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!