CSA Week 15

The recent clear and cool evenings have provided some beautiful skies, the lunar eclipse and super blood moon were awesome this past weekend and this weeks post picture is of the brilliant sunset last night.

Shares this week will include:

• Potatoes
• Tomatoes
• Carrots
• Apples (red delicious)
• Brussels Sprouts
• Lettuce
• Butternut Squash
• Parsley
• Jalapeno Peppers
• Cayenne Peppers
• Applesauce

We are clearing out a few remaining cases of applesauce from last season's production.  This week's share will have 3 sampler jars, one of each variety. Try them all and choose a favorite as we will be including a large jar next week

Following are a couple of recipes that utilize some of this week's produce.  The Brussels sprout recipe was provided by one of our shareholders (thanks Kim!)

Roasted-brussels-sprouts-with-bacon

indonesian-carrot-soup.html

Our chickens continue to size up nicely, they should be ready for shares the week of October 12th.  I expect that we will have 6-8 extra birds if anyone is interested.  Pricing is $4.50 per pound for shareholders or $5.00 per pound for non-shareholders. Average size should be in the 4-6 pound range.  Shoot me an email or let me know during share pick up if you would like to reserve any.  Following are a couple of pictures provided by shareholders of chickens from our batch earlier this year (Thanks Carmen & Ashley!)

CSA Week 14

More fall vegetables this week, including spaghetti squash and leeks.  Spaghetti squash lives up to its name with both the look and texture of pasta, still tastes a bit like squash but milder than butternut or acorn, and it is delicious served with marinara sauce!  Most squash recipes have you cut the squash in half and scrape out the seeds before baking, however they are hard and can be a pain to cut through without a large knife or chain saw...I just put them in the oven whole and cut and scoop out the seeds after they are are baked, which is a lot easier.

The leeks are the things that look like giant green onions.  They have a wonderful flavor and make great soups, the following recipe actually has you caramelize some of the leeks in the oven to use in the soup, they are delicious!  http://dfo-recipes.weebly.com/roasted-leek-and-potato-soup.html

I also wanted to pass along a most excellent zucchini dessert recipe that Melissa, one of our shareholders sent me.  http://dfo-recipes.weebly.com/zucchini-brownies.html  I made them on Monday evening and they were all gone by this morning!

The chicken's pasture this past week was the old sweet corn planting, the corn takes a large amount of nitrogen from the soil so I figured moving the chickens in would allow them to clean up any left over ears and add back some serious nutrients

This week's shares include:

• Potatoes
• Tomatoes
• Leeks
• Spaghetti squash
• Green beans
• Swiss chard
• Carrots
• Basil
• Jalapeno Peppers

CSA Week 13

Fall is by far my favorite of the four seasons.  The weather is one of the reasons, I love the cool, crisp mornings and evenings, and a warm sunny afternoon in September always feels better than one in the middle of summer.  The cooler weather also means its time to start harvesting some awesome fall crops, we continue to have apples in shares this week and we have also begun picking squash and onions.  This week's squash variety is acorn.  If you have never prepared acorn squash, or even if you have, following is a delicious recipe that uses several of this week's crops (and the parsley from last week if you have any left).  We made it for dinner on Monday night and everyone really liked it.

http://dfo-recipes.weebly.com/sausage-and-apple-stuffed-acorn-squash.html

Their back..... our late zucchini plants are starting to produce so the big green guys are appearing in shares again this week! 

If you haven't tried the zucchini crisp recipe yet, this may be your last chance of the season, you will swear it is apple crisp!

http://dfo-recipes.weebly.com/zucchini-crisp.html

This weeks shares include:

• Potatoes
• Tomatoes
• Cherry tomatoes
• Beets
• Acorn Squash
• Yellow Onion
• Green Beans
• Jalapeno Peppers
• Cayenne Pepper
• Oregano
• Apples
• Zucchini

Following are a couple of pics of today's harvest and the fields this morning as the sun was coming up before the fog burned off

CSA - Week 12

Hopefully everyone had an enjoyable Labor Day weekend and for those of you with school age children or that are teachers, I hope you survived backed to school Tuesday! 

We received almost 6" of rain since last Thursday, and since several of this weeks items grows underground so we will be doing plenty of washing with this week's harvest.

Nothing ever produces exactly as planned but one crop I had been disappointed in this year was green beans.  The primary plantings were stunted a bit from the overly wet June and just never got up to full yield.  Fortunately they are still producing and the two additional plantings that I did in early July are now kicking in. We picked 65 lbs of beans between Monday and today so heavier bean bags in the shares this week!

Prima apples are wrapping up, and we are now starting on McIntosh.  While the Prima's don't have a long shelf life, they are very resistant to apple scab. Meanwhile the McIntosh stay firmer longer and store better, but they are extremely susceptible to apple scab.  Apple scab is a caused by spores that infect the leaves of the apple tree in early spring following warm rains and then the spores on the leaves drop onto the apples as they are forming and cause black splotchy surface defects.  As long as the the scab is not too severe the apples are fine, just not very pretty.  In cases where it is more severe it causes the apple skins to crack as they grow larger.  The organic fungicide spray that we have used gets washed off with every rain, which also happens to be the time when the spores are released, as a result it isn't very effective.  So when you get both Prima's and Macs in your shares this week, the ones with the black surface blemishes are the McIntosh, they won't win any beauty contests but they are delicious!  :)

This week's shares include:

• Parsley
• Basil
• Potatoes
• Carrots
• Green Onions
• Jalapeno Peppers
• Tomatoes
• Cherry Tomatoes
• Green Beans
• Lettuce
• Apples