October Eleventh

The nineteenth summer share delivery may mark the near-end of the produce deliveries for some folks, but it is by no means the end of the work that is done on the farm this season.  There is still a good month’s worth of work for us out there harvesting the root vegetables, tearing down tomato trellising, ripping up black plastic mulch, and planting and mulching seed garlic.  We will also need to mulch the strawberry patch before the ground is frozen.  Only when the ground is literally frozen solid will we finally be done. 

One more Summer Share delivery left in the season and then we have a ‘week off’ with no produce deliveries.  We will use that week of time to dig potatoes, carrots, sweet potatoes, parsnips, beets and more.  The race is on now to get all of our fall storage veggies safely out of the ground, washed and into storage where they will be shared with Fall Share and Thanksgiving Share members.  With whatever veggies we have left over, we will hope to sell them to our local food coops and restaurants.  We do not have strong established relationships with many other buyers since we prioritize sending all of our #1 produce all summer to you, our CSA members. 

One of my favorite Fall projects is garlic planting.  I love the ritual of breaking apart all of those bulbs of garlic into bins full of individual cloves.  I love tucking them sweetly into their ‘beds’ in the fields at planting time and telling them to sleep tight.  Maybe this year we’ll hum lullibies on the transplanter at planting time.  When they’re all put to bed, we blanket them with a thick layer of mulch that will protect them from the heaving frozen earth, harsh winter temperatures and will also prevent a large percentage of the weeds from coming up in the Spring.  Additionally, the mulch will help hold moisture in the ground around the seeds and then ultimately it will add organic matter and nitrogen to the soil once it is completely broken down. 

I do love the waning day-length this time of year.  The darkness reminds us farmers to rest.  Ironically, we finally have more time for cooking and baking.  Using the oven is fun because warming the house up and making it smell delicious is part of the motive. There is something about working all day in the cold and wind and then coming into a warm house that smells like pumpkin pie that makes a person feel like they’re in the right place in the world. 

We hope you enjoy cooking with all of these new Fall foods like Brussels Sprouts, sweet potatoes, celeriac root, rutabaga, leek and more!  Box packing took much longer than usual this week because we had to try to figure out a way to tuck each item in the box just so, so that it would all fit.  We struggled with getting many of them closed properly! 

Soooo……What’s in the Box???????

Brussels Sprouts-  Yes, these are the very funky looking vegetable that grows on a stalk.  They have the little sprouts that go all the way up the stalk.  We left the snapping-them-off-the-stalk part for you as well as any additional cleaning you desire for these.  One member told us she never learned to love Brussels Sprouts until she had them roasted in the oven.  Check out our roasted Brussels Sprouts recipe below! 

Broccoli-  A gorgeous head of broccoli for you because eating broccoli each week makes life a little better.

Cauliflower-  HUGE heads of cauliflower.  We really struggled with getting these guys in the boxes this week with all of the other items to tuck in there. 

Butterkin Squash-  This is a fun new variety of squash we grew for the first time last year.  A seed we got from Johnny’s.  It’s a cross between a butternut and pumpkin.  It has all of the orange and creamy color of a butternut, but a similar flesh texture and shape of a pie pumpkin.

Savoy Cabbage-  Savoy means ‘crinkley’ or ‘wrinkley’ or wavy or curled.  That’s what the leaves of this cabbage are like.  If you’ve never had it before, it doesn’t keep as well as a storage cabbage variety, but it does have a very light, tender and fun airy texture.  It makes a lovely slaw or salad.  Have fun with this rare jewel! 

Sweet Bell Pepper-  One sweet bell pepper per member.  Peppers are going out of season fast.  There are still peppers on the plants and we’re feeling very lucky that Jack Frost hasn’t come in the night yet and taken them all away from us.  We’re planning to have them again next week, but they may not be full color or they may be entirely green. We’ll have to pick what is left on the plants, turned color or not! 

