June 18, 2012
CSA Distribution Week #2
cabbage duo

Waltham Fields Community Farm

 

CSA Newsletter

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What's in the shares 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 eight items this week from the following list: 


Lettuce:  It's still salad season! 

 

Spinach We plant three rounds of spinach in the spring and three rounds in the fall.  We aim to offer spinach for the first three weeks of the CSA with the spring plantings.  We hope the very hot temperatures in midweek don't thwart our plans for this cool-season crop! 
 
Garlic ScapesThe final week for this spring specialty crop!  The flower stalk of the garlic plant that many farmers traditionally pull off in an attempt to make the plant put its energy into the bulb, garlic scapes are essentially a waste product that have become an early-season star. Use them just like you would fresh garlic -- they are delicious raw or cooked.

Escarole:  A farmer's favorite from the lettuce family, well known to the Egyptians and ancient Romans,  escarole helps make up for the fact that we have a hard time growing mustard-family greens like arugula in the springtime.  Traditionally used in soups, the flavor of this versatile green pairs well with rich or smoky flavors like balsamic vinegar, bacon or smoked cheeses.  Escarole is also great grilled, braised, or wilted in a spring risotto. 

Frisee Endive:  Great mixed with mild lettuces, fruits and nuts in a salad.  Another spring favorite we won't see again until fall. 

Kohlrabi: It comes in green or purple, but the color is really only skin-deep and there's no taste difference that we can recognize.  After you peel it, it is extremely versatile:  Sliced thin in salads or spring rolls, arranged on a crudite plate with your favorite dip, layered with Gruyere and green apple on a simple sandwich, or braised in a savory sauce, this vegetable does it all (see recipes for more ideas). 

Kale:  We grow the familiar curly kale kale closeupas well as the more robust black Tuscan variety (hint:  also called dinosaur kale for those of you for whom this might be an incentive).  Both are delicious steamed as a simple side dish, chopped raw into a salad, or cooked in any number of recipes. 

Swiss Chard:  Colorful and packed with folate, vitamins A, K and C, magnesium, potassium and fiber, chard is one of the healthiest vegetables we grow -- good thing it's also one of the most tasty.  Use it in frittatas and pasta dishes, soups and casseroles, or use the leaves to wrap rice and meat combinations or salmon. 

 

Radishes:  You might see French breakfast (white and red), Rover (red round) or Easter Egg (multi-colored) radishes this week -- or possibly a combination of the three. are the earliest of the three varieties we grow.

Beets:  Everyone has their favorite way to prepare beets.  Sliced thin and roasted into beet chips, pureed into bright-pink hummus, in the classic salad with goat cheese and walnuts... the possibilities are endless.  Well start the season with a couple of weeks of red beets and then bring on the candy-striped and golden beets with the warmer weather.
  
Cabbage:  Our sweet, delicious early-season green cabbage is perfect for coleslaw and sauerkraut, wrapped around meat or rice fillings, or chopped with fish tacos.  Napa cabbage will be along in a week or two, followed by red cabbage before we take a break for the summer.

And a farmers' choice of a few other surprise items throughout the week!

Pick-your-own crops this week:
  • Perennial Garden Herbs   
  • Sugar Snap Peas
  • Basil
  • Possibly dill and cilantro towards the end of the week 

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Quick Links

Events and Programs

 

Children's Learning Garden Programs!

 

Registration is now open for our well-loved summer programs!  Sign up for Garden Explorers, Farmer for a Week and more by clicking on the link above.

  

Wild Foraging Walk with Russ Cohen  

 

Wed., June 20th 5:30-7:30 pm at the Farm.

