This week, the red oaks began their bombing in earnest, waiting until I fell asleep to hurl acorns at metal roofing and other acoustically impressive targets. Perhaps they’re just mischievous. Or maybe they’re trying to communicate – to rouse me to the defense of their dying breathern across our wooded western border, where all week lumbering lumber machinery has been transforming living landscape into logs.

It’s kind of sad, but we work to find the positive in situations beyond our control. The unwanted branches and trunk bottoms they left behind made for easy, excellent fire wood.

While Kristin was in Cleveland, we swapped out farm helpers – now the Albatross houses a new WWOOFer – Bryan from Austin, who will be working with us until he heads back to finish college at the end of the month.

On our way out to the farm from Minneapolis, I explained how to spot edible Chicken of the Woods mushrooms from the road.  We didn’t see any though, and decided to head to the Wolf Creek Bar for dinner rather than cooking. Afterward, while driving around the backroads of the Barrens (our neighborhood), he announced that he was still on the lookout for “chicken of the forests or whatever” – and immediately we drove past a tree covered with them – not in the woods, but in the yard of an old hunting cabin. Score!

The recent humidity has not led to only happy tales, however – it’s also  opened the fungal floodgates in the Field, and we’ve been fighting it on multiple fronts. Although we haven’t had much rain lately, the humidity has ensured that the crops are regularly covered in heavy, dripping dew – combined with the heat, this has created an ideal environment for the fungi and their parasitic relatives.

The cucumbers and most of the melons were decimated by a wave of Anthracnose fungi, as have certain susceptible tomato varieties. All the squash, zucchini, pumpkins and gourds came down with intense cases of Powdery Mildew (actually a fungus). Much of our Thai basil has come down with the deadly new disease on the block – Basil Downy Mildew (not a mildew, but also not technically a fungus – rather, they are in the order “Oomycota” which was recently split out from the Fungi).

We’ve never really had free moments to battle such diseases in previous years, and tried to regard outbreaks with resigned fatalism – especially when the Killing Frost could be only weeks away. But this year we’re just a bit more on top of things, and we’re fighting to save what we can.

Most of the melon plants are dunzo, but we’ll be treating the survivors with organic copper spray this week to help them fight it off. The infected Thai basil will be destroyed in an effort to save the less-affected Italian Sweet Basil plants. And we’ll continue to spray milk on the squash, gourds, and pumpkins … it sounds weird, but in recent years it was discovered that diluted milk is quite effective at fighting Powdery Mildew, so we’ve been spraying the leaves down with a garden sprayer – and have a 5-gallon backpack sprayer on order and en route, for more effective application of all the milk, copper, and neem oil we’ll be spraying in our future fungi fights.

Box 13

IMG_0873

• Sugar Baby Mini Watermelon – the fungal melon disease that destroyed the vines also gave the fruit a skin condition – but it hasn’t effected the fruit, and won’t – as long as you eat it soon. Don’t let the fungus win – eat yer melon before it does – or cut it open, scoop out the insides, and save them in the fridge til you’re in a melon mood (meloncholy?)You don’t need an ice cream maker to  make Italian ice!
  http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/watermelon-ice-15266
  Infuse the syrup with holy basil, mint, or other herbs if you like.You can also pair watermelon with savory ingredients, as in this recipe (that we have not tried):
  http://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1014851-tomato-and-watermelon-salad

• Carrots! (multiple color varieties, including white, yellow, purple, orange)
  

• Tomato Medley (Unchained)
  Kristin has always wanted to make a tomato tart. “They are so darn pretty!” There are many recipes online.
  
  If you’ve had enough of tomatoes (say it ain’t so) you can put them in a freezer bag and into the freezer. They will peel easily when they thaw, and be good for making sauce.

• Collard Greens – Kristin sez: “Often cooked with bacon and also good with hot peppers, garlic, and lemon. Recipes often recommend simmering them for 30-45 min but I would not cook them that long. I would also not say that to a southerner.”Once we split them out into the boxes there were less than we’d intended to give ya’ll (southerner veggies), and it was too late to go harvest more – so cooking them down won’t yield a great amount – maybe put them in a soup with some roasted radishes, or use them to make wraps (with collard leaves instead of tortillas)

• Ground Cherries – Not really cherries, but nonetheless delicious. Peel the husks and enjoy – notice the variable flavor depending on the color (deep yellow without any greenish tint is sweetest).

