Barking Moon Farm

In Your Box:

Onions

Potatoes

Delicata Winter Squash

Carrots

Salad Mix

Braising Mix

Beets

Leeks

Spinach

Cabbage

Farm Update:

Apologies for a late post for the last winter CSA update. The week got away from us! We hope you enjoy the last box of the winter share and look forward to providing winter CSA boxes to you next winter. All is proceeding wonderfully on the farm. The hoophouse plastic is up and Josh did a first pass on the tractor the other day. We will be planting it soon with greens. With all this beautiful weather, Josh was able to work the soil at our home farm to get ready for planting peas and fava beans. We are on our way this weekend to Breitenbush Hot Springs for a last family vacation before the season begins. Every February, a hundred or so organic farmers from the NW take over Breitenbush Hot Springs and spend time sharing tips, information and resources about organic farming. We are able to glean so much great information from other organic farmers not to mention get jazzed and inspired for the season coming up. It is truly one of the best farming conferences out there. All the farmers set the agenda and facilitate the sessions and soaking in warm water is nice too! When we get back next week from that, we will make a big push on the first big seeding of the year with onions, shallots, leeks, brassicas and other greens. Time to get going. Markets start up again within a month. We are feeling pretty good about everything as we begin our fifth growing season in the Rogue Valley. Enjoy the veggies. Make some great soups as the rain and snow come back next week. We’ll be seeing you at markets in the spring!

By the way, if you are interested in receiving a season discount at any of our farmers’ market booths, ask us about our Barking Moon Market Share Program. The more you purchase, the more you save!

In Your Box:

Onions

Potatoes: A mix and the last week of potatoes.

Delicata Winter Squash

Carrots

Salad Mix

Braising Mix

Cabbage

Arugula

Golden Turnips

Beets

RECIPES: wintercsarecipesjanuary27

Farm Update:

Are you eating your greens and making green smoothies and juices? Maybe it was because I didn’t want to eat greens at all while I was pregnant this past summer, but I’ve been inhaling the winter greens lately and yum! We’ve been having sides of spinach, kales, cabbages every night and making banana,  blueberry, kale smoothies. Yum! I can’t seem to get enough. Maybe it is the time of year — a time when you can no longer eat all those heavy starchy vegetables like potatoes and turnips and instead, craving yummy greens.

We got the hoophouse up! That’s exciting. I’ve posted pictures below. The weather has been so great too and the soil has dried enough that we will begin soil preparation this next week on the farm getting ready for spring planting. Wow! We can’t believe it is rolling again. The hoophouses will be planted in a couple of weeks and all the seed is starting to roll in the mail. The greenhouse is already filling up. Markets are starting in less than two months! Phew. A quick winter, once again, but we’re excited to get going again. We’ve had fun planning for next year’s winter CSA and look forward to adding more winter crops next year like celery, celery root, parsnips, burdock root and other grains like flour corn, beans and barley. We’re really looking forward to exploring our creativity in this venue.

Enjoy the veggies this week and please don’t forget to email or call with any questions or comments.

Frame is up!

Laying out the frame

In Your Box:

Onions

Purple/Red Potato Mix: Pretty!

Acorn Squash

Carrots

Salad Mix

Braising Mix

Shallots

Spinach

Napa Cabbage: Our “January King” green cabbage just isn’t heading up like it is supposed to…hopefully, next delivery.

Fermented Vegetable Medley: Made with our veggies and fermented by Mellonia Farm.

RECIPES: winterJanuaryCSrecipes

Farm Update:

The winter is just moving along here. The new 30 x 96 hoophouse arrived last week and will go up next week. We’ve already started the first round of seeds to be planted in the two hoophouses in February. Here’s what will go in the 2 hoophouses: lettuce, arugula, spinach, mustard greens, escarole, frisee, peas (an experiment), radishes, chard, and kale! Exciting. Other happenings around the farm include putting endwalls on our little greenhouse and Josh just finished building a germination steam chamber. We’ll post pics soon.

As a sidenote, we are beginning to hire our 2011 crew, so if you know anyone who is interested in working on an organic vegetable farm for the season, send them our way.

Happy eating this week.

Winter CSA Share — Week Three:

Onions

Russet Potatoes — Standard variety of potato, but one of our favorites for making homemade oven fries. That’s mostly why we grow them!

Spaghetti Squash

Carrots

Lettuce Mix — Two varieties of lettuce. Add kale and chard and cabbage to spice up your salad. Next year, we hope to diversify this mix with more specialty greens.

Braising Mix

Leeks

Arugula — Simply toss it with olive oil, salt & pepper and you are set to go! Check out our recipe for arugula pesto. Yum!

Savoyed Cabbage – Our winter green cabbages are not quite ready, so more savoyed cabbage this week. We love chopping it and throwing it in a pan with butter and a little water as a great, easy, yummy side dish.

Purple Kohlrabi — Check out our roasted kohlrabi recipe. It has a flavor close to cauliflower if you’ve never tried it.

Beets

Rutabaga — One of our favorite vegetables. Check out the carrot and rutabaga puree. Yum!

