Winter CSA Share — December 22nd

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Winter CSA Share — December 22nd

December 22, 2011 by barkingmoonfarm

The harvest and packing went a lot smoother this week, even with still colder temperatures than last delivery. We also had the help of one of our CSA members, Heidi Dawn, who spent Wednesday morning helping us pack boxes. Thanks Heidi!

All is well on the farm. Besides harvesting carrots and veggies every week for CSA and wholesale deliveries, we’re spending time cleaning up the farm as well as putting up our 3rd hoop house! We also purchased a very nice refurbished Allis Chamers G cultivating tractor. We’re excited about adding this tractor to the season next year. It should really help reduce our weeding costs as well as speed up the time we spend on cultivation. Between projects and harvesting, we’ve also been sleeping a lot and hanging with our kids during this dark time of year!

So, onto your boxes. Here’s what is in there this week with accompanying notes:

4# Carrots
1 Bu Arugula
1# Leeks
3# Pie Pumpkins — I’ve been making pumpkin cookies with the flesh. Yum!
3# Savoy Cabbage — These should be especially flavorful with all the cold weather!
2# Yellow Onions
1 Green Kabocha Winter Squash
1# Beets
1.5# Purple Top Turnips — We’ve noticed that while cutting into some of these, there is a browning occurring in the middle. While we throw a lot of turnips into the compost and to our chickens, it is sometimes hard to tell which turnips might not be good without cutting into all of them. The turnips with brown in the middle can still be eaten — just cut that part out. If you receive any really bad or rotting turnip, let us know! It can be hard for us to identify bad turnips.
1.5# Braising Mix — A mix of kales, chard and napa cabbage. You may find a yellow flowering leaf/stem in the braising mix. This is called Hon Tsai Tai – an asian green. We planted this in the hoop houses and unfortunately, it went to flower before we could bunch them for you. But we harvested what we could and tossed it into the braising and salad mix this week. Just throw the whole stem and flower into your pan. So sweet and delicious!
1/2# Spinach
1/2# Salad Mix — This week, a mix of red lettuce, mustard greens and Hon Tsai Tai. Our green lettuce is kaput unfortunately. We’ll be looking for tougher green lettuce varieties for next year that can withstand the low temperatures, if that is at all possible. It has been stressful and a bummer to lose so much lettuce, but we hope that with the light returning and possibly some warmer weather, our lettuce crop will start re-growing in the next few weeks. We haven’t even been able to irrigate our hoop houses because the irrigation pump and pond are frozen and haven’t thawed out in weeks! We’re ready for some rain and warmer nights, hopefully. We’ll continue putting as much salad into your boxes as we can, but it has been the biggest challenge for us so far. A fellow farmer mentioned to us that he thinks with climate change occurring that this may be the standard for our winters — really low temps with dry weather. Interesting to think about how this will affect farming in the future.
3# Potatoes — Yukon Gold this week.
1# Popcorn — Yes, we did grow this! It is an heirloom variety called Tom Thumb’s Popcorn. We popped it yesterday while packing CSA boxes. It pops small kernels and takes a couple of ears of the corn to get a nice snacking bowl. We popped in a combination of olive oil and coconut oil, but I think this popcorn would do well in an air popper. Don’t miss out on eating this. Such a special treat. You can take the kernels off the ear in a couple of minutes with your fingers. My 4 year-0ld had a great time doing this yesterday.