CSA Harvest #21~ The Garlic is In!

Many thanks to our awesome CSA members who spent their Sunday afternoon helping us plant 2,400 feet of garlic for next season! As you can see from the pictures above everyone seemed to have a great time and the old adage of "many hands make light work" rings true! There were a few things about garlic which I forgot to add in last week's blog. For one garlic is the most important crop that we save our seed from each year to replant. The taste of garlic actually improves as it is grown on the same soil year after year. Die hard garlic enthusiast claim the subtle flavors from the soil can be tasted in the garlic much the way a wine aficionado can swirl wine in their mouth and describe the soil it was grown in by the subtle notes in the wine.
The garlic we planted on Sunday was given to us two years ago by our good friends and fellow CSA farmers Norm and Cinda Lehne who farm out Garden Valley Blvd. For the first year or two of our CSA season we really relied on Norm and Cinda for support and growing advice for this climate that was new to us. We traded items back and forth in our CSA (we grow crops they do not and vice versa). Finally we seemed to get a handle on when to get things in the ground so we were able to make it the full 26 weeks with the items we had grown on the farm that we did not need to go pillage Norm and Cinda's fields in search of extra produce to fill that baskets.
Every year around this time we catch our breaths, survey the fields and the storage sheds and hope we have enough product left to make it through the remaining CSA weeks. For the last few years we have pulled though.. this year because the summer birth of Tione we are a little more anxious than usual. One huge bonus is that we have not yet had a frost and we hope that the warm, sunny weather will last as long as possible!

This week you will notice an extra goody in your CSA share and that is the addition of Asian pears that a fellow CSA member told us about. Asinete and I picked them Monday at an organic pear orchard out on Del Rio Rd outside of Roseburg. The man who had planted and tended the trees had passed away and there was no one left to tend to and harvest the fruit. The orchard had been open to u-pickers but there were still soft, rotting fruit in a thick layer all over the ground. It made it hard to pick as we slid around in the pear slurry. We are happy that these will not be wasted and we hope will be relished by you!`

Enjoy and we will see you next week! Five more weeks to go!

Suzie, Asinete, Tione, M.A, Sally, Grandma GG and Violet

Harvest This Week Includes:

Asian Pears (will keep best in your fridge)

Carrots

Watermelon

Kale (Red Russian or Winterbor) *kale chips recipe below yumm!

Red Meat Radish

Shallots

Onion

Yukon Gold Potatoes

Boothby Blonde Cucumbers

Cilantro

Tomatoes (not pretty but all we could muster)

Delicata Winter Squash

How to Cook It

Winter squash is different from summer squash in that it has a hard rind on it that allows it to be stored at room temperature for months at a time. There are many different varieties of winter squash and most need to be cured (well dried for several weeks) before eating but delicata is one of the few you can eat without curing. Winter squash is chock full of vitamins and minerals!
Classic Baked Delicata Squash
1 Delicata squash
1 tablespoon Butter
2 tablespoon Brown Sugar
2 teaspoons Maple Syrup
Pinch of salt
A pinch of fresh ground pepper (optional)
A pinch of cayenne pepper (optional)
Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.

Using a strong knife, cut the squash in half lengthwise. Spoon out seeds and stringy bits in the center of each half. (save the seeds!) Place each half in a baking pan, cut side up. Rub 1/2 Tbsp. butter on the inside of each half. Add a pinch of salt (and black pepper and cayenne if you wish), add 1 Tbsp brown sugar to each half, then drizzle each half with maple syrup. Adding a little water, about 1/4 inch, to the bottom of the baking pan will help keep the squash from drying out.

Bake for an hour, or until the squash is very soft. When serving, if there is any of the sugary butter sauce left, spoon that over the squash.

