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Waltham Fields Community Farm
CSA Newsletter #2
June 14, 2009
In This Issue
Coming up at the Farm
What's In the Share This Week
Pick-Your-Own Crops
Got Greens? A recipe to use them up
Notes from the Field
Quick Links
Recipes
Do you have a recipe you'd like to share? Don't be shy -- let us know!

For more information, see our Recipe pages.
Farm Wish List

5 gallon buckets, preferably with lids

Free or very low-cost massage or chiropractic practice for our hard-working farm staff

Small air compressor
Fun for the Kids
Story Time on Tuesdays, 4-4:45
Boudicca Hawke (age 9) will once again do Story Time on the farm for children of all ages.  It will be held each Tuesday from 4:00 to 4:45 at the meeting shelter.  She will have a selection of books that are related to farms and the creatures that live on farms, however if anyone has a favorite book they'd love to share, please bring it as she will be happy to read that too.  
 
Fun on the Farm, Tuesdays, 3:30 - 5:00 pm
Kids, please join us for free play, old-fashioned games, Boudicca's story hour  and a (nut-free) snack. About once a month, we'll do a special activity such as tour bee hives and chicken coops (see the notice below for this week's excursion!), inventory birds and insects, make cornhusk dolls and our famous Silly Olympics. Parents -- (nut free) snack contributions would be great! Look for Anastacia near the distribution shed at 3:30!
 

Coming up at the Farm 
 
Children's Program Sign Up
Sign Your Child Up Now!  We still have a few openings in our summer Children's Learning Garden Program. Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1:30pm-4:00pm, July 7 - August 13
 
Second Chances Clothing Drive, 6/20-6/27
WFCF is sponsoring a clothing drive at the farm for Second Chances, a non-profit whose mission is to provide clothing to people in need, inform supporters about issues affecting our community and help people connect with local organizations or issues that resonate with their values, skills and personal experiences.
Welcome to the 2009 Harvest Season!

CSA Pickup Schedule for This Week:
Greens in the shed
  • Tuesday, June 16
    from 3-7 PM 
  • Thursday, June 18
    from 3-7 PM 
  • Saturday, June 20 from 8 AM to 12 noon
What's In the Share This Week
 
Field of greensPlease note:  this list is prepared the week before you receive your share.  Some guesswork is involved! We do our best to predict which crops will be ready to harvest, but sometimes crops are on the list that are not in the share, and sometimes crops will be in the share even though they're not on the list.  

  • Lettuce:  tender red butterheads, speckled 'trout' type, and maybe some others!
  • Spinach:  delicious raw or cooked lightly.  
  • Bok Choy:  a delicious Asian green, not spicy but flavorful in simple stir-fries with ginger and garlic.
  • Arugula:  spring and fall classic on the farm.  Spicy, nutty and delicious in salads, with pasta, or in quiches or frittatas.  Arugula is rich in iron and vitamins A and C.
  • Napa Cabbage:  Sometimes called Chinese cabbage, Napa has a delicate flavor that is wonderful shredded in salads or sauteed in stir-fries.  Try it with pork from the Waltham Farmer's Market in this tasty stir-fry recipe. It makes an amazing simple lacto-fermented sauerkraut or kimchee.
  • Radishes:  we grow "french breakfast"-style red and white striped radishes as well as multi-colored "easter egg" varieties.  They are similar in flavor, but the french breakfast radishes are slightly more delicate than their rugged round cousins.
  • Kale:  Delicious shredded and eaten raw as a salad, or cooked in a variety of ways.  Amanda Dumont sautees some onions in warm olive oil, then adds shredded kale and a little tomato sauce or paste, and cooks for a while to make a delicious filling for omelettes, calzones or quesadillas.  Even kids like kale this way!
  • Collard Greens:  A staple of the CSA, collards will be a choice for shareholders throughout the season.  Though unfamiliar to some, collards are a nutrient-dense vegetable with lots of character as a side dish for barbecue or a component of a pasta main dish.
  • Swiss Chard:  A relative of spinach, this Bright swiss chardcolorful green is a staff favorite.  Try it in a gratin, over pasta or rice, or simply lightly steamed as a side dish.
  • Garlic Scapes:  Only harvested for two weeks of the season, the tender flower stalks of our hardneck garlic can be lightly sauteed or chopped raw into salads.  They are a true seasonal treat!
  • Scallions:  Purple and white scallions are the first of our onion family to make an appearance in the spring.
  • Beets:  We grow three types of beets:  the more familiar red ones, candy-striped Chioggia beets, and deep orange Golden Detroits.  The flavor is similar, but the red ones are slightly more earthy and "beety", while the gold and striped ones are more delicately flavored.  Very tasty with goat cheese from Westfield Farm.
  • Salad Turnips:  These delicate white cousins of fall purple-top turnips are delicious in spring salads or stir-fries. 
Pick-Your-Own Crops
 
Sugar Snap Peas sign
Shareholders are welcome to pick-your-own anytime during daylight hours. Please remember to always check the white board on the red kiosk for PYO information.


  • Perennial herbs (including mint and thyme)
  • Sugar snap peas
  • Snow peas
  • Strawberries, for shares listed under the letters R-Z (if we finally get a little sun and warm weather!)
Got Greens?!
A recipe that uses lots and lots of greens
 
Shareholder Barrett writes... "The best thing is that I've found this recipe to be very forgiving. If you don't have cauliflower, no problem. Even if you don't have mushrooms, it still tastes good.  If you're vegan and don't do cheese, it's ok. I usually use it as a side dish, but you can also eat it as a light supper with fresh bread to mop up the juices."
 
