begin with the instructions to soften a diced onion and other seasonings in a pan? This is the time to add your diced chard stems as well.

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No Dig Day

While today is Election Day in the US (please vote), it’s No Dig Day according to Charles Dowding in the UK. We’re enormous Charles Dowding fans, having several of his books on our bookshelf that we refer to frequently. The temperatures we see in Central NM from mid-October through mid-April closely mirror the temperatures seen during the same period at Dowding’s Homeacres, so we’re always looking to his books and YouTube channel for inspiration for what to grow during the cooler months of the year.

No Dig = No Till = Sheet Mulching = Lasagna Gardening = Back to Eden Gardening

It’s what we do at Rocket Punch Farm.

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Why don’t you grow…?

While our 2027 food list is extensive, we don’t grow everything. Because that would be impossible: we’re only two people and we only have so much time, energy, and garden space. Everything we grow has been chosen for high productivity, nutritional density, culinary value, flavor, texture, appearance, and climate appropriateness.

Foods we don’t grow because they take up too much space: corn, large pumpkins, watermelon.

Foods we don’t grow because we can’t eat them: asparagus, okra, sunchokes, bulb onions, and bulb garlic. For onion/garlic flavors, we grow green onions, chives, garlic scapes, and Chinese toon…and we grow stridolo, which tastes a lot like asparagus.

Foods we don’t grow because of intense pest pressure and unfavorable climate: Brassica oleracea crops like heads of cabbage, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, and broccoli. Instead, we grow Brassica rapa crops like bok choy, tatsoi, and turnips along with other green vegetables outside of the Brassicaceae family.

Foods we don’t grow because we just don’t like them (sorrynotsorry): spinach, kale, celery.

For green chile, eggs, dairy products, and locally raised meats, we support the hard work of our neighbors.

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Ferments

We’re big fans of using homegrown and local foods to make fermented products for our own enjoyment.

Kimchi made with bok choy, carrots, radish, green onion, garlic scapes, and red chile
Green jalapeño hot sauce, in progress
Probiotic soda made with prickly pear, using a “beet bug” for fermentation and carbonation.
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Change is constant

Hello. Yes, we’re still here, still farming.

See, we started farming at the start of COVID–when everything got really weird–so we were selling directly to customers from home. And then we tried other people’s farmers markets, tried launching our own farmers market, and tried selling through an indoor farmers market that was open every day…until it closed its doors in June 2026.

Over the years, we’ve attracted a small following of passionate locavores who enjoy the boutique experience that only a microfarm can provide. Here in Central, NM you can grow and eat local food all year, just don’t expect fresh tomatoes in February. For a list of our 2027 foods, click here.

November 1, 2026 UPDATE

The following foods are available in limited amounts: tomatoes, carrots, beets (roots and greens), rainbow chard, sorrel, green onions, onion chives, garlic greens, mint, tarragon, lovage, salad burnet, oregano, sage, and thyme.

We expect to harvest daikon, turnips, and mustard greens along with other cold-hardy greens, root veggies, and herbs throughout the winter.

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If our harvest list speaks to you, give us a call, text, or email. You will find our contact info here. Please note that we no longer use any social media platforms as the business operations of those companies deeply conflict with our ethics as regenerative farmers.

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In Appreciation

Back in the warmer days of 2023, Scarlett Metals gifted us an amazing piece of metal artwork. Jason thought it was just the bees knees and wanted to show how much it meant to him, so he screened this super-limited edition shirt based on the original sculpture. Now, he just needs to get it to Wayne!

The online shop still has a few of the limited, big-print logo shirts in stock, as well as our regular logo design. More shirt designs are on the horizon. Stay tuned!

Limited BIG RPF logo tee
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2023 Review and Looking Ahead to 2024

This post is inspired by visitors who came to our farm today, who said they read our blog posts. We talked for about an hour and we could have easily talked for much longer. We love meeting our neighbors and exchanging knowledge about farming in our changing climate.

And what a wild and busy year 2023 was (hence the lack of blog posts)! We had a long, cold spring that went directly into a heat wave for the entire month of July. The insufficient summer rains could be best characterized as a non-soon…and then the first frost arrived about two weeks early in October on Friday the 13th. These conditions resulted in a longer than expected spring lettuce harvest season and an all-too-brief summer tomato harvest season.

Now we’re seeing a wet and cold winter apparently due to El Niño. What will 2024 bring us? Hold on to your butts!

What are we doing to prepare? As always, soil health is first and foremost in our minds. Plants grown in healthy soil are naturally more resilient to whatever comes. We’ve been spreading compost and mulch throughout our planting areas to boost soil fertility.

Since it’s likely that we’ll be seeing more Southern NM weather here in Central NM due to climate change, we need to adopt Southern NM growing techniques. After all, the USDA recently announced the updated Plant Hardiness Zone map and we’ve graduated from Zone 7a to Zone 7b, meaning our winters are now 5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer on average than they used to be. As farmers, we try to see these changes as opportunities instead of challenges.

Perhaps out biggest project to prepare for the coming season is building shade structures over our planting areas. We had previously planted honey locust trees for shade, but they aren’t yet large enough. So in the meantime, while the trees continue to grow, we will construct shade structures. We’re still in the planning stages of this project, so look for a future post once we start building.

And what are we going to plant? We’re taking more advice from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange on what to grow during hot summers, some of which we had already been following.

Goodbye Phaseola vulgaris “green beans” (and wax beans and purple beans that turn green when you cook them), hello Lima beans. We had already been growing yardlong beans and we’re adding a few new varieties in different colors.

For tomatoes, we’re keeping everything that was successful last year. All of our favorites and yours from previous years will return. And we’re adding a couple of varieties developed at Southern research universities for added insurance. As we did last year, we intend to participate in H2 Academic Solutions’ Hummingbird Festival over the last weekend of April to sell seedlings. All of the same tomato varieties we grow on our farm will be available to the public at this sale.

You can read the rest of SESE’s recommendations for yourself. Our other crops for the coming year include 12 varieties of lettuce for autumn through spring harvests, bunching onions, lemony sorrel, collard greens, celtuce for pickles, basil in 6 varieties, purple sweet potatoes for both summer greens and autumn tubers, Swiss (rainbow) chard, New Zealand spinach, purple snap peas, potatoes (fingerling as well as low glycemic Huckleberry Gold), Persian cucumbers, cantaloupe, pattypan squash, garlic…and more!

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Limited T-shirt Screen Print Design

After having done the nobori-style farm flag earlier this summer, Jason still had the screen on hand and had not cleaned it yet. On his way to finally wash it out, he had a thought that maybe it would work as a limited t-shirt design.

So, here in our shop, are four XL and three 2XL BIG-print Rocket Punch Farm t-shirts, white ink on dark heather grey, now available. These are all there will be as he’s washed out the screen. Ready to ship out to you or for local pickup.