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Waltham Fields Community Farm
CSA Newsletter #3
June 21, 2009
In This Issue
CSA Pickup Schedule
Pick-Your-Own Crops
Greens go Greek!
Notes from the Field
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.
Recipes
Have you had a chance to try out last week's Greens recipe?! There's another one this week!
 
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, 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.

CSA pickup schedule for the week
 
Tuesday, June 23 from 3-7 PM 
Thursday, June 25 from 3-7 PM 
Saturday, June 27 from 8 AM to 12 noon
Quick Links

What's in the share this week...

Bok ChoyPlease 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.

Familiar faces this week will include:
Lettuce   Spinach   Bok choy
Napa cabbage   Kale   Collard greens
Swiss chard   Scallions   Radishes

New choices this week may include:

Bunched Asian greens, including komatsuna and vitamin green

Broccoli raab: 
Also called rapini, this mildly bitter green is commonly used in Italian and Chinese dishes, and is a delicious source of vitamins A, C and K.  This simple recipe
highlights its flavor.

Salad turnips:  While their purple-topped relatives make an appearance in hearty fall stews and soups, these more delicate spring versions of turnips are tasty raw or cooked.  They are great salad components and pair well with radishes, carrots and napa cabbage in a simple Asian-inspired slaw.

Carrots: 
our earliest carrots are of the "Mokum" variety; not huge, but extremely crisp, tender and flavorful. 

Kohlrabi: This odd-looking vegetable is most like a crisp, tasty broccoli stem.  It is good raw or lightly steamed or sauteed, in salads, soups or dipped in your favorite dressing. 

Miniature bunching onions: 
Also known as pearl onions, these beautiful purple and white onions can be eaten raw or cooked.  Their sweet flavor makes them perfect in spring salads. 
Pick-Your-Own Crops
 Lettuce close up
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
  • Flat and curly parsley (delicious with broccoli raab)
  • Strawberries, for shares listed under the letters R-Z who have not yet picked a pint (if we finally get a little sun and warm weather!)
Greens go Greek!
From Shareholder Susan F. who says... "I used many of my spring greens from this weeks pick-up to make a spanakopita pie.  Traditionally it would have only spinach, but many of the tender greens this week worked perfectly as an addition.  It was delicious!  "
 
2 lbs greens (any kind you have mixed together - spinach, collard greens, swiss chard)
1/2 pound feta cheese, crumbled
2 eggs
Several sheets of phyllo dough
2 Tbs butter, melted
1/8 tsp nutmeg
 
Saute the greens in a Tbs of water, covered, until wilted.  Mix them with 2 eggs, feta cheese, and the nutmeg.  Butter a square baking dish (roughly 8x8) and put down a layer of phyllo dough.  Lightly butter each layer of phyllo - if you are using standard thin phyllo put down about 5 layers on the bottom.  Put in the green and feta mixture and then put several layers of phyllo on for the top "crust", lightly buttering each layer as you go.
 
Bake at 375 for about 30 - 45 minutes or until phyllo dough is golden brown. 
 
Enjoy!
Notes from the Field
Farm Heroes and Villains

Our little farm is staffed full-time during the season by a crew of five farmers who do all of our tractor work (including field preparation, cultivation and seeding) and lead volunteers in all of our greenhouse work, transplanting, harvesting and vegetable washing.  This season, for the first time, our farmers are joined in the field by a team of folks who have rapidly become our heroes:  four part-time field crew members who spend their mornings exclusively weeding and harvesting our crops.  Our "weed crew", as they are affectionately known on the farm, has made a huge difference already in the appearance and productivity of our fields. 

Some weeds are almost inevitable on an organic farm, where no easy herbicide solution to weed issues is available.  Some weeds, of course, are edible and very nutritious; and if they are not permitted to go to seed, weeds can be a good source of organic matter when they are returned to the soil.  Every vegetable crop, however, has a "critical weed-free period", a time in its development during which an excessive amount of weed pressure will stunt its growth and decrease yields.  For some crops, these critical weed-free periods are essentially their whole lives --  carrots, for example, never like to compete with weeds, while weeds love to take over carrot rows even if a tractor has carefully cultivated between the rows.   From hand-weeding of delicate pick-your-own crops like dill and cilantro to intensive cleanups of the pathways in our onion and leek beds to the purely aesthetic weeding of our sunflowers, working in all weather and with incredible good cheer and stamina, our weed crew has helped our farm stay relatively weed-free this spring.  Our abundance of kale, for example, is due as much to their hard work in hand-weeding the kale beds as to our pest prevention and fertility promotion -- it all goes hand-in-hand on on organic farm.

As we enter the first weeks of summer, the weed pressure on our farm increases dramatically.  The next six weeks are critical ones for our weed team.  Weather, of course, influences our ability to control weeds; lots of rain encourages their growth while making hand-weeding less effective, since many weeds simply re-root in the rain.  Less rain makes weed control much easier.  Sunny days are perfect days to use our tractors to kill weeds in between the rows, allowing the weed crew to come in and clean up in the row where the tractors can't reach.   

The crew -- Amanda Dumont, Ryan Yorck, Sarah Kielsmeier-Jones, Brad Leatherbee and pinch hitter Johanna Flies -- comes from a variety of backgrounds; one is a professional singer, one a pre-med student, one an experienced farmer.  They live in Watertown, Arlington, Cambridge and Jamaica Plain, and they have found themselves in this position -- crawling up and down carrots rows twenty hours a week -- for many different reasons.  What they share is a clear commitment to a job worth doing, done well, which is what they come to the farm to do every weekday morning -- and a sense of humor and fun that makes the mornings seem shorter.  We owe them a huge debt of gratitude for the work they have done so far and the produce that they have helped make possible already.

Canada geese have hurt the farm this spring almost as much as the weed crew has helped it.  While this is a slight exaggeration, the family of geese who have found our fields at the Lyman Estate and munched their way through the kohlrabi, radishes, broccoli raab and early beets has definitely done thousands of dollars worth of damage to the crops.  Since the field is right at the edge of a brook and very well-protected from the street and other predators, the geese found the field early, and what was initially a mere nibbling at the edges of the plantings became extremely destructive last weekend. 

Despite our "scary" fake coyotes, perimeter fences, flash tape, pie plates on stakes, and crazed early-morning wild goose chases, nothing seemed to deter the geese until we brought over sheets of the spun-fabric floating row cover that we use to control insects and help protect crops from frost and covered the entire field, except for the onions and arugula, in white.  Since the geese are federally protected, a meal of fennel-stuffed wild gosling was not an option, so covering the field, although it keeps us from being able to cultivate with the tractor and is extremely labor-intensive, seemed like the best thing to do.  Now, every morning, the row cover is tracked with goose footprints as well as those of the local raccoons, skunks and other animals that traverse the field when we can't be there, but so far no more damage has been done.  Of course,  my five-year-old son is right when he insists that "geese have to survive too."  We just wish they would surivive on some of the weeds instead of the vegetables. 

Enjoy the leafy harvest -- summer squash and zucchini are on the way!


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