Serves 2


yield: Makes 6 servings

This is my favorite way to cook winter squash. You peel, and slice it, then cook it in a skillet with cider and winter herbs.
adapted from Bon Appétit

Ingredients

2 medium delicata squash (about 2 pounds) or other firm winter squash
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
1/4 cup very coarsely chopped fresh sage
1 tablespoon coarsely chopped fresh rosemary
1 1/2 cups fresh unfiltered apple cider or juice
1 cup water
2 teaspoons sherry vinegar
1 teaspoon salt
Freshly ground black pepper
print a shopping list for this recipe

Preparation 1. Squash. If using delicata squash, peel it with a vegetable peeler, cut it lengthwise in half, and scrape out the seeds with a spoon. Cut each piece lengthwise in half again, then crosswise into 1/2-inch -thick slices. Other types of squash should be peeled with a chef's knife, seeded, cut into 1-inch wedges, then sliced 1/2-inch thick.

2. Herb Butter. Melt the butter in a large (12-inch) skillet over low heat. Add the sage and rosemary and cook, stirring, until the butter just begins to turn golden brown, 3 to 5 minutes. Do not brown the herbs. Cooking the herbs in butter mellows their flavor and improves their texture.

3. Cooking the squash. Add the squash to the skillet, then the apple cider, water, vinegar, and salt. Cook, stirring occasionally, over medium heat at an even boil until the cider has boiled down to a glaze and the squash is tender, 20 to 30 minutes. Taste and season with pepper, and additional salt if needed.

Vegan Cheesy Kale Chips (guaranteed delicious!)

First you will need to make the sauce to coat the kale chips. We just use a regular old blender which works fine!

CASHEW CREAM
1 cup raw cashews. Rinse the cashews under cold water. Place the cashews in a glass bowl, cover with 1 - 2 inches of water, cover and refrigerate for at least 8 hours. Remove from fridge, rinse with cold water, place in blender and cover with
1 - 2 inches of water. Turn the blender switch to high and blend until cashew mixture is completely homogeneous.

Step 2: season the Cashew Cream. I added about a teaspoon each of garlic powder, cayenne pepper, freshly ground black pepper, and sea salt, but you can season however you want. A few tablespoons of nutritional yeast add the "cheezy" flavor. Pay a visit to your local health food store for nutritional yeast. (You can often buy it in the bulk section by the scoop and it makes a great popcorn topping!) A lot of recipes called for bell pepper, which would add some great nutrition and flavor.


Step 3: Rinse the kale and tear it into smaller (but not too small because it will shrink a good deal when you bake it) pieces. Pat or spin it dry so the "cheeze" sticks.


Step 4: Coat the kale with the cashew cream mixture. Just pour it on top and toss it with your hands in a large bowl.

coat the kale in your "cheezy" cashew cream

Step 5: Spread the kale thin on a parchment lined cookie sheet (2 sheets should be enough for 1 bunch of kale). Bake at 375 until crispy, wait 15 minutes and then flip with a pair of tongs and bake for another 10-15 minutes until crispy.

Eat right away or else keep sealed up tight as it quickly loses its crisp!

CSA Harvest #20

Welcome to week 20 of eating locally! For many of you this has been a new experience to enjoy food harvested and grown right in your community. Some of you have been with us since our humble beginnings and this will be your 98th week of eating our produce (considering that this is our 4th year running the CSA program).
In these four years we have tried many crops and moved our CSA drop off location three times. As many of you know the first year our drop off was at the old New Day Market location downtown by the Bagel Tree. Having people pick up their CSA shares at New Day provided us cooler space to keep CSA shares cool and fresh on hot days and also it had the benefit of bringing more business in to New Day. We were there for half a season before we had to move due to the uncertainty of New Days time left in the building and lack of space for their product and our CSA shares in their cooler. At that point a CSA member who lived in Hughcrest offered us their home as a drop off and so we finished our first year and second season dropping off there. The third and fourth year has brought us to Broccoli Street where we hope to stay as long as they let us :).

