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CSA Week 12 Newsletter

In the beginning of the week, we all thought it was too cool, too soon. By the end of this week, we were steamed into eagerness for fall. So the storm came and the temperature dropped twenty degrees whilst the wind tore apart the mosquito gazebo and felled dead oaks pell mell through the chickenyard.

With a headlamp, predawn, I surveyed the damage and noted a rain covering askew upon the Playhouse RV, fetched a ladder and leaned it up and ascended to yank the roofing home. The storm I’d thought I’d dodged before bed came upon me unannounced in a deluge, as if a bathtub had been upended above my head, and I had literally to laugh aloud through the waterfall.

A day that starts with such a baptism feels good to live.

The vegetables were into it, too.

inside box 12 is a melon, and

  • Onions – Onions are not to be placed into direct association with your melons; the internet is full of charlatans that will mislead you into wasting a perfectly good summer quinessence of a melon, if you do not be’ware.
  • Potatoes
  • Melon – take your melon and cut or ball it up and drizzle with honey, then scatter your holy basil up onto it, tiny piece-meal? Or, you can just eat it.
  • Tomatoes – This is the time of year in which I try to blend the words “tomato” and “tornado” in a satisfying way.
  • Cherry tomatoes
  • Zucchini 
  • Eggplant 
  • Ripe peppers, not hot.
  • Radishes
  • Edamame – Don’t eat the pod. The storm knocked a bunch of dirt onto things so wash them first. Then boil them, salt them, and eat them. Could boil em and pop them out of their pods to use in your stirfry or blended into dip.
  • Cabbage
  • Tulsi/holy basil (you’ve been down too long in the midnight sea)– makes magical tea, or you could do something with it and your melon.
Kristin was out early saving the cabbages from the morning soaker (they split when they drink too much)

PS – Did you find the hidden toad up top?

Week 11 CSA Newsletter

The predator came back this morning and found where mama and the dozen had bedded down near the bird feeders. The chicks escaped while mom sacrificed herself to save them. It was not a great way to start the day and it wasn’t until the end of harvest that I stopped feeling gloomy. Hmm, I tried glossing over the Part 2 of the Bad Morning Blues I see. Well I was raised catholic so let’s do confession; when I tried to herd the 10 baby chicks to safety at dawn this morning, I fatally injured one of the chicks. A metal wall I was using to corral them tipped over on him (I’m gonna pretend to know it was a rooster to take the edge off, ok? and I had to end his life by hand. You might not be a baby chicken massacrer but perhaps you have made poor decisions that you regretted vehemently and you understand how it goes. Ugh.

But then there were ten, and after harvest was done we had a comical time trying to corral them, finally succeeding in capturing half the Orphans (as that generation are now collectively known), enabling us to box them up and send them to their new home at CSA shareholder Cody’s house – where they will grow up adored by her two children and spoiled as the only poultry people present. So that was nice. The remaining five will be bravely facing life and the lurking predators and the dangerous Gabe Guy with the rest of the flock.

There is also a vegetable predator marauding in the greenhouse – a woodchuck, so with the aid of a motion sensor alarm I send him running with a warning shot from the .22, but if he returns and continues to evade the live trap while making an absolute hog of himself on our produce, we might get to find out how his species tastes.

woodchuck chomped

The deer, however, are no problem at all this year and it’s relaxing not having to worry about them – especially since we finally finished the amazing new deer fence yesterday (that last part was unlikely to be breached, but the possibility of being proven wrong had kept your farmer up at night worrying about the tender little fall crop seedlings growing up just inside there).

Foraging continues: this time of year is all blackberries and wild mushrooms – this week we brought a load of chicken of the woods over to Neighbor Marcia’s to refrigerate for the market, and found a hoard of far superior quality and quantity when we were driving away up her driveway looking into her woods! All rejoiced, and the abundance helped make the farmer’s market our most successful ever!

And in happiest news, mighty enough to counterbalance the chicken problems; the cat has officially adopted us and its name is Ranger and the boys love it and it purrs when we pet and pick it up.

Farm Life taketh away but it also giveths … so, so much.

