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July 9, 2012
| CSA Distribution Week #5 |
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Waltham Fields Community Farm
CSA Newsletter
 
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What's in the shares this week | |
This list is prepared before we harvest 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.
Mix-and-Match nine items this week from the following list:
Kale: We grow the familiar curly kale as well as the more robust black Tuscan variety (hint: also called dinosaur kale for those of you for whom this might be an incentive). Both are delicious steamed as a simple side dish, chopped raw into a salad, or cooked in any number of recipes. Our friends Bruce and Jenny at Picadilly Farm send us the third common variety, the flat-leaf Red Russian kale, when they have it available. Swiss Chard: Colorful and packed with folate, vitamins A, K and C, magnesium, potassium and fiber, chard is one of the healthiest vegetables we grow -- good thing it's also one of the most tasty. Use it in frittatas and pasta dishes, soups and casseroles, or use the leaves to wrap rice and meat combinations or salmon.
Beets: Everyone has their favorite way to prepare beets. Sliced thin and roasted into beet chips, pureed into bright-pink hummus, in the classic salad with goat cheese and walnuts... the possibilities are endless. We'll start the season with a couple of weeks of red beets and then bring on the candy-striped and golden beets with the warmer weather.
Carrots: Sweet, juicy 'Mokum' and 'Nelson' carrots are one of the highlights of early summer on the farm. Take off the tops before storing them -- but we don't think you'll need to store them for very long.
Fennel: Fennel is another ancient vegetable that was first enjoyed by the ancient Romans. It can be used raw, slivered into salads or served as a crudite, or cooked in a variety of ways -- braised, roasted, grilled, sauteed and tossed through pasta with cream, lemon and parsley.
Scallions: easy to use anytime, raw or cooked; especially good with carrots and Napa cabbage in an Asian-inspired slaw.
'Red Long of Tropea' Onions: These beautiful torpedo-shaped onions are some of the best fresh-eating onions around. They are great sliced into salads, on burgers, or simply grilled.
Zucchini: We grow three different types of zucchini: the traditional green, a beautiful gold variety, and an heirloom variety called Costata Romanesco ('Roman Rib'), which is tasty even when it's very large, which, because it can hide easily in the giant leaves of the plant, it often is.
Summer Squash: Coming on fast, you'll see the traditional yellow 'Slick Pik' joined by the green and yellow patty pans and the beautifully striped 'Zephyr'. All are delicious on the grill, sauteed in butter, or made into summer's best enchiladas for a special meal.
Cucumbers: First of the year!
New Potatoes: Whether it's green bean and potato salad at a backyard picnic, a quick and hearty soup with kale and chorizo, roasted and topped with ricotta, or twice-baked bites, new potatoes are an early-summer favorite. Their skins are very thin, so you don't have to peel them, and they have a crisp, moist texture that lends itself well to all kinds of quick cooking techniques.
And a farmers' choice of a few other surprise items throughout the week!
Pick-your-own crops this week:
- Perennial garden herbs
- The last of the fava beans
- The first of the green beans
- Basil
- Dill
- Cilantro
- Parsley
- Flowers
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Kids Corner - For Kids, By Kids
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A word about the Kids Corner, an occasional column that appears in this newsletter...
Many of you have probably met Natasha Hawke at pickup; she's one of our distribution coordinators. But have you had a chance to meet her daughters? They're a terrific bunch, just as involved at the farm as their mom, and so they wanted to write for other kids who visit the farm. Every so couple of newsletters, you'll see their column highlighting a plant you can find at the farm.
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Quick Links
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Events and Programs | |
Children's Learning Garden Programs!
Registration is now open for our well-loved summer programs! Sign up for Garden Explorers, Farmer for a Week, or perhaps you want to arrange a special one-time Farm Visit as a birthday party or for a youth group you work with.
Breakfast on the Farm w/ chef Joh Kokubo from Kitchen on Common
Sat., July 14th
Come anytime between 10am and 1pm at the Farm.
All are welcome - bring a blanket or some chairs and your friends!