Mini-Sweet Peppers-  Just a few of these little guys this week.  They could have been the red, yellow or orange ones.  We thought it might be a little difficult for you to tell the difference between the mini-sweets and the hot peppers this week as the hot peppers are mostly red this week as well. 

Jalapeno Pepper-  Many of the Jalapenos this week were red.  Some of them may have been green.  The jalapenos at this stage, many of them have ‘stretch marks’ on them.  A fun characteristic of late-season jalapenos.  Some people say that red jalapenos are sweeter than green ones.  What do you think?

Hungarian Hot Wax Pepper-  Many of these have turned red as well.  Earlier in the season they were yellow or green-ish in color, but many of them have turned red now.  Watch out for the mix of small-ish peppers in your box this week.  Some are hot, some are not! 

Spinach-  A heavenly half-pound bag of tender spinach for all this week.  We picked this spinach on a very muddy and rainy morning.  We did our very, very best to get all of the mud off of the leaves with the wash-time we had, but you might want to check the leaves for mud before eating them or give them an extra rinse before cooking or eating raw. 

Parsnip-  We had a great parsnip year!  Many of the parsnips this year were big and beautiful as we always strive for them to be, but we have had years were many of them did not size up well.  Parsnips sold in stores are many times coated in a paraffin wax (a plastic wax) to help them keep and to prevent them from oxidizing.  We strongly feel that coating your vegetables in paraffin wax is un-necessary-even for storage life.  Taste the difference.  These are so fresh! 

Rutabaga-  These are not turnips!  A rutabaga does look quite a bit like a large storage turnip-but I assure you these are rutabagas.  Rutabagas are wonderful if you just peel them, mash them and toss them with butter like a mashed potato-and your family will never know the difference!  They’re just a little less starchy than a potato.  We also love them cubed into a soup or stew. 

Sweet Potatoes-  Two pounds of fresh, lovely sweet potatoes.  This year wasn’t our best sweet potato year.  We still got a nice harvest for our CSA members, but many of them did not size up quite like they did last year.  You can eat sweet potato skins. 

Celeriac Root-  Our celeriac roots are huge this year!  These are not the most beautiful vegetable in the world, but they do get major brownie points on our charts for a few different reasons.  Which are:  they are a low-carb root veggie that adds variety to what is available locally for vegetable offerings in the fall.  They are fantastic keepers.  Store these in a plastic bag in your fridge, and they wil keep for months!  They also offer a very smooth and subtle celery flavor to your soups and stews that we have really learned to love.  Don’t judge this book by its cover.  It really is an awesome vegetable! 

Leek-  Take a leek?  One big ol’ leek for each CSA member this week.  Leeks are in the onion family.  You can use them in your cooking like you would use an onion, but they are also fun to feature in a potato leek soup, fried in coconut oil until crispy and sprinkled on top of your soup or salad or really any dish.  Have fun exploring leeks if you’re new to using this vegetable.  The most commonly used part of the vegetable is the white stalk, but they greens are also edible.  They get a little tougher as you go up the leaves. 

Recipes

Roasted Brussels Sprouts

Leek and Swiss Chard or Spinach Tart 

Pureed Root Vegetable Soup with Celery Root, Parsnip and Rutabaga and Orange, Ginger and Tarragon 

October Eighteenth

The Final Week of Summer Share CSA deliveries brings a kind of bittersweet feeling.  We are welcoming the slower pace of the waning day length, yet recognizing the end of the work we love and the food that has been so bountiful and plentiful all summer long.  Mostly though, I feel a strong sense of gratitude for everything the farm and the community has had to offer us this season. 

The CSA model so beautifully embodies everything a community and a small piece of land can accomplish when they work together.  Without the help of all of the amazing pairs of hands that come to this farm and work, the people like you who have chosen to give their hard-earned dollars for a CSA share, and the desire that Adam and I share for organizing this symphony of food production, there would be one less family farm preserving a piece of land and the healthy little ecosystem inside it. 

