Week 6 CSA Newsletter (July 12-19, 2021)
CSA Newsletter Week 6
July 12-19, 2021 | “B” Week
Last week’s CSA boxes create a beautiful mosaic in our cooler.
What’s in the Box this Week?
GARLIC OR GARLIC SCAPES ~ You’ll either receive a bunch of garlic scapes or a fresh head of recently harvested garlic from the “Great Garlic Harvest.” The skin on the garlic will not yet be cured, so you’ll want to store them in the fridge (in a plastic bag) and use within a week (before they start growing moldy). Pull the cloves apart, peel off the outer layer, and then chop, mince, smash, or grate.
SWEET ONIONS (1 bunch) ~ These will come with green tops. You can trim the green tops and use them to garnish tacos or salads or meat dishes. (You can also chop them up and freeze them for later use!) Store in your fridge in a plastic bag, and try to use them within 2 weeks. Simply chop or slice the bulb. You can freeze onions by throwing them in a Ziplock bag and freezing them raw.
DILL WEED – Store this delicate herb in a plastic baggie in your fridge and use within 7 days. To use, remove the fronds from the thicker middle stem, and chop finely. Add to salads, salad dressings, dip, fish, or compound butter. Some of our bunches may also come with dill flowers, which you can use for pickling.
SWISS CHARD — Here’s your green for the week! Store these in a large Green Bag in your fridge and use within 5 days. You may want to cut the stem from the large leaves and store those separately. The stems can be chopped and added to stir fries for a bit of crunch. The leaves can be used as wraps, or subbed for wherever you might use spinach. Try them in smoothies too.
CANDY TURNIPS ~ Take the tops off your roots before you store them. The tops can be used in scrambled eggs or omelettes, soup, spaghetti sauce. The bottoms should be stored in a plastic bag and will last for several weeks. You can eat them raw in a salad or veggie tray. I also have had them roasted with potatoes and other root veggies in a 400 F oven, tossed in some olive oil and seasonings.
BRESCO RED BEETS — These came from a pretty weedy bed, so the tops of the beets may not be so petty. Remove the tops from the roots as soon as you get home and store them separately in a green bag. Use them within a few days. Or add them into green cubes or make pesto! Store the roots in a plastic bag and leave in your fridge, where they will last for several weeks (maybe even a couple months). Just wash them and roast, boil, grill or eat raw.
Jean Modene created beautiful tacos with last week’s box.
THIS WEEK’S ADD-ON SHARES:
It’s “B” week (for all our bi-weekly shares)
Fruit: blueberries from Michigan, Japanese plums and Lodi apples from Eshleman Orchard in Clyde.
Note: Lodi apples are not apples you should eat “out of hand.” They have a mealy consistency and are tart. As the first apple of the season, they should be used for applesauce or making pies/baking.
Maddie & Bella’s Coffee: Mexico High Grown Altura – Crisp, full, sweet
Knueven Ice Cream Share Flavor: Vanilla Bean
Bread Share Week 1 (ELMORE ONLY): Honey Oatmeal
This week is Giveaway Week! Participate in our daily challenge for your chance to win free stuff!
Announcing… CSA Giveaway Week!
Do the CSA Daily Challenge for your chance to win a cool prize every day next week.
I’ve been purging my attic, and I collected a LOT of free Tupperware last year when we had that big Tupperware Party for our CSA. (It’s full of Fridgesmarts and batter bowls!) Now I want to finally give it away to you guys. So, this week, I’m going to run a Daily Challenge Contest to try and move it.
Here’s how it works:
Starting Monday-Friday (July 12-16), I will put up a simple question post or instruction inside the Facebook group. All you have to do is leave a comment or do what the post says before 6 PM. I will choose 2 people each day at random who will get to choose ONE item from my box above. (It’s like the toy box at the dentist office!) You cannot win a prize more than once. It may be something like, “Post a picture of your kids eating my food….” or “Tag me on Instagram with a picture of your meal tonight…”
If you win, I’ll send you a photo of the items that are available, and you can choose the one you want. I’ll bring it to your next CSA pickup site. Let’s have some FUN with this!
The Salmon Run begins this week! Order your salmon now.
Time to order Alaskan Salmon!