• Black Spanish radish – “I was surprised to learn that black Spanish radishes are considered medicinal. You can buy extracts and pills of it, or just enjoy eating it! Salting and then rinsing radishes tones down their heat – and if you can’t fathom eating so much raw radish, try braising or roasting them with other root vegetables.”
  We gave you a lot so you could experiment with roasting them – it’s our favorite way to eat a quantity of radishes, and would cook well with the carrots in the box.
• Zucchini
• Assorted Peppers
• Broccoli
  

• Eggplant – (Italian, Asian, or a skinny white variety that I can’t recall the name of right now. Originally eggplants were white – hence the name …) The eggplant plants, like the nearby peppers, are big healthy leafy plants – with almost no interest in flowering or fruiting. Grrr. Fortunately, some of them are still into it!
• Holy Basil – often used in Thai cooking, and pairs well with anything watermelon. I really enjoying sniffing it.
• Italian Basil – also pairs great with watermelon!

Miscellaneous Pics from the Week

(some thanks to WWOOFer Bryan)

It’s been an interesting week, but I guess I could say that every week. (Maybe I do.)

On Sunday, Field Marshal Kristin left for Cleveland, Ohio for five days, leaving me to run everything …. including the CSA harvest today.

It hasn’t been bad but it was a bit frightening to behold coming at me through the calendar.

Fortunately, the timing was good.

Things were pretty stable in the field, and for harvest I had help from two short-term but very supportive WWOOFers- Miami Juan & Miami April (AKA “the PhDs” (both are psychologists)), as well as Neighbors Dave & Marcie and Patriarch Jim Sehr.

The PhDs had actually been running backup for me since Kristin left – cooking delicious and interesting food, helping weed, and keeping company. And they did so with wonderful cheer in spite of the fact that they were both slowly being killed by the unseasonable August chill that had rode in on a daylong howling wind to banish last week’s Floridian heatwave.

Which is to say, it got really chilly, down into the 40s at night, and it did so right before these poor unsuspecting hot-blooded Miami natives arrived and found their bodies, wardrobes, and accommodations unprepared and unable to maintain sensation in their extremities.

My blood is thicker, but I suffered a bit with them – although I closed all the windows for the first time in months, sleeping was cold without Kristin there.  I swapped out the Albatross screens for storm windows, provided the PhDs with extra blankets. and draped a thick fleecelined flannel over old Cleo. (I could have run the woodstove, but I didn’t want to concede to winter. And even if I did, it would be demoralizing to the dwellers of the unheated Albatross, and it would chip away at our woodpile, which suddenly seemed too small, urgently in need of additional wood to get busy drying out.; the last thing I wanted to do was start shrinking it in August.)

The sun came out today though, for a gorgeous harvest day, the opposite of last week’s grey rainy scene.

Here’s what we put in your boxes in that sunshine:

Week 12 Box

(Kristin wrote in remotely to help me out today with this part!):

Savoy cabbage aka cabbage patch kids
The sweetest and most tender type of cabbage best type for eating raw in salad or use leaves for wraps. Can also be sautéed with butter/ tasty oil, garlic, ginger, pepper, lemon, whatever seasonings you like!

Thai basil
Add to soup, stir fry, add to peanut sauce zoodles.
Try making an Asian style pesto by blending:

2 cups fresh Thai basil leaves
2 tablespoons dry-roasted peanuts
1 tablespoon sugar
1 1/2 tablespoons dark sesame oil
1 tablespoon fish sauce
1 tablespoon rice wine vinegar
1 teaspoon crushed red pepper
2 garlic cloves

Zucchini
http://www.splendidtable.org/recipes/sweet-and-hot-curried-zucchini-pickles

Edamame (aka fresh soybeans)
Don’t eat the pods! Basic serving suggestion:
http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/food-network-kitchens/chile-garlic-edamame-recipe.html

Other edamame ideas:
http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/5877128

Sugar baby watermelon:

(Drat, I opened one of the coolers today and saw a tree frog hanging out on the watermelon pile inside – but he hopped away all photo-shy when I pulled out my phone. So use your imagination here.)

