Monthly Archives: July 2010

Hi Everyone,

Expect the following in your shares this week:

Lettuce

Green Beans

Carrots

Cucumbers*

Zucchini*

1 bunch arugula

1 bunch onions

1 head garlic

Herbs

(There will also be bunches of amaranth greens for people who want them.)

Mature green beans plants, young green bean plants and baby lettuce.

We have been having quite the time lately!  Over the weekend, I got the opportunity to speak to a few seasoned, well-known vegetable growers in the community for a few hours.  It was a wonderful experience for me as a farmer.  I got to hear about their successes and failures and received advice on what we can do this season and beyond.  They gave me some great tips for how to deal with the hot weather, how to resurrect our brittle kale plants, and how to water when there is no rain.  This is our first dry, hot season, so we are working as hard as we can to adapt our skills and knowledge in order to grow the best possible vegetables.

With that, I am concerned about our cucumber and summer squash plants.  We will be spending this week implementing a new watering system that will hopefully help us produce higher yields of these vegetables.  As far as this week goes, I am unsure of the quantity we will have, but hopefully enough for everyone to enjoy.

Recipes

Cucumber and Parsley Bulgar Salad

1 cup bulgar

1-2 cucumbers, peeled and diced into 1/4 inch dice

1 bunch parsley, finely chopped

1/4 cup chopped onion, scallion or chives

1 clove garlic, minced

juice of 1-2 lemons

3 TBS olive oil

Cover bulgur with hot water and let stand until the grains are soft and the liquid is absorbed, about 30 minutes to 1 hour.   Drain any extra liquid.  Toss with all remaining ingredients and season with salt and pepper.  Let stand for another half hour.  Add more lemon juice if desired.  Serve with a nice tosses salad or grilled vegetables.

Basic Green Beans

For warm green bean dishes.

Begin with any amount green beans.  Cut the ends off (or “tip and tail” them) and cut in half (if desired).  Place green beans into boiling salted water and cook for 3-4 minutes, or until tender.  Drain in a colander and then dry on a clean towel.  Toss with olive oil and herbs, pesto, hot pepper/garlic/sesame oil, or your favorite dressing or sauce.  Serve warm.

Hello Everyone,

I am starting with the list of produce for the week:

Carrots

Summer Squash

Cucumbers

Onions

Cabbage

Kale or Chard

Herbs

This week I will not be posting any recipes, but if anyone has anyone questions, please don’t hesitate to post questions.

We are growing a wide variety of both summer squash and cucumbers this year.  To keep you well-informed, here is a description of them.

Cucumbers A popular summer treat, cucumbers are refreshing and easy to prepare.  They are usually enjoyed raw in salads and cold soups.  Cucumbers often have a bitter flavor which is concentrated in the skin and the ends, so peeling them and chopping the ends off helps keep the bitterness at bay.  We pick the cucumbers at a variety of stages.  Younger cucumbers have a slightly wrinkled, thin skin with small seed while more mature cucumbers have a shiny, thick skin and large seeds.  When a recipe calls for the seeds of cucumbers to be removed, it generally refers to mature cucumbers.  Small, young cucumbers are good for pickling because they stay crisp longer.

The five varieties we are growing this year are Poona Keerna, Boothby Blonde, National Pickling, Lemon and Marketmore 76.

Poona Keerna is an Indian heirloom that has a pale yellow skin and is shaped like a Kirby.  They are a heavy producer, easy to grow and have a nice flavor and texture.  They are early so there will be more of them than the green ones in the beginning of cucumber season.

Boothby Blonde is a new variety for the Second Wind CSA.  The seed catalog we order from called it “a staff favorite” so we decided to give it a try.  It is quite yummy!  It look so similar to the Poona Keerna that we can hardly tell them apart, save the black spots that adorn the Boothby Blonde.

Lemon cucumbers have quite the reputation among locavores.  Farm market and CSA aficionados rave about the lemon cuke.  They look like lemons, but taste like cucumbers.  Some people claim that they taste citrusy, but I will leave that up to you to decide.  I love their flavor, both as a young cucumber and a mature one.

National Pickling The name says it all.  Well, not quite, because these cucumbers can also be eaten as is, no pickling needed.  National Pickling cucumbers are super crunchy, allowing them to make delicious, crunchy pickles.  I also recommend making cucumber salad out of them, for the very same reason.

Marketmore 76 is the long, fat, green cucumber we all grew up eating.  This type of cucumber is usually what you find in the store, only better coming from the CSA!  We try to pick the Marketmore big and ripe because they have the best flavor and texture as a mature cucumber.  These cucumbers are also large, so they are good for making salads, soups and sauces that call for cucumbers, such as Gazpacho, tsatsiki and tabouli.  We will have recipes for all these in the weeks to come.

Summer Squash The first summer squash of the season are quite exciting.  We are growing 4 heirloom varieties this year.  Summer squash matures quite fast, so there might be giant squashes at times.  We find that these are best for making things like zucchini bread or zucchini souffles, leaving the smaller tender ones for other dishes that highlight the flavor and texture of summer squash.

Dark Green Zucchini is the run-of-the-mill green zucchini.

Costata Romanesca is my favorite.  Quite the looker, Costata Romanesca is ribbed and striped making it quite beautiful to look at, whole and sliced.  Plus, it has great flavor, even when large.

