CSA Newsletter Week 18

October 22-28, 2023    |    “B” Week    |  FINAL WEEK OF CSA

CSA Week 18 Box Contents:

CARROTS (with tops) ~  (from Wayward Seed Farm) : Remove the green tops as soon as you can, leaving about an inch of stems. Refrigerate these carrots in a plastic bag. You can also store them in a bin of water (like celery) to keep them crisp, changing out the water every few days. Save the tops in a plastic bag. To prep: Organic carrots don’t need to be peeled. Boil 2-inch cubed carrots in rapidly boiling salt water, uncovered, for 7-10 minutes. Fresh carrot tops can be chopped into a green salad or stir-fry too! The greens can be dried and used as an herb like parsley. To freeze: Blanch cut coins for 3 minutes in boiling salt water, dunk in cold ice water for 3 minutes, drain, let dry, and pack in airtight container.

BUTTERNUT WINTER SQUASH (1)  ~  Cut open squash. Scoop out the seeds and pulp. Save the seeds to roast. To cook: Steam 1-2 inch chunks for 15-20 minutes. Puree or top with butter and use for your pumpkin pie filling. Or you can boil 1-2 inch chunks in salted water until tender, 8- 10 minutes. Or cut pumpkin in half, scrape out seeds/pulp, and bake cut-side down with 1/2 inch of water in the pan at 400 degrees for 45 minutes. Then allow to cool and scrape the flesh out and puree in food processor. Pumpkin seeds make a great snack too, baked in some olive oil and salt at 350 degrees until browned.  To freeze: Cook squash and mash or puree it. Then pour it into ice cube trays and freeze. Pop the frozen cubes into freezer Ziplock bags. From our cousin Steve Turnow at Turnow Ventures.

SWEET POTATOES (3#)To store: Keep unwashed sweet potatoes in a cool, dark, place, such as a loosely closed paper bag in a cupboard, and use them within a few weeks. Do not store sweet potatoes in the refrigerator. To prep: Scrub them well. The skin can be eaten, but peel them if you will be eating them raw. If you will be pureeing or mashing them, bake or boil them whole and then remove the skins. To cook: Try raw sweet potatoes cut into sticks for dipping, or grate them into salads. To bake, place whole potatoes (poked with a few holes) each wrapped in foil in a pan and bake at 400 degrees for 45 minutes until the centers are soft. Boil whole sweet potatoes in salted water until very tender, 25-40 minutes. Then mash. To freeze: Place puree into ice cube containers and freeze. When frozen, put cubes in Ziplock freezer bags.

GOLD BALL TURNIPS (no tops) ~ Turnips are a root vegetable, related to arugula and radishes, which are members of the mustard family. This week’s are a golden yellow color! They are best in the fall or spring, when they are small and sweet. To store: The turnip roots should be stored in a plastic bag in the crisper drawer of your fridge for up to a week. To prep: Wash and cut the white roots into wedges or slices. To cook: Serve raw with dip in a veggie tray. Or grate and add them to a salad. Turnips are delicious when roasted with other root vegetables (like carrot, potatoes, rutabaga, garlic). Add a turnip or two to your favorite mashed potato recipe. Or add them into soups and stews. To freeze: Blanch for 3 minutes in hot boiling water. Cool in ice water for 3 minutes, drain and pack into freezer containers or freezer bags.

MILD N WILD LETTUCE MIX ~ This is a slightly mustardy flavored lettuce mix, easy to grow in the fall. Store in the fridge in a Green bag. Wash before use. Use within a week.

SWISS CHARD ~ Swiss chard has expansive, pocketed leaves with stems in a spectrum of colors: red, white, green, yellow. It is actually in the beet family but doesn’t develop a bulb. Its leaves are more tender and delicate than other greens. Eat small leaves raw in salads and blanch or steam larger leaves. You can freeze chard for recipes later To store: Keep dry, unwashed greens in a sealed plastic bag in the refrigerator up to 2 weeks. To prep: Wash leaves in basin of lukewarm water to remove grit. Remove the thicker stems by folding the leaves down the center and cutting out the stem. Stack several leaves on top of each other and slice into 1-inch wide ribbons. To use: Add uncooked greens to a mixed green salad. Steam stem pieces 8-10 minutes, and leaves 4-6 minutes. Or sauté greens until tender in a large sauté pan with olive oil, a pinch of salt, and garlic or onion. Watch for color to brighten as this signals they are done. Serve cooked chard alone as a side dish or use them in soup or with pasta, beans, rice, or potatoes. Chard also goes great in stir-fries or in any recipe calling for spinach. To freeze: Blanch washed greens for 2-3 minutes. Rinse in cold ice water to stop the cooking. Drain and freeze.

