Week 8; August 14, 2014

What's in the box?

Full Share

sweet corn

onions

peppers

eggplant

oregano

cherry tomatoes

slicer and heirloom tomatoes

rainbow chard

carrots

greenbeans/ dragon tongue beans

zucchini/ summer squash

cabbage

sweet corn

eggplant

peppers

oregano

hot peppers

tomatoes

carrots

zucchini/ squash

cabbage

head lettuce

Notes on the box...

Remember to remove the tops from the carrots before storing to keep them fresh and crisp. There's a carrot top pesto recipe in the week 6 blog post.

Eggplant gets bitter as it sits longer. Try to eat it soon! If you think you don't like it, try cooking it and eating it sooner than later. The freshness makes all the difference with eggplant! Store in an open plastic bag in your crisper to retain moisture.

Remember not to put tomatoes in the fridge unless they are super ripe and you can't get to them right away and plan on cooking them later.

Hungarian hot wax ranges from a bright yellow to a limey green to an orangey red color. They are long and slender, but smaller than the red sweet roasting peppers. Not sure if it's a hot pepper? Taste with caution!

Recipes...

Thai Chopped Salad with Mango and Coconut Dressing

Summer Corn Salad

Chard Fritters

Chard Salad with Lemon and Breadcrumbs

Tomato and Carmelized Corn Galette

Cold Noodles with Miso Lime and Ginger from Smitten Kitchen (see photos of the farm for a picture of our lunch!)

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On the farm...

We are excited to invite you and your family out for a Summer cookout on August 16th at the farm. We will be grilling and hope you bring a dish to pass. There will be farm tours and plenty of time and space for kids and adults to explore, sample goodies straight from the field, get to know your farmers, breathe some fresh air, and release your wiggles! We’ll plan on dinner at 6 PM, You can come a little early to explore the farm (around 4 or 5) and feel free to camp out overnight if you’d like. Please let us know if you plan on attending! We are on google maps, just search for Turnip Rock Farm

Our Harvest Party will be September 20th. Another potluck! Mark your calendar! pumpkins to pick, and fall colors.

Sam Karns, a friend and Turnip Rock employee is raising hogs over at his farm nearby and he still has pork for sale! If you're interested in purchasing some for delivery this fall, contact him at birdnbearfarm@gmail.com

building the box

Otto helped to arrange the vegetables for the pictures

a beneficial bug doing a little hoeing in the brussel sprout patch

Rainbow chard!

Sweet sweet sweet corn!

Turnip Rock FarmerAugust 13, 2014 Comments

Week 7; August 7, 2014

What's in the box?

Full Share

sweet corn!

potatoes!

sweet onions

green top beets

bell pepper

zucchini / summer squash

sage

broccoli

tomatoes

cucumbers

green beans

green top carrots

Single Shares got same as full in lesser quantities, excluding beets and broccoli.

Notes on the box....

To preserve flavor and texture, store tomatoes and potatoes out of the fridge. Use the ripest tomatoes first and save less ripe ones for later in the week. Store tomatoes with the stem side facing down, sitting on their shoulders. This will help keep the tomato in better shape for longer, so that the bottom doesn't get a soft spot from sitting on the counter.

To keep beets and carrots from going soft and bendy, remove tops before putting them in the fridge. You can cut off the tops of the beets right below the rubber band so that the greens stay in a neat bunch for later use. Tops of both beets and carrots are edible. Beet tops can be used as you would chard or spinach. See last weeks blog for the recipe for carrot greens pesto.

Sweet onions are not cured (meaning dried for storage) and should be kept in the fridge.

Sweet corn should be stored in the fridge and tastes best eaten sooner than later. We love it husked, silked, and boiled for just a few short minutes and served with butter and salt.

Recipes...

Carrot Salad with Tahini and Crisped Chick Peas from Smittin Kitchen

Summer Vegetable Tian

Refrigerator Cucumber Salad

[yumprint-recipe id='41'][yumprint-recipe id='42']and for those of you who might still have cauliflower or cabbage from previous weeks, a couple of recipes from our lovely member, Abby...

Curry roasted cauliflower:

Dress cauliflower florets and stems in coconut or olive oil, salt, pepper, and 3 ish tbsp of curry powder. Roast at 400 about 40 minutes, finish with lemon juice and fresh cilantro.

Kids Love It.

Grilled cabbage:

Cut a head of cabbage into quarters (or more if its big), keeping the core intact so wedges keep their shape. Drizzle with olive oil, salt, pepper, wrap in tin foil, grill until amazing.

Thanks for sharing, Abby! and anyone else who has recipes to share, please email us or comment.

We are in search of a good dilly bean recipe. I lost my favorite recipe that we sent out in a newsletter years ago, before the blog. We've had a request for the recipe, but I can't find it! Anyone out there have a tried and true dillybean recipe??

On the farm...

A big thank you to our friends at FoxTail Farm for growing the corn and potatoes this season. We decided to ask them to grow these crops for us this season so that we could do some soil building and not have our limited land base completely in use. It's opened up about 2 acres that we have been able to cover crop this Summer. Josh worked for Paul and Chris at Foxtail years ago and counts them as mentors and great friends. They are really pros at these crops and we and our soil greatly appreciates them growing these crops for us!

