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Waltham Fields Community Farm
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CSA NEWSLETTER
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Week 9: August 5, 2013  
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NEW T-shirts and cookbooks are in! Stop by the merch shelves in the back corner of the CSA barn. Proceeds support our food access and education work.
Summer Programs in the Learning Garden: Farmer for a Week, Farm Visits and more...
Click here
Drop-In Volunteers welcome on Mondays (high school and older) and Saturdays (all ages), arrive at 9am sharp.
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From Hilary, a friend of the Farm.
6-7 fresh garden tomatoes sliced lengthwise, stem and core removed
1/4 sweet yellow onion chopped in large pieces (separated)
2 green onions, tops trimmed
1 jalapeno (optional)
1 clove of garlic cut into slivers
1 tbsp olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste
1 small handful of chopped cilantro (DO NOT ROAST)
Line small baking sheet with tinfoil (easier cleanup) and spray with olive oil cooking spray. Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Slice tomatoes lengthwise and put onto center of baking sheet. Add separated pieces of onion, green onion and jalapeno on and around tomato. Place garlic slivers inside the tomato halves to protect them from burning and to infuse the tomatoes with garlic flavor. Drizzle olive oil all over mixture. Add salt and pepper to taste. Place in oven and roast for 20 minutes or until tomatoes are soft and juicy and the onions are tender. Remove from oven and let cool thoroughly. Add to a bowl with fresh cilantro and blend using an immersion blender or regular blender. Refrigerate for a few hours before serving so the flavors can combine. Enjoy.
Do you have a recipe you'd like to share? We love to include shareholder recipes in the newsletter! Please send it in to Susan Cassidy. |
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What's In the Share This Week
Each week, we do our best to predict what will be available in the CSA barn and in the fields. The CSA newsletter is prepared before we start harvesting for the week, so sometimes you'll see vegetables in the barn that weren't on the list, and sometimes vegetables will be on the list but won't make it to the barn.
CucumbersEggplant: Our eggplant harvest is in full swing, including the beautiful bell type, the long, grillable 'Asian' style, and the petite and tasty 'Fairy Tale' variety. Zannah grew these at our Gateways field in Weston, and apparently they're very happy there!
Potatoes: These little beauties are "new potatoes", with delicate skins and delicious flavor. This week's variety is 'Augusta', and it's a Yukon Gold-type with yellow skin and light pink eyes. Delicious!
Fresh Onions: We grow some beautiful varieties of fresh-eating onions on the farm that are perfect for salads, sandwiches, or anything else you can imagine. We'll be harvesting them over the next few weeks. They keep best in the refrigerator; you can keep their tops on or cut them off, but keep them in a bag for best results. Bell Peppers: Big green bell peppers, beautiful purple peppers and delicate white 'Chablis" peppers are pouring in from the fields at Gateways. They are truly beautiful this year -- enjoy them in gazpacho, ratatouille, or on the grill! Possibly some more Tomatoes from the fields at the Lyman Estate, although cool nights mean fewer tomatoes!
 Sweet Corn from Verrill Farm in ConcordAnd a few surprises from Picadilly Farm, the great New Hampshire family farmers who provide us with 100 shares each week!
Pick-Your-Own Crops This Week  Pick-your-own fields are open to all shareholders any day of the week during daylight hours. Please check the pick-your-own stand for maps and a list of available crops, along with amounts to pick. Please harvest only in labelled rows, and pay close attention to the amounts you harvest in order to ensure that there will be enough for all shareholders.
Hot Peppers: Jalapenos and serranos are early this year! Enjoy them, but pick carefully only where signs are. Cilantro Dill Parsley BasilCherry and Plum Tomatoes availability will be weather dependent; cool nights mean tomatoes don't ripen as fast
Husk Cherries
Tomatilloes Green Beans Perennial Garden Herbs & Flowers: Please pick carefully (use scissors), pay attention to signs, and watch your step in the perennial garden. There are many great herbs that are going to be ready later in the season!
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FRUIT SHARES AND WINTER SHARES FOR SALE!
Autumn Hills Orchard is a working orchard located in historic Groton, Massachusetts about 35 miles northeast of Waltham. The farm produces over 25 varieties of apples, plus peaches, pears, plums, grapes and raspberries. For over 10 years, Autumn HIlls has partnered with Waltham Fields Community Farm to provide weekly shares in the late summer and fall. Share contents vary by week over the season but are primarily apples with other fruit varieties based on availability including: Concord grapes, Italian plums, Bartlett pears and Bosc pears. Shares may also include the following apple varieties: Paula Red, Ginger Gold, Macintosh, Cortland, Red Cort, Empire, Golden Delicious, Mutsu, Cox' Orange Pippin, Spencer, Rhode Island Greening, Macoun, Kendall, SpiGold, Northern Spy, Sun Crisp, Red Delicious, Fuji, or Braeburn. Autumn Hills' employs Integrated Pest Management (IPM) techniques, growing high quality fruit and takes pride in producing fruit for customers and CSA subscribers. The farm is open September through October for "pick your own." WFCF CSA customers who visit during that time will receive a special welcome and tour!