RECIPES: wintercsarecipes.Dec302010

Farm Update:

All is well on the farm. We begin seeding the first of the hoophouse greens next week. Salad greens, spinach, chard, kale, mustard greens, escarole and frisee will all get started in the propagation house. We just ordered our second hoophouse, which will arrive next week and we will put it up by mid-January for planting in February. Hard to believe we are already rolling on the 2011 season already. Season extension on the farm allows us to bring income to our family throughout the year and in some of the slimmest times of the year like March and April. Josh has also been spending time building a steam chamber in the greenhouse to germinate greens this January. It will also help germinate our hot weather crops in March like tomatoes, peppers and eggplant. In January, we will also spend time planning and scoping out our new five acre parcel that we will be farming this next year. Have a happy new year!

P.S. Hope you have been enjoying the wheat berries. We have made the wheat berry chili and the wheat berry cereal. Both were delicious! Tracy Harding, drop site host and CSA member, has been throwing it in with her kale salads and loving it!

Winter CSA Share — Week Two:

Onions

Potatoes

Red Kuri and/or Sunshine Kabocha Winter Squash

Carrots

Spring Wheat Berries — If you don’t have a grinder for grains at home, we’ve heard you can also use your coffee grinder as well. The wheat will be a little rough, but still usable. Also, please see our recipes for what to do with wheat berries instead of grinding for flour. Lots of great ways to use wheat berries — breakfast cereal, salads and even stews and chilis!

Salad Mix

Spinach

Braising Mix — A mix of chard, kale & napa cabbage. If you have some water in your bag, shake it out over the sink. We don’t spin braising mix, so water may collect at the bottom of the bag.

Beets

Savoyed Cabbage

Broccoli

RECIPES Winter CSA Recipes.Dec16

Farm Update:

Not much new to report on the farm. We’ve been taking it easy and enjoying December and time off. The wheat in your boxes this week was grown as part of a trial for Oregon State University Extension. We were one of a number of farms trialing out various wheat varieties to see which has the highest protein and grows the best in our region. This was our first shot at growing wheat on the farm and while there were some big learning curves (namely efficient harvesting..!), we really enjoyed having grain in our rotation of vegetables. The wheat was grown on about an 1/8 of an acre where potatoes, tomatoes, winter squash, oats and peas has previously grown. The hardest part about growing the wheat was the harvesting as we did not have any tools, so our crew did it by hand. We threshed it with an All Crop Combine at our friend’s farm in the Applegate. We then winnowed it even further at Wolf Gulch Farm, which eradicates any miscellaneous chaff or seeds in the wheat and then we bagged it up for you. Quite a process. We hope you enjoy it. Here are some pictures from that trial. Happy solstice, holidays and new year!

Josh harvesting wheat. Photo by Neil Subhash.

Harvested wheat. Photo by Neil Subhash.

Hand harvesting wheat! Photo by Neil Subhash.

Winter CSA Share — Week One:

Yukon Gold Potatoes

Onions

Carrots

Purple Top Turnips

Butternut Squash

Mixed Kales

Baby Rainbow Chard

Romanesco Cauliflower — Tastes and acts like a regular cauliflower although the spirals are amazing on this vegetable! We absolutely love this specialty cauliflower and it just does great in cold weather.

Daikon Radish — Great for shredding with cabbage for a fresh salad. Use it for dipping with hummus and other spreads.

Napa Cabbage

Salad Greens

WINTER CSA RECIPES — Winter CSA Share.weekone

Welcome to the first week of the winter CSA season! We’re so happy to be providing produce for the winter season. Each box will have standard staple vegetables that should last you 2 weeks — onions, potatoes, carrots, squash, etc. and then we will add cooking greens, salad greens and then any specialty vegetables available at the time, i.e. cauliflower, broccoli, arugula, etc. Despite the cold November, we have lots of vegetables still in the field. Most have weathered the really cold temperatures — some vegetables we pre-harvested before the really cold freeze (napa cabbage and daikon), so that we would have them available for the boxes. Some of you may remember the really cold temperatures we had last December and how we were on vacation during that time, which resulted in huge losses of vegetables for us. Well, we’re really prepared this year. We even built a storage room in our barn to store winter squash, onions and garlic, so that they will last through the winter.

December is a slow month on the farm. We start our 2011 planning and by the end of the month, we will have started the first of our greens for the February planting of our hoophouse. It seems crazy that we are already thinking about next season when we just finished markets in November! We are purchasing a second hoophouse this month and putting it up in January, so we can have 2 hoophouses in the spring, which will allow us to have so many more greens available in March and April for spring markets. We love season extension around here at BMF! Besides planning for 2011, we’ll take some much needed rest, sleep and family time in-between CSA harvests until it starts to get busy again in February. This is our time to cozy up in the house and enjoy our children and eat lots of good food. The short days really allow us to do that.

Other projects for the winter include working on our existing greenhouses and improving some of the components of those structures. We usually try to pack in too many projects during the winter, so this year, we aren’t going to put too much on our plate. In other news, we’re also taking on a third property to farm next year, so we will be planning for that parcel. We currently farm 3 acres on hwy 238 and 2 acres at our home farm on Thompson Creek Road and then we will be farming another 5 acres on North Applegate Road, for a total of 6 – 10 acres in production for next year. Woah! We’ll be entering our fifth year of farming and it seems amazing how far we have come in those 5 years. We had no idea we’d be taking on this much acreage when we first started. But, we love it. We dream of being able to consolidate all this acreage into one farm one day, but for now, we’re growing all over the place. A lot of the acreage will be devoted to winter and storage crops as we continue to grow our winter markets, which seems to be a good niche for us.

Enjoy the vegetables and let us know if you have any questions! Happy eating.