This week, you’re getting some of our organic storage pears in your share as a bonus

GREEN BROCCOLI ~ Broccoli is a cool-weather crop, available only in the early summer or fall. It is a member of the cole family. This family also includes cabbage, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, Chinese cabbage, collards, kale and kohlrabi. All of the cole vegetables contain bioflavonoids that help reduce the risk of cancer. To store: 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.

STORAGE PEARS ~ ORGANIC – These pears come from our own tree up front by the staff house, and were picked by the entire Bench family. They will be hard when you first get them, so be sure to ripen them first — 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.

ADD-ON SHARES, WEEK 18,

It’s “B” Week for all our bi-weekly shares — except fruit. Fruit shares were a 16 week share.

ARTISAN CHEESE: Apricot-Ginger Chevre from TurkeyFoot Creek Creamery; Canal Junction’s two hard cheeses: Wabash Erie Canal & Black Swamp Gouda

MADDIE & BELLA COFFEE SHARE: Harvest Blend (crisp, rich, soft spice)

KNUEVEN ICE CREAM: Chocolate Banana Chunk

FINAL CSA PICKUP INSTRUCTIONS:

This week is your final CSA pickup. You will not be taking home the actual plastic vegetable bin this time.  Instead, at pickup, our site host crew will pull a liner bag from the CSA tote and place it right into your car! Please make sure you bring back all your CSA totes you may have collecting in your garage! 

If you renewed your membership for 2024 by Monday night, you will receive your free gallon of apple cider at your final pickup site.

END OF YEAR CSA EVALUATION

Fill out our CSA evaluation here by November 30.

We’d like to hear what you thought of your CSA experience. Please fill out our Google Form survey at this link before November 30. We have some specific questions that we’re looking for answers to, but we also want to give you a chance to give constructive feedback. Thank you!

Corinna took Farmer Kurt to Keto Ramen for the first time this week!

Farmer Kurt Says Good-Bye

It’s time to say good-bye for the season. This is always a bittersweet moment for us. We will be sad to see you go, but we’re also ready to get a little break. In a couple weekends, we’re hoping to round up the boys and head to Hocking Hills for a weekend getaway at our Uncle Jeff’s cabin — as a way to celebrate ending our season. Later this Christmas, we’ll be doing a 7-day trip to Oregon, to visit Corinna’s brother and nieces/nephews. And sometime in February, I’m hoping to whisk Corinna away for a long weekend to celebrate the big 5-0… I know, she looks incredible for fifty, doesn’t she?

We have some GREAT news for next year! Thanks to all of your “early decisions” to renew for 2024, as of Saturday afternoon, we currently have 310 shares sold – -that’s about 80% full. We have hit our sales goal, and we want to thank you! What does this mean for us as farmers? Well, for one thing it puts us in a confident position financially, starting January 1st. Normally farmers have to take out loans to make sure they have cash flow until the summer harvest comes in. But with so many of you renewing, we can confidently budget and predict what our financial position is for every month. So thank you for this gift to us.

The tomatoes are all fully harvested — the last of the romas and globes are ripening in black crates — which is why you’re still seeing them in the online store one more week. The tomato stakes were all pulled. This week I’ll be chopping those plants. I chopped our watermelon radishes down. All the plastic has been pulled off the beds. The fields look pretty bare now. This week you’ll see a FRUIT in your veggie box. I decided to throw in some of our “storage pears” from our tree up by the road. Every year, we have a blast climbing ladders and picking the fruit off this tree. The pears are some kind of mix of Asian pear and Bosc — they’re real crunchy. Let them soften before you eat them. But these are organic!

Our crew picked the storage pears last week

I’ve shifted into planning mode for next year, believe it or not! I’m sending off soil samples so I can map out my fertility plan. WIth the rain this week, we weren’t able to do much in the field, so I had my crew sort sweet potatoes, clean up the pack shed, empty out the silver cooler, and take some time off.

