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Waltham Fields Community Farm
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CSA NEWSLETTER
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Week 16: September 23, 2013  
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HERITAGE BREED
PIG LOTTERY
NOW OPEN!
See the block below this week's recipe for more info...
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ALL OF OCTOBER: Eat at Elephant Walk in Waltham!
FARM DAY
Sat., Oct. 5
2-5pm
Free event on the farm celebrating local agriculture and Massachusetts Harvest for Students Week. Live music & farm fun! All are welcome - bring your friends and family!
See our website for more details, including a list of participating organizations offering activities and this year's event sponsors.
Volunteers Wanted, please contact Kim.
MAKE YOUR OWN BABY FOOD WORKSHOP
Sat., Oct. 12
10am-12pm
Join Kim Hunter, Waltham Fields Educator and mother of two young ones growing up on lots of farm-fresh food, as she shares her favorite tips and engages you in hands on preparation of vegetable purees.
Click here for full details and registration info.
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What's In the Share This Week
Each week, we do our best to predict what will be available in the CSA barn and in the fields. The CSA newsletter is prepared before we start harvesting for the week, so sometimes you'll see vegetables in the barn that weren't on the list, and sometimes vegetables will be on the list but won't make it to the barn. Leeks
Tomatoes
Napa Cabbage
Radishes
Salad Turnips
Pick-Your-Own Crops This Week
Pick-your-own fields are open to all shareholders any day of the week during daylight hours. Please check the pick-your-own stand for maps and a list of available crops, along with amounts to pick. Please harvest only in labelled rows, and pay close attention to the amounts you harvest in order to ensure that there will be enough for all shareholders.
Cilantro
Dill
Parsley
Husk Cherries
Tomatilloes Perennial Garden Herbs & Flowers: Please pick carefully (use scissors), pay attention to signs, and watch your step in the perennial garden.
Pasta with Peppers, Squash, & Tomato
This recipe comes from Martha Stewart's website. Serves 4.
Ingredients
Coarse salt
3/4 pound rigatoni
2 T extra-virgin olive oil
1 pound sweet or spicy Italian sausage, casings removed
1 bell pepper (not green), cut into 1/4-inch strips
1 small yellow squash, cut into 1/4-inch rounds
2 pounds cherry tomatoes, halved
Red-pepper flakes
Grated Pecorino Romano, for serving
Directions
In a large pot of boiling salted water, cook pasta according to package instructions. Reserve 1/2 cup pasta water, then drain.
Meanwhile, in a large skillet, heat 1 T oil over medium-high. Add sausage and cook, breaking apart with a slotted spoon, until cooked through, about 6 minutes. With slotted spoon, transfer sausage to a bowl.
Add 1 T oil and bell pepper to skillet and cook, stirring occasionally, until browned in spots, 6 minutes. Add squash and half the tomatoes; cook 1 minute. Add 1/4 cup pasta water and cook until tomatoes soften, 4 minutes. Return sausage to pan and add remaining tomatoes. Season with red-pepper flakes. Cook until sausage is warmed through and juices thicken slightly, about 2 minutes. Toss with pasta; if necessary, add remaining pasta water to create a light sauce that coats pasta. Serve with Pecorino Romano.
| Do you have a recipe you'd like to share? We love to include your recipes in our next newsletter! Please send it in to Susan Cassidy. |
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HERITAGE BREED PIG LOTTERY NOW OPEN!
At our Gateways fields in Weston, the peppers are still ripening, eggplant production has slowed, the sugar pumpkins have been made into Watch City Brewery's Pie-Eyed Pumpkin Ale, the bigger pumpkins are curing in preparation for sale at our Farm Day event, and the pigs have grown fat and healthy, raised on a diet of forage crops, vegetable scraps and grain pellets by our Assistant Grower, Zannah Porter.
The pigs are a mix of heritage breeds. They were born in Wellesley this spring and have put on roughly a pound a day, now weighing between 200 and 250 pounds each.
For those interested in purchasing half of a pig, we welcome you to enter our lottery. Here are the details:
- Each half will yield approximately 70lbs. of meat (which may increase or decrease a little depending on your butchering choices).
- The price of each half is $650, due in full within one week of winners being notified.
- The lottery is open to one entry per Waltham Fields Member Household.
There is no fee to enter the lottery.
- Lottery winners will be drawn on Oct. 1st at noon using a random number generator program.
- If you are a lottery winner, you will receive an email from Zannah by the end of the day on Oct. 1st with a cut sheet, detailing your butchering options. If you do not receive an email from Zannah by October 1st, then you were not chosen. Winner names will not be publicized.
- Payment and completed cut sheets will be due by Oct. 8th.
