It’s getting cold around here. When I wash produce at this time of year I spend a lot of time thinking about how I really need to go over to Hamilton Marine to buy a pair of fishermans neoprene gloves.

Progress on farm projects has been slow for the past few weeks. Between our involvement in MOFGA’s Common Ground Fair and Nose to Tail Pork Processing workshop, we’ve been pretty busy off the farm and have had to hustle just to keep up with harvesting. Last week was our last salad harvest, though, so that will take some pressure off of us. We’ve only had one real frost so far, but a good hard freeze is all but inevitable this week. That will hopefully finish off the last of the tender crops which are hanging on in the hoophouse (and which I haven’t had the heart to yank, yet). Aside from generally cleaning up and putting things away for winter, the big farm tasks left are seeding some cover crop in our veggie field, dismantling the hoophouse out in the veggie field and planting garlic.

The end of the CSA is in sight, which is bittersweet. The last CSA delivery marks our last official produce obligation, so continuing to pick and wash after that is just a matter of determination and masochism. It’s a shame though, to see the season come to an end and to see the last of the veggies leave. We’re not, however, in a bad spot for this winter; we’ve got plenty of kale and corn (not our own) frozen, some carrots, beets, potatoes, leeks and (hopefully) onions to store and our living room is full of winter squash and pumpkins.

A note about Eggs and Bags: Thank you to all of you who return your egg cartons and canvas bags every week. If you have any bags or egg cartons kicking around, please bring them back next week. We ran out of bags this week, so I know that at least one of you has a secret stash somewhere.

Three weeks left. The last share will be November 3rd.

Detailed share information, notes about the veggies, storage tips and recipe tips are all inside the full post.

All shares contain:

• Celeriac
• Stir-fry Greens
• Garlic
• Long Pie pumpkin

“Full” shares also contain:

• green Peppers (the round ones)
• Salad Turnips
• Basil (ah, the last of the season)
• more Garlic
• Parsley
• hot Peppers (the long, pointy ones)

Bread shares: no bread this week

Veggie Notes

Celeriac – The parsnip of the celery family?!? Hidden behind it’s humble appearance is a wonderful, mild celery flavor. These keep very, very well and are excellent anywhere you would use root veggies and/or celery. (Specifically soups, stews and roasted.) To prepare, trim off the top (with the green stems), the bottom (where all of the trimmed root nubbys are left) and peel, peel, peel. Then just prepare according to your recipe’s instructions for the other root veggies.

Garlic – This week’s garlic is a variety named “German Extra Hardy” but could just as easily be called “German Extra Big-Ass Cloves”. They have fewer cloves per head than other garlics, but the cloves are massive, making this a lot of fun to grow and use in the kitchen.

Long Pie Pumpkin – A true Maine heirloom, it doesn’t look like much but it is unparalleled for making pumpkin puree for pies, muffins, cheesecakes or anything else “pumpkin” flavored.

Storage Notes

Store celeriac, greens, parsley, turnips and peppers in a plastic bag in the fridge. Garlic and the pumpkin are fine on the counter with no bag. As for the basil, use it up!

As always, we welcome your feedback. Please let us know if you have any questions, concerns or problems. Also, please send along any recipes you’d like to share.

We hope you enjoy the share!

One of the fun things about putting together weekly shares is that we occasionally get the chance to put together thematic shares. The season being what it was, we never got to put together a salsa share, but we did give out a “pesto share” last month and today we get the “potato-and-leek-soup share”. Full shares might also be able to get some carrot soup out of it, too.

Nothing too exciting happening in terms of farm work this week. We continue to clean up the gardens as time allows: chopping down old crops and removing plastic mulch. I’m beginning to get really nervous about seeding some of our winter cover crops in time; winter rye and hairy vetch are best seeded in late August or early September, but they’ll also do just fine if seeded this late. I just need to make the time to get out there and do it. We did buy a tractor and a reach in cooler this week, which is kind of exciting. The tractor is the same old ’67 Cub that we’ve been borrowing from friends all season and the reach-in is a bulky thing that needs a little repair and will help us to better store produce with different storage requirements (like apples, which give off ethylene gas).

Eggs are back this week! The ladies are laying again! Not quite as abundantly as they had been, but enough that we can start giving out egg shares again. Enjoy!

Detailed share information, notes about the veggies, storage tips and recipe tips are all inside the full post.

All shares contain:

• Carola Potatoes
• Leeks
• Parsley
• Garlic
• Delicata squash

“Full” shares also contain:

• Swiss Chard
• Carrots
• more Delicata

Bread shares: one loaf each of Whole Wheat and Cherry/Pecan

Veggie Notes

Leeks – I can’t remember whether I’ve written about leeks, but … they’re great. They have a rich, buttery, creamy flavor than an onion just can’t match. Some will say that you can use the whole thing, but find the dark green leaves to be tough and bitter. To prepare, trim off the base and roots and cut off the top. (The blanched or white part of the stalk is the premium stuff, while the lighter green part is a little bit less choice. Anyway, we generally go up to where the leaves start to branch off and cut the top off there.) Now, slice down the length of the stalk through the lighter green part and into the white part. Fan this out under running water to rinse out any dirt that might have collected between the layers. Finally, chop up the rinsed stalk according to whatever recipe you’re following.

