Week 15; September 13, 2018

What’s in the box?

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Pie Pumpkin!
onions
peppers (sweet and bell, none hot)
sage
carrots
salad turnips
potatoes
spinach
tomatoes
tender kale
celery (some is cut and bunched)
cilantro

Notes on the box.

Please move your potatoes from the plastic bag to a paper or fabric bag and store in a dark place but not in the fridge.
Pie pumpkin, onions, and tomatoes should also be kept out of the fridge.
If you’d like to dry the sage, just hang it upside down in a dry space and you can keep it for later.
All greens will store best in the fridge in plastic bags in the crisper.

Cosmic Wheel Creamery Cheese Shares.

Some of our delicious fresh ricotta and a grating cheese aged one year called Tarazed. A perfect pasta dinner pairing. Enjoy!

Recipes.

Smoky Harissa Red Pepper Carrot Soup

Pumpkin Sage Polenta

Quick Fridge Clean Out Veggie Soup
Carrots - sliced
onions - diced
celery - sliced and leaves reserved to add at the end
potatoes (optional) - diced
beets (optional) - diced
peppers - diced
garlic clove - minced
Add above with cooking fat (oil, butter, lard, etc) and sauté until veggies are near to tender. Add
tomato puree, stock or broth, or even just water to cover veggies. Add a bay leaf. Season with salt and pepper and add herbs of your choice. Simmer till veggies are cooked through. You can add cooked beans (we like it with white beans), cubes of ham, cooked bacon or chicken, etc. At the end of cooking add the celery leaves and whatever chopped greens you would like (spinach, kale, turnip greens, etc.) Taste and season more as needed. Good with cooked pasta added in or served with bread, rolls, or biscuits.

On the Farm.

We are really looking forward to the Harvest Party and Land Stewardship Fundraiser at the farm on September 22! Please come out and bring a dish to share. We will provide some meat from our farm. There will be bad apples to throw to the pigs. There will be cheese to taste. There will be a nice Photo Booth area. There will be tours and wagon rides. At sundown there will be a short presentation about Land Stewardship Project and all they do for small farms, rural communities, and their great work of promoting local food systems. There will be a few short documentaries about these topics shown in our beautiful barn! This will be the fundraiser portion and the suggested donation is $10, but any amount is appreciated.

If you have a stash of CSA boxes, please return them to your drop site so that we can re-use them! We are running low.

We wanted to share this article from Civil Eats about what’s happening in the world of farming. As a small, direct to market, diversified farm, we are protected from a lot of the issues affecting our conventional dairy farming and commodity row crop growing neighbors. But we care about their well being because we want to see our community continue to have small farms, conventional or not, rather than large consolidated confinement dairy and less people on the land. It’s a hard time for small farmers. Small dairy farms are going out of business at an alarming rate and farmer and agricultural worker suicide rates are alarmingly high. At the Wisconsin Farmers Union conference I attended most of the talk was not about trade, which has gotten a lot of attention and blame for the state of things, but most of the farmers were saying that the problem has more to do with consolidation of land, vertical integration by processors, and the prices they get being less than the cost of production for too long. The farm part of the farm bill, they say, doesn’t have much in it to address these issues. We feel very fortunate to be able to set our prices where we need them to be in order to make our business work, but we know this isn’t possible for every farm to do. And we need our neighboring farmers to continue to exist to keep our rural community functional and vibrant.

We had a nice visit from some students from our local elementary school’s Project Based Learning class. They asked some really great questions, tasted food they picked themselves, and had a great time throwing bad apples to the pigs.

We are sorry to not have the broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage that would normally make this time of year’s boxes a little heavier. We did not win the battle with flea beatles and an extra hot and dry stretch after the baby plants went into the ground. We hope you enjoy this weeks box anyway and what might be the last bits of Summer (but really who knows at this point?!).

Turnip Rock FarmerComment
Week 14; September 6, 2018

What's in the box?  

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Carrots
Tomatoes
Cilantro
Radishes
Sweet Peppers and Bell Peppers (none hot)
Delicata Squash
Baby Kale - bagged
Arugula - Bunched
Onions

Notes on the box.

Tomatoes, Onions, and Delicata Squash should all be stored out of the fridge (though you can put tomatoes in the fridge if you plan on cooking them). 
The Delicata Squash has edible skin.  That makes it the perfect squash for making roasted half-moons.  Cut in half lengthwise, scoop out the seeds, then cut into half moons.  Toss with a little olive oil and salt.  You can add spices at this point, too.  Chili powder, berbere, parmesan and Italian seasoning, etc... Roast at 400 for 15 minutes, flip and cook for another 15-20 min.  
Everything else can go in the fridge.  Arugula is the bunched greens and can be chopped for fresh salad, made into a pesto, or chopped and added to hot pasta to wilt it before eating. It has quite a bit of holes from flea beatles (the bugs that destroyed our fall brassicas like broccoli), but don't worry, the holes don't taste like anything!  Remove greens from the radishes.  Radish Greens are edible if you can't get enough greens!    

Cosmic Wheel Creamery Cheese Shares.

This week we have two different batches of Circle of the Sun.  One was made in early Spring of this year and the other was made in early November of last year.  It's fun to taste them together to see the variation and how much the cheeses change based on how much hay vs. grass the cows are eating, the time of year, and how long it has aged.  

Recipes.

Warm Kale and Delicata Squash Salad
Roasted Squash Bowls with Arugula and Apples
Roasted Delicata Squash with Cilantro Chimichurri
Sheet Pan Roasted Red Pepper and Tomato Soup

On the Farm.