This past weekend was spent spreading cover crop seeds since the rains we have had moistened the soil enough for us to work it up without the ground turning to dust and blowing away. Walking through the cleared fields with a hand spreader to be sure the seeds are evenly dispersed. Planting cover crops is one of my favorite things to do on the farm. It is the one crop that we plant for the health of the ground and the one crop that we do not harvest. We always seem to battle the pigeons though as they appear overnight after we plant the cover crop seeds. There are always seeds that are not buried that the pigeons find. I try chasing them out of the field with the dogs barking behind me. They fly off in a cloud, circling the farm and valley only to land again and resume eating more exposed seeds when we've gone. We always hope there are enough seeds hidden from the pigeons to sprout!

This coming week also marks garlic planting time where we will go through our storage garlic, choose out the largest heads, separate them into cloves and begin planting out. Garlic has the longest growing season of any other crop on the farm. It requires nearly 10 months of growing before it is ready to harvest! When planted now in mid- October it will not be ready to harvest until around the 4th of July. We hope you will still be with us to enjoy it then!


If any of you would care to join us in planting out the garlic please let us know via email or phone. We are planning on planting it out this Sunday October 16th from 1-4pm(ish). Many hands make light work!

Thank you for supporting local farmers!

Suzie, Asinete, Tione, M.A, Sally, Violet and Grandma GG

Harvest This Week Includes:

French fingerling Potatoes

Onions

Garlic

Salad Turnips

Head lettuce (we had to fight the deer for these heads.. you may notice they sampled some of yours).

Hot pepper mix (Serranos, Anaheim and Jalapeno)

Tomatoes (not the prettiest due to the rain!)

Strawberries OR Raspberries

Watermelon (this week for sure!) Last week we were forced to skip it due to lack of room in the baskets and the fact that our second delivery truck died in the field forcing us to fit everything in one truck).

Boothby Blonde Cucumbers

Summer Squash

Italian Flat Leaf Parsley

Eggplant


Recipe Ideas


Roasted Parsley Potatoes

2 lbs potatoes (if you can find fingerling potatoes, use them.)
1/4 cup olive oil
2 tablespoons mayonnaise
2 tablespoons garlic, minced
2 tablespoons parsley, chopped
1 tablespoon basil, chopped
salt
pepper
grated Parmesan and chopped parsley (to garnish) (optional)

Directions:

1.Preheat oven to 375°F 2. Cut potatoes into large pieces (if potatoes are small, you can leave them whole). Do not peel skin. 3. In a large bowl, fold the rest of the ingredients (except the garnishing) with the potatoes and make sure that the potatoes are coated with all the ingredients. 4. Place potatoes in roasting pan uncovered. 5. Roast for about 30 minutes, stirring occasionally, until potatoes are golden brown in some spots and cooked through. 6. Garnish with parmesean and chopped fresh parsley if desired.

Curried TurnipsOne chopped onion

2 tablespoons oil
5 or 6 turnips sliced thin
2 teaspoons curry powder
1 teaspoon salt
one lemon, cut into wedges

Sauté the onion in the oil for a few minutes until translucent. Add the turnips, the curry powder and salt and cook until everything is tender. Squeeze some lemon juice over the dish before serving and serve with extra lemon wedges.



Enjoy! Next week: delicata winter squash and kale!

CSA Harvest #19

Nothing says Autumn like a truckload full of harvested winter squash! Asinete, Tione and I and a helper spent Sunday hauling in the winter squash from out in the field. We knew the rain was coming and wanted to get the squash in while they were dry. We will have five varieties to share with you in the coming weeks.. butternut, green acorn, Cha Cha (a green Kabocha variety), delicata and Red Kuri. If you are new to the winter squash world you are in for a treat! Winter squash are sweet, chock full of nutrients and cook up wonderfully in pies and many other dishes (also while they are sitting on your counter waiting to be used they add quite a festive flair!) You can see Asinete above doing his best Jack 'O Lantern face!