Carola potatoes – I wrote a little bit about these last week. Again sorry for some of the extra peeling that some of these will need.

Delicata squash – The queen of squash! I won’t say anything about; I’ll let it speak for itself. To prepare: cut in half lengthwise and scoop out the seeds. We generally roast face down in a 350-400 degree oven for 45 minutes or so — until tender to a poke of a fork. No need to peel: the skin is edible.

Storage Notes

Store leeks, parsley, chard and carrots in a plastic bag in the fridge. Potatoes and Squash should be kept in a cool, dark place, but not in the fridge. Garlic is fine on the counter with no bag.

As always, we welcome your feedback. Please let us know if you have any questions, concerns or problems. Also, please send along any recipes you’d like to share.

We hope you enjoy the share!

No rest for the weary this week. After we packed up last weeks CSA, we spent two days getting ready for our Thursday farmers market. Normally, I go to market, but last week Kendra went for me so that I could go to MOFGA to help get things ready for the Common Ground Fair. (I co-coordinated the Ag Demo area and needed to get the tents and tables and such all set up for all of the exhibitors that come to show off what they do and what they have to offer.) Then we spent three days are the fair! Kendra gave a wood-fired bread talk on Friday and I muddled about trying to keep things running smoothly in my area. We also saw lots of friends (and a few of you) and ate lots of great Maine-raised organic food. (Including cheeseburgers, cheesecake, ice cream and some too-delicious-and-cheap-to-believe potato pakoras.) We got home on Sunday, slept a little and got back up on Monday to start all over again. (OK, we did sleep in a little bit.) It was a fun but exhausting weekend.

We also got our first frost over the weekend. Friday night we lost our outdoor basil and eggplants, and some of the peppers took a bit of a roughing up. We were kind of expecting it, so we had already picked all of our peppers (over 70#) and eggplants. It’s nice in that don’t have to worry about those crops any more, but it’s definitely a shame to see the all-too-short season start to come to an end.

Another egg share update: still no egg shares. The hens are definitely laying more this week, but still not enough for us to give out. I spoke to our local extension agent at the fair and he thought it could take as long 3-4 weeks (!!) for them to get back to their regular schedule. (This is week 2, by my count.) If they continue to increase their lay, we may have eggs again next week, but don’t hold your breath. Regardless of what happens, we’re keeping track of how many shares have been given out and we’ll be sure that everyone gets the eggs that they are due — even if it means a couple of weeks of “egg shares only” after the end of the veggie CSA.

Speaking of the end of the veggie CSA, this is week 13, and based on how much produce has been given out, there are 5 weeks left. That will put us into the first week of November (11/3) before the shares are done. Go ahead and pencil that in on your calendars, but of course I’ll let you all know in advance when things seem more concrete.

Detailed share information, notes about the veggies, storage tips and recipe tips are all inside the full post.

All shares contain:

• Green Peppers
• Stir-frying greens
• Leeks (not in full shares)

“Full” shares also contain:

• Carola Potatoes
• Garlic
• fresh Shallots
• Eggplant
• Fresh Onions

Bread shares: no bread this week

Veggie Notes

Peppers – These are nice, big, fat Italian frying peppers. Sweet, not hot. Normally, we wait for these peppers to ripen to a rich, vibrant red … alas, as with so many things this year, that won’t be happening. Use as you would any green pepper.

Carola potatoes – Carola’s are a great all purpose potato with excellent flavor. Their texture tends to be firm, making them ideal for stews, soups, potato salads or anything where you want the potatoes to hold themselves together.

Eggplant – These eggplants are a variety called Applegreen and yes, they are ripe.

Shallots – If you’re unfamiliar with shallots, a market customer once described them as “onions with the butter built in”. They tend to be milder than onions, with a richer flavor. Often used in cream sauces and vinaigrettes, they’re also perfectly fine anywhere that an onion would feel at home.

Storage Notes

Store onions, greens, leeks and shallots in a plastic bag in the fridge. Potatoes should be kept in a cool, dark place, but not in the fridge. Garlic is fine on the counter with no bag, as are Peppers and Eggplant, both of which are probably better in the plastic bag.

As always, we welcome your feedback. Please let us know if you have any questions, concerns or problems. Also, please send along any recipes you’d like to share.

We hope you enjoy the share!

Cool night temps continue around here, slowing down any growth we had hoped might be happening. We’ve dodged frost so far — friends of ours in Dixmont have been getting light frosts since last August! — which means that everything is still alive, but it’s just not growing very fast. This is the reason that full shares got chard AND kale today, instead of chard and tomatoes.