Kohlrabi 'n' Carrot Slaw

From Angelic Organics. Serves 4 to 6

 

1 pound kohlrabi, peeled, grated 

2 med-large carrots, grated
1 red bell pepper, diced
1 small red onion, chopped
2 t chopped fresh thyme

1 large clove garlic, minced 

1/2 cup sour cream
1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil
4 cups wine vinegar
1 1/2 t chili powder
1/2 t salt
1/4 t black pepper


1. Toss the kohlrabi, carrots, bell pepper, onion, thyme, and garlic in a large bowl. 2. Whisk the sour cream, oil, vinegar, chili powder, salt, and pepper in a medium bowl. 3. Pour the dressing over the vegetables and toss to coat. Cover and refrigerate for 2 hours before serving.  


Do you have a recipe you'd like to share? Just send it on in -- please do let us know where you found it so we can reference the source.

 

 


 

 

Kids Corner - Garlic Scapes

 

NAME: Garlic Scapes.

FAMILY: Allium Sativum.

NUTRITION: Calcium, Vitamin B & C, Iron, magnesium.

FUN FACT: Dried garlic stems make excellent Harry Potter wands.  The scapes loop around in a circle, if you find some of the small ones you can wear them like bracelets to keep away vampires.  Also garlic flowers are beautiful flowers. Did you know that our head farmer Amanda used them in her wedding bouquet?

 Kid-Garlic

This is our family's favorite pesto pasta recipe with garlic scapes.

 

5 cups fresh basil from the farm or our garden.

3-6 Garlic scapes

1 tsp. salt

1/2 tsp. black salt

1 fresh jalapeno

1 ½ cup olive oil

½ cup grated parmesan

½ cup pine nuts (optional)

 

Blend all ingredients together except the pine nuts, once you have done that add the pine nuts in and you are ready to serve you pesto pasta!

 

Did you know you can take any pesto pasta recipe and add garlic scapes? The amount is up to you the more garlic you use the more garlicky it will taste, you can use less garlic to give it a bit of a kick.
Notes from the Field: Resilience

tomato plant - youngMid-June is a transitional time on the farm.  The big planting pushes of the spring are over.  While we'll keep putting in successions of carrots, lettuce, beets and greens until September, only one more big block of planting -- our fall broccoli and cauliflower -- stands between us and autumn.  The major tasks of the next few weeks are getting those plants in the ground, keeping everything as weed-free as we can, staking and tying our acre of tomatoes, and feeding the crops as they need it.  The harvests are manageable up until the first big pick of the season -- the garlic -- in early July.  Our weed crew, who arrived June 4 and are the reason you'll be able to pick weed-free sugar snap peas this week, are kicking it into high gear.  At some point later this week, nighttime temperatures will climb out of the fifties and we will travel to the Gateways field three times a week to pick squash and cucumbers.  The plan is in place, the die is cast, and a big part of what we have to do now is pay attention so that we know what to do when the time comes.

There is a lot of talk about resilience, in farming and out of it, these days.  A resilient small farm, in a somewhat dry dictionary sense of the word, is one that is able to respond to unexpected adversity with strength and flexibility.  This week, as I've been thinking hard about the ability to bounce back, to grow stronger through challenges, I realized that I have spent the better part of a decade trying to create a plan for a farm where nothing can go wrong.  This, of course, is nonsense.  Unexpected adversity is as much a part of farming as it is the rest of life.  Adversity, absurd or appalling, makes an appearance in every farm season whether we look for it or not.  It might be a pest that devours eighty percent of our spring peas.  It might be a tractor that stubbornly refuses to start no matter what we do on a day when the sun is shining and we need to cultivate, or a flood that washes away a crop and a field with it.  The challenges we take on ourselves -- the everyday hard work that is just part of farming, like training for an athletic endeavor -- are a very different thing from the sudden hailstorm, the unforeseen blight, the dry spell that becomes a drought before your eyes.  The real strength of the farm lies not in somehow, through superhuman effort, barring the door to these troubles; it is in realizing that there is no door.  All that we have is our ability to adapt, survive, and, if we are very lucky and very wise, build something new and beautiful from the aftermath.

