CSA Farm Newsletter Week 15 (October 1-7, 2023)
Farm Newsletter Week 15
October 1-7, 2023 | “A” Week
The crew harvests lettuce for last week’s box
What’s in the Box this Week?
HEART OF GOLD WINTER SQUASH (2) ~ This winter squash looks like an acorn squash, but with beautiful orange, white, and green markings. Store these on your counter.To prep: To bake, slice in half lengthwise, scoop out seeds, and place facedown on a cookie sheet. Add 1/2 inch of water to pan. Bake at 400 degrees for 45 minutes until shells are soft and starting to collapse. Remove and fill with butter, brown sugar, maple syrup, seasoning or fillings. You can also just cut the squash into rounds and bake it. the skins of this squash are edible. To freeze: Simply cook squash and mash or puree it. Then pour it into ice cube trays or directly into Ziplocks and freeze.
WHITE POTATOES – (from Mile Creek Farm) ~ To store: Keep unwashed potatoes in a cool, dark, dry place, such as a loosely closed paper bag in a cupboard. They will keep for two weeks at room temperature. Light turns them green, and proximity to onions causes them to sprout. Don’t put them in the refrigerator, as low temperatures convert the starch to sugars. To prep: Scrub well and cut off any sprouts or green skin. Peeling is a matter of preference. In soups, the skins may separate from the flesh and float in the broth, but when baked, pan- fried or roasted, the skins acquire a crisp, crunchy texture. To cook: Boil potatoes in water for 20-30 minutes until tender. If desired, mash them. Use potatoes in soups, hash browns, and salads. Roast sliced or whole small potatoes with fresh herbs, salt, and olive oil at 400 degrees until tender, about 20 minutes.
DAIKON RADISHES (MIX) ~ Daikons are big, long radishes with a pointed tip. They come in multiple colors — red, purple, green, and white. Wrap it in a damp kitchen towel and store it for up to two weeks in the fridge. Before preparing, make sure it’s properly cleaned and peeled using a vegetable peeler, as the peel is tough and bitter. Daikon radish has a milder taste than your more common radish varieties, and it can be eaten raw, pickled, marinated, dried, or cooked. It’s also popular with sashimi. Great when paired with bok choy, cucumber, parsley, carrots, mushrooms, peanuts, or cilantro. Traditional Chinese medicine praises the stimulating effects to digestion from daikon radish, which is why it’s often used as an ingredient in Chinese cooking to alleviate a full stomach after a heavy meal. When used with honey, it is also said to work well as cough syrup to treat cold symptoms. To freeze: Do not freeze raw, as the high water content will turn these to mush. Instead, blanch in boiling water, and freeze in Ziplock for up to 3 months.
This is what happens when cauliflower starts to go to seed. It flowers!
PURPLE BROCCOLI ~ Gorgeous purple colored heads, same delicious broccoli taste. Wrap broccoli loosely in a plastic bag and keep it in the crisper drawer of your refrigerator. Store for a week. To prep: For organic broccoli, soak head upside down in cold salted water (1 teaspoon salt to 8 cups of water) for 30 minutes to remove any hidden field worms. Any critters will float to the top. You can eat the stalks, leaves, and head of broccoli. Break the head into florets of desired size. Then use a peeler or paring knife to cut the tough skin off the broccoli stalk, and cut into equal size pieces. The stalks will require a few extra minutes of cooking time. To freeze: Cut into florets. Blanch in boiling water for three minutes or steam for five minutes. Remove and dunk in ice water for 5 minutes. Drain. Individually quick freeze broccoli on a parchment-lined tray and then package into air-tight freezer bags.
POBLANO PEPPERS (4) ~ These peppers have a mild heat to them, and are used for Tex-Mex cooking! To store: Refrigerate peppers unwashed in a sealed plastic bag in the crisper drawer for 1-2 weeks. To prep: Cut in half and remove the seeds from the inside. Slice, chop or mince. To use: Try roasting peppers over a flame until the skin blackens. Place the pepper inside a plastic bag to cool. Then remove to slide off the skins. To freeze: Wash and dry peppers. Freeze whole or cut into bite-size pieces and place in Ziplock freezer bag, removing as much air as possible.
Purple broccoli has a gorgeous color!
MILD & WILD SALAD MIX 0.4 lb (salad greens) ~ This is an Asian green! Store unwashed lettuce in a plastic bag in the refrigerator. To store lettuce that you have already washed and dried with a spinner, place back in a plastic bag with a dry paper towel in the bag, and place the package in the vegetable crisper bin. Use within 4 days.
SWEET ITALIAN RED OR ORANGE FRY PEPPERS (2) ~ To store: Refrigerate peppers unwashed in a sealed plastic bag in the crisper drawer for 1-2 weeks. To prep: Cut in half and remove the seeds from the inside. Slice, chop or mince. To use: Try roasting peppers over a flame until the skin blackens. Place the pepper inside a plastic bag to cool. Then remove to slide off the skins. To freeze: Wash and dry peppers. Freeze whole or cut into bite-size pieces and place in Ziplock freezer bag, removing as much air as possible.