$5/plate per person, $10/family |
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Lemony Zucchini Goat Cheese Pizza | Many thanks to Hilary for sending in this recipe from the fabulous blog Smitten Kitchen.
...Use thyme with or instead of your basil, or another herb you like. Add slices of eggplant, tomato or even potato, if that's what's coming up fresh in your area. Don't like goat cheese? Use gruyère or mozzarella. Is that too many options?
Makes one small pizza, which with a big green salad, makes an nice summer meal for two
1 store-bought pizza dough that will yield one small (approx. 11 to 12 inches across), thin pizza
1 lemon
4 oz goat cheese, at room temperature
Few leaves of fresh basil, cut into thin slivers
1/2 medium yellow zucchini, sliced as thinly as you can pull off with a knife or your mandoline (I went for 1/8- inch thick with mine)
1/2 medium green zucchini, sliced as the same as above
Drizzle of olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste
Preheat your oven to 450 degrees. Roll your pizza dough into a thin 12-inch circle and lay it on a tray or stone that has been dusted lightly with cornmeal.
In a small bowl, stir together the goat cheese with the juice of half your lemon. Season it with salt and freshly ground pepper, and spread it over your pizza dough. Scatter fresh basil slivers over the cheese.
Arrange your zucchini coins in concentric circles over the goat cheese spread, overlapping them slightly. You can alternate their colors, if you're feeling fancy. Squeeze the juice of the second half of your lemon on top of you zucchini, then drizzle with olive oil and finish with more salt and freshly ground black pepper.
Bake in preheated oven for 10 to 15 minutes (your baking time will vary, so please watch carefully), or until the edges of your pizza are golden brown and the zucchini looks roasted and a little curled up at the edges. Serve with a green or even simple tomato salad.
Do you have a recipe you'd like to share? Just send it on in -- please do let us know where you found it so we can reference the source.
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| A Few Reminders About CSA Share Pickup | We are very grateful to be able to offer some flexibility to our CSA shareholders, both in terms of what day you can pick up your share and what items you can select. We do ask you to observe some simple guidelines for share pickup:
- Weekday shareholders must pick up on Tuesdays or Thursdays only. If you have a conflict with your pick up one week, please email Amanda at the beginning of the week (no phone calls, please) to request a one-time Saturday pickup. We're much more able to accommodate occasional Saturday pickups during the summer when folks are away on vacation; in the fall, Saturdays get very busy on the farm and we may not be able to make a switch for you.
- Please remember that in general, we ask you to choose eight to ten different items when you are selecting your vegetables from the choices that are available. If we have enough of something available to make duplicates possible, we will post that on the blackboard sign near that vegetable.
- If you split your share, please remember that you must pick up the entire share at once each week. You can alternate weeks with your share partner, or you can meet to divide your share at the farm or at home, but you can not pick up half a share at the farm at any time.
- Please remember to check the white board for PYO directions and amounts. PYO is not unlimited; we ask that everyone stick to the amounts we suggest on the board in order to make sure there is enough for everyone.
Thanks to all of you for helping ensure that our choice system continues to work well for all of you as well as for the farm!
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Notes from the Field:
|  This week was a crazily mixed bag on the farm. There was a lot to celebrate --we transplanted fall broccoli, kale, cabbage and collards, harvested all of our garlic and laid it out in the greenhouse to cure, picked a huge amount of squash and zucchini and the beginning of our cucumbers, cultivated everything we could get a tractor on, did some serious weeding, and welcomed Andy back from his three-week paternity leave.
At the same time, we got some news that we've been hoping we would not hear for a while. Farms in Weston, Wayland, and Natick found late blight on their tomatoes this week. Late blight is the oomycete (a fungus-like organism) that caused the Irish potato famine, and also the collapse of many growers' tomato crops in 2009 (including ours). Back in 2009, it had been raining for three weeks and continued to rain, off and on, through July. This late blight organism loves rain and cool temperatures. It can spread in the rain over several miles if conditions are right, but it dessicates quickly in the sunny, dry, hot weather like we've been having this year. That's the good news.