Inside Box 11

  • Little Old School Pears – eat these fast or they will become mush. Ideally eat them at the exact moment the greenish tint turns yellowish. If you wait too many minutes longer the flesh softens and browns. But they’re pretty yummy so try your skills at timing their consumption. Put them all in a shallow bowl where you can see them all; the comparison allows you to see which are yellow. Yellow ones might last a few more minutes if refrigerated but why not just eat it now?
  • Bok Choi bagged with Baby Broccoli
  • Melonnote: melons don’t keep getting riper/sweeter while they sit, unlike tomatoes
  • either Radishes or Tomatillos
  • Eggplants
  • Zucchinis
  • a Cucumber
  • Tomatoes
  • Cherry Tomatoes
  • Shallots
  • Italian Frying Peppers and one ripe Bell Pepper – use them the same.
  • Jalepeno
  • Sweet Corn
  • Lettuce Leaf Italian Basil
  • Kale Microgreens

wEEK 10 csa nEWSLETTER

I’m not going to dwell or bemoan or wax forboding but it is just a science fact felt in the bones of all life local that summer has peaked and is now on the slow opening slide into the wintertimes. Trees know it, we know it. This part of the ride is really pretty. We’ll strive to remember to look up, and look out(ward).

We foraged lobster and chicken if the woods mushrooms, said forever farewell to the last O.G. Ginger chicken, and picked 10 pounds of chokecherries and a nice little pile of blackberries … we missed the opening salvo of these but are ready to ride the rest of the wave.

This week,

, which of course means that we mulched, and weeded, and welcomed the white and grey kitten to hang around if it wanted, and a chick got munched by a larger wild bird, and the pole beans got weeded. Wwoofer Margaret joined us, speaking of pole bean weeding.

Inside Box 10

TOMATOES – Prime tomato sandwich season is upon the land (and there was great rejoicing.) The green ones are likely almost peak ripe, as are almost all of them. If you don’t eat them within a few days, maybe move them from the counter to the fridge … or eat them. Eating them is a popular and correct path, with much potential for creative expression and joie de vivre. Tomatoes!

(PS do you need to buy a new jar of mayonnaise?

Cherry Tomatoes– like the other tomatoes, but little and adorable, in the manner of babies.

Purple Potatoes – If you’ve been mindful of how beets might color a dish, you’re equipped to handle the potential of the purple potatoes to dye a soup in an unpleasant direction (light colored soups become murky gray. Boiling them removes their color, but roasting is pretty purple preservative.

Red Onions – they are like the white onions, but they’re red. Pretty on a sandwich raw, if you swing that way.

They also stay pretty pickled.

Shishito Peppers – usually left whole. best blistered by high heat; grilled or on hot oil. Sprinkled with a little sale, and some garlic when you’re almost finished cooking them,

Sweet Corn – just a couple ears, and rather smallish. The corn is not having it’s best year. We have theories

Zucchini

Slicing Cucumbers

Summer (?) Savory – it might go well with your roasted potatoes, or in a compound butter. Use fresh or dry some for a later soup or something.

a Melon – either a cantaloupe or a sunjewel, or the one Yellow Canary Melon if you are that one box.

Arugula Microgreens – They have some spicy zip.

Maybe Ground Cherries – the hand of farmer fate is handing out a pint of ground cherries to the half of our members who missed a melon last week. So it be. Don’t worry if you miss them today – there will be more.

CSA Week 9: the news

In this week’s Installment of Rain News, it rained a couple of times earlier in the week, and then rained again a whole lot yesterday and we don’t even know what to think anymore about anything. It seems like it must be a good thing though, so we are not lodging any protests. Have I mentioned we find ourselves grateful for our sandy soil this moisture-laden season? We do.

A woodchuck has been taking nibbles and leaves from the high tunnel and is marked for capture or worse. An unknown beast devoured an entire pile of chicken eggs being sat upon in the woods, as well as the hen who sat upon them; a bear or fox or coyote has a plump belly and a sanguine expression, unwitnessed by us humans. The wasping continued; Kristin was stung twice, I was stung once, several wasp and hornet nests were taken down in defensive retaliation. Hopefully with the cooler temperatures, cooler heads will prevail and we can resume our truce with the stingy stripeys.

Jasper, trying to help with the fieldwork, climbed up on the tiller after it had just shut off, and burned himself on the exhaust – it seems that most of us have a story of the time we burned ourselves on a hot exhaust, and now he’s joined our club. I’d rather he had hadn’t but he did and so now he is learning about the joys of having bandages changed and keeping them clean and all the rigamarole that comes with burns, and we are learning about the joys of being the ones in charge of it all. He’s doing good though, complaining only when we do mandatory maintenance.