RED ROMA TOMATOES (6) SYLVANIA/ELMORE ONLY ~ Your final tomatoes of the season! Store these on the counter until ripe. Then transfer to the fridge to keep them from spoiling. Tomatoes can be frozen whole in a Ziplock bag with their skin on. These will have a lot of juice in them. They are great for canning whole tomatoes or making juice, FYI.
Geoff Mendenhall took this photo of our farm dinner with his drone.
CUSTOMER PHOTO OF THE WEEK!
This week, I awarded the Photo of the Week to Geoff Mendenhall. Geoff attended our Field to Table dinner 2 weeks ago, and he brought his drone to the event! He was able to capture beautiful aerial images of our farm, and even recorded a short video! I want to thank him for this gift to us! (Plus, he had some fun bonding with my boys over his drone).
WEEK 15 ADD-ON SHARES: We are Week “A”
Odd-numbered weeks of our CSA season (week 1,3,5) are called “A” weeks. And even-numbered weeks (week 2,4,6) are called “B” weeks. If you have any kind of non-veggie, bi-weekly share, you have been assigned to either “A” or “B” week for the season. If you get a cheese share, it always comes on Week “A.”
Fruit Share (not organic):
Remember, the fruit share is a 16-week product. This is the FINAL week for bi-weekly “WEEK A” fruit share members.
HONEYCRISP APPLES (Quarry Hill) ~ Delicious apple for eating out of hand, or baking! Store in a plastic bag in your fridge, where they’ll keep for 4-5 weeks!
AMBROSIA APPLES (Quarry Hill) ~ Another super-star apple in its own elite class. You will fall in love with this sweet apple!!! Hard to find. Store in your fridge in the crisper in a plastic bag. Best for eating out of hand.
BOSC PEARS (Quarry Hill) ~ These pears have a brown skin, and are delicious when poached! Pears are picked unripe and ripen best at home off the tree. You should always purchase pears that are firm to the touch. A ripe pear will be ready at home when the skin around the neck gives to slight pressure. Note: Cut pears will turn brown when exposed to air. Coat them with lemon juice to prevent this. To store: To ripen pears, place in a loosely closed paper bag out of the fridge at room temperature until the skin responds to a gentle pressure at the neck of the fruit. After pears have ripened, store them in a plastic bag in the fridge in your crisper drawer.
Artisan Cheese Share:
Raclette from Black Radish Creamery ~ washed rind-style cheese. Slight funk, nutty with creamy texture. Award-winner!
Red Bandit from Black Radish Creamery ~ young red cheddar. Creamy milkd and buttermilk tang. Award-winner, best-seller.
Honey Chevre from MacKenzie Creamery
Ice Cream Flavor of the Week:
Pumpkin Spice from Knueven Creamery.Be sure to stop by their truck at each of the pickup sites to grab your milk and ice cream order.
Coffee Flavor of the Week:
Before the Dawn, Maddie & Bella Coffee Company
Kurt poses with other leaders of the Midwest Mechanical Weed Control Field Day in Wooster, OH, this past week. Kurt was a key organizer of this huge event.
FARMER KURT’S FIELD NOTES
This week I was gone from the farm Monday-Wednesday, attending the Midwest Mechanical Weed Control Field Day, in Wooster, OH. This event featured all kinds of state-of-the art cultivation tools. It’s like Farm Science Review for weeder machines! Over 200 farmers attended, and I took both Jed and Josiah (and Glen) with me! We watched field demos of autonomous tractors, drones, and more. I was in my element!! I geek out on farm machinery. I brought my Farmall 200 and the Hefty G to showcase. I’ve actually been one of the key members of the planning committee for this event. For the last 5 months, I’ve been on weekly Zoom calls to get this all organized. I had a lot of contacts with people in Ohio, who were able to come and present or be vendors. This made the event AWESOME this year. I got to know my buddy Sam really well, and did some major networking for those 2 days.
Of course, that left my beautiful bride at home, running the show! She managed things swimmingly. In fact, she teased me that there were ZERO hiccups while she was in charge. I had NO phone calls or texts while I was gone. (That just means that I organized it very well for my absence! LOL.)
There’s a giant field of watermelon radishes waiting to be harvested.
In my absence, I kept things simple on the farm. The crew mostly focused on harvest: CSA harvest, winter squashes, carrots for a wholesale order, and more tomatoes. John and Noah seeded more greens for the final weeks of CSA. We had some rain this week, so I had to shuffle some tasks around to keep my crew out of the fields.