Probably just eat it, right? That’s easiest. But it would also pair nicely with Thai basil. Here’s a refreshing drink:
http://www.thekitchn.com/recipe-watermelon-basil-agua-fresca-recipes-from-the-kitchn-205390

Tomatoes
Gazpacho! Tomato soup served ice cold!
Tomato slices on burgers, sandwiches, and with eggs Benedict.

Broccoli
Cucumber
Onion
Sweet Corn

The challenge this week was fitting things into the boxes. Holy crap … you have less zucchini than you started with, and Plan A of putting BOTH a cabbage and a watermelon in the boxes was sensibly and necessarily abandoned … so the watermelons are a la carte.

Hope you enjoy the food!

The week was kind of a roller coaster, with rapid highs and lows, sudden twists and turns, and questionable safety measures.

The summer’s temps and humidity have been ideal for the propagation of all kinds of fungal blight – early and late blight, tomato and potato blight, leaf and stem blight, Anthracnose and Anthrax.  Chunks of our melon rows to what we think was Anthracnose – including our favorites, the Christmas Melons; sad face. Most of the potatoes are looking rather blighty.

The pepper plants are also kind of hard to look at; they are not diseased at all, in fact they are vibrant and green and leafy … but many are flowering not at all, or too little and perhaps even too late, depending on what the weather does. So much went into raising them, keeping them alive through the cold nights, transplanting them, keeping them weeded … and we may only be getting little green annual shrubs for most of the effort. But, que sera, sera!

We’re fortunate, really  – things could be far less awesome than they are.  At the market, we chatted with a larger-scale tractor-based farmer – he’d just lost 100% of his massive tomato planting to Late Blight – something like fourteen 300-foot rows of plants, dead without producing a single tomato. Yikes.

We’re seeing signs in certain tomato plants that sure look likely to be blight of some type – and with the yesterday’s rain followed by 3 more inches forecast over the next day or two, conditions will be ripe for all the blight-bringing fungal and swimming spores to get frisky.  But so far, the tomato plants are a source of joy and beautiful bounty – especially satisfying after last year’s poor tomatular showing.

One of the reasons that we like to grow for a CSA, in spite of the difficulties, is the sheer variety of things it mandates that we grow.  It’s great to have all these varied crops in play, because very year, due to factors beyond our abilities to predict or control, some things will flourish and others will flounder and fail.

We are getting better at Surfing It as it comes, and at getting back on the waves and riding them with a grin after being knocked down into the rocks.

Toward that end, every year we try to bring our friends together for a “reboot” – some time together with tribe and separated from usual scenes … ideally near and in a river.

This year we had perfect weather for wading into the Saint Croix with pool noodles and floaties and flowing through the trees for 7 miles and 5 hours before coming back ashore at our campsite.

It was refreshing.

We got home and got back to work – with a renewed appreciation for it all …  transplanted out some new fall greens, squished caterpillars and worms and beetles and  larvae, worked to better keep the devouring deer, rabbits, and racoons out of the field, and progressed in the assembly of the high tunnel, a scaled up version of the Lego structures that our 8-year old WWOOFer had made, digging through boxes for the correct components, carefully joining them according to directions, and step by step bringing a whole together from a collection of parts.

(Grown-up farmer Legos are just bigger and more likely to maim you … and the directions are a whole lot more confusing.)

Today the beginning of a 2-day rainfall began just as we finished harvesting the last of the crops, before we had things divided up and boxed.

We enjoyed weather-appropriate music while we worked with Kristin’s parents & Neighbor Marcie, and thanks to their help we finished early, in spite of the necessity of finding new ways to operate in the downpour.

Week 11 Box:

• Peppers – a mix of those hot and sweet peppers that have actually felt like making some things for us to eat! ones that are shaped like cayenne peppers or jalepeno they’re probably hot – if they’re bell pepper shape they’re probably not. Everything else is a mystery to be explored.
  
• Potatoes – Adirondack Red variety ... it’s cooling off, maybe make some soup! “Nothin’ wrong with roasted potatoes.” – Kristin
  
• Tomatoes – The wave is on! Sooooo may ways to use these … especially with basil! Tomato soup? Sauce? Bruschetta? We tried to only include ripe or very-nearly ripe tomatoes in your box this week – even if they’re yellow or orange or green, they should be ready to eat as soon as you want to. Heirlooms come in an array of ripened colors … so, like the peppers, taste, experiment, enjoy! Please do let us know if you have questions or strong feelings about any of the types!
• Tomatillos – Won’t be any next week (maybe later though) … if you still have some from previous weeks, find a good recipe that uses lots – a sauce, salsa, soup, etc – and use them all up together?
  