WOW! A very big THANK YOU for all the comments and emails we got after last weeks blog! We are feeling very grateful and we hope that we can convey how much we appreciate our members. Simply put, we honestly would not be here without you! CSA is our first love and will continue to be the heart of our farm, even as we try to diversify with some wholesale, cheese making, and livestock. We have really been enjoying eating meals where vegetables take up over half of our plates and we hope that you have been able to do the same. We hope that the veggies are extra delicious and that you are fortified by the love and intention that we grow them with! We have been reading and sharing the feedback with our farm crew this season and everyone says thanks for the kind words. Lots of gratitude and we look forward to seeing any and all of you on the farm!

We are working on fixing the hiccups with the garlic add-on and the fall share. Please check back or email us if you'd like us to sign you up for either option.

Reminder: August 16 is the cookout on the farm!

Sweet farmers making bunches of sweet onions for you. Taste tested by baby Sadie!

Summer time also means a little break for us to visit the county fair. Here's some shots of Otto being his favorite farm animals

Turnip Rock FarmerAugust 7, 2014 Comment

Week 6; July 31, 2014

What's in the box?

Red Cabbage

Green Beans and Dragon Tongue Beans

Head Lettuce

Collard Greens

Red scallions

Basil

Cauliflower

Broccoli

Bell Pepper

Tomatoes (cherry or slicers)

Summer Squash/ Zucchini

Cucumbers

Red Cabbage

Green Beans and Dragon Tongue Beans

Collar Greens

Basil

Red Scallions

Cauliflower

Broccoli

Green Top Carrots

Cukes

Summer Squash/ Zukes

Notes on the box...

We put carrots in Single Shares only this week, but full shares will have them next week. To help your carrots keep longer, be sure to remove them from their tops. Store the carrots in a plastic bag in the crisper. They are so sweet and bursting with flavor, I'm sure they will be eaten as a snack. Of course, they are also great in stir fry, roasted, shredded in coleslaw, etc. But you can't beat them enjoyed all on their own as a snack. The tops are edible and we have finally actually found a good recipe that uses carrot tops! See the recipe section for Carrot Top Pesto! Carrots are a crop that are usually grown with lots of specialized mechanization on a large scale. This makes carrots pretty dang cheap in the store. At our scale, we spend SO MUCH time growing these lovelies for you! You wouldn't believe the amount of time that goes into hand weeding, harvesting, bunching, and washing these guys. We hope that you can taste the difference!

Peppers and tomatoes in Full shares only this week, but hopefully both next week as more ripen. Think warm thoughts! It's almost August and the tomatoes are JUST coming on. It's pretty late! Lets hope for a late frost this season so we all get our fill of these beauties.

Recipes...

Collard Greens with Butter Beans

Cauliflower tots

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Notes from the field....

It dried up! Now we are irrigating. But it's really hard to complain about this weather. I mean, we could use a little rain and yeah the cool temps are slow to bring on the summer crops but... really, it could be 90+ and we could have had hail storms and pest infestations, but we don't. We lost a good amount to plants drowning, but now it seems to be dried out and some plants might hopefully bounce back. I'm counting our blessings, this is a beautiful Summer. We hope everyone has been eating all their vegetables and having a great time doing so. We love hearing from you, send us pictures, post comments good or bad. Let us know you actually read this; we spend quite a bit of time coming up with the recipes, taking pictures, and writing all this stuff to give you a window into our farming lives and where your food is coming from! We don't always respond right away, but comments mean a lot to us. It lets us know you care.

Fall extension shares

We are hoping to have some of our fall extension shares listed on our website soon, as we start bringing in and getting a grip on fall crops. This will bring your harvest out to Thanksgiving, adding another 4 weeks on with some fantastic cold sweetened greens, brussels, savoy cabbage, spinach, plus all the standard root crops and onions that store well packed in a bigger box. A perpetual Thanksgiving with many crops that will hold well into Jan-Feb if stored properly. We will let you know as soon as they are available.

Fantastic garlic add on share

We also will be offering a one time garlic add on to your box. Normally we'd like to just give you the garlic, but here is why we are doing the add on... Last year we moved the farm and had to leave our garlic crop (that was planted in the fall of 2012) behind. This was years of seed saving that allowed us to be able to give everyone an abundance of garlic. Some were really nice heirloom varieties that were gifted to us from friends over the years. We were so bummed to have to leave it behind! But it was lost. So last fall we bought 100 lbs of seed garlic. That was all we could find or afford as seed garlic prices are very high due to a disease that spread across many midwestern garlic growers in 2011-2012. So our hope is that we can take the money we get from the add on garlic share to help buy more seed garlic (on top of what we save) this fall so that everyone will get garlic in the box next year and we can continue to build up our seed stock again. Sign into your account to add garlic or just send us an email and we can do it for you.

Don't forget about the farm events coming up. Summer cookout on August 16th at the farm. We will be grilling and hope you bring a dish to pass. There will be farm tours and plenty of time and space for kids and adults to explore, sample goodies straight from the field, get to know your farmers, breathe some fresh air, and get the wiggles out! We’ll plan on dinner at 6 PM, You can come a little early to explore the farm (around 4 or 5) and feel free to camp out overnight if you’d like. Please let us know if you plan on attending! We are on google maps, just search for Turnip Rock Farm Please RSVP so we know how many people to expect!

Our Harvest Party will be September 20th. Another potluck! Mark your calendar! pumpkins to pick, and fall colors.

green house of towering heirloom tomatoes, just waiting to ripen...

No one feeling picture day while bunching carrots! Except for the carrots. They were pretty photogenic.

Hats by Herban Outfitters. It's fashionable to look like you don't carrot all!

Turnip Rock FarmerJuly 30, 2014 Comments