covered rowWe build a resilient small farm with three kinds of strength, woven together like warp and weft through the work of everyday.  One is an internal strength, the work that we do that's almost invisible.  It is soil building, team building, creating systems and practices that are both extremely effective and totally dispensable if need be. It is incorporating farming methods that we believe are good for the environment and adaptable to the vagaries of the new normal weather patterns -- cover crops, beneficial organisms, and all the old artistry of organic agriculture that it takes a lifetime to learn.  It is the constant work of maintaining a mental state that can create and believe in a complex plan -- for the day, the week, the season -- and let it go at a moment's notice.  This kind of strength has as its basis  the courage to be awake enough to see the thing you least want to see, whether it is trivial or tragic, and to let go of your former plans to begin your preparations for a new reality.  It is the strength to give up on a practice that you have come to rely on, that feels familiar and easy, because it is no longer serving the larger purpose of building a healthy farm.   It is the fortitude to cut your losses, to turn in the crop that won't make it despite the work you have invested in it.  
  
The second kind of strength is the strength of patience and healing, the adaptability to move beyond the rift in the pattern we had planned and begin to weave a new one.  It is the ability to dig deep, to recognize that scar tissue can be strong .  It is the backbone both to grieve and to not take it personally.  This is the strength that turns the loss, after the initial shock is past, into an opportunity -- it is the ability to re-plant the empty bed, to know that if the soil is good, some other mystery will take root there to be harvested.

The third strength is the strength of community.   In all the work that we do on the farm, we are dependent upon the understanding and responsiveness of our community (you) to  support us through the hard times.  Economic support is only part of the picture, but it is a significant part.  A farm that is financially supported by its customers is a strong farm, one that is not in debt to and dependent on any large corporations.  The financial strength of community for a farm definitely means obligation -- we owe each of you a good portion of what we grow in a good year, and we owe you a constant stream of explanation and education in the meantime; in crisis, however, community support means freedom, the chance to take the time to reflect and make good decisions instead of responding based on debt and fear of loss.  The resilience that comes from community also means all of the other things that community brings with it -- conversation, connection, mutual learning and respect, shared meals, generations, friends of friends, mistakes and missteps, and, if we are very lucky and very wise, deepening knowledge and increasing flexibility. 

As we move into this mid-season pattern of tending to the plants, watching the skies, and meeting up with each of you once a week, I am hopeful that our farm's strength is this kind -- not the strength of that barred imaginary door, but the strength of the open window that can't shatter, of those "prayers that are made out of grass."

Enjoy the harvest.

Amanda (for the farm crew) 

Waltham Fields Community Farm Year-Round Staff  

Claire Kozower, Executive Director

Kim Hunter, Education & Volunteer Coordinator (on maternity leave)

Fan Watkinson, Interim Education & Volunteer Coordinator 

Amanda Cather, Farm Manager

Andy Scherer, Gateways Field Manager

Dan Roberts, Field Manager

Erinn Roberts, Greenhouse & Field Manager

Marla Rhodes, Development Coordinator

Deb Guttormsen, Bookkeeper & Tech Coordinator

 

Assistant Growers

Sutton Kiplinger, Zannah Porter   

Field Crew

Alison Denn, Anna Linck, Katherine Murray, David Taberner 

Weed Crew  

Becca Carden, Kathryn Cole, Annabelle Ho, Meghan Seifert

Learning Garden Educators

Rebecca Byrd, Alison Dagger, Ian Howes

 

Work Sharers

Graphic Design, Neva Corbo-Hudak

CSA Newsletter, Susan Cassidy

Learning Garden Maintenance, Rebekah Carter

Container Garden, Dede Dussault

Perennial Garden Maintenance, Sabine Gerbatsch and Amy Hendrickson

Farm Work, Naomi Shea

CSA Distribution Coordinators: Joy Grimes, Natasha Hawke, Deepika Madan, Eileen Rojas, and Aneiage Van Bean  

www.communityfarms.org          781-899-2403  

Waltham Fields Community Farm | 240 Beaver Street | Waltham | MA | 02452