We harvested all of our winter squash yesterday — pictures to come. We need to cure them in our hoophouse for a couple of weeks before we put them into the share; this helps to ensure that they’re actually ripe and that they’re really sweet. As winter squash develop on the vine, they always look ready before they actually are, leaving impatient growers plenty of time to pick them too early. If you’ve ever gotten a winter squash (Acorn squash, especially) from the store and been underwhelmed by it’s flavor, then you’ve noticed this. As they cure we make sure to sample them — honestly, it’s excruciating work — to know when they’re ready. The squash haul wasn’t as abundant as it was last year — thanks to all of that cold and rain in June and July — but there’s still plenty to put in the share.

Also, I started a Facebook page for the farm. There’s not much there that isn’t already here, but if you have a Facebook account, it can’t hurt to head over there and “become a fan” of us. You can also find that button over on the right on the front page of this blog.

An update on egg shares: as the sun comes up later and goes down earlier, the hens natural tendency is to stop laying as they prepare for winter and their next breeding cycle. Of course, this isn’t so great for commercial egg production. We were taken by surprise last week when the number of eggs we were collecting each day dropped from 2 dozen to 2 — just 2 — and we quickly rigged up some timed lights in the coop to get them back into the swing. This is a common practice in egg production — it’s meant to simulate longer day length — but in our pasture based system involves hundreds and hundreds of feet of extension cord. Anyway, we’re hoping that they’ll start laying again soon but, until then, don’t be surprised that there are no eggs in the share.

Detailed share information, notes about the veggies, storage tips and recipe tips are all inside the full post.

All shares contain:

• Swiss Chard
• Fresh Onions
• Leeks
• Parsley

“Full” shares also contain:

• Island Sunshine Potatoes
• Garlic
• Kale
• Lemon cucumbers

Bread shares: one loaf of Multigrain and one of Olive

Veggie Notes

Leeks – We use leeks just as we do onions: as a savory base to just about any dish. The flavor is unique and distinct from that of onions, but entirely delicious none the less. Potato Leek Soup is a classic preparation, but as long as you chop it up and saute it in butter, you can do just about anything with it. Omelettes and quiche are very good options, and they’re also very good roasted and slightly caramelized.

Potatoes – These Island Sunshine potatoes, a variety that has a dry, starchy or flourly texture and are excellent roasted, fried or mashed. They taste excellent and — miracle! — are late blight resistant. Unfortunately, they were in the ground so long after all of the other potatoes come out of the ground that little bugs called wire worms flocked to them and chewed those little dark tunnels into the spuds. Just trim those parts out.

Cucumbers – These are heirloom cucumbers called Lemon cucumbers. The don’t taste lemony, but they do taste very mild and sweet. I’m not a cucumber person, but these are the only cuke that I can tolerate.

Storage Notes

Store onions, greens, leeks, parsley, and cucumbers in a plastic bag in the fridge. Potatoes should be kept in a cool, dark place, but not in the fridge. Garlic is fine on the counter.

As always, we welcome your feedback. Please let us know if you have any questions, concerns or problems. Also, please send along any recipes you’d like to share.

We hope you enjoy the share!

With nights routinely in the 40s, it’s hard to deny that summer is quickly coming to an end. We’re covering our heat loving crops (eggplants, peppers, basil and such) at night to help keep them from getting too cool at night and things are growing more slowly. Some crops that I had given up on early keep chugging along: winter squash is still looking healthy in the field, and onions are still green in the field. (When onions stop being green, they’re ready for storage, but their leaves aren’t any good to use anymore. Last year, the last week of August was the last share to get fresh onion.) On top of those, our hoophouse tomatoes are still producing well, although they’ve produced so well that we’ve just about picked all of the fruit that’s in there. (In the past three years, I don’t think we’ve ever picked all of the fruit off of a tomato plant.)

It’s late, so I won’t write a whole lot, but keep an eye out for another post with some farm pictures.

Detailed share information, notes about the veggies, storage tips and recipe tips are all inside the full post.

All shares contain:

• Braising or Stir-fry Greens
• Fresh Onions
• Salad Turnips
• Celery

“Full” shares also contain:

• Zucchini
• Tomatoes
• more Braising Greens

Bread shares: no bread this week

Veggie Notes

Braising Greens – You can eat these raw, but they will very spicey. Even a very light cooking will tame that heat. Use these in any stir fry, or see below for a simple ginger sesame greens recipe.

Salad Turnips – Forget what you know about turnips. These are sweet and tender, unlike those purple-top things your grandmother put into the boiled dinner. We prefer not to cook them, instead just slicing them over salads or lightly salting them and eating them as crudites. The tops are edible and can be added to the braising greens, or cooked on their own.

Zucchini – These aren’t exactly exotic, but I’ll just mention that we like to slice them and salt them for a while to draw out some extra moisture. We then saute them with some onions. Yummy.