• Broccoli florets aka Baby Broccoli
  
• Italian Basil
• Zucchini 
  
• Corn – Sweet corn, hopefully – although there is a possibility that you may get a strange hybrid that cross-pollinated with one of the other types of corn we’re growing this year! (We staggered plantings to avoid this very thing, but then the first planting of sweet corn failed to germinate, and we had to do a second round 10 days too late … so they tasseled (corn’s version of flowering) at the same time as the flour corn. If you  do open one to find “Indian corn” kernels, enjoy; surprise! Perhaps cut it off the cob and make cornbread or put it in soup …

  

• Cucumbers – The cucumber plants are increasingly calling it quits for the season – soon, cool refreshing cukes on a hot summer’s day will be only a memory, one to cherish in the winterbleak … for now, eat your cukes. And like ’em. :)
• An Onion or two – According to Neighbor Marcie, the onion is, if not exactly the pièce de ré·sis·tance, the final piece to complete the week’s box and tie the other parts all together into a m*th@rfu¢k!ng nexus of potential recipes. QUOTE! (OK so she didn’t actually say that last part. I’ve been in the car for an hour and a half …)
  
• Green Beans (Neighbor Marcie Variety – large boxes only)

 

We made good progress on the high tunnel – all the ribs were raised, the baseboards attached, and and many additional pages of instructions were decoded and supports were added.

Construction went faster this week – in part because we had more experience, but largely because we had good help – Jim continued as project foreman, and we were joined by Neighbor Dave and his tractor – which allowed us to forgo awkward tippy ladder work, and instead simply work from inside the raised bucket, with all the necessary equipment and tools up with us.

Part of the work required using self-drilling metal screws to secure pipes together – this created hot shards of flying metal. We discussed how eye protection should be worn, but I didn’t want to stop working to lower the tractor bucket, run up to the shipping container, and put on the safety glasses … so of course, within minutes of the conversation, a piece flew into my eyeball before I could blink. I could feel it when I blinked. I hoped it would go away n its own, so I kept working – but after the efforts were one for the day and I splashed water in my eye, I could still feel something scratchy in there.

So Kristin took a look, and reported grim news – there was as tiny piece of metal stuck in my eye, in the white just outside the iris.  The hot shard had apparently sizzled into the surface, and stuck fast. At least the heat probably made it sterile, I reckoned.

Fortunately, our friend Chris Thrift had donated to us not just the safety glasses that I hadn’t bothered to wear – he’d also donated a single use eye wash kit, which I used to vigorously squirt a stream of saline solution into my eyeball, while looking every-which-way and laughing at the absurdity of it all.

Fortunately, it worked,and the wound the hot metal left behind seems to be healing up quickly.

Week 10 Box

• Spaghetti squash – Cut in half, scoop out the (tasty & edible if roasted) seeds, and bake it in the oven until you can scrape out spaghetti-like strands with a fork. Best if not overcooked. You can microwave it too – as-is if you want it to explode, or with vent holes if you’d prefer it didn’t. There are a lot of good recipes out there.
  

• Fennel herb – It will be droopy and sad looking when it gets home, but just stick it in some water overnight – and it will stand back up. It’s often paired with fish, but is also great chopped into salads.Goes well with oranges and apples and other fruit. Mouth freshening when eaten raw in the field.
  

• Tomato Medley – they’re ripening!!! I wish I’d taken a picture of them all spread out on the processing table in their colorful glory. The stripy Green Zebras are ripe even while still green – feel them to see if they’ve softened – if so, they’re ripe! Actually, all your tomatoes should be about ripe this week. Enjoy the variety!
  

• Tomatillos – like tomatoes, they keep out on the counter and don’t need refrigeration.  They will turn yellow and get sweeter the longer they sit out. Until it’s too long and they rot. Good in a sauce with chicken or pork.
  

• Potatoes – I would probably make some potato salad with mayo.

• Eggplants – some Thai, some Italian, some white like the original eggplants were.
  

