July 30, 2012
CSA Distribution Week #8
Corn  

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 nine items this week from the following list: 


Kale: It's back!  kale and squashAfter a little break for fertilizing, weeding and watering, kale should be around for most of the rest of the season.  Since we don't have as much lettuce this week, you could try making one of these delicious kale salads for a quick no-cook meal, or try a smoothie with kale as a great way to get your greens on (you could substitute lambs' quarters for spinach if you want all local greens)!

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. 

IPM Sweet Corn:  We don't grow sweet corn at WFCF, but it's such a summertime staple that we choose to buy it in from careful growers we trust and respect. Verrill Farm in Concord has grown sweet corn for us for the past 5 years.  While they are not organic growers, they use integrated pest management techniques to grow some of the best corn around.  We hope you enjoy it. 

Beets
Back after a little break for some irrigation! 

Carrots:  Sweet, juicy carrots are one of the highlights of early summer on the farm.  Take off the tops before storing them -- but we don't think you'll need to store them for very long.
 
Garlic:   This is cured 'Spanish Roja' garlic, harvested the first week of July and stored in our greenhouse for the past month.  It does not need to be refrigerated and should store well -- if you can keep from using it all to make pesto right away.

Zucchini
We grow three different types of zucchini:  the traditional green, a beautiful gold variety, and an heirloom variety called Costata Romanesco ('Roman Rib'), which is tasty even when it's very large, which, because it can hide easily in the giant leaves of the plant, it often is.

Summer Squash
Coming on fast, you'll see the traditional yellow 'Slick Pik' joined by the green and yellow patty pans and the beautifully striped 'Zephyr'.  All are delicious on the grill, sauteed in butter, or made into summer's best enchiladas for a special meal. 

CucumbersStill coming!  Time for some white gazpacho!

Yukon Gold Potatoes
Whether it's green bean and potato salad at a backyard picnic, a quick and hearty soup with kale and chorizo, roasted and topped with ricotta, or twice-baked bites, new potatoes are an early-summer favorite.  Their skins are very thin, so you don't have to peel them, and they have a crisp, moist texture that lends itself well to all kinds of quick cooking techniques.   

Eggplant The first of the year, our delicate 'Orient Express' eggplant is tasty on the grill or made into a delicious Thai-style stir fry.  It will still be available in limited quantities this week because of the cool nights, but should be on the stand through September.

Celery:  Our celery is smaller, greener and more strongly flavored than the blanched white celery you traditionally see in the grocery store.  It is perfect in potato or pasta salads, where it adds a tantalizing crunch, soup stocks, or other recipes where you want the texture and flavor of celery.

Green PeppersJust the beginning of a crop that should take us into early October.  We planted our red peppers a little later this year to try to avoid the pepper maggot fly, so we're not planning to see those until September.  For now, enjoy these beautiful green peppers in ratatouille or gazpacho!

Hopefully a few more tomatoes:  The forecast is not promising, but we're hoping that all of our hard work will pay off in the form of a few more delicious vine-ripened early tomatoes this week. 

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

Pick-your-own crops this week:
  • Perennial garden herbs   
  • Green beans  
  • Basil
  • Dill
  • Cilantro
  • Parsley   
  • Hot peppers:  jalapeno and serrano
  • Tomatilloes
  • Husk cherries
  • Possibly a few cherry and plum tomatoes  -- please harvest only if plants are dry 
  • Flowers 

Summer Online Auction!

eSprout ends this Tuesday (7/31 at 11pm)

BID NOW!

All proceeds benefit our Food Access & Education programs.

Recipes for Purslane 

We got an enthusiastic note from shareholder Suzanne, who wrote: 
What perfect timing with Amanda's note on weeds! I've been regularly taking home my "car full" of purslane and cooking up seasonal treats full of those healthy omega-3's - reportedly higher than flax seeds or any plant in the vegetable kingdom! (source: Wikipedia). So, I will share a couple of favorite recipes and another that looks super. But mostly I just add it fresh to my salads or load up my green smoothie drinks with all it's delicious lemony tang

 

Three salad recipes pairing with our current CSA share veggies: 

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Quick Links

Events and Programs

Potluck and Stargazing w Astronomer Andrew West

Join us Tues., Aug. 14th 7:30-8:30pm Potluck 8:30-10pm Stargazing FREE public event - All are welcome!

