Week 17
We made a small dent in the winter squash last week but still have a lot to haul. We planted less this year but are still struggling to find a place for them all. Hopefully by this time next week we will be have them all inside and breathing a sigh of relief.
The rain did a number on the cherry tomatoes but we are hoping to give you one more round of them this week.
Broccoli
Cherry Tomatoes
Acorn Squash
Kale
Shallots
Spinach - Small Only (large share next week)
Bok Choy - Large Only
Carrots - Large Only
Fall Salad Mix - Add On Veggie Only - For the last couple years I have been experimenting with seasonal salad mixes. We seed our regular salad mix weekly. Timing the lettuce to mature at the same time as the mustards is irrelevant because we can always pick different plantings to get them to line up. It is a little harder to time the seasonal mixes. I had wanted the fall mix to have radicchio in it but it isn't even close to ready. Instead it is a pretty mix of red lettuces and orange and yellow calendula.
Hope you all enjoyed your weekend. I am off to trim and bag onions and listen to the game with Kelly.
Sunday, September 25, 2016
Sunday, September 18, 2016
Week 16
Happy Autumn (well almost). Today is a beautiful fall day. I love working outside in the fall when the sun is out. It has a mellowness and a pleasant warmth to it that is so different from the harsh, but also wonderful, sunshine of summer. Today though, I am mostly inside, roasting and freezing tomatoes, making garlic chile sauce and maybe, if I get to it, some pickled peppers. We had a long day Friday - harvesting and hanging dry beans after we finished preparing for Saturday. It is comforting to see them hanging in the rafters of our metal building. We also had unexpected visitors for a late dinner on Friday. Kelly drove the dry beans home to hang them and I drove through the farm at dusk with a harvest knife and a bucket gathering a bunch of veggies to roast, herbs and the propane for the grill. It was a meal that brought summer (tomato and basil salad with grilled peppers and onions) and fall (roasted cauliflower, potatoes and fennel) together. Your boxes kind of do the same today with a nice mix of summer and fall. We decided to start the winter squash party with a spaghetti squash. These are a new variety (Angel Hair) for us and look a little different than the common yellow spaghetti squash. I was attracted to the smaller size. The small shares will get a single squash and the large share two of them. They look a little bit like mini pumpkins but they taste like spaghetti squash.
Carrots
Cauliflower
Corn - hopefully for all of you. This is a bicolor corn or as we like to say around here in our best Tennessee accent, it is white, half yellow. This is the response my dad got when he asked a farmer in Tennessee what color his corn was.
Spaghetti Squash
Cherry Tomatoes
Slicing Tomato
Salad Mix
Happy Autumn (well almost). Today is a beautiful fall day. I love working outside in the fall when the sun is out. It has a mellowness and a pleasant warmth to it that is so different from the harsh, but also wonderful, sunshine of summer. Today though, I am mostly inside, roasting and freezing tomatoes, making garlic chile sauce and maybe, if I get to it, some pickled peppers. We had a long day Friday - harvesting and hanging dry beans after we finished preparing for Saturday. It is comforting to see them hanging in the rafters of our metal building. We also had unexpected visitors for a late dinner on Friday. Kelly drove the dry beans home to hang them and I drove through the farm at dusk with a harvest knife and a bucket gathering a bunch of veggies to roast, herbs and the propane for the grill. It was a meal that brought summer (tomato and basil salad with grilled peppers and onions) and fall (roasted cauliflower, potatoes and fennel) together. Your boxes kind of do the same today with a nice mix of summer and fall. We decided to start the winter squash party with a spaghetti squash. These are a new variety (Angel Hair) for us and look a little different than the common yellow spaghetti squash. I was attracted to the smaller size. The small shares will get a single squash and the large share two of them. They look a little bit like mini pumpkins but they taste like spaghetti squash.
Carrots
Cauliflower
Corn - hopefully for all of you. This is a bicolor corn or as we like to say around here in our best Tennessee accent, it is white, half yellow. This is the response my dad got when he asked a farmer in Tennessee what color his corn was.