I know we just finished ordering our fresh halibut, but it’s now time for the Salmon Run out in Alaska. If you want to order your freshly caught wild Alaskan salmon, this is the time. Our partnership with our Community Supported Fishery at CitizenSalmonAlaska.com means you get a 5% discount off your total order when you use our CSA’s unique coupon code. (It’s also how Kurt and Corinna get their affiliate commission). Check your weekly email to find it!
Head to www.CitizenSalmonAlaska.com to place your order now. You’ll get your order sometime around July 13th, when they begin shipping. Your fish arrives frozen via FedEx overnight shipping. Remember: the price you see on the website INCLUDES the shipping. You’ll get the best deal if you buy a large portion size. So get a group together of friends and family, or organize something in our Facebook group to get a group order.
Softneck versus Hardneck Garlic:
Who Will Win?
With all the harvest activity around our garlic crop this past weekend, I thought I’d share a little known fact about garlic varieties, and which one is “better.”
There are two classifications of garlic: softneck or hardneck.
Only the hardneck variety has a stem running through the center, which forms the garlic scape.
Hardnecks are so-called because of the long stem growing through the center of the bulb. The flowering part of this stem is called the scape, which you have been enjoying the first part of our CSA season. The scape will straighten up and flower in July, indicating it’s time to harvest. The bulb surrounding the scape’s stem consists of a single layer of larger-shaped cloves. Hardneck varieties usually produce about 4-10 cloves per bulb — much fewer than softnecks. However, the cloves are often bigger and have a stronger flavor.
Softnecks on the other hand, yield a greater number of cloves — usually between eight and twenty per bulb. Irregular in shape, the cloves are present in two or more layers. They do NOT form a scape and are missing the inner stem. Softneck varieties tend to be milder in taste. A great proportion of softneck garlic is used for processing food products, including garlic powder and seasonings. Their cloves are also more difficult to peel, given their irregular shape and tight, thin skins.
Only hardneck varieties have a scape which will flower to signal it’s time to harvest.
Most garlic sold in stores comes from China, and is usually of the softneck variety. Strangely, many consumers do not know the price difference in seed between softneck and its superior cousin hardneck. Garlic seed is our MOST expensive seed, often pricing at around $25/lb, which is one of the reasons we price ours at a premium. It’s so worth it!
We invite you to do a blind taste-test between the softneck grocery store garlic and our SLF garlic, and tell us what you think. Can you tell a difference? Share your thoughts in our Facebook group.
Christina Wise helps pull garlic.
CSA Scholarship Update: Thank you!
As promised, I am reporting on the final results of our CSA Scholarship Campaign. Each year, we raise funds to help some of our CSA families be able to participate in our CSA. We pledge never to make cost be a barrier to keeping someone from joining our farm. And your donations have once again allowed us to come alongside our fellow farm-lovers who could use a little extra help this season. Accountability is important to me, and so I wanted to share exactly how we allotted your gifts to help our our members.
Collectively we raised $2618! Keeping our members’ names anonymous, I was able to help out 8 families in the following manner:
- Farmily #1 – $250
- Farmily #2 – $330
- Farmily #3 -$100
- Farmily #4 – $430
- Farmily #5 – $380
- Farmily # 6 – $300
- Farmily #7 – $50
- Farmily #8 – $400
There is still a small remaining amount in the scholarship fund. This will be available for use this season for any future CSA customer need or rolled over to next year’s scholarship fund. Thank you so much for working together to be able to help our families!
Tara Baranwoski makes a homemade pizza with last week’s box.
Sign Up for Your Field to Table Dinner!
Imagine eating a fancy dinner on our farm, where you can rub shoulders with your farmers AND watch the Master Chef at work just a few feet away.
This year, we are partnering with Chef Joseph Jacobsen (the former chef of Degage), who is now the owner of Cork and Knife Provisions — a premier catering company based in Perrysburg. Chef Joseph has always been a big proponent of supporting local farmers. He is a regular buyer of our produce for his clients, and you’ll find our product featured on his menu. This year, Chef Joseph will be offering 3 dinners at our farm — 2 private dinners for 16 guests, and one larger dinner for 50 guests (on Sept 17). And you can now reserve your seats!
Here are the dinner dates:
Saturday, July 24 — Dinner #1 for 16 guests, 6-9 PM.
Friday, August 6 — Dinner #2 for 16 guests, 6-9 PM.