It was chilly this morning. I am rolling over in bed, pulling up the covers, and avoiding eye contact with thoughts about winter. But I know they’re out there now.

rocks & chicks (by Deb)

And, it was my birthday again this week, which seems to happen with increasing rapidity as the numbers get larger.

The brakes on this ride don’t seem to work, but the views are beautiful.

I’m into it.

(thanks for this Marcia!)

inside box 9

  • Bell Peppers – purple Islanders and green
  • Eggplant – eggplants don’t really change color as they ripen; they stay the color they are, whether green, purple, variegated, or white (the O.G. eggplant color, which makes sense of their name).
    The secret to eggplant is not being stingy with oil when cooking. They like oil and you will like them better when they’re happy.
  • Tomatoes – damn I love tomato season. They love the high tunnel and they are making that abundantly clear. Most of them are ready to eat now, or after they sit on the counter for a bit. Let us know if you find a type you especially enjoy!
  • Cherry Tomatoes
  • Zucchini – we don’t give out giant war clubs anymore.
  • Onions
  • Broccoli – side shoots from the early-season plants. They heat earlier this week made them a little different,
  • Purple Opal Basil – we grow our basil amidst our tomatoes in the high tunnel; they do great together as plants and as flavors. These could be used like Thai basil or Italian basil in a dish. Might look weird as pesto?
  • Thai Basil – spicier/different from the Italian basil you got last week; best used in Asian dishes
  • Italian Basil Microgreens – caprese skewers, tomato salads … Shareholder Melissa has plans for basil I hear.
  • Maybe Melon (Sun Jewel or Green Muskmelon)– this week, the folks in Saint Paul and near the Farm are getting a melon, If the fates feel cooperative, Minneapolis and Vadnais will get one next week.

week 8 CSA newsletter

It didn’t rain, and continued to not do so, until suddenly it did. It was very exciting, I must admit, watching the radar and rooting for rain … and then winning! One and a third inch, almost doubling our July total.

Before the rain crashed the drought though, we finally ran the field irrigation for the first time this year. And so of course we also had our annual well-trouble-anxiety. Pretty sure the problem isn’t urgent and can be fixed without much ado or adollars, In the meantime, it works fine for our purposes.

We had a waspy week. Kristin got stung a couple of times inside the little greenhouse, where she must water the microgreen trays and where they build nests and are generally peaceful until some angry defensive phase of their nest building kicks them into asshole little monster modes. So then I went to knock down their nests, and stumbled backwards in my non-OSHA-approved flipflops as I retreated from the ensuing buzzswarm and thusly deeply sliced into my big toe with a switchblade of a hose clamp. And then yesterday Otis, doing Otis things back behind the outhouse somehow drew the pointy ire of a solitary wasp that nailed his hand, causing it to swell up exactly like the hand of a hammer-smashed cartoon hand.

Living with nature is like that sometimes. We’ll take it.

Before the rain the weather was ridiculously beautiful, and after the rain it’s been pretty much more of the same except hotter. It’s not bad. Like winter, you adapt habits and coping mechanisms to suit the changes. It’s pleasant not paying an air conditioning electric bill.

Otis has been working on Scooby Doo style traps in his quest to capture and hold the free-ranging chicks. Jasper stayed busy doing Jasper things.

inside the box

  • a Red Cabbage – Have you tried snacking on cabbage leaves with peanut butter? It’s a thing and it turns out it’s quite tasty. We were skeptical too, but they were right … “you’ve eaten peanut butter on celery, right?” But Grandma Deb makes a delicious recipe = a cabbage slaw with raisins and pecans.
  • Beans Beans BeansDragon Tongue, Purple, Yellow, Green
  • Radish Micro Greens – popular at the farmer’s market due to their transformative potential. They make good stuff better.
  • Cherry Tomatoes – these have been taking their time.
  • Tomato Tomatoes
  • Zucchini – I bet you’re familiar, and hope you’re a fan.
  • Onions:
Marty & Marcia prepping onions

  • Broccoli Side Shoots – choice edible flower buds
  • Basil (Lettuce Leaf” variety) – That salad thing with tomatoes and basil and maybe mozaerella cheese? Pesto. BLT lettuce substitute? Or, do like most folks do and wear it in a fabric bag around your neck or waist.
  • Dill – Time to make fridge pickles? Or …. just sell or gift it to the pickle hungry ghosts that haunt your local Marketplace and Buy Nothing pages, or make an offering to the compost gods.
  • Cucumbers (pickling & slicers) – crunchy hydration snack packs
Cucumbering