 

Andrew will have a telescope set up - bring yours too if you have one!

  

Indian Vegetarian Cooking with CSA shareholder Meena Kothandaraman

Fri., Aug. 24, 5-7pm

Click here to learn more! 

 

Children's Learning Garden Programs!  

Registration is now open for our well-loved summer programs!  Sign up for Garden Explorers, Farmer for a Week, or perhaps you want to arrange a special one-time Farm Visit as a birthday party or for a youth group you work with.

Fruit on the Farm:  Blueberries, and Apple Shares are Back!
This week we'll have a very limited supply of delicious wild blueberries from the Benson Place in Heath, MA for sale in the barn! Get them while they last -- thanks to Marla for making the connection with the Benson Place as well as the trip out to Heath to pick up the berries!

WFCF is proud to be working with Autumn Hills Orchard in Groton again this season to offer shares in what promises to be a bountiful harvest of seasonal fruits. Fruit shares include mostly a wide variety of Autumn Hills's award-winning IPM cooking and eating apples, but may have a few peaches, pears, grapes and plums mixed in depending on the season! Shares cost $70 for 9 weeks of a half-peck bag of fruit, between 5-6 pounds a week. To sign up for a fruit share, you must pay at a CSA pickup before August 15. (Read more about the fruit share right above the Notes from the Field below.)
Roasted vegetable ratatouille
Makes 2 1/2-3 cups, 6 servings as a side dish - serve hot or at room temperature

2 medium eggplants, chopped into 1" squares
2 onions, chopped into 1" chunks
2 red or green peppers, seeded and cut into 1" chunks
2 good sized zucchini or summer squash, washed and cut into large chunks
Garlic salt
Dried thyme, other dried Italian-style herbs of your choice
Salt and black pepper
Olive oil
1 whole head of garlic
1 14 oz. can chopped tomatoes (fire roasted, if possible) - see note on fresh tomatoes
Red pepper flakes (optional)
Splash of balsamic vinegar
1 tsp sugar
Handful of fresh chopped parsley

1.Cut all vegetables to an even size, toss lightly with olive oil. Season with garlic salt, black pepper, thyme, other Italian-style herbs. Spread over 2 lightly oiled rimmed cookie sheets (don't crowd into deep lasagna pan - the vegetables will steam instead of roast). Roast for 35-40 minutes, checking frequently and rotating cookie sheets in the oven. Remove when brown, even slightly charred, around the edges.
2. Roast garlic (roasting can be done together with the other vegetables) - slice pointed end off all individual cloves of the garlic, keeping head intact. Peel off the papery layer that goes around the head, but not around individual cloves. Drizzle with a little olive oil and some black pepper and thyme. Wrap in foil and bake for about 20 minutes or until soft and golden.
3. In large soup pot or dutch oven, combine 1 can tomatoes, balsamic vinegar, sugar and red pepper flakes, if you plan to add them, and simmer until the liquid is reduced significantly and turns slightly syrupy. Squeeze out the whole head of garlic into tomatoes; it will likely ooze out. Mash into tomatoes.
4. Add roasted vegetable to warm sauce, toss to coat, and let them absorb some saucy goodness.
5. Adjust for taste (salt, balsamic) and toss in a handful of fresh parsley.
Notes To make this more like a spicy caponata, add a handful of golden raisins and some toasted pine nuts to cooled ratatouille.
If you prefer to use fresh tomatoes, use about a pound. If the tomatoes are really "wet," seed them and add another tomato or two. Cook down the tomatoes with balsamic/sugar/pepper flakes as above.
Winter Shares and Fruit Shares for Sale!
Winter Share_Nov. 08WFCF has a very few of our own delicious winter shares for sale for $200!  Purchase one now to make sure you keep receiving tasty, organically grown veggies through the end of the year. 

Both primary shareholders and split share partners (secondary shareholders) can purchase their own winter shares, but please make sure we make a note of who is purchasing the share when you sign up!   

  

Winter shares consist of four distributions of a range of seasonal vegetables, including winter greens, cabbage, onions, leeks, carrots, turnips and other storage crops and include a selection of winter squash and potatoes from Picadilly Farm. These shares are a delicious way to celebrate the late-season harvest!