We all love the idea of there being more organic farms on the countryside, cleaner soils and water in our communities and the preservation of a small family farm.  These things are all possible simply because people like you, yes YOU-reading this exact newsletter, care so very much about them.  Because you care about them and support them, they exist.  And for all of this I honesty and genuinely feel gratitude.  It makes my heart sing to see crews of mixed ages, skill levels and backgrounds, all come together on a weekly basis and show up to stick their hands in the soil and get their clothes and nails and boots dirty while picking spinach and peeling leeks on a foggy October morning. 

The farm will soon turn a page.  We will finish up our 12^th season running our little CSA.  The leaves will soon all be fallen from the trees, the ground will soon be frozen, the carrots and the sweet potatoes will all be harvested and safely stored away for winter sales.  After the first of year, we will begin marketing for our 13^th season running our small CSA.  We’ll get a couple short months rest before greenhouse season begins again and the earth’s little trip around the sun starts anew. 

Fast approaching is my favorite Holiday, Thanksgiving.  I love the idea of there being a Holiday that causes us all to pause for a day and recognize everything the earth has offered us.  In the days of semi-trucks and ships shuttling food across the globe at record speed, we no longer experience hunger and famine the ways people once did in this country.  We have access to every kind of fruit and vegetable at any moment-free of worry that it might not be there for us tomorrow.  But if we honor the pause that Thanksgiving day offers us, we can try to reconnect with how blessed we truly are. 

So Thank You, from the depths of my heart, for an amazing season of bounty that feels like a celebration to me each year that we accomplish it together.  I feel honored to do this work.  I feel thankful to share it with you.  I feel blessed to have this life and look forward to doing it all over again next year.  We hope you will join us! 

Soooo……What’s in the Box???????

Brussels Sprouts-  Yes, these are the very funky looking vegetable that grows on a stalk.  They have the little sprouts that go all the way up the stalk.  We left the snapping-them-off-the-stalk part for you as well as any additional cleaning you desire for these.  One member told us she never learned to love Brussels Sprouts until she had them roasted in the oven.  Check out our roasted Brussels Sprouts recipe in last week’s newsletter. 

Broccoli or Romanesco-  A gorgeous head of either broccoli or romanesco for you.  We didn’t quite have enough Romanesco to give everyone one.  We filled in with Broccoli for those that didn’t get it.  Romanesco is the lime-green broccoli or cauliflower-like vegetable that is fractal looking.  Romanesco spirals up to a point at the top.  A really fun vegetable to grow.  It has a very long season and comes  on somewhat irregularly and sporadically, so it can be difficult to time for a CSA giving. 

Cauliflower-  Very nice heads of cauliflower for everyone.  We really struggled with getting these guys in the boxes this week with all of the other items to tuck in there.

Butternut-  This is probably the most-loved winter squash variety of all.  Everyone seems to know this variety of squash and loves to eat and cook with it.  The texture is smooth and consistent, the flavor is sweet and nutty, and the sheer color of the flesh once cooked up is warming and comforting.  Squash keep very well on your countertop for months. 

Bell Peppers-  Several peppers per member or enough to fill out the box.  Not necessarily colored bell peppers this week.  We knew frost was coming, so we went out and clear-cut the pepper plants no matter the size or color of the pepper.  Adam reminded me that some people do love to eat green peppers.  All peppers will turn color eventually; green peppers are just ‘unripe’ peppers that would turn color if left on the plant long enough.  Peppers freeze very nicely!  Just slice them up, de-seed them, and freeze them in zip-lock bags!  No blanching or extra work required!  We love to use frozen peppers in the winter months on pizza, fajitas, quiches or even thaw them and roast them if you like them that way. 

Spinach-  .4lbs  A heavenly bag of tender spinach for all this week.  This spinach was first-picking greenhouse grown spinach.  We plant greenhouse spinach in the Fall to have spinach for winter harvest.  This was the first picking which always means the leaves are more tender.  Yum!