Yellow Crookneck is a yellow squash with a bumpy skin and a crooked neck.  Makes great fried squash.

Benning’s Green Tint is the weird flying saucer shaped vegetable in the squash bin.  Grab one of these and you won’t be sorry.  The shape may seem odd at first, but you will soon learn the virtue of the large slices you can make if you like to put summer squash on the grill.

Question of the Week

This week’s question is an issue we have been wanting to address for a while.   Many of you have asked us this question in one form or another, but paraphrased it is:

The weather is so different this year from last.  How is the season going with all the dryness and heat?

As shareholders, I think you should be well-informed of not only our farming practices, but how the season is going and how we deal with difficulties.  And unfortunately, I think we will see the down side to this season this week.  In short, we have had some crop failures.  We have had to take many crops out of the ground due to poor germination and bug damage.  These crops include arugula, mustard, bok choy, Asian greens, radishes, cauliflower, herbs and now kale and our second round of summer cabbages are suffering greatly.  We have a high concentration of bugs at the farm and one of the ways we deal with them is by covering things with row cover.  This has not worked for us for a couple of reasons.  First, it created a mirco-climate for many bugs that originate in the ground, such as aphids.  Second, the row cover has been causing the plants to get burned, but when we take the row cover off, the plants suffer greatly.  Since the plants are already vulnerable due to the heat, they are more suseptable to the air-borne bugs that we use the row cover to protect them from.  So this week, we don’t have much greens to round the shares off with, and that’s why.

On the other hand, our tomatoes, peppers and eggplants look gorgeous.  They love the heat, and we are using drip irrigation this year, so they are quite happy to get their roots watered and to hang out in the dry heat all day.  We are predicting that we have a good onion harvest, with less rot on the storage onions.  We are also hoping to have a good long summer squash season.  Some of you may remember that we had a short, measly summer squash season last year since a fungus attacked our squash plants due to the wet chilly weather.  There is rain in the forecast, so we will be spending time this week seeding all sorts of veggies that will be ready in the weeks to come.

It’s just like the cliche, you can’t control the weather.  We try, but sometimes our efforts are no match.  That’s why it is important that we grow a wide variety of vegetables that cover the spectrum of our seasonal climate.

Have a great week.

Erin and Sam

Hello Everyone,

I hope you are all staying cool in this hot weather we are experiencing.

This week we have a few new items that I hope you enjoy.  A couple of them might be unfamiliar to you, so please read the information on the vegetables this week if you have any questions.

Expect the following in your shares this week:

Lettuce

1 head red cabbage

1 bunch red amaranth

1 bunch carrots

1 bunch chard

1 bunch onions

Shelling peas

Herbs*

*We are trying something new with the herbs.  We will have the herbs all together and members can take what they will use from the bin.  There will be a variety of different herbs to chose from.  Limit one bunch of each type.

Red Cabbage: Typically known as a summer cabbage, red cabbage is extremely versatile.  It has a mild flavor and pleasant crunch.  Use red cabbage in raw slaw dishes, as a topping for tacos and burritos, or, if you feel like turning on the stove/oven, red cabbage can also be seasoned and braised or cooked.  for this week’s cabbage recipe, I am posting a popular recipe from last season.  You may use either almond butter or peanut butter in the dressing.  Each gives the salad a different, yet delicious flavor.

Fresh Cabbage Salad

1/2 Red Cabbage, thinly sliced

Dressing:
1 Tablespoon minced ginger
2 cloves minced garlic
1/4 cup almond butter OR peanut butter
3 tablespoons honey
1 Tablespoon sesame oil
1 Tablespoon grapeseed oil
2-3 Tablespoons soy sauce

Garnish:

1/4 cup chopped chives, onions or scallions

chopped basil or cilantro
Mix dressing ingredients together until very smooth and light enough to coat the cabbage.  Toss cabbage with dressing.  Top with garnishes of choice and serve.

Amaranth: The amaranth in the shares is a “leafy” vegetable, but it is indeed the same plant that the grain amaranth comes from.  Amaranth has a high nutrition content, the greens are particularly high in vitamins.  We grow amaranth in the summer because amaranth does remarkably well.  In fact, it has gained attention in recent years because it is a food that grows well in parts of the world stricken with drought and poor soil.  For us, amaranth is a spinach substitute.  Its mild flavor lends itself to being adapted to many dishes.  Amaranth can be eaten raw, wilted, braised, sauteed, steamed, etc.  Like spinach, chard and beets, amaranth has a high oxalic acid content, so those sensitive to oxalic acid should take care when preparing it.

Onions: This week we are distributing our sweet non-storage onions.  (Although they will keep for quite a while.)  These onions are fresh from the ground and will not have cured.  Peel back the thin, tough layers and chop off the ends. These onions are mild and sweet enough to be eaten raw, thus pairing well with many summery foods that do not require cooking.

***A reminder***

Please sign in at distribution!  Please make sure you are only taking what the sign designates! We only pick enough produce for the number of shares we have, and sometimes what we pick is all we have, so please take care to read the signs and take only what the sign says.

We are happy to have “substitutes” pick up shares, however, please inform them of all distribution procedures.  Let them know that:

1.  They should bring their own bags.  We do not have a supply of bags and finding appropriate vessels for shares can be a bit time consuming.

2.  They should sign in.

3.  They should take only the designated amount of produce.

Thanks!