Storage Notes

Store onions, greens, turnips, celery, and zucchini in a plastic bag in the fridge, tomatoes are fine on the counter.

Recipe Ideas

Braising Greens – from last year’s CSA, here’s a recipe for Ginger Sesame Stir Fried Greens

As always, we welcome your feedback. Please let us know if you have any questions, concerns or problems. Also, please send along any recipes you’d like to share.

We hope you enjoy the share!

I won’t write much this week since it’s late already, but this marks the half-way point for the CSA: we’ve been going for 10 of the nominal 20 weeks. In terms of actual value of the produce we’ve distributed, though, we’re actually on week 11.5. This means that we’ll be able to give out the correct amount of produce, but wrap up at least a week or two early. Of course, that’s still 8 weeks away. As I’ve said before, my primary goal with giving out larger shares is to be able to make use of some of the diversity we have now before the season winds down and we’re stuck with just onions, potatoes and kale every week. Of course, when I mentioned this to one shareholder a few weeks ago he responded (paraphrasing) “That’s great! All you need is some sausage!”

Some half-way point numbers: full shareholders have received $238.50 worth of produce, or about $23.85 per week, while half shareholders have received $123.50, or about $12.35 per week. We aim to give out $21 in full shares and $10.50 in half shares (you paid for $20 and $10, resp.).

Also, half way makes a good excuse to solicit some feedback. I build the shares every week as I think about what we have in the field (tomatoes, fennel), what a family might need to cook (onions) and what might be fun or interesting (rainbow carrots). Is this working for you? Do the shares seem too big? Too small? Getting sick of anything? Want more or something? Is the produce in OK shape when you get it? Is it keeping OK? Tasting OK? Are the bunches too big, etc etc. We hear lots of positive feedback all the time, but sometimes a little constructive criticism is nice too. Now’s your chance!

Detailed share information, notes about the veggies, storage tips and recipe tips are all inside the full post.

All shares contain:

• Carrots of Many Colors
• Fresh Onions
• Broccoli
• Tomatoes
• Collard Greens

“Full” shares also contain:

• Fennel
• more Tomatoes

Bread shares: I think bread shares got a Brooklin sourdough and a Multigrain sourdough

Veggie Notes

Collard Greens – Treat these just like you would kale. As with kale, they freeze well.

A note about our brassicas: Kale, collards and broccoli are all members of the Brassica crop family, the same family as cauliflower and cabbage. They all descend from a common ancestor and share many pests … including cabbage worms. Aside from leaving unsightly holes in the leaves, they also hitchhike home on the leaves and heads of the crops. Until I have a chance to spray an organic, bacterial pesticide to control them, you should assume the every leaf will have a little friend on it, just waiting to look you in the eye and say “Hi!” as you’re about to put your fork in your mouth. If you’re not into a little bonus protein, you can wash each leaf thoroughly or just quickly dip them all in boiling water. The hot water will kill the worms; they will turn yellow and float to the top of the water where they’re easy to spot. I apologize for this hassle, but we just haven’t had a chance to make this happen.

Storage Notes

Store onions, lettuce, carrots, collards, and fennel in a plastic bag in the fridge, tomatoes are fine on the counter.

As always, we welcome your feedback. Please let us know if you have any questions, concerns or problems. Also, please send along any recipes you’d like to share.

We hope you enjoy the share!

Big, big shares this week. We’ve got a lot out in the field, it looks great and I’m still anticipating some shortages later in the season, so let’s celebrate it now while we have it.

As if we needed any more reason to relish that brief, very intense stretch of summer we had a few weeks ago, it was punctuated by some alarmingly cool night temperatures. We covered our outdoor hot crops (peppers, eggplants and basil) and resumed closing our hoophouse every evening to protect what remains of our tomatoes. Even so, we had some chilling damage to some basil. Late summer also means that some of the work in the gardens begins to relent and we get to think about some other things for a change. Since we don’t have as many crops left in the field to keep us busy, (I mean that both in relation to earlier in the year and to this time in previous years) this might be the year when we actually get our fall cover crops planted on time. As we grow veggies in one field, we spend some time preparing another field for veggies next year. Getting cover crops planted on time will let them grow large and lush and produce lots of organic matter for the soil, as well as lots of nitrogen to help next year’s crops flourish.

We lost a couple of hens this week; we think a hawk is getting them. Still working on how to handle that, but at least it’s not a fisher or something; they pretty much just kill everything and leave it all behind. Hawks seem to take out one bird at a time and at least attempt to carry them away to eat them.

You might have noticed that there are still tomatoes in the share. It was four weeks ago that we found late blight in our field and feared that everything would collapse around us in a heartbeat. In fact, we’ve had some of the highest quality tomatoes we’ve ever grown and we continue to harvest them. Late blight is all through the plants, but it’s progressing much less quickly than I was expecting. Yeah!

Detailed share information, notes about the veggies, storage tips and recipe tips are all inside the full post.