The first fall rains on the farm are welcome as they give all the crops a good drenching.. doing a much more thorough job than we do with our irrigation system. The rain is not good for the berries however.. it makes them wet, soggy and quick to spoil so please enjoy your berries quickly!

We spent another part of Sunday erecting a large carport to store our tractor implements under this winter. This year we have invested in our new Kubota tractor along with the costly implements of a new rototiller and flail mower.


In the next coming weeks we will be cleaning up the farm.. tilling in old crops and starting to plant out our cover crops which will arrive this week (all 350 pounds of them!) We will need to make the tough call about when to call it quits on the strawberry patch and till them in before the ground is too muddy to work. The strawberries you have been enjoying this year are now in their second year which is their last year. As the years progress the berries produce less and less, are smaller and not as sweet. This coming Spring we will replant 2,000 new strawberry crowns and will be rewarded soon after with large, sweet berries!

The last big planting we will do this Fall is planting out our garlic. We would love to have some help planting out the cloves. We will be planting it out on Sunday October 16th from 1-4 pm. There will be snacks provided! Please let us know if you can make it out even if just for an hour.

Enjoy the tastes of Fall!

Suzie, Asinete, Tione, M.A, Sally, Violet & Grandma GG

Harvest This Week Includes:

Beets

Red Meat Radish *also called watermelon radish.. cut them open and see why!

Sweet Corn (please excuse the corn ear worm at the top. The tip of the corn is all they should be living in.. simply cut off the tip and eat!)

Strawberries OR Raspberries

Boothby Blonde Cucumbers ( a crunchy, sweet, heirloom gherkin from Maine)

Basil

Tomatoes (large ones only this week.. the rain made all the cherry toms split open)

Sweet Peppers (some are ugly we know. These have been sunburned. Just cut away that part and eat the rest.. they are still good!)

Shallot

Yellow Copra Storage Onions

French Fingerling Potatoes (look at the beautiful blush inside when you cut it!)

Watermelon (finally!) Instead of eating cold out in the warm sunshine you may have to eat huddled up by your wood stove!) Eat it and relive the long days of summer :)


Recipe Ideas

Beet Risotto with Purple Greens

6 cups vegetable stock
1 tablespoon butter
2 tablespoons olive oil
3 small spring onion bulbs, chopped
1 spring garlic stem, or 4 garlic chives, chopped
1 1/2 cups Arborio rice
1/2 cup dry red wine
3 tablespoons fresh parsley, chopped
3 tablespoons fresh basil, chopped
3 medium beets, peeled and grated
3 cups of greens – use the beet greens, and if you need to make up the difference, you can add chard, kale or spinach.
Salt and pepper to taste
3/4 cup fresh grated Parmesan
Zest and juice of one lemon



Bring stock to a simmer on the stove. In another large, wide-bottomed stock pot, heat the butter and olive oil, then add the onion and garlic and cook on medium heat until translucent, about 2 minutes. Add the rice, stir to coat it, and cook for 1 minute.

Add red wine, stir, and simmer until it is absorbed. Stir in the parsley, basil, and beets, plus some salt and pepper to taste. Combine well, then add 2 cups of the stock, cover and cook at an energetic simmer until the liquid is absorbed.

Begin adding the remaining stock at 1/2 cup increments, stirring constantly until each addition has been absorbed. When you have a half cup left, add the chopped beet greens. When the last ½ cup is absorbed, stir in 1/2 cup of Parmesan cheese. Taste for salt and pepper, and sprinkle with remaining Parmesan. Garnish with parsley and serve.


Watermelon Radish
This gorgeous root crop, also called red meat or red heart radish, is
less spicy than other radishes. It is great sliced thin or grated raw into
salads, roasted with olive oil and herbs or butter and brown sugar, or
sliced or diced into a stir fry or soup. Red heart radish slices are great
chip or cracker substitutes to use with hummus and other dips, and
make great edible garnishes for any dish. The tops can also be sautéed
like any other green.