Note:  Winter shares are distributed on Saturday afternoons in November and December.  Please make a note of the distribution days to make sure you will be available to pick up your winter share!

 

2012 Winter CSA Share pick-ups will be as follows:

Saturday, November 3, 1-4 PM
Saturday, November 17, 1-4  PM
Saturday, December 1, 1-4  PM 

Saturday, December 15, 1-4 PM

 

Autumn Hills Orchard Fruit Share 

Autumn Hills Orchard, an 84 acre orchard operation in Groton, Mass., grows over 30 varieties of apples, as well as peaches, plums, pears and grapes.  For $70, fruit share customers will receive 9 weeks of a half-peck (or equivalent value if not apples) of what's in season and picked to order. Here's a sampling of what CSA shareholders have received in past seasons:

 

Early Season: Peaches, Bartlett Pears, Ginger Gold, Paula Red, Gala
Mid-Season: Italian Plums, Cortland, Macintosh, Empire, Cox' Orange Pippin, Spencer, Golden Delicious, Bosc Pears, Concord Grapes
Late-Season: Macoun, Mutsu, RI Greening, Spigold, Suncrisp, Red Delicious, Ida Red
           

We typically feature two or three varieties each week - but sometimes we mix it up a bit depending on the week and what's available. Autumn Hills Orchard, in Groton, MA, is open for pick your own during September and October. We also partner with CSA farms in Eastern Massachusetts and deliver fresh, picked to order, tree fruit as well as grapes to customers on a weekly basis. Our farm is three rolling drumlin hills and has panoramic views of the hills and mountains of Massachusetts and Southern New Hampshire - very good land for growing apples! Our staff has years of experience in farming responsibly and sustainably and we are careful to employ good farming practices. We are "extreme" followers of Integrated Pest Management techniques and consult regularly with UMass Extension and other agricultural experts to grow the best fruit possible.  Learn more about us at
www.autumnhillsorchard.com.

 

Notes from the Field: Harvest
onions curingIt starts on Saturday after the CSA pickup is over.  Erinn packs up the remainder of the vegetables carefully into blue crates, each marked with the crop and the quantity, to be stored in the cooler until our Outreach  Market on Tuesday.  Then she walks the fields with her notebook, carefully evaluating which crops are ready for the following week.  Each week, we try to offer a crop from the allium family (onions, scallions, leeks, garlic, or shallots), along with a salad green, a cooking green, and what we call the "standards" -- beets, carrots, cukes, squash, and as they come in, eggplant, peppers, and tomatoes.  We plan to have other crops, like kohlrabi, escarole, fennel, cabbage, radishes, salad turnips, bok choy, and the like, make scheduled appearances throughout the season so that folks won't get tired of them.  Spinach is a spring and fall crop only (summers on our farm are too hot and dry) and tasty brassicas like broccoli, cauliflower, arugula and broccoli rabe are autumn-harvest only for us because of the intense pest pressure on these crops in the spring at WFCF.
 
Heading back to the farm office with her notes and her calculator, Erinn uses the percentage popularity of each crop that was available the week before to figure out how many of each to harvest for the upcoming CSA week.  Because of the choice that we offer shareholders, we have lots of spreadsheets where we keep track of how many bunches of chard we picked, how many were taken, and how many shareholders picked up -- the important number that results from all these columns and rows being that "percentage take" that we then use to calculate how many bunches we'll need for Tuesday's pickup.  It's not rocket science -- in fact, it's basically an educated guess -- but it makes us feel better to have some concrete numbers to base the harvest on, and it usually works.  Because she works Tuesdays through Saturdays, Erinn leaves her harvest list on the kitchen table in the office, where the crew can find it on Monday morning. 

Monday at 6:00 AM, Amanda talks with Jenny at Picadilly Farm in Winchester, New Hampshire.  Picadilly has grown all of our Potatoesstorage potatoes and winter squash for the past five years, and has grown 100 CSA share equivalents for us since 2011.  Jenny and Amanda agree on what Picadilly will send down to Waltham for the week, and those numbers are then figured into the harvest list.  At 7 AM, the core farm staff convene in the farm office to look over the list and decide on the order of events for the morning, including, most critically, who will join Andy at the Gateways field in Weston for the big harvest of cucumbers and squash.  Sutton is usually in the wash station on Mondays, so she puts on her boots and bibs and heads out to fill up the wash tubs and check out how the coolers are arranged.  Amanda, Andy and Zannah split up, with Andy and Zannah usually loading the box truck with black crates to head to Weston, and Amanda heading out to the fields to start the early harvest.