I did some cover-crop seeding before I left for Wooster. This field will be our tomato crop next year, so I needed to get it seeded up. I can see the end of the season! As I’ve been doing my field walks, I noticed some “cabbage maggot pests” in my field turnips and radishes. I had hoped to put those into the final boxes of CSA. That may affect my yields. We’ll see. My Brussels sprouts are loaded in wooly aphids again this year, too. Such a disappointment! I think it’s the ground — they need more fertility next year. I think I’m going to mow most of them down, so I’m not tempted to rescue them. Last year, I sold some that were poor quality, and said, “Never again.”
We’ve got plenty of food though, even with the damage. Hoping to load up the boxes near the end of the season! You’ve got some great final weeks ahead.
Jose arranges scarlett turnips on the wash trays last week. The crew is looking forward to heading home in a month.
Our crew will be heading back to Mexico the first of November. We will be arranging their flights for them. Part of the H2A worker visa program agreement is that we cover their travel expenses to and from the farm. I always like to send them home on a direct flight — it’s faster than taking a bus, and by the end of the year, they just want to get home and see their wives and kids. These guys have been so amazing for us! I can’t even tell you how much better my life is knowing I have a solid, reliable crew behind me. At the end of the season, we like to allow our CSA members to “tip the crew” to help send them on their way home. I’ll let you know more about that in a couple weeks.
Remember that this is week 15 out of 18 of our CSA season. The end is in sight. Many of you are asking, “What happens for next year? How can I sign up?” Never fear: Corinna will walk you through that process next week. I know we start pre-registration on October 15, early in the morning. She is working out the early-bird signup offer this coming week, lining up our vendors, and adjusting our pricing to account for increasing labor wages from the H2A worker visa program. We really appreciate it when you can give us your commitment in the fall like this. It helps us pay the bills January-June, and helps us know where we stand with our sales. (Plus, it just makes us feel really good when a lot of you sign up again so early!)
Kurt
My brussels sprouts are covered with wooly aphids again this year. Looks like I’ll be chopping the whole crop down.
WEEK 15 ANNOUNCEMENTS
- Save the Date! Our Farm’s “Chopped! SLF Edition” Cooking Competition will take place at Cork and Knife’s beautiful location in Toledo, on October 13th. Our contestants for this competition will be chosen from this week’s Spaghetti Squash Starter Challenge. Tickets for this event will go on sale on Tuesday, October 3. You can watch our finalists duke it out for the coveted prize of “SLF Chopped Champion.” It will be limited to 40 people, so keep that in mind!!
- Take the Spaghetti Squash Starter Challenge before October 2nd! Create an appetizer/starter course that features spaghetti squash in some way. NOTE: It MUST be a starter AND prominently feature spaghetti squash as a main ingredient in order to qualify for judging!! Take a photo of the finished product and post it by October 2nd at 8 PM in the private Facebook group (or email it to me). Hashtag it #squashchoppedchallenge so we can find your entry! Four winners will be chosen from this week’s challenge, and they will face off for 2 rounds in our own rendition of the famous “CHOPPED” TV cooking show at Cork & Knife’s kitchen and dining room on October 13th. In each round, our contestants will have to create an appetizer, main, or dessert in 30 minutes, using the mystery ingredients provided at their station.
- When can you sign up for next year’s CSA?!… We will be opening the doors to pre-registration for next summer season on October 15th. We give all our current members and Sampler members first dibs on the full-season spots for next year. You will have until October 23rd to renew at the early bird price (and get our free bonus gift). After that, the bonus/early price goes away. We open remaining spots to our wait list on October 25th. Look for next year’s pricing and sign up details in next week’s newsletter!
- You can order additional items from the Shared Legacy Farms online store. Our store link is super easy to remember: www.sharedlegacyfarms.com/store. 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 36 hours before your site. We harvest the product on Monday and Wednesday mornings — early. This week, the store will have: Heart of Gold winter squash, Honey Nut squash (limited), spaghetti squash, delicata squash purple broccoli, italian sweet peppers, poblano peppers, dinosaur kale, curly kale, dandelion greens, tatsoi, green beans mix, cilantro, head lettuce, chard, white cauliflower, red turnip (no tops), daikon radish mix, fennel, sweet banana peppers, hot banana peppers, gold or red beets, tomatillos, ground cherries, Jonathan apples, Crimson Crisp apples, Golden Supreme apples, Asian pears (discounted).
Beth Phlegar roasted tomatoes with balsamic vinegar
WEEK 15 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!
Savory Stuffed Heart of Gold Squash
Sausage and Apple Squash
Spicy Roasted Daikon Radish French Fries
Cadie’s Vegetable Loaded Chili (also uses squash)
Shredded Daikon Salad
Chicken Potatoes with Garlic Parmesan Cream Sauce
Roasted Poblano and Potato Skillet
Creamy Poblano Soup
Asian Beef, Broccoli and Cabbage Stir Fry
Broccoli Caesar Salad
Crock Pot Apple Pear Cider
Crockpot Apple Butter