Warm Salad by Mollie Katzen
 
You can use any combination of greens that you'd like.  Use 2-3 greens from this list: escarole, chard, mustard greens, dandelion greens, kale, collards, spinach, tat soi, napa cabbage.
 
3 T olive oil
5 cups of mixed greens (I recently used one small head of Napa cabbage, one bunch of chard, and one bunch of spinach)
1-2 t salt
2 large cloves of garlic, minced
2 medium leeks
2 c. red onion
10 oz. sliced mushrooms
1 stalk celery
½ small head of cauliflower
3 T balsamic or wine vinegar
6 T parmesan
Fresh black pepper
 
1) Heat 1TBS oil in a deep skillet or wok.  Add the greens, one handful at a time, salting lightly after each addition, and adding more greens as soon as the ones in the pot cook down a bit.  Use a fairly intense level of heat under the pot and stir as you cook.  When all the greens are wilted and tender, stir in the garlic.  Cook and stir one minute more, then transfer to a platter.
 
2) Add the rest of the oil to the skillet and when it is hot, add leeks, onions, mushrooms, celery, and cauliflower.  Salt lightly, and stir-fry quickly over med-high heat until just tender (5-8 minutes).  Add to the platter, mix gently to incorporate the greens, and sprinkle with vinegar and parmesan while still hot.  Grind black pepper, and serve hot, warm, or at room temperature, with thick slices of toasted bread to mop up the juices  
 
Enjoy!
Notes from the Field
A New Tractor... and Snapping Turtles in the Field

This past week on the farm was one for the history books.  One CSA shareholder put it very well when we saw her in the field last week -- although the farming season has been going on for several months, June and the start of harvests really mark a shift to "people season" on the farm.  Our first CSA distributions are always a whirlwind of seeing old friends and meeting new ones, as well as remembering how to harvest and get other farm work done at the same time. 

One of the many highlights of our week was the arrival of an additional tractor for the farm, which we purchased used back in April from a dealer in New Hampshire.  This tractor, a Kubota L4200, is the result of many hours of research and online shopping that Andy and I did during the winter and early New orange tractorspring.  Though it may seem like overkill for an 11-acre vegetable farm to have five tractors, the Kubota will contribute to our farm's productivity beginning immediately.  Our farm staff transplants most of our farm's acreage by hand, using a tractor-mounted transplanter that requires a tractor that can go very slowly -- in the case of some closely-spaced crops, less than 0.5 miles per hour.  Before we purchased the Kubota, our Massey-Ferguson was the only tractor we had that could travel that slowly.  Because of its horsepower and size, it is also the tractor that did most of our field preparation and plastic mulch laying, along with all of our compost making and spreading with its bucket loader. 

The Kubota, which is essentially the same size and horsepower as the Massey, can help with all of these tasks, and will be critical in helping us get our fall crops in the ground during the big planting push that begins in early July.  Along with the Massey, the Kubota joins our two sixty year old Farmall Super A tractors, which do all the cultivating on the farm, and our Ford 850, also about fifty years old, which pulls our manure spreader and two-bottom plow and helps out with the tilling on the farm when needed. 

The rain that swept the farm on Thursday night and Friday was welcomed by our crops, but some of its beneficiaries were a surprise to us.  As we drove into our field at the Lyman Estate on Friday morning to harvest, we were greeted by the sight of a huge snapping turtle mama making her way ponderously across a wide expanse of newly tilled beds, stopping periodically to make a trial nest or two for her eggs.  As we walked down the pathways between the onion beds to the Swiss chard, another turtle reared its head from the adjacent pathway.  And as we ranged ourselves down the beds, bunching bands in hand, a third popped up from the beet beds close by.  Though we had seen nests built in our scallion and onion beds for about a week, apparently the rain had brought them out in force.  We tried to move the mama turtle out of the beet beds filled with ping-pong-ball-sized beets, but she did not go willingly, struggling and snapping at our boots until she ended up ignominiously upside-down in the pathway and then trudged away in disgust, apparently deciding that this bed of beets was not the place for her nest.

While snapping turtles are not by any means an uncommon animal, our encounters with them, along with the coyotes, hatching baby killdeers, tiny toads and great blue herons, remind us of the importance of the gentle kind of agriculture that we try to practice to the maintenance of the delicate ecosystems in our urban area.  The animals that come in and out of the edges of the work that we do, even the Canada geese and woodchucks who are such terrible pests to our farm, are indicators of the health and diversity of these ecosystems.  In these times of rapidly disappearing species and a growing awareness of our lack of knowledge of how we affect our plant and animal neighbors, the sight of a trio of snapping turtles on a rainy morning is an inspiration to try our hardest to understand and moderate our impact on the land and its non-human inhabitants.

Enjoy the harvest, with its goose-nibbled radish tops and turtle-trampled beet greens.

Amanda, for the farm staff
 
Warmly, 

The Staff of Waltham Fields Community Farm
 
Jericho Bicknell, Education and Outreach Coordinator
Amanda Cather, Farm Manager
Amanda Dumont, Field Crew
Debra Guttormsen, Administrative and Finance Coordinator
Paula Jordan, Spring & Fall Children's Learning Garden Assistant
Sarah Kielsmeier-Jones, Field Crew
Claire Kozower, Executive Director
Brad Leatherbee, Field Crew
Jonathan Martinez, Assistant Grower 
Blake Roberts, Outreach Market Intern
Dan Roberts, Assistant Grower
Erinn Roberts, Assistant Grower
Nina Rogowsky, Children's Learning Garden Teacher
Andy Scherer, Assistant Farm Manager
Lina Yamashita, Summer Children's Learning Garden Assistant