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Waltham Fields Community Farm
CSA Newsletter #7
July 19, 2009
In This Issue
CSA Pickup Schedule
Pick-Your-Own Crops
Zucchini ... many ways
Tour de Farms Bike Tour
Notes from the Field
Coming up at the Farm 
   
2009 Wine Share
Eat well! Drink well! WFCF is teaming up with Turtle Creek Winery in Lincoln to offer a new, wine share program to its CSA members. Owner and winemaker Kip Kumler will be on hand Tuesday, July 
21 from 3 to 7
pm to talk about the program and grape-growing in MA. Members will be able to taste the wines and sign up for a 2009 wine share to be delivered with their CSA pickup this August. 
Open to CSA members only. For more info, email Turtle Creek Winery.

 
Children's Program Sign Up

Sign Your Child Up Now!  We still have a few openings in our summer Children's Learning Garden Program. Monday -Thursday, 9am-12pm, August 3-6 or 17-20.
Recipes
We love getting recipes from our shareholders!
 
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
  
Fun on the Farm, Tuesdays, 3:30 - 5:00 pm
Kids, please join us for free play, old-fashioned games, story hour (see above), nature drawing (bring supplies!) and a nut-free snack. About once a month, we'll do a special activity such as tour bee hives and chicken coops, 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.
 
Story Time   
Tuesdays, 4-4:45 pm at the meeting shelter.
Boudicca Hawke (age 9) will once again do Story Time on the farm for children of all ages.     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.
CSA pickup schedule for the week
 
Tuesday, July 
21
 from 3-7 PM 
Thursday, July 23 from 3-7 PM 
Saturday, July 25 from 8 AM to 12 noon
Quick Links

What's in the share this week...

Please 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.  
Mizuna
Pick-Your-Own Crops
 
Shareholders are welcome to
pick-your-own anytime during daylight hours. Please remember to always check the white board on the red kiosk for updated PYO information.


  • EpazotePerennial herbs and flowers (including mint and thyme)
  • Flat and curly parsley
  • Genovese, purple and Thai basil
  • Green beans
  • Epazote
  • Dill
  • Cilantro
Zucchini
 
Though it's not even August, we've recently gotten quite a few zucchini recipes. Anyone got some good ideas for the pattypan squashes?!

Sally writes "I have a delicious zucchini recipe that was a favorite of mine when I was a kid.  I made it last night with the zucchini from last week's pick up!"

Rachel wrote in ... "The batter is sometimes a bit runny, but they cook up delicious.  I like them with goat cheese, or fried eggs, or really with anything. They refrigerate well, and I just reheat them on a tray in the oven. I'd suggest making a double recipe as they're so delicious you'll want extra."

2 eggs beaten
2 cups of grated summer squash
1/4 cup flour
1T melted butter
2 chopped scallions
2 T parmesean
chopped jalapeno (optional but very yummy!)
salt and pepper
oil for frying

Fry 3-4 T size scoops in oil, turning after the first side is well browned.

Barrett recommends the Quinoa with Corn and Zucchini recipe that appeared earlier this month in the New York Times.
Tour de Farms Bike Tour
Boston's 3rd Annual, held Saturday August 1st
 
Back by popular demand!  This year's Tour de Farms will feature two loops - a 15-mile route in Boston to visit urban farm and garden projects, and a 40-mile route to visit community farms on the city's outskirts.
 
Boston Urban Farm Loop
This 15-mile route covers Dorchester, Roxbury, Jamaica Plain, and Mattapan. Farm stops include The Food Project, City Natives, ReVision Urban Farm, and the Minton Stables Community Garden. 9 am start at Franklin Park.
 
Community Farm Loop
This 40-mile route covers Boston, Brookline, Watertown, Waltham, Newton, and Milton. Farm stops include Allandale Farm, Waltham Fields Community Farm, Newton Community Farm, and Brookwood Community Farm. 8 am start at Franklin Park. This is an advanced ride for experienced cyclists.
 
Both rides will be led by experienced riders and there will be technical support in the case of flat tires -- but please be sure to bring extra tubes and tools! Rain or Shine (except in case of extreme weather).

On-line pre-registration is required; registration and insurance fee $10. For more information, contact Jennifer Fahy at Farm Aid.
Notes from the Field

This past week was another chapter in our continuing education in organic farming.  Mid-week, we received a box in the mail from the New Jersey Department of Agriculture containing four small mesh bags, each with twenty shriveled, brown, spiky creatures inside.  The creatures were the mummified larvae of the Mexican bean beetle, which has been causing shortened harvests for our bush bean crop for the past few years.  If you've picked beans on the farm before, you probably remember seeing the larvae of the bean beetle, which look like tiny yellow hedgehogs with voracious appetites, skeletonizing the leaves of the plants and damaging the beans.
 