• Thai Basil
  

• Aromata Basil (large shares only) – it’s rather purple.
  

• Cucumbers can’t stop wont stop

• Summer Squash Zucchini – we have been loving our zucchini in cakes, pancakes, tacos, tots, kebobs, and almost everything else. One day they were in all three meals; it was good.
  

• Beets and greens – don’t throw away those tasty greens! Yes, you.
  

• Broccoli (large boxes only)

“Last Week’s CSA” by Shareholder Amy:

… and some pics she took:

Some of our pics from the week:

Ok, so I killed the laptop this week (I heard a critter outside the window, possibly the White Cat that’s been spotted repeatedly in the vicinity, went to peek, stumbled in the dark, and crunched the screen inside the laptop bag on the floor) – so this newsletter may be short and full of typos. More typos than usual, even. We’ll just see how this works, posting from a touch screen device ….

This week, we finally made some serious visible progress on the huge high tunnel greenhouse that we got the USDA grant to build – over half the 14′ high ribs were raised and secured to their baseboards.

Although we knew the dimensions and had laid out the foundation weeks ago, it didn’t really sink in just how looming the structure would be until the ribs went up – easily the largest structure on the land, dwarfing the seedling greenhouse we built last Spring, and surprisingly visible from all over the farm.

Saturday after Market harvest, three of the four WWOOFers headed toward their homelands in Montreal and Alabama, leaving just us and NYC Reynaldo on the farm for the time being. Farewell on your roundabout journeys home, and hopefully our paths will cross again!

It was my (Gabe’s)  birthday on Monday, and we started the day with an amazingly delicious brunch – Neighbors Dave & Marcie joined forces with shareholder Maaren and her Wandering Fire portable pizza oven.

In the field, the tomatoes are mostly hanging out being green and waiting for hot nights or Santa Claus or something. We are going to be taking steps to intervene and hurry them along this week, because the nights seem to be getting cooler and I swear I see trees up here already putting on their autumn colors. The pepper plants seem to have gotten too much nitrogen in their rows, which we planted in an expanded part of the field that had been in clover for two years – apparently this had fixed more nitrogen than we’d really expected, so the pepper plants are big and lush and green and leafy –  but not flowering or peppering all that much, which is frustrating to say the least, after all the work and transporting back and forth we out into them all spring long. Hopefully the boost of magnesium we provided with Epsom salt foliar feeding will get them going! The squash continue to spread like wildfire, devouring walkways and menacing neighboring plants. It’s a good problem to have, at least. But some are showing signs of vine borers, so we will be doing more surgical interventions this week to save them. The melons look great.

We took down most of the pea trellising, donated the pea plants that we cut down to the neighbors’ cows as a tasty treat, and tilled the rows for new plantings. (We couldn’t remove half of one row though, as the trellis and pea plants were inextricably entwined by the sprawling pumpkin vines two rows away. )

We planted new rows of cilantro, dill, mustard greens, and pea tips. The salad turnips we planted last week came up and we hay mulched around them. A bunny or bunny squad has been munching mercilessly on the soybeans, transplanted broccoli, and even the beets – we sprayed the survivors with some homemade deterrent concoction made from dried hot peppers, fresh marigolds, and garlic bulbulets. Widget has been hunting them too, but so far the rabbits have remained a step ahead…

the week 9 box

• Tomatillos – make them into a salsa verde with tomatoes and onions, or perhaps prepare them like fried green tomatoes on their own. After husking, rinse off the film on the skin for best results.
• tomatoes – a variety of the brave individuals that have broken from the green pack and actually ripened.
• italian basil
• Potatoes – red & blue Adirondack varieties (mostly reds this week) – we dug up some plants that finished early, many of which seemed to have been terrorized belowground by the Vole Menace. It’s a miracle that nature lets us have anything at all.
• Broccoli 
• Green & wax Beans – With some beautiful contributions from Neighbor Marcie, who let us (well, Reynaldo really) harvest some of her abundant crop to include in your boxes this week
• Kale – either red Russian, curly blue dwarf, or Dino depending on which box fate assigns to you.
• Onions
• Arugula – tender and fresh and not intensely peppery, because it’s not old stuff from spring, but volunteers that came up from the seeds of last fall’s planting.
• Cukes
• & Zukes – have you ever tried making “zoodles”? They’re great!