The evening begins with a 6 PM arrival with mocktails and a chance to walk the fields. Our sit-down dinner begins at 7 PM. Due to the smaller guest list, this 5-course dining experience will have a more intimate feel. You’ll be able to see Chef Joseph prepare and plate your meal just a few feet away, and have a chance to talk with him. You’ll also have a chance to rub shoulders with your farmers Kurt & Corinna, who will also join you for dinner. Menu will feature locally sourced meat and produce from our fields — whatever is in season. Sorry, per chef request, no menu substitutions or vegetarian options available. Ticket Price: $100 per person. Price does NOT include gratuities or alcohol. BYO wine/beer/drinks. We’ll provide a mocktail, lemonade, and water for beverages. Dress is “nice” but casual.
How Do I Reserve My Dinner Tickets?
We are not selling these tickets in the online store. Instead, to reserve your seat, you must email your farmer at sharedlegacyfarms@gmail.com and tell me WHAT date and how many tickets you want to reserve. I will then invoice you. If you choose the larger dinner, we will be sure to seat you with your friends. YOU MUST PRE-PAY FOR YOUR DINNER TICKETS VIA CHECK OR PAYPAL within 7 days of your reservation. There will be no paper tickets. We will reach out to you via email 5 days before the dinner with information.
FARMER KURT’S FIELD NOTES
This weekend’s big focus was the garlic harvest. Every July, we spend an entire day on this project. The first step involves “topping” the garlic — so I drive over the beds and cut the tops off a bit. Then I drive over them again with an undercutter bar. This “lifts” the bed up from beneath and loosens the bulbs, making it easier to pull them out. Our crew of volunteers came through and pulled each garlic plant out one by one and placed them in black bulb crates. These were then dumped onto a giant wagon/trailer and carted back to the greenhouses for processing. It was so great to see some of you out here, working alongside us. What a boost in morale that gave us! I appreciate you braving the heat and the mud, and I hope you got some exercise!
What’s next for the garlic?… My crew will lay the garlic on the greenhouse tables, where they will sit for 10 days until they have fully cured. Then we’ll start the laborious process of “processing” the garlic, which involves cutting off the stem and roots and rub off the outer papery thin skins to show off the bright white color underneath.
We mulched our tomatoes with straw this week. Imagine a giant trailer stacked with straw bales (five levels high). We used ALL of it to cover the area around our tomato plants. This seems to help with weeds, water loss through evaporation, and disease control. But it’s itchy work!
Volunteers stopped by Saturday to help us pull garlic from the fields. Thank you for boosting our morale!
The other big job this week has been weeding. Every year, around this time, they start to get away from me. We’ve got a couple beets and carrot beds that are pretty bad, and at this point, it doesn’t make sense to even try to weed them. I’ll chop the tops off and only harvest the roots below. But my priority was the onions, celery, and pepper plants. Jed, Josiah, and I shared the task of cultivating on the tractor. My staff did a lot of hand weeding and hoeing.
The asparagus acre is pretty overgrown too. My biggest concern was getting the weeds out before they flowered – as I’m trying to avoid the spread of weeds to other parts of my fields. Luckily they pull out pretty easily since the ground has been wet. We’ll need to make this a priority this weekend.
There have been a few crop casualties so far in the fields. My recent bed of cut lettuce and mesclun mix dried up in last week’s heat — I had planned to put that in the box for the next two weeks. Lettuce is so very hard to grow in the hot part of the summer, and I had hoped those greens would make it. The edges of my eggplant beds have been nipped by rabbits. I had to replant some of them. I have never seen so many rabbits as I have this year! Must be a lack of carnivores around here.
I also lost both my leeks and sweet potatoes. The latter is especially disappointing, because I loved that variety, but the slips just didn’t root out. My mom gave me new transplants to try and throw into the ground to start over, but it’s too late. They wouldn’t be ready in time. This is a crop that is hit or miss for me every year. You’ll still get sweet potatoes in your share. But I’ll have to buy in this veggie from my partner farm Mile Creek in October, like we did last year, to make sure you get a taste of this fall favorite.
It’s been a wet week, and it looks like there’s more rain in the forecast. This is a little unsettling. I’d rather control the water to the plants via irrigation. But it is what it is. My zucchini has some early stages of blight as a result of the hot temps and wet conditions. This causes the fruit to turn black and fall off. The tomatoes and peppers are looking great. So are the onions. The chard and kale are freaking beautiful and just keeps on coming. The beans are looking good.