Parsnip-  1#  We had a great parsnip year!  Many of the parsnips this year were big and beautiful as we always strive for them to be, but we have had years where many of them did not size up well.  Parsnip sold in stores are many times coated in a paraffin wax (a plastic wax) to help them keep and to prevent them from oxidizing.  We strongly feel that coating your vegetables in paraffin wax is un-necessary-even for storage life.  Taste the difference.  These are so fresh!

Rutabaga-  These are not turnips!  A rutabaga does look quite a bit like a large storage turnip-but I assure you these are rutabagas.  Rutabagas are wonderful if you just peel them, mash them and toss them with butter like a mashed potato-and your family will never know the difference!  They’re just a little less starchy than a potato.  We also love them cubed into a soup or stew.

Sweet Potatoes-  Two pounds of fresh, lovely sweet potatoes.  This year wasn’t our best sweet potato year.  We still got a nice harvest for our CSA members, but many of them did not size up quite like they did last year.  You can eat sweet potato skins.

Celeriac Root-  Our celeriac roots are huge this year!  These are not the most beautiful vegetable in the world, but they do get major brownie points on our charts for a few different reasons.  Which are:  they are a low-carb root veggie that adds variety to what is available locally for vegetable offerings in the fall.  They are fantastic keepers.  Store these in a plastic bag in your fridge, and they wil keep for months!  They also offer a very smooth and subtle celery flavor to your soups and stews that we have really learned to love.  Don’t judge this book by its cover.  It really is an awesome vegetable!

Leek-  Take a leek?  One big ol’ leek for each CSA member this week.  Leeks are in the onion family.  You can use them in your cooking like you would use an onion, but they are also fun to feature in a potato leek soup, fried in coconut oil until crispy and sprinkled on top of your soup or salad or really any dish.  Have fun exploring leeks if you’re new to using this vegetable.  The most commonly used part of the vegetable is the white stalk, but they greens are also edible.  They get a little tougher as you go up the leaves.

Recipes

Celeriac Mashed Poatoes

Potoato Leek Soup with Celeriac Root

Celeriac Potato Hashbrowns with Jalapeno and Cheddar

The Great Dane Inner Warmth Squash Peanut Stew

Smoky Romanesco Celery Root and Broccoli SoupSmoky Romanesco Celery Root and Broccoli Soup

November 15th

Winter on the farm is only just a few days away.  It’s hard to believe!  We’ve been working as busy as bees taking advantage of every hour of daylight these days trying to get the last of our storage crops out of the field.  We have just 1 bed of carrots, 1 bed of parsnips, and some rutabaga left to harvest.  They crew has been working very hard lifting out all of the plastic mulch that we used this summer and rolling it into balls so that it can be taken to a recycle dumpster.  We are very fortunate to be able to take our plastic mulch and plastic irrigation tape to a dumpster near by that will go to an agricultural plastic recycle center.  We aren’t proud of our use of plastic mulch, but it has it’s place on our farm and saves us huge amounts of labor and fuel in cultivation in the summer. 

We also just finished garlic planting and mulching in the nick of time before we had some very hard freezing weather.  We planted about 600 lbs of garlic on the farm this year and managed to get it all mulched by last Friday.  Now we’ll have just a few more days of field clean up picking up irrigation lines and a little mowing on top of our harvesting we can get done before old man winter moves to town. 

We are also very excited about nesting and preparing for the arrival of our 3^rd child who is due on December 14^th.  I have been working hard to keep up with the crew and help with the field work in whatever ways I can.  I’m feeling thankful for the crew of young, strong workers this summer to help compensate for my lack of strength this Fall.  This baby comes at great timing, at the close of a long season and when we’ll have a chance to really rest and bond as a family in the darkest winter months of the year.