 The other good news is that this year we are prepared to do everything we can to protect the tomatoes organically. We planted all of our tomatoes with a row of other crops between them so that we can drive between the rows with our boom sprayer, using a combination of organically approved materials to protect the tomatoes once a week. The spray row, along with the two-foot spacing we plant tomatoes on within the row, also helps provide better air flow for the crop so that it can dry out after a heavy dew -- also important in disease prevention. The materials that we are able to spray organically won't totally protect against late blight, particularly in situations of very heavy disease pressure, so every little bit of what are called 'cultural controls' helps too. We fertilized carefully with compost and micronutrients in the spring so that the crop would be as healthy as possible, and continue to fertilize weekly through the drip irrigation lines as the tomatoes begin to flower and set fruit. So, unlike in 2009, we were at least prepared to get the news of late blight in the area. But it's very early, and all we can do from here on out is what farmer Dan Kaplan calls some really "heavy duty praying." We'll keep you posted.
The other bad news (in the same email from UMass Extension, thanks ALOT) is that the Spotted Wing Drosophila (SWD), a fruit fly that infested our raspberries for the first time in 2011, has been found again in Massachusetts. This fly was found in New England for the first time after Hurricane Irene, although it has been a pest in the South and Northwest for some time. It is unique among fruit flies in that it attacks sound fruit that is not overripe or damaged in any way. It lays its eggs in perfect, beautiful raspberries and -- well, you can guess the rest of the story, but you probably don't want to eat it.
We set traps to monitor for the SWD earlier in the summer, and we'll be checking them on a regular basis starting now. As organic growers, as with late blight, we have pretty limited options for controlling the SWD, and they involve the sprayer and the tractor. It's sounding like we're going to need to find a designated tractor for all this spraying. Oh, and a designated farmer.
 | | Last year's beauties |
All jokes aside, we'll try our best to protect the berries against SWD this year, but if it doesn't look like we can manage it with a small amount of spraying, organically approved or not, I think we will probably give up on trying to grow them. Even organic pesticides have consequences. One is the unintended death of beneficial insects. This insects (including pollinators, who are having a hard enough time as it is) are really part of the ecosystem we are trying to promote and protect on the farm as organic growers. Another consequence is the potential build up of resistance among pests to the small arsenal of effective organic controls -- if we spray one of the really useful materials more than a few times against the same pest, the bugs that survive may adapt. So once again, we'll keep you posted.
 In the meantime, we'll keep on planting that broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage for the fall -- Dan's water wheel is working beautifully, which is a good thing, since there's no rain on the horizon (knock wood). We'll keep weeding away (more on that next week) and start harvesting potatoes. We hope you enjoy the harvest.
Amanda, for the farm crew |
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Waltham Fields Community Farm Year-Round Staff
Claire Kozower, Executive Director
Kim Hunter, Education & Volunteer Coordinator (on maternity leave)
Fan Watkinson, Interim Education & Volunteer Coordinator
Amanda Cather, Farm Manager
Andy Scherer, Gateways Field Manager
Dan Roberts, Field Manager
Erinn Roberts, Greenhouse & Field Manager
Marla Rhodes, Development Coordinator
Deb Guttormsen, Bookkeeper & Tech Coordinator
Assistant Growers
Sutton Kiplinger, Zannah Porter
Field Crew
Alison Denn, Anna Linck, Katherine Murray, David Taberner
Weed Crew
Becca Carden, Kathryn Cole, Annabelle Ho, Meghan Seifert
Learning Garden Educators
Rebecca Byrd, Alison Dagger, Ian Howes
Work Sharers
Graphic Design, Neva Corbo-Hudak
CSA Newsletter, Susan Cassidy
Learning Garden Maintenance, Rebekah Carter
Container Garden, Dede Dussault
Perennial Garden Maintenance, Sabine Gerbatsch and Amy Hendrickson
Farm Work, Naomi Shea
CSA Distribution Coordinators: Joy Grimes, Natasha Hawke, Deepika Madan, Eileen Rojas, and Aneiage Van Bean
www.communityfarms.org 781-899-2403 |
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Waltham Fields Community Farm | 240 Beaver Street | Waltham | MA | 02452
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