On the Farm: A trip to Heritage Prairie

Chicago has been awash in Michelin Star buzz. The awards have been described as good, bad, and plain unexpected. Just the same, they have given Chicago’s food culture a lot to crow about.

Now, the reality check. All we need to do to be reminded about how much more we have to learn about food is to head to a farm. Ideally, a small one that is gearing up for winter.

So yesterday, Paul Virant visited Heritage Prairie Farm, which houses Vie’s very own bee hive. Tony, Vie’s cookbook recipe tester, and I came along for the ride. This is the point in which I admit that before this visit, I didn’t know anything about bees, hives, hoop houses, or how to grow fresh things during a Midwest winter. City, meet slicker.

Heritage Prairie Farm is best known for founder Bronwyn Weaver’s Bron’s Bee Company honey. Located near Geneva in La Fox, Illinois, the farm is only about an hour and a half west of Chicago. This year, Bronwyn offered some Chicago chefs the opportunity to adopt a hive. The project became dubbed a local chefs’ apiary. A sign went up on the selected hive with the restaurant’s name. When it came time to harvest the honey, the restaurants cashed in on their investment.

But the farm produces much more than honey. While the mild fall had finally given way to damp, grey air pierced with a chilling breeze, there was plenty to do in the barn, hoop houses, and fields. The farm’s market manager, Katie, and new chef, Jeremy, met us in the farm’s cozy market. Jeremy, who got to know the farm while running Niche in nearby Geneva, caught up on restaurant news with Paul while walking us over to the cold barn where managers and staff trimmed beets to the tune of Bob Marley. After a quick hello, we walked next door to warm up in a heated hoop house that contained delicate microgreens.

Bronwyn came out to greet us and we were also joined by Nate, one of the farm’s assistant managers. Nate explained that they had moved the hoop houses into their winter position. Which meant that the lightweight, 10- or 12-feet tall white shelters that covered select beds of vegetables wouldn’t be moving around for a few months. Apart from the microgreen operation, the other hoop houses weren’t warm, but they were comfortable. In a hoop house mechanically heated to stay just above freezing, large red and green blooms of lettuces thrived. In another, this one heated only with the sun, hearty winter spinach had taken root. Outside, a bed of mixed lettuces appeared to be impervious to the cold.

By April, Nate explained, one of the hoop houses will be moved over a bare patch of ground. After about two weeks, the ground will have thawed enough to plant tomato seeds. An early planting allows Heritage Prairie to start selling tomatoes as early as July, an important commercial advantage at the Green Market. With the right strategy, the farm can produce food nearly year round.

“This looks like the Eliot Coleman system,” Tony said. He has been studying four-season farming, a strategy that Coleman, a year-round Maine farmer, has perfected.

“That’s exactly what we’re going for,” Bronwyn replied.

They’ve still looking for efficiencies. Coleman developed his method—which includes crop rotation, use of unheated and minimally heated hoop houses, and small-scale farming—in Maine, which doesn’t get the strong winds typical for the farm’s corner of northern Illinois. At Heritage Prairie, which was hit with a 70-mile-an-hour windstorm a few weeks ago (which did a number on the beet greens), there is still plenty to learn about climate control.

Most of the activity occurred on that one acre, though the farm has expanded into adjacent fields. On our way across these open fields to the hives, we walked by fennel, cabbage, carrots, and a smoldering pile of tomato plant trimmings.

Then we got down to the honey. What I learned, from Bronwyn:

At least 50 varieties of flowers are needed when creating an environment that promotes bee health.

It takes 10 flowers to get one drop of nectar

It takes 10 drops of nectar to make one drop of honey

It takes 10 drops of honey to make one drop of wax. (Wax is a concentrated honey.)

Honey is removed from honeycomb in a centrifuge, then it is strained. Bronwyn uses cheesecloth; high volume producers often use silk.

Honey is stored best frozen or at a warm room temperature. If, like the Bron’s Bees honey,  it isn’t processed and filtered intensely, it crystallizes at 50-59F.

Spring blossoms make lighter honey.

In the winter, the worker bees swarm around their queen to ensure she stays in an environment of 90F.

Tagged as: adventure, farmers market, sweets