But our resting period is not long!  We’ll get a few short months free of field work, but we’ll be back to work marketing for 2018, ordering seeds and supplies and beginning greenhouse work the first week of March.  For now we are very much looking forward to Thanksgiving and spending more time doing what we love most, cooking warming, home-cooked meals in the kitchen and sharing them as a family. 

Soooo.....What's in the Box??????

1 Butternut Squash-  All Squash varieties will keep best at room temperature.  They prefer a warmer or dry area.  If they start to develop spots of any kind, you’ll know it’s time to eat them up.  They don’t like to be kept in refrigerators and they look very festive sitting on your countertop.  Butternuts are the classic, creamy orange squash that everyone loves and many recipes call for. 

1 Pie Pumpkin-  Keeps best at room temp.  One very cute looking pie pumpkin with just enough flesh to make a home-made pumpkin pie.

1 Sweet Dumpling Squash-  Keeps best at room temperature.  They have a flesh similar to color, texture and flavor as a delicate.  Usually a very sweet squash, but they can vary. 

5 # Carrots-  A nice bag of carrots for you to snack on, add to your fall soups or cook in any way you can dream up.  We thought the carrots this fall were very sweet and crispy! 

5# Potatoes-  Many of the potatoes were the Yukon gold variety which is a very creamy potato that is very nice for mashed potatoes.  But some members may have received russets which are a more textured potato that hold together very nice in a soup or stew or for baking. 

1# Garlic-  Garlic will keep best in the refrigerator.  You can keep a bulb or two on your counter at a time, but truly they will keep best in the cold and dry of your refrigerator.  They will dry out and possibly sprout if left on your counter. 

1 # Leeks-  Leeks are in the onion family and can be used in soups much like an onion.  Potato leek soup is the most common recipe.  Leeks can be used all the way up the stem to where they turn into the dark green leaves.  The dark green leaves are edible, but a little more tough (toss them in your stock). 

1 Celeraic Root-  Don’t judge this book by it’s cover!  Celeriac is the price disguised as a frog.  It is very ugly on the outside, but a true gem to have in your fridge to add to your soups and stews.  Peel it, cube it and boil and mash it with potatoes for a celeriac mashed potato recipe.  It is also wonderful if peeled and then cubed very small into a soup or pureed into a creamy celeriac potato soup. 

1 Rutabaga-  Rutabaga are lovely if peeled, boiled and mashed with a little butter.  Your family might not know that they aren’t mashed potatoes.  Rutabaga are also nice if peeled and cubed very small and added to any soup or stew of your choice.  They don’t have a lot of flavor, similar to a potato, so very benign in a soup or stew.  They have less starch and carbs than a potato as well. 

3# Sweet Potatoes-  This year our sweet potatoes weren’t quite as last year.  Due to when the slips arrived in the mail, we planted them later than usual and they didn’t size up as nicely this year.  So some of your sweet potatoes are a little smaller than what we have given in the past.  But the small ones are just as good!  No need to peel your sweet potatoes!  Did you know the skins are healthy to eat and perfectly edible?  Yes!  We like to make home-made sweet potato oven fries.  Toss them (cut into sticks with skin and all) with coconut oil and bake them into fries.  Yum! 

3# Onions-  A nice mix of red and yellow onions for storage.  Onions also prefer a refrigerator for long term storage, but if you cook with a lot of onions, they’ll be fine on your counter for up to a month without sprouting. 

3# Beets-  Beets keep terrifically well in a plastic bag in the fridge for months.  But these guys are so sweet, I know they won’t last long at your house!  Boil or roast them and discover your favorite beet recipes. 

1 Brussels Sprouts Stalk-  Brussels are truly a unique fall gem that can only be enjoyed this time of year.  They’re a bit of pain to snap off of the stalk, peel back and prepare, but they’re so worth it!  Have you had roasted Brussels Sprouts?  Try it!  

Recipes

Shepards Pie with Rutabaga Topping

Mashed Potatoes with Celeriac Root

Roasted Brussels Sprouts

Potato Leek Soup with Celearic Root