- There will be two pick-ups at the Farm, one for non-smoked meat cuts in late October and one for smoked meat (bacon and ham) in mid-November.
Questions? Contact Assistant Grower, Zannah Porter
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WINTER SHARES FOR SALE!
We still have a few WFCF winter shares for sale, now open to our share wait list members and the general public as well as to you all, our current shareholders - so feel free to tell your friends and direct them to the CSA page on our website!
Winter shares are the perfect way to extend your CSA experience through the late fall and eat local (and delicious) for the holidays! Winter shares are $200.00 and include three pickups at the farm on Saturday afternoons, November 9, November 23 and December 7. We plan for winter shares to represent the tasty bounty of the season, including carrots, beets, sweet potatoes, turnips, radishes, cabbages, lettuces, spinach, arugula, bok choy and kohlrabi, onions and garlic, and winter squash and potatoes from Picadilly Farm. Winter shares are available on a first-come, first-served basis until they are gone!
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Notes from the Field: The Change
Many thanks to Saul Blumenthal for sharing the lovely photos he took at the farm.
 The remarkable New England nature writer Hal Borland wrote that "essentially, autumn is the quiet completion of spring and summer. Spring was all eagerness and beginnings, summer was growth and flowering. Autumn is the achievement summarized, the harvested grain, the ripened apple, the grape in the wine press. Autumn is the bright leaf in the woodland, the opened husk on the bittersweet berry, the froth of asters at the roadside." The equinox and the harvest moon passed this week, and autumn is upon us. The mornings are beautiful and cool, the skies impossibly blue; the afternoons are warm, and the evenings are early and brilliant with stars.
The change is on the farm fields as well. Winter squash, harvested and cured in the fields, appears on the stand for soups and casseroles. After one final harvest of tomatoes this afternoon, we'll turn our full attention to digging sweet potatoes, which need to cure in the greenhouse for a couple of weeks before their starches turn to sugar and they are good to eat. Cool nights turn roots and leaves sweet. Cover crops like field peas, oats, winter rye and hairy vetch sprout in the rows where finished crops have been turned in. Hawks and coyotes are abroad in the fields, hunting the rabbits and voles that brave the open spaces to fatten themselves up for the coming winter.
On the day of the equinox, we had an evening potluck at the farm to celebrate the work of our field crew. As we served ourselves, someone murmured that it may be that heaven is like a farm potluck at the end of September. We enjoyed the crystalline weather, the delicious food that bridges the seasons, and the grateful, tired company. We ate quiches, one with with leeks and potatoes, another with arugula and sweet pe ppers, a crisp and lemony carrot salad, Erinn's signature quinoa salad with sweet corn and feta, spinach dip, caprese bites, mashed potatoes so fluffy and delicious they were like eating a cloud. There was a pizza with radicchio, smoked cheese and aji dulce peppers, and another with olives, tomato, onions, peppers, lemon and capers. There was a delicious flan, apple cobbler, pepper jelly, peach cobbler, and spicy ginger cookies. Children roamed the fields, pulling carrots, nibbling raspberries, snipping flowers. Hector's son Victor demonstrated a range of Colombian instruments for us, and their music floated over the fields, drifting out across the rows of lettuce and spinach, arugula and carrots, to the sumac and maples just starting to turn red on the margins.
Change is in the air. The field crew ends their time with us this week. Naomi Shea, a fixture on the farm through the spring seedling production season, rejoins us in the fields to help with work of the fall. Our focus, still on the harvest, also broadens to include planning for the upcoming season, which will bring great shifts as we take on the management of Lexington Community Farm and work to reach out to more people through our own work here in Waltham. But for now, we have a moment to enjoy what Borland calls "the annual pause... a time of relative ease and quiet. The plant commits its future to the seed and the roots. The insect stows its tomorrow in the egg and the pupa. And, as the urgency begins to abate, man, close to the land and surrounded by his own harvest, knows again the old, old truths of the season. It is, even today, the time of ripeness, of reaping, of plenty, of summer come to fulfillment."
Enjoy the harvest,
Amanda, for the farm crew
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Marla Rhodes, Volunteer & Development CoordinatorAmanda Cather, Farm ManagerErinn Roberts, Greenhouse and Field ManagerDan Roberts, Field ManagerSutton Kiplinger, Assistant Grower Zannah Porter, Assistant Grower Andy Scherer, Farmer Naomi Shea, Field Help Hector Cruz, Maricela Escobar, Amber Carmer Sandager, and Lauren Trotogott: Field Crew Lizzie Callaghan, Sage Dumont, Alice Fristrom, and Eli Shanks: Weed Crew Mikaela Burns, Matthew Crawford, Sarah Schrader and Fan Watkinson: Farm Educators
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