Spaghetti Squash
Cherry Tomatoes
Slicing Tomato
Salad Mix
Sunday, September 11, 2016
Week 15
On Sunday nights do ever find it hard to believe that tomorrow is Monday again? Wasn't it just Monday? For us, and I imagine for many of you, it means that some of the things you had hoped to get done will have to wait until next Sunday. I am a little behind getting food put up. Last Sunday we did tomatoes, roasted and raw peppers and basil. I had hoped to do more tomatoes and apple sauce today but I spent too much time hanging out with the piglets we picked up last Wednesday. They are spotted, floppy eared, snorting little guys who love melons. I can't help but check on them…a lot. I also got the greenhouse ready for arugula, salad and bok choy transplants. We are just about done transplanting. Our last remaining flats to go out in the field are kale that we are planting to harvest raab off of next spring. It will go out this week and the greenhouse should be filled by the end of next week. Kelly did a bunch of tractor work and it feels so good to see some of the fields that we were done harvesting out of get mowed and disked. Our dry beans are about ready to come out and so is the squash. You can only fight the change of seasons for so long.
We hope to have corn in the boxes next week along with cauliflower.
Sweet Peppers
Lettuce
Japanese Cuke
Green Beans
Slicing Tomatoes
Sweet Onion
Melon
Eggplant - Small Only
Cherry Tomatoes - Large Only
Kohlrabi - Large Only
Yu Choy Sum or Shungiku - Add on Veggie Only - You will get one this week and the other next week.
Yu Choy Sum is an asian green in the same family as kale, cabbage, bok choy, etc. It is mild - not a bit of bitterness. I knew I would like it because I like greens but it isn't just a green for green lovers. It is mild enough to please everyone. I made Choy Sum with Garlic Sauce. It was quick and easy and yummy…less than 10 minutes start to finish.
Shungiku or Chrysanthemum Leaves - These are used in many Japanese dishes including shabu shabu, sukiyaki and tempura. In china the leaves and flowers are used in soups. They have a distinct flavor and are very aromatic. We grew a small patch of them last year. I used them in salads and in chicken broth. A customer used them to make gomae and brought me some. The simplest recipe I found here, however in the version I had the sesame seeds were ground into a paste. There are many recipes for gomae on the internet with lots of different vegetables. The seeds are traditionally ground with a mortar and pestle but a coffee grinder works great too. Chrysanthemum cooks very quickly. You only need to blanch it for a minute. The raw leaves can be added to salads.
On Sunday nights do ever find it hard to believe that tomorrow is Monday again? Wasn't it just Monday? For us, and I imagine for many of you, it means that some of the things you had hoped to get done will have to wait until next Sunday. I am a little behind getting food put up. Last Sunday we did tomatoes, roasted and raw peppers and basil. I had hoped to do more tomatoes and apple sauce today but I spent too much time hanging out with the piglets we picked up last Wednesday. They are spotted, floppy eared, snorting little guys who love melons. I can't help but check on them…a lot. I also got the greenhouse ready for arugula, salad and bok choy transplants. We are just about done transplanting. Our last remaining flats to go out in the field are kale that we are planting to harvest raab off of next spring. It will go out this week and the greenhouse should be filled by the end of next week. Kelly did a bunch of tractor work and it feels so good to see some of the fields that we were done harvesting out of get mowed and disked. Our dry beans are about ready to come out and so is the squash. You can only fight the change of seasons for so long.
We hope to have corn in the boxes next week along with cauliflower.
Sweet Peppers
Lettuce
Japanese Cuke
Green Beans
Slicing Tomatoes
Sweet Onion
Melon
Eggplant - Small Only
Cherry Tomatoes - Large Only
Kohlrabi - Large Only
Yu Choy Sum or Shungiku - Add on Veggie Only - You will get one this week and the other next week.
Yu Choy Sum is an asian green in the same family as kale, cabbage, bok choy, etc. It is mild - not a bit of bitterness. I knew I would like it because I like greens but it isn't just a green for green lovers. It is mild enough to please everyone. I made Choy Sum with Garlic Sauce. It was quick and easy and yummy…less than 10 minutes start to finish.