All shares contain:

• Basil
• Fresh Onions
• cut Lettuce
• Tomatoes
• Parsley
• Garlic

“Full” shares also contain:

• more Lettuce
• more Tomatoes
• a little bit more Basil
• Kale
• Fennel

Bread shares: no bread this week

Veggie Notes

Basil – a big bag of Basil for making some pesto! There should be enough for a double or triple batch, so make extra and freeze some for winter. We’ve included a recipe below. Note that we haven’t washed this basil as too much moisture can hasten spoiling in basil, so rinse it before you use it. Also note that we’ve had a couple of cool nights here at the farm, and that has tinged some of the leaves a darker green or brown color. They’re fine to eat, but don’t look so nice … which makes them perfect for pesto!

Fennel – a Mediterranean classic. With texture like celery (juicy & crunchy) and flavor like licorice, it’s delicious in fruit salads, chicken salad, caramelized (like onions) and on pizza. Of course, the licorice flavor means that people either love it or hate it. We’ve never met a market customer who was ambivalent about this stuff.

Storage Notes

Store onions, lettuce, parsley, kale, and fennel in a plastic bag in the fridge, tomatoes are fine on the counter and we’ve kept a bag of basil on our counter for a week or so without too much degradation. Keep it closed so that it won’t dry out.

Recipes

Pesto – Kendra & I really enjoy listening to podcasts of The Splendid Table. We recently bought their cook book (How to Eat Supper) and one of the recipes in it is for pesto. A real Genoan pesto. I had always made the the “handful of parsley, two handfuls of basil, some garlic and pine nuts” kind of pesto and thought that my recent lack of desire for pesto was just the general ambivalence that develops toward a dish when you’ve had it one too many times, regardless of how good it is. Thank God for Kendra, who decided to actually make pesto — GASP! — from a recipe! She used the recipe in this book and it’s totally reinvigorated our love of this sensory overload of a pasta “sauce”. Of course, when we say that she “followed the recipe”, we mean that she did follow the recipe, except that she toasted the pine-nuts and also added a few stalks of parsley. Most pesto recipes tell you that pesto shouldn’t be made with anything but a mortar & pestle before telling you that a food processor will suffice. We can attest that a food processor does only an acceptable job of making pesto — it’s cuts everything up, it doesn’t grind it — but also that only Manhattan trust funders and Italian grandmothers have the time to actually use a mortar and pestle. Pesto made with basil that has been ground and thoroughly smashed has a wonderful, creamy texture and flavor that food processor pesto never matches. We have found that a hand cranked meat grinder does a very good job of grinding the basil to fully release it’s flavor without taking all night. In fact, it’s downright quick and fun to boot.

Short of buying the book, the same recipe (albeit with a much pickier introduction) appears on the show’s website: A Classic Pesto of Genoa. We suggest that you ignore the admonitions about the size of the basil leaves to use and that you lightly toast the pine nuts in a skillet as well as adding some fresh parsley. And try the meat grinder thing if you have one!

As always, we welcome your feedback. Please let us know if you have any questions, concerns or problems. Also, please send along any recipes you’d like to share.

We hope you enjoy the share!

I guess I should feel glad that my early pessimism is coming back to bite me in the butt. Our tomatoes are still going (not groing strong, but at least going), our some of our onions might turn out decent, we might have a few winter squashes after all and — best of all — we’re in the middle of a good three weeks of sunny, beautiful weather that’s only been briefly interrupted to make way for a hurricane. Things could certainly be better, but I’m pretty happy with how they are. You know … all things considered.

The next month or so will see us finishing up the bulk of our planting and weeding, digging the rest of our potatoes, hopefully seeding some cover crops for the winter, taking some soil samples so that we know how to amend our soil with nutrients and perhaps beginning to harvest some of our tree fruits.

Detailed share information, notes about the veggies, storage tips and recipe tips are all inside the full post.

All shares contain:

• Broccoli
• Fresh Onions
• Celery
• Cucumbers
• head Lettuce

“Full” shares also contain:

• more Broccoli
• Cherry Tomatoes
• Tomatoes

Bread shares: Brooklin Sourdough and Cherry/Pecan Sourdough

Veggie Notes

Broccoli – It is worth noting that I pretty much gaurantee at least one cabbage worm per bag. If you cook the broccoli in water, the worms will float to the top, or you can soak the broccoli in water for 5-10 minutes to get a few of them. I’ve heard that some folks think soaking in a salt water is really effective. We tend to eat broccoli raw or grilled and generally take the “just don’t think about it” approach.

Cucumbers – Some of you will have received some “normal” cukes, but you all received some funny little round cucumbers. These are “Lemon” cukes, a nice heirloom variety that is lemony in appearance only. The skin is thin and never bitter.