The sweet corn is about 2 weeks out. It’s tasseling now and is looking really good. I still haven’t found a solution to my staffing problem of “who will be in charge of pulling sweet corn everyday.” This is a very specialized skill, where it helps to have an experienced crew that can move fast, especially because we do it every morning for a couple hours. I’m under-staffed, and trying to figure out how I can assign this job, so that I don’t end up having to do it myself every morning.
Thanks to Maddie Bella Coffee Roasters for giving us a TON of burlap coffee bags to recycle and reuse. They store their green coffee beans in them, and were looking for a place to offload them instead of throwing them away. After noticing one of our Facebook posts where our crew was weeding the onions, Rich Jambor, Sr. offered to gift us their burlap bags. “Maybe you can use them as a weed mat or something,” he suggested. BINGO. I share this story because it’s a great example of how a community can work together to achieve mutually shared goals.
The boys offload used coffee burlap bags from Maddie and Bella’s. We’ll use them for weed mat.
We planted more melons this week. This is a succession crop, to make sure we have a continuous stream of melons for multiple weeks in a row. Jed also shaped some beds for me that I’ll be planting fall cabbage into. I’m looking ahead into the “summer crop season.” We are at that delicate transition point where the types of crops soon switch over to summer ones. I’m trying to juggle harvest, weeding, and pest control between the rain.
On a personal note, Corinna and I celebrated our 14th wedding anniversary last week. We didn’t get a chance to get away yet on a dinner date. W
The boys offload used coffee burlap bags from Maddie and Bella’s. We’ll use them for weed mat.
e’re hoping to check out the Gideon Owen Wine Company (formerly known as Mon Ami), but I guess it’s hard to get reservations. We’re also shopping for a new upright freezer this week — looking on FB Marketplace first to try and get an old-fashioned, heavy-duty one that will last forever. As always, I appreciate you having our backs. You have no idea how much peace of mind that brings us.
~Your Farmer, Kurt
WEEK 6 ANNOUNCEMENTS
- Sign up for one of our two first Field to Table dinners. Choose from 2 dates: July 24 or Aug. 6th. See our article above for details on times and price. To reserve your spot, you must email Corinna at sharedlegacyfarms@gmail.com and let her know what date and how many people are coming. She will then mail you an invoice.
- It’s time to make your pre-order for Wild Alaskan Salmon. The Salmon Run begins next week in Homer, Alaska! Aaron from CitizenSalmonAlaska.com will be shipping freshly harvested salmon around July 13th. Remember, you can get the best deal when you place a large order, since shipping is built into the price you see online. Feel free to organize a group neighborhood or family/friends order, and have it ship to your house. It will arrive frozen via FedEx. Be sure to use our CSA’s unique coupon code to get 5% off your entire order. Look in your email or the facebook group to see the coupon code.
- Want to volunteer for a couple hours, packing the CSA bin? If you’d like to help out one time during a CSA Pack night (Mondays and Wednesdays from 4-8 PM), please email me at sharedlegacyfarms@gmail.com. We require our volunteers to be vaccinated if you want to be mask-less. Otherwise masks must be worn while working.
- You can order additional items from the Shared Legacy Farms online store. green scallions, red long tropea onions, boxing cabbage, Tokyo Bekhana greens, Red beets, golden beets, chioggia (bulls-eye) beets, rye flour, maple syrup, and honey. Our store link is super easy to remember: www.sharedlegacyfarms.com/store. We reload and open the store inventory on Saturdays, around 6 PM. Just be sure to select the right pickup site that coincides with your pickup location. If the pickup option is greyed out or not available, it means you missed the window to order. You need to place your order 2 days before your site, because we harvest the product early on Monday and Wednesday mornings.
The Bread Share begins this week in Elmore!
WEEK 6 CSA RECIPES
Members: You can download these recipes as a PDF here. These recipes are designed to inspire you to use your box this week! Please check inside our private Facebook group to find your fellow members sharing ideas for what to make with their box! Share a photo and you might be featured in next week’s newsletter!
Balsamic Glazed Grilled Sweet Onions
Vegan Double Chocolate Muffins
Beetroot and Feta Cheese Salad
Quick Pickled Beets and Onions
Spicy Peanut Cabbage and Chard Salad
Slow Cooked Swiss Chard and Potatoes
Glazed Turnips
Miso Roasted Turnips
Parsley or Dill Garlic Butter
Plum Salad with Black Pepper and Parmesan
Beet and Berry Smoothie
Blueberry Raspberry Muffins
Lodi Apple Crisp