REMINDER:  Harvest Party and Land Stewardship Fundraiser on September 22!  We do hope you can make it out for delicious food, fun farm tours, and movies in the barn.  We will start at 4 PM and we do hope you can make it out!  

More rain.  After so many dry weeks we've really gotten quite a lot of rain in the last 2 weeks.  Almost 6 inches!  Thankfully not nearly as much as some of our farmer friends in Southern Wisconsin.  We've seen some photos of washed away top soil and drowned crops that are heartbreaking.  We hope everyone there gets a chance to dry off!  

Squash is harvested, and safe in the shed. Potatoes are dug and stored. Tomato trellis is pulled. And the weather has cooled down and the light is looking like fall. We still have a big carrot harvest and Brussel sprouts to look forward to and garlic to plant in Mid October. But this is the time that things begin to slow down a bit.

This transition back into fall crops is going to be a little awkward with so many brassica crops missing due to dry hot weather and more flea beatles than we have ever seen. But we have tried to fill in with some new crops, and we'll see how it goes. By no means will the box be empty. This season marks my 15th year managing a CSA. Every year is a new adventure.  

3 more weeks to go for the main season which ends September 27. 
We have chosen to roll out the last 4 season extension boxes right after the main season is up. Putting the last of the vegetable deliveries October 25. 

We are anticipating another meat share delivery, October 4, we will have pork and lamb! Just in time for a delicious fall roast.  We do have extra meat, so inquire for more details. 
 

Turnip Rock FarmerComment
Week 13; August 30, 2018

What's in the box?  

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celery
beets
lettuce
onions
cucumbers
tomatoes
peppers (all sweet, no hot peppers)
spinach

Notes on the box.  

Everything except tomatoes and onions should be stored in the fridge.  The peppers are all bell peppers, sweet peppers.  The tiny ones are lunchbox peppers that we grew as a trial.  We are considering growing more for the boxes next season.  They are fun little snackers.  None of the peppers are hot.  
Spinach is back!  Nice and tender, you can chop it for salads or cook it down.  Yum!

Cosmic Wheel Creamery Cheese Shares.

Moonglow and cheese curds.  Enjoy!

Recipes.

Creamy Garlic Roasted Red Pepper Pasta

Italian Style Stuffed Peppers

Julia Childs Baked Cucumbers with all variations

Chocolate Beet Brownies

Pickled Beets 
If you can, you can make these, can them, and give them as gifts later.  If you don't can, refrigerator pickles are a great option!  
Prep beets- wash and cut off tops leaving about 3 inches of the stems on to prevent color bleeding.  Place beets in a pot and cover with water.  Boil for 20-40 minutes depending on size.  Remove from boiling water and run under cold water.  Skin should come off easily.  Cut beets into preferred shapes (slices, large dice, or wedges).  
Make pickling syrup by boiling 2 cups of vinegar (any combination of white and cider vinegar that you prefer.  You can also add a little balsamic.  Add optional spices.  Good options are whole mustard seeds, a few peppercorns, a clove or 2, garlic, etc.  
Pack beets into hot sterilized jars and pour in hot pickling syrup, leave 1/2 inch headroom.  Add 1 tsp salt per quart or 1/2 tsp per pint to the jars.  Put the lid on and allow to cool then refrigerate for a week before eating.  Or put them in a canner in a boiling water bath for 30 min.  

On the Farm. 

Join us for an event, here on Sept 22.  We’ll be showing some short documentaries in our barn, pot luck, hay rack rides, starts at 4.  This event will also be a fundraiser and membership drive for the Land Stewardship Project.  There's a suggested donation of $10 to see the documentaries.  The money will go to LSP and can be your membership fee to join LSP.  LSP has been one of the most supportive organizations for small scale family farms.   They are doing great work to protect our environment and keep our rural communities vibrant by encouraging more small scale diversified farms.  We hope you will join us!  

3.7 inches of rain here last week.  We needed all of it. Breaking the longest dry spell we’ve had all summer and in what seems like in two years. 

Cucumbers are done this week. Tomatoes are winding down. Peppers will go until frost. All the winter squash is ripe and we should have some in the box next week. Sadie and Otto are back in school.  Fall is coming quick!
Carrots are coming along with more spinach and baby kale mixes. Fall broccoli and cauliflower will not be on the menu this year due to a crop failure, flea beetles, mostly. This is a first for us, but apparently we were not alone.  Talking to some of the neighboring farms the same thing happened to them. Too hot and dry for too long for the tender plant starts.  I think we can make up for the loss in some other crops. 
4 more weeks of main season deliveries. If you have an Eat Like a Farmer (or vegetarian farmer) share you have season extension and that will be 4 more deliveries after the main season.

Meat!  We have a few extra meat packages this year.  All of our animals are vital to our farm’s fertility and eco system. They allow us to sequester carbon and capture value from waste.
Our pastured heritage breed hogs raised on locally grown barley, whey from the creamery, and "seconds quality" veggies.  Cuts include, bacon, chops, ground, brats, shoulder, ham, steaks, ribs, hocks. 
Half hog 65# 430$ 
Quarter hog- 30# 210$

100% grass fed Ground beef 30# 180$ 

Details are on the website or just send an email if you are interested. 

All meat is raised here and processed in a USDA inspected facility, in Siren WI. Everything will come frozen and delivered to your drop site. 

We are having a little technical difficulties with pictures today.  Hope to update later.  

Thanks!!

Turnip Rock FarmerComment