Tomatoes – The pinkish/purplish tomatoes with green shoulders are heirloom tomatoes called “Cherokee Purple”. They’re our favorite heirloom tomato and the only “funky” heirloom we planted in our hoophouse — which is why we actually have some to put in the share. All of our outside heirlooms are a mess. Some of the cherokees weren’t perfectly ripe, which you can tell by the bottom of the fruit being a deep, dark red — tinted with that characteristic brownish/purplish hue. Don’t let the green shoulders put you off; they’ll never go away. These, my friends, are what summer is all about; savor them while you can.

Storage Notes

Store onions, broccoli, celery, cukes and lettuce in a plastic bag in the fridge, tomatoes are fine on the counter.

As always, we welcome your feedback. Please let us know if you have any questions, concerns or problems. Also, please send along any recipes you’d like to share.

We hope you enjoy the share!

Perhaps it’s this beautiful weather, but I feel like things are going great. Late blight is definitely killing our tomatoes, but this hot, dry weather slows it down so that we can still harvest fruit. Our potatoes are all dead now, but they were happy potatoes before they died and, as such, we’ve got a decent potato crop to harvest. Not a lot, but enough. I’m still not optimistic about the diversity of the shares through the fall, but I know that there will be enough.

The shares are a little light this week, due to a miscalculation about how many tomatoes we’d have. Most of the shares have been pretty large up to now, so we’re still ahead of the curve, but I thought I’d let you know in case you were thinking things looked a little shy.

Egg shareholders should feel free to return their used egg cartons. We don’t need them now, but I’m sure we’ll need them sometime.

Detailed share information, notes about the veggies, storage tips and recipe tips are all inside the full post.

All shares contain:

• Fresh Onions
• Endive
• TOMATOES! (one half share got cherry tomatoes instead of slicing tomatoes)

“Full” shares also contain:

• Parsley
• Cherry Tomatoes
• Swiss Chard

Bread shares: No bread this week.

Veggie Notes

Endive – A frilly, bitter green. Here’s a few recipes we put together for some of the Italian bitter greens in last year’s CSA.

Storage Notes

Store onions, endive, parsley and chard in a plastic bag in the fridge, tomatoes are fine on the counter. Aficionados often say that putting tomatoes in the fridge ruins their flavor.

As always, we welcome your feedback. Please let us know if you have any questions, concerns or problems. Also, please send along any recipes you’d like to share.

We hope you enjoy the share!

We harvested most of our garlic this week. Perhaps a week behind schedule, but considering the rest of this season, that’s practically 3 weeks ahead of schedule. It looked good — healthy — and there’s a lot of it. We also found out that our potatoes — not the plants, but the actual spuds — will be fine. If you remove (cut, bag and trash or just burn w/ a propane torch) the plants early enough, the tubers will be unaffected by the blight and will store fine. So, we’ll have plenty of potatoes. Perhaps not big potatoes, but potatoes none the less. That’s good news.

And good news is important, because it helps to buffer the bad news, like: late blight in the tomatoes. The only good thing about this is that we’re one of the few organic growers who’s actually been able to harvest some tomatoes. We took some to market last week and — hooray — there are some in the share this week. We’ll probably be able to take some more to market this week, but the outlook is dim — very dim — for next week. So expect these to be the first and last tomatoes you’ll see from us and then you’ll be all tickled pink if we actually manage to squeeze another week out of them. A friend of mine wrote eloquently about this situation in a CSA newsletter for her farm in Massachusetts a few weeks ago. (In the “notes from the field” section, towards the bottom.)

Since I started farming, I’ve always wanted an old Red Sox hat that said “Wait ‘Till Next Year”. This year more than ever.

Honestly, though, I’m not this much of a downer. Let’s see: Basil is doing really well for us. These Rainbow Carrots are pretty cool. Garlic, like I said, did good. Hey, remember that cauliflower and broccoli? Man, that stuff was beautiful. Our popcorn is going gangbusters, too. Hot peppers are ripening and our sweet peppers are about to set a whole lot of fruit. And let’s not forget that the kale, collards and chard are really rockin’ the block. See? I’m not all down about how the most important and exciting crops are are all more-or-less failures this year…

Detailed share information, notes about the veggies, storage tips and recipe tips are all inside the full post.

All shares contain:

• Rainbow Carrots
• Fresh Onions
• Basil
• TOMATOES!

“Full” shares also contain:

• Garlic
• More Tomatoes
• Swiss Chard

Bread shares: one Multigrain and one Olive Levain

Veggie Notes

Fresh Onions – these are an heirloom variety from Tropea, in Italy. Somewhere between a scallion and a real onion. The tops are edible (as long as they’re not turning yellow), too. We had some on pizza, but you can use them anywhere you’d use onions or scallions. Expect a bunch of onions in the share from now on.

Tomatoes – a mixed lot of different colored tomatoes. The red ones are easy enough to know about; the orange and yellow ones are meant to be orange and yellow. Any green blush means they’re not quite ripe; just leave the on the counter for a day or so and they’ll be ready. As I mentioned above, you should probably not expect any more tomatoes in the share this year. Sadly. So sad. None of these are heirlooms, but they are tomatoes and in a season like this one, that’s worth something.