Deliveries are scheduled to start in early September with 7 deliveries planned. Depending on the availability of early fruit, the start date will be announced shortly but we anticipate start-up just after Labor Day. Ann Harris, of Autumn HIlls, will be here in Waltham in early August to answer your questions, etc. Later in the season, she will also be on hand during selected pick up times to share recipes, tips, and more. The 2013 Fruit share is priced at $56.00. The sign up deadline is September 1. To sign up, just bring payment to your CSA pickup. Please make sure that the name of the primary shareholder is on all payments.
We also have a few WFCF winter shares for sale! Winter shares are the perfect way to extend your CSA experience through the late fall and eat local (and delicious) for the holidays! Winter shares are $200.00 and include three pickups at the farm on Saturday afternoons, November 9, November 23 and December 3. We plan for winter shares to represent the tasty bounty of the season, including carrots, beets, sweet potatoes, rutabaga, turnips, radishes, cabbages, lettuces, spinach, arugula, bok choy and kohlrabi, onions and garlic, and winter squash and potatoes from Picadilly Farm. Sign up at any CSA pickup! Availability is limited, and we'll sell winter shares on a first-come, first-served basis until they are gone!
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Notes from the Field
Many thanks to Saul Blumenthal for the photos!
 August on the farm brings a subtle shift in our work energy. Where two weeks ago we were still in high-season planting mode, the first of August is a marker beyond which we don't plant anything that needs to be in the ground for more than 50 days to mature. It means all our carrots are in, all our beets are in, all the fall turnips and rutabagas and leeks are in. The only things left to plant are lettuces and spinach, arugula and mixed greens, which we'll continue to put in the ground, and in the hoophouses, until early September. As fields slowly begin to come out of production, we'll also begin planting cover crops, including oats and peas, winter rye and hairy vetch, that can hold our soil over the winter and add organic matter when we turn them in in the spring.
 Now the bulk of our energy turns to the harvest. Squash and cucumbers, peppers and eggplant at our Gateways fields in Weston will soon be joined by cantaloupes, though we'll need a few days of heat to ripen them up. The fields at the Lyman Estate will need the same in order to start really churning out the tomatoes. It's a race against disease in weather like this, where the (beautiful) cool days and nights are favorable to the spread of cucurbit and tomato fungi and bacteria, as well as the dreaded late blight oomycete. We've been spraying our field tomatoes with copper to protect against late blight whenever the "blitecast" website from Cornell tells us that weather conditions warrant it; since we haven't yet seen any on the farm, we haven't sprayed the pick-your-own tomatoes yet. We have started to spray the raspberries with spinosad, a compound made by bacteria that is approved for use in organic systems and is currently thought to be our best bet against the spotted-wing drosophila.
Last week the weed crew continued their swing through our fall broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage, cleaning them up with hoes and hands while Dan worked the tractors. Sutton worked on her (hopefully) rabbit proof fence around the tomatoes before departing for her summer vacation. Andy was back from two weeks in Wisconsin with his family to help with the bountiful and beautiful harvest that the field crew and Zannah pulled in at Gateways. The pigs got bigger and bigger.
Our outreach market is in full swing, bringing bags of free and reduced-cost produce to about one hundred of our low-income neighbors every Tuesday evening. The farm is filled with young people participating in our summer Learning Garden programs. Our brand-new youth programgot underway this past week; Sutton trained our youth crew in harvesting on Friday morning in preparation for their first trip to the Waltham farmers' market next Saturday. And we heard some great news on Monday -- the Lexington Community Farm Coalition, which submitted a proposal to operate the former Busa Farm in Lexington as a brand-new community farm with WFCF as the farmers, was selected by the town as the winning proposal. Now, with LexFarm, we'll begin the work of bringing a new farm, responsive to its individual community, into being.
Beets and sweet fresh onions, carrots and potatoes, lettuce and swiss chard all continue to come in beautifully despite the cool nights. Our next succession of kale is almost ready to harvest, and we'll start picking shallots and storage onions as soon as their tops fall over. The sun has begun its inexorable swing to the south and autumn is around the corner. For now, we're hoping for a little warm weather to ripen up those melons and tomatoes, and we'll be all set.
Enjoy the harvest,
Amanda, for the farm staff
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Marla Rhodes, Development CoordinatorAmanda Cather, Farm ManagerErinn Roberts, Greenhouse and Field ManagerDan Roberts, Field ManagerSutton Kiplinger, Assistant Grower Zannah Porter, Assistant Grower Andy Scherer, Farmer Hector Cruz, Maricela Escobar, Amber Carmer Sandager and Lauren Trotogott: Field Crew Lizzie Callaghan, Sage Dumont, Alice Fristrom, and Eli Shanks: Weed Crew Mikaela Burns, Andrea Coughlan and Matthew Crawford: Farm Educators
Ashley Kemembin, Forest Foundation Summer Intern
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