At WFCF, we harvest every morning until about noon.  We pick "hard crops" like eggplant, peppers, potatoes, squash and cucumbers on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays; greens get picked on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays.  Beets, carrots, onions and other in-between crops are harvested whenever we have time.  We usually harvest tomatoes in the afternoons, when the plants have had a chance to dry from the morning dew or overnight showers, in order to minimize the chance of spreading disease through the crop.  So while Zannah and Andy drive over to meet some of our field crew at the Weston field, Sutton and Amanda might pick eggplant into orange baskets until the rest of the field crew arrives at the Field Station site at 8 AM.  The Gateways crew will harvest squash and cucumbers all morning, picking down the long rows into white 5-gallon buckets, then sorting and counting into black crates that will stack easily in the box truck, where they'll be cooled down on their trip back to Waltham.  At the Field Station, Sutton might drive the eggplant back to the wash station to be sprayed down, counted, weighed and packed into blue bins in the cooler while Amanda and Kat move on to peppers and potatoes.  In the meantime, Sutton directs the weed crew to their first project of the morning. 

We dig potatoes using the tractor and a simple I&J potato plow, designed for use with horses.  The plow helps break up the potato hill and bring the spuds to the surface, where we can pack them into black crates and carry them back to the coolers.  As Sutton finishes washing and packing each crop, she rotates back into the harvest, making sure that produce keeps moving out of the field and back to the wash station on a regular basis.  If the crew has time after the potatoes, we'll move on to bunching beets or carrots or getting a head start on cleaning garlic.  The truck from Weston usually rolls in just before noon, so we have time to unload the truck and try to fit all those cucumbers into the cooler before lunch.  Monday afternoon probably includes some tomato harvesting and garlic cleaning until the field crew leaves at 4 PM, giving the core farm staff a little while to catch up on loose ends before we head home. 

Tuesday at 7 AM, we convene back in the farm office to see what's left to pick.  Tuesday is Dan's day in the wash station, since it gives him a chance to pack and organize some vegetables for the Outreach Market that afternoon.  We start with greens, which like to come out of the field before the day heats up.  The wash station fills up with piles of bunched greens that Dan quickly dunks in the wash water and packs for the cooler.  Beets and carrots are next.  We either bunch these crops or, if we are finishing up a succession, we might harvest the whole bed loose with our bed lifter Dan sprays the root crops on a mesh table, dunks them in the water to rinse off any remaining soil, and packs them into crates.  Someone takes a truck out to Verrill Farm in Concord to pick up the sweet corn and maybe a few scones for the harvest crew.  By noon on Tuesday, we are usually finishing up the harvest, recording all the numbers for the past two days on our wash station sheets, and calculating how much is available for the Outreach Market and the Tuesday CSA pickup.  After a quick break for lunch, the Outreach Market team begins to pack the truck with veggies, tables, tents and signs to head out to downtown Waltham, while the farmer who is running the CSA begins her set up.  The rest of us get an afternoon to transplant, cultivate, irrigate or do greenhouse work before the harvest cycle begins again on Wednesday morning. 

Each of our farm staff has a critical role to play in the harvest dance that we do each morning.  Speed, thoroughness, consistency and quality control (otherwise known as 'beauty') are all very important in harvest, and each of us has different and complementary strengths.  The harvest is more of an endurance event than a sprint, a muscle workout that includes bending, lifting, crawling, bunching and hunching; it is an intense and demanding job that requires focus, concentration and stamina.  While there are times when we harvest in a group, spread out down the row, which is conducive to conversation about anything but vegetables, as often we are too spread out for talking and have to work with our own inner conversation.  It is a good time for reflection, planning, organizing for the rest of the day, or just taking the time to enjoy the beauty of the fields in the morning.  Harvest is the only task on the farm that has to happen every day regardless of weather conditions -- no matter what, the food needs to come in.  Any morning, rain or shine, between 7 AM and noon, if you happen to look out the window, think of us harvesting -- the truck rolling into the wash station loaded with food, the graceful motions of the crew bunching kale, the glistening amethyst of the eggplant and emerald of the peppers. 

 

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