BasilTo try to outpace the beetles, we plant five successions of beans each year, but by September, the populations of beetles and larvae are generally large enough to make our last planting a little hit-or-miss.

Early this season, we read in the University of Massachusetts's extension service newsletter about the pediobius wasp, a tiny wasp which parasitizes the Mexican bean beetle by laying its eggs on the larvae.  When the eggs hatch, the wasp larvae eat the insides of the bean beetle and then pupate in the empty shell, or mummy.  These mummies, filled with pupating wasps which would soon hatch, mate and breed, are what came in the mail last week, just as the first bean beetle larvae hatched on the underside of the bean leaves.  As you pick beans this week, you might see the mesh bags hanging under the plants; you might even see the tiny wasps hovering in the air over the bean plantings.  While the wasps can't survive the winter in New England, their population should increase over the course of the season, enhancing their control of the bean beetle population.  The wasps can travel up to five miles in the area, so they will hopefully help out with bean beetles in the neighboring community gardens and local home gardens as well.  They will be an interesting experiment for us in beneficial insect control of a particularly troublesome pest on our farm.

While the parasitic wasps are a welcome addition to the life of our farm, a very unwelcome visitor made itself known this past week as well.  Introduced by transplants sold by many big box stores and garden centers, and promoted and spread by the cool, rainy weather of the past month, the fungus-like disease phythophthora infestans appeared in our tomato planting.  This disease, also called late blight, was the cause of the Irish potato famine in the late 1840s and has been called "worse than the Bubonic plague" for tomatoes by a New Jersey tomato researcher.  As growers who are committed to growing using organic principles, we tried many kind of cultural controls to help prevent this disease, including only working in our tomatoes when they were dry and being extremely vigilant about fertility (since healthier plants resist diseases) and tying the tomatoes up, helping their canopies dry out when the weather was dry.  We were prevented by rain from spraying copper when it was first recommended by the extension agents, but we did spray last week when we saw the first symptoms of the disease on the farm.  We also removed the infected plants we saw in the pick-your-own section, since we learned that heavily diseased "hot spots" can sometimes be taken out to slow the spread of late blight.

Tall SunflowersThe bottom line is that there is no organically approved cure for late blight in tomatoes.  Copper is a preventative fungicide that is moderately effective if sprayed every five days when the disease is not present; while it may delay its spread to some of our later tomato plantings, it will not cure the tomato plants, heavily laden with fruit, that are infected now.  Because we are not certified organic, we could technically use a non-allowed systemic fungicide to kill the disease.  Although the thought has crossed our collective minds in the past week, our commitment to organic principles has made this decision for us.  Nothing about this situation makes our choices easy ones, but we plan to try to keep the disease from our healthy plants with copper and repeated applications of fish, kelp and compost tea, continue to remove "hot spots", and hope that our shareholders are as committed to organic production methods as we are. 

Fortunately, our small new potato crop is not affected at all by the disease.  We will begin to harvest these this week and should finish up quickly, removing the plants and tubers before the disease has a chance to hit the Lyman Estate field.  The tomato crop, however, may be seriously impacted.  While we are hoping for the best, it's probably only wise to prepare ourselves -- and you -- for the worst -- the potential that we will have many fewer tomatoes, and much less variety, than we have in the past. 
According to our extension agents, late blight can wipe out a tomato field in a week if conditions are right.  This is particularly hard for us to face this season because our tomato plants look so healthy and are responding so well to the compost, soybean meal, fish emulsion and attention that we've lavished upon them so far this spring and summer.  There is also some evidence that peppers and eggplant can be impacted by late blight during particularly bad infestations, so we will monitor those crops, which have been set back significantly by cool wet weather, for signs of the disease as well.

KaleSo there you have it -- we know much more about sporulating lesions than we ever wanted to know.  On the other hand, many crops are growing and producing well with the onset of some more summer-like weather.  Our onion and garlic crops look great, summer squash and cucumbers are prolific, and carrots are sweet and abundant.  We are almost caught up with our fall plantings of broccoli, brussels sprouts and cauliflower, which we'll start harvesting around Labor Day.  Things could be worse -- but they could be quite a bit better on our little farm as well.  I hope we can use this opportunity to be grateful for the crops that we do have, and do our best for the ones that we might not.

Enjoy this summertime harvest,
Amanda, for the farm crew
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
Ryan Yorck, Field Crew
Waltham Fields Community Farm | 240 Beaver Street | Waltham | MA | 02452