What's in the share this week...

This list is prepared before we harvest your share. Some guesswork is involved! We do our best to predict which crops will be ready to harvest, but sometimes crops are on the list that are not in the share, and sometimes crops will be in the share even though they're not on the list.   

Mix-and-Match nine items this week from a list that may include:  

• Carrots 
• Beets 
• Okra 
• Cucumbers 
• Summer Squash 
• Zucchini 
• Tomatoes 
• Eggplant 
• Bell Peppers 
• Collards 
• Kale
• Potatoes 
• Chard 
• Celery
• Napa Cabbage
• Scallions

Pick-Your-Own Crops   

You are welcome to harvest the PYO portion of the share during any daylight hours, 7 days a week. Please check the board at the little red kiosk for information on amounts, locations and picking instructions. Remember, you can pick one time per week but it doesn't necessarily have to be at the same time you are picking up your share.       

• Raspberries
• Chiles
• Cherry tomatoes
• Plum tomatoes
• Green beans
• Cilantro
• Basils:  Italian, Thai, purple, lemon and lime 
• Dill
• Parsley
• Perennial herbs & flowers

Quick Links

Upcoming events at the Farm

Shareholder Rachel wrote in -- I found this recipe, and it's a perfect one for the food we picked up this week. Thought I would pass it along. We thought it was delicious and very easy to make :-)

Gourmet | September 1997 Yield: Serves 2

1/2 pound fresh okra

1 medium vine-ripened tomato

1 small onion

1 ear corn

1 1/2 tablespoons vegetable oil

1/2 cup water

1/2 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce

Cut okra into 1/2-inch-thick slices. Peel and chop tomato. Cut onion into thin slices and cut corn from cob. In a heavy skillet heat 1 tablespoon oil over moderately high heat until hot but not smoking and saute okra with salt to taste, stirring occasionally, until browned, about 3 minutes. With a slotted spoon transfer okra to a bowl.

Add remaining tablespoon oil to skillet and saute onion, stirring, until it begins to soften. Stir in tomato, water, and Worcestershire sauce and simmer, stirring occasionally, 3 minutes. Add corn and simmer until corn is crisp-tender and sauce is thickened, about 3 minutes. Stir in okra with salt and pepper to taste and cook until heated through.

Do you have a favorite recipe you make with farm produce that you'd like to share!?

Send it on in!

Thursday, September 8th from 6:30-8:30pm

Learn to preserve a multitude of veggies using lactic acid fermentation! This is the technique used to make sauerkraut and kimchi, but will also make delicious dill pickles and more. In this workshop, participants will make lacto-fermented bok choy and pickles to take home and enjoy!

WFCF is happy to welcome back Audra Karp, veteran lacto-fermenter and Certified Professional Midwife, to teach this workshop. Fee: $25 members/$30 non-members. Register Today!

... same as the first.  It's a favorite saying of Andy's, and it perfectly captures the rhythm that we fall into at this time of the year.  Mondays, harvest squash, cucumbers, peppers, eggplant and tomatoes.  Beets and carrots if we're lucky.  Maybe some melons.  Scramble to get some beds made so we can plant some more lettuce and other greens.  Tuesdays, harvest lettuce, chard, kale, collards, other greens, and anything else we didn't get to on Monday. Pick tomatoes.  Scramble to get some things planted in the beds we made the day before.  CSA pickup and outreach market.  Wednesdays, back to harvesting Monday's crops.  Pick tomatoes.  Take a break to harvest some melons.  Think about doing something besides harvesting.  Cultivate.  Thursdays, back to harvesting Tuesday's crops.  Pick tomatoes.  CSA pick up.  Fridays, harvest everything.  Pick tomatoes. Talk about how to harvest sweet potatoes.  Saturday, CSA pickup.  Don't harvest anything (except sometimes tomatoes).  Try to tie up loose ends so the farm can rest for a day before it all begins again.   

This rhythm is alternately comforting and maddening, depending on the day and your mindset at the time.  It is deeply reassuring to have cucumber and tomatoes that need to be harvested on a regular basis.  At the same time, if you have any resistance to bending over in the same position you've been in for ten weeks, reaching into the spiny branches of the squash plants with an arm still engraved with angry-looking scratches from two days ago, filling buckets and trays again and again and carrying them down to the end of the row while mosquitoes buzz around your ears and neck and the sun grows stronger -- then it can take an effort of will to begin again each week and each day as the season lengthens into maturity.  Some say if you repeat a task 10,000 times, you master that task. My son was trying to do this with catching a baseball earlier this summer; his friend was practicing scales on the piano.  If picking cucumbers can be put into this category,we have become virtuosos by late August.  

When this rhythm is interrupted, as it was last week with the approach of Hurricane Irene, it takes us a little while to figure out how to do something else.  With our hand in the glove or our fingers on the keys, our arm sunk deep in that spiny squash, our minds can sometimes go on autopilot, drift into an alternate consciousness that makes it difficult to get out of the deep groove the repetition has worn into our minds.  Last week, after a flurry of indecision, we decided to put some seasonal projects temporarily on hold and sink a significant amount of energy into storm preparation.  Beginning Wednesday afternoon, we seeded and transplanted in every available bed on the farm, trying to get spinach, arugula, lettuce, braising greens,  Dan and Erinn, with the help of some volunteers, took the plastic off of our old and unpredictable hoophouse.  We picked all of our pumpkins and stored them with the onions, shallots and garlic in the smaller of our two greenhouses.  With the help of a group from the BU School of Management, we harvested and sorted 2,000 pounds of tomatoes in two hours and stored those in the greenhouse as well.  We battened down the hatches, storing anything that seemed like it might fly away, buttoned up the greenhouses, and went home to wait.   

Along with much of north Waltham, the farm lost power for a few hours on Sunday morning.  According to our rain gauge, about 3.5 inches of rain fell between Saturday afternoon and Monday morning.  The winds were strong enough to knock our

 hot peppers around, but most everything else on the farm looked fairly normal by Monday morning; there was no standing water in the fields, only a few shingles off the gray shed roof, and both greenhouses and our little green shed were undamaged.  Early in the morning, we took all the harvest crates and wash station bins out of the walk-in cooler where we had stored them and put them all back where they belonged.  We opened the greenhouses back up and put all the pick-your-own signs back in the field.  We took a little walk around to make sure there were still crops in the ground to harvest.  And then it was time to pick the squash again.  

Waltham Fields Community Farm Staff  

Claire Kozower, Executive Director

Jericho Bicknell, Education & Volunteer Coordinator

Amanda Cather, Farm Manager

Andy Scherer, Field Manager

Dan Roberts, Field Manager

Erinn Roberts, Greenhouse & Field Manager

Marla Rhodes, Development Coordinator

Deb Guttormsen, Bookkeeper & Tech Coordinator

Assistant Growers/Farmers in Training:

Larisa Jacobson, Lauren Weinberg

Farm Crew:

Rachel Dutton, Andy Friedberg, Courtney Giancaterino, Rachel Kaplan, Sam Powers, Shira Tiffany, Laura Van Tassel

Learning Garden Educators:

Marie Benkley, Rebekah Carter, Kristin Cleveland, Dede Dussault, Paula Jordan

Summer Fellow (from Stanford's Center for Public Service):

Joanna Rosene-Mirvis

www.communityfarms.org          781-899-2403