Shungiku or Chrysanthemum Leaves - These are used in many Japanese dishes including shabu shabu, sukiyaki and tempura. In china the leaves and flowers are used in soups. They have a distinct flavor and are very aromatic. We grew a small patch of them last year. I used them in salads and in chicken broth. A customer used them to make gomae and brought me some. The simplest recipe I found here, however in the version I had the sesame seeds were ground into a paste. There are many recipes for gomae on the internet with lots of different vegetables. The seeds are traditionally ground with a mortar and pestle but a coffee grinder works great too. Chrysanthemum cooks very quickly. You only need to blanch it for a minute. The raw leaves can be added to salads.
Sunday, September 4, 2016
Week 14
Well, August is done. The rain came. It feels like fall. However, I am sure we have some nice days ahead of us and we won't be moving on to winter squash and parsnips just yet! No need to rush, we have plenty of time to enjoy those. We do have a veggie making it's farm premier this week - celery. It is our first year growing it. We only had one planting and it looks and tastes great. It has a more intense celery flavor than what you buy in the supermarket, particularly the outer leaves. My mother told me that when I was little we use to eat braised celery. I don't remember it nor would it have ever occurred to me to make it if she hadn't mentioned it, but she made it sound delicious. I looked at a recipe out of Julia Child's first book but ended up making a simpler version I found on line. I included a link below. I used chicken stock instead of beef (Julia favors beef as well, but I had chicken on hand). I really liked it.
While Kelly was at market last Tuesday and I was frantically cleaning the house in hopes of making it look like we are just very neat and tidy people all the time, Ian and Jo did a nice job of getting most of the onions out last Tuesday. We had a big push early last week to get everything that had matured out of the ground before it rained. I meant to take a picture of them before it got dark but time slipped away from me. They look great. If you would have told me in April that we might have the nicest onions we have ever grown I would have either laughed at you or called you nasty names. There was a period when I wondered if we would even have onions this year. For some reason many of the seedlings died and those that didn't weren't growing any roots. I ended up seeding all the remaining seed we had left three weeks after our normal seed date. The first round ended up growing roots after doing nothing for about a month and the new ones which I seeded in different potting soil looked great but they all got transplanted later than we ever have transplanted them before. They all look great. There were a couple beds that got planted even later than the rest with some of the onions that took so long to grown roots. I was so doubtful about their success that I didn't even label the different varieties. They aren't mature yet and we left them in the ground but I am hopeful for those as well.
Carrots
Beets
Cherry Tomatoes
Celery
Zucchini
Garlic
Basil
Broccoli - Large Only
Slicing Tomato - Large Only
Braised Celery
Well, August is done. The rain came. It feels like fall. However, I am sure we have some nice days ahead of us and we won't be moving on to winter squash and parsnips just yet! No need to rush, we have plenty of time to enjoy those. We do have a veggie making it's farm premier this week - celery. It is our first year growing it. We only had one planting and it looks and tastes great. It has a more intense celery flavor than what you buy in the supermarket, particularly the outer leaves. My mother told me that when I was little we use to eat braised celery. I don't remember it nor would it have ever occurred to me to make it if she hadn't mentioned it, but she made it sound delicious. I looked at a recipe out of Julia Child's first book but ended up making a simpler version I found on line. I included a link below. I used chicken stock instead of beef (Julia favors beef as well, but I had chicken on hand). I really liked it.
While Kelly was at market last Tuesday and I was frantically cleaning the house in hopes of making it look like we are just very neat and tidy people all the time, Ian and Jo did a nice job of getting most of the onions out last Tuesday. We had a big push early last week to get everything that had matured out of the ground before it rained. I meant to take a picture of them before it got dark but time slipped away from me. They look great. If you would have told me in April that we might have the nicest onions we have ever grown I would have either laughed at you or called you nasty names. There was a period when I wondered if we would even have onions this year. For some reason many of the seedlings died and those that didn't weren't growing any roots. I ended up seeding all the remaining seed we had left three weeks after our normal seed date. The first round ended up growing roots after doing nothing for about a month and the new ones which I seeded in different potting soil looked great but they all got transplanted later than we ever have transplanted them before. They all look great. There were a couple beds that got planted even later than the rest with some of the onions that took so long to grown roots. I was so doubtful about their success that I didn't even label the different varieties. They aren't mature yet and we left them in the ground but I am hopeful for those as well.
Carrots
Beets
Cherry Tomatoes
Celery
Zucchini
Garlic
Basil
Broccoli - Large Only
Slicing Tomato - Large Only
Braised Celery
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