Corinna and I bought tickets to Mexico City for the crew. They leave on November 13th from Chicago Ohare — we’ll make the road trip to the airport at 1 AM, so they can catch a super early flight home. We’re giving you an opportunity to Tip the Crew before they leave — and we’ll present them with our collective thank you as we see them off. If you’d like to give something, that’d be awesome, but no pressure. We’re also hosting an end-of-year hog roast “Adios” party for all my crew —  including the production crew, harvest crew, site crew, bin washers, our CSA Coach Cadie, our farm neighbors, even our book-keeper! Everyone who has a part of making this farm run — it’s important to me to bring us all together and celebrate our end of year success.

Asuncion cuts the celery root from last week. It was pretty muddy!

All in all, this has been our absolute best year in our history. Great weather, great soil, good yields, good sales, not so many crop failures. We were able to pay off our tractor loan this month — it feels amazing to end the year with a strong surplus. We couldn’t have done it without YOU. Corinna and I are so grateful.

If you renewed your membership with us for 2024, a special thank you. And if this is good-bye to CSA, I want to say how much I appreciated the chance to grow for you. We say good-bye with a firm handshake, and please know that my farm is always open to serve you again. If CSA isn’t your thing, consider just buying from my online store next year every now and then. We’ll keep in touch — Corinna will do a monthly email to keep you in the loop. And for all of you wanting Thanksgiving veggies, we’ll let you know details of when you can order from our Fall Pop-Up  market, after we get back from our trip to Hocking Hills. 

Your farmer, Kurt

Clara Eckel made this roasted romanesco soup last week.

WEEK 18 ANNOUNCEMENTS

1. TIP THE HARVEST CREW: If you’d like to show your appreciation for our harvest crew, we invite you to leave a “tip” for Noah, John, Polo, Pedro, Jose, and Asuncion. This is completely optional. We will share this equally with our crew to show our appreciation of their hard work this season. You may either write a check (made out to Shared Legacy Farms), or donate via PayPal (see email) or Venmo (@Corinna-Bench). This money will help with getting our crew home to Mexico too! (They just booked their flights this past week!)
2. Early Renewal registration for next season’s CSA ends this Monday, October 23rd, at 10 PM for all current CSA members. Get the sign up link in your EMAIL!!
3. Thanksgiving Pop-Up Market?… YES. We’ll do some kind of online store pop-up market in November to help you get ready for Thanksgiving! Stay tuned to your email.
4. Shop the online store this week. We have Golden Berries, purple kohlrabi, sweet potatoes, Heart of Gold winter squash, pie pumpkins, butternut squash, honey nut mini squash, potatoes, Tokyo Bekana asian greens, green cabbage, watermelon radishes, globe tomatoes, dinosaur kale, dandelion greens, radicchio,  chard, red or gold turnip (no tops), hakurei white salad turnips, daikon radish mix, purple haze carrots, orange carrots with tops, gold or red beets, Honeycrisp apples, Apple Medley bag, honey, extra flower bouquets. Be sure to place your order before Monday or Wednesday morning (depending on your pickup site).
5. THIS IS OUR FINAL WEEK OF THE CSA, SO YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO TAKE THE FINAL CSA BIN HOME WITH YOU. The bags will be lined with a large plastic liner bag, so all we have to do is grab the bag out of the bin and put it in your car. Please bring ALL plastic totes, green hampers, wooden crates, egg boxes, etc. back this coming week. We will charge you $8 for any missing totes.
6. BRING YOUR CSA DEPOSIT PAYMENT TO YOUR FINAL PICKUP IF YOU CAN. Don’t forget to post-date the check for January 2, 2024. You can also mail it to the farm.

7. WHEN DO I GET MY CIDER BONUS? If you renewed your vegetable share before Monday night, October 23, I will pass your bonus to you on your final week at pickup.

Photo of the Week Winner:

Ellen Rodriguez gets this week’s prize with this great idea: a sheet pan using roasted cabbage and brats. Such an easy meal!!

This week’s Photo of the Week winner is Ellen Rodriguez with this roasted cabbage sheet pan meal.

WEEK 18 CSA RECIPES

Members: You can download this week’s recipes here. Here is what Coach Cadie Jardin has prepared for you…

One Pot Sweet Potato and Chard Salad
Chard Stir Fry
Garlic Herb Chicken Sweet Potato Sheet Pan Meal
Roasted Squash with Sesame Seeds and Cumin
Garlic Roasted Potatoes and Carrots
Slow Cooker Chicken and Kale Sweet Potato Stew
Savory Stuffed Butternut Squash
Glazed Turnips
Roasted Butternut Squash with Cider Vinaigrette
Sausage & Apple Butternut Squash
Carrot and Butternut Squash Puree
Curried Carrot Soup