Storage Notes

Store carrots, onions, garlic and chard in a plastic bag in the fridge, basil w/ the stems in a jar of water on the counter, tomatoes are fine on the counter. Aficionados often say that putting tomatoes in the fridge ruins their flavor.

As always, we welcome your feedback. Please let us know if you have any questions, concerns or problems. Also, please send along any recipes you’d like to share.

We hope you enjoy the share!

Today was our first day to distribute egg shares. We’ve been getting eggs from the hens for only about a month now, so we’re still figuring out how best to handle everything. Please let us know how we’re doing and how we might improve.

You’ll notice that the eggs range in sizes. The smallest of them are “pullet” or “starter” eggs, the small eggs which the hens lay as they first begin laying. Most of the hens seem to have begun to lay normal-ish sized eggs by now, with a few jumbos thrown in there. We’ve been surprised at how many double-yolkers we’ve been getting when we make french toast in the morning. Anyway, we don’t grade the eggs for size when we pack them in cartons.

In case you’re interested, our procedure is that we collect eggs every day. After collection (where we’re getting between 20 and 24 eggs a day), we take the eggs to our walk in cooler and sort the clean and more-or-less clean eggs into cartons and set aside (for breakfast or dinner) any which we notice as cracked. The eggs which are dirty enough to need some cleaning are kept separate until we’re ready to wash them. Washing usually entails a warm, damp cloth and some mild elbow grease, but the dirtiest ones will get a brief soaking in warm water to loosen up whatever’s stuck on. After that, these cleaned eggs are then put into cartons. Until we take them to market or to the share sites, all of the eggs are kept in our walk in cooler.

When kept refrigerated, eggs should easily keep 4-5 weeks or longer. Eggs that we sell have often been “out of the chicken” for less than week (in fact, some of the eggs in today’s share were laid yesterday) and never more than a week and a half.

We hope you enjoy the fresh eggs!

I must be starting to sound like Chicken Little, but it seems like the bad news just keeps coming. On Sunday we found late blight in our potatoes. I’m not 100% certain that it’s late blight, but there are few diseases of potatoes and tomatoes that can decimate crops as quickly as late blight can and it seems a likely suspect. If you haven’t been keeping up with Maine news for the past month or so, there is an epidemic of late blight affecting growers across the state. We had hoped that we would be isolated to avoid it, but I guess not. Late blight is the same disease that caused the famed Irish “potato famine” in the mid-1800s. In most years late blight is a minor problem late in the season, but this year a large wholesale grower of tomato seedlings in Alabama sold several hundreds of thousands of infected plants into the big box store supply chain, at which point the plants were dispersed all over the northeast and midwest. The cold, wet conditions of the early part of the season provided a perfect environment for the blight — which is very fungus-like — to develop and spread. Once it has gained a foot hold and reproduced, it’s spores can travel for miles on the wind. Organic growers have few options for dealing with late blight; most adopt of regimen of spraying copper solutions on their susceptible crops every 5 days. The copper treatments will not reverse or cure an infection, but they will hold off further infection. We would have been doing this were we not so short handed this year. So far we’ve just removed the plants that have displayed obvious signs of infection — although our understanding is that this will only slow down the infection; not stop it. All in all, it’s pretty frustrating.

But all is not lost. Even if we don’t have loads of big tubers through the fall and winter, we’ll still have plenty now. And as you can see in your share this week, there’s plenty of crops that are doing just great. So long the blight doesn’t jump to our tomatoes right away, we’re hopeful that we can start putting some in the share this week or next. Keep your fingers crossed.

Detailed share information, notes about the veggies, storage tips and recipe tips are all inside the full post.

All shares contain:

• Rainbow Carrots
• Basil
• New Potatoes
• Garlic

“Full” shares also contain:

• Cherry Tomatoes!!
• more potatoes
• Asian Eggplant
• Collard Greens

Bread shares: no bread this week.

Veggie Notes

Rainbow Carrots – Multicolored carrots are beautiful and — though they all taste “carroty” — each has it’s own flavor. We find that the orange, purple and white ones taste the best, while the yellow and pink ones are … well, yellow and pink!! The purple carrots will fade a bit when cooked, but the rest of them will hold their color — we tend to just eat them raw. You can remove the tops and compost them.

New Potatoes – Delicious fresh spuds are — if a potato can be — juicy. Treat them just like normal potatoes or like you would those little red potatoes that seem to be at all of the road side stands this time of year. The white ones are Green Mountains, an old heirloom variety reknowned for it’s flavor and it’s texture, which is perfect for frying and mashing. The purple skinned ones are a new variety for us this year called Purple Majesty. They have purple flesh!

Collard Greens – Very closely related to kale, collard greens are said to be better for eating during the heat of summer. I’m not sure I buy that — we like them both all year round — but they are delicious. These have been picked small and tender. Use them as you would kale.

Storage Notes

Store carrots, eggplant, garlic and collards in a plastic bag in the fridge, basil w/ the stems in a jar of water on the counter, potatoes in a paper bag in a cool spot (but not in the fridge). Eat the cherry tomatoes up or keep them in an open bag on the counter.

Recipe Ideas

Eggplant – We roasted some of these with chopped garlic on top a few weeks ago and they were great. So simple and delicious.

Cherry Tomatoes – I found this recipe from our CSA newsletter in 2007. We make this dish a lot during cherry tomato season.

Roasted Cherry Tomato Pasta

1 pint cherry tomatoes, halved
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp hot pepper
1-2 tbsp parsley, chopped
1-2 tsp thyme
¼ c fresh basil, chopped
¼ c Parmigiano cheese, freshly grated
1-2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
salt and pepper to taste

While the cherries are roasting, bring a pot of salted water to boil and cook one pound of pasta until “al dente” or still lightly firm. When the pasta has cooked and been drained and the cherries are finished roasting, toss them all together in a large pot or bowl with the Parmigiano, parsley and basil. Taste and adjust for salt and pepper and serve.

As always, we welcome your feedback. Please let us know if you have any questions, concerns or problems. Also, please send along any recipes you’d like to share.

We hope you enjoy the share!

I’m going to keep it brief this week because — holy cow! — it’s sunny and I’m really itchin’ to get back out and get a few things done.

The past couple of weeks have seen some larger than average shares. Last year, giving out larger shares meant that we could end the share a week ahead of the end date — which was good since we didn’t have a whole lot left in the field at the end anyway. This year, though, I started bulking up the shares now because I’m a little nervous about having enough to put in them for the next month or so. The past six weeks of rain and below average temps has not just delayed growth, but prevented a lot of planting. Actually, I’m not concerned so much about having enough to put in the shares as I am about having enough variety for the shares. But then again I should also clarify that I tend to be afflicted with a peculiar mix of optimism and pessimism: optimism keeps me farming and working toward some beautiful agrarian vision while pessimism tells me that we’re always in the middle of the worst case scenario. That said, there’s two possibilities for the next month or so; you’ll get your share every week and think either “great. more kale, potatoes and onions” or “great! he was so full of it when he said he might not have enough”. As usual, let’s hope for the best and prepare for the worst.

The hens are definitely on the upward curve of their laying, so we’re getting plenty of eggs and we’re planning to start giving out egg shares next week. If you’re already getting a veggie share, just look for note next to your name on the check off list and find the box of eggs. If you’re not getting a veggie share, then I’ll call you this week to go over the details.

Detailed share information, notes about the veggies, storage tips and recipe tips are all inside the full post.

Please remember to return your tote bags every week.

All shares contain:

• cut Lettuce
• Cauliflower
• Celery
• Parsley

“Full” shares also contain:

• Fava beans
• more Lettuce
• Swiss Chard

Bread shares: one loaf of our “80/20 sourdough” (whole wheat) and one loaf of our “Brooklin sourdough” (plain, or “white”)

Veggie Notes

Again, I won’t go into detail about veggies we’ve had before.

Celery – Fresh celery has a richer, sweeter flavor than the store bought kind. Obviously, these slender stalks won’t stand up to the peanut-butter-and-raisins treatment, but their richer flavor will more than make up for that. Use the leaves, too!

Fava beans – For putting these in the share, you may love me or you may hate me. They’re delicious, but they’re a lot of work. Don’t eat them like green beans; they must be removed from their pod first and beans larger than a fingernail need to be blanched then have their tough skin removed. After that, though, they’re great…

Storage Notes

Everything can be stored in a plastic bag in the fridge. A note about freezing: greens — such as kale and Swiss Chard — are especially easy to freeze for winter. Just chop them up, pack them loosely into bags and put them in the freezer. When you’re ready to use them, just open them up and drop them right into the pan — they’ll defrost as they cook.

Recipe Ideas

Parsley – Shareholder Sonya Skoog wrote in a few weeks ago about a parsley pesto: “I made a parsley pesto…….it was almost as good as basil pesto. I used toasted walnuts and added lemon zest. I usually use lemon juice, but this time I also added zest and it was amazing!” She tossed it with some stir-fried pac choi. Sounds good!

Favas – We love these things braised in butter (a lot, like a half stick) with a giant pinch of chopped parsley, then poured over boiled new potatoes. We love them this way so much that we simply never even try to make them any other way. If that doesn’t sound interesting to you, there seem to be plenty of great recipe ideas out there.

Cauliflower – We linked to a few cauliflower recipes in last weeks newsletter.

As always, we welcome your feedback. Please let us know if you have any questions, concerns or problems. Also, please send along any recipes you’d like to share.

We hope you enjoy the share!