THIS WEEK'S HARVEST
New German Butterball Potatoes, Heirloom & Slicing Tomatoes, Sweet Peppers, Golden Beets, King Richard Leeks, Curly Green Kale, Green Cabbage, Broccoli, Pink Lady Slipper Radishes, Olympian Cucumbers, San Juan Melons, Summer Squash and Zucchini, Rainbow Carrots, Fall Braising Mix (with Frisee, Radicchio, Baby Chard & Baby Kale), Red Butter & Muir Summercrisp Head Lettuce, B-Grade Creole Garlic
U-PICK
🌟NEW Classic Green Beans: Sweet and delicate. Limit 5 pints
Dragon Tongue Green Beans: NO LIMIT. Getting larger. See Week 13’s newsletter for a great pickled green bean recipe
Cherry Tomatoes: NO LIMIT
Frying Peppers: Winding down. Shishito, Black Hungarian, Padrón / See Week 2's newsletter for harvest tips
Jalapeños: Winding down. Located below the frying peppers
Strawberries
Husk Cherries - Gleanings - See week 8’s newsletter for harvest tips
Herbs: Italian Basil, Tulsi Basil, Thai Basil, Purple Basil, Italian Parsley, Rosemary, Lemon balm, Lemon Verbena, Perennial Cilantro, Annual Cilantro, French Sorrel, Onion Chives, Garlic Chives, Tarragon, Oregano, Thyme, Chamomile, Mints, Anise Hyssop, 🌟 Culinary Lavender, 🌟 Lemongrass
Flowers! There some nice new zinnias and cosmos beds on the farm to the left of the cherry tomatoes
Chase helps Jaime harvest from the new green bean plants
HARVEST NOTES
Fall Braising Mix: We’ve been loving this week’s greens mix at home. It is a mixture of baby red Russian kale, baby chard, frisee, and radicchio. (Frisee and radicchio both being in the chicory family of leafy vegetables which also includes endives. Chicories have a rich, sweet, slightly bitter flavor.) Try using this mix in three ways:
Eat it raw on its own drenched in your favorite dressing
Mix it up: Mix it in with the lettuce this week to add a hearty note to your lettuce salad
Broil it: Our favorite method. In a bowl, toss the Fall Braising Mix lightly with oil, coating every leaf. Lay the coated leaves out on a pan and put in the broiler just long enough to wilt the leaves and brown some of them. Watch carefully to keep from burning! Take out of the broiler and toss with raw garlic, lemon juice, perhaps more olive oil, and salt to taste. Top with shredded parmesan to take it to the next level. Bon appetite!
New German Butterball Potatoes: The third of four potato varieties we’re debuting this month, German Butterballs are aptly named. A creamy, rich, yellow-fleshed beauty with sublime flavor. These potatoes are sometimes called the gold standard of gold potatoes. New potatoes are potatoes harvested fresh while the mother plant is still green and the skins haven’t hardened. They are crisp, turgid, fresh vegetables and something of a delicacy.
San Juan Melons: A type of Ananas melon. Ananas are oval, netted melons originally from the Mideast. Renowned for their sweet, aromatic, and slightly pear spiced flavor. Some San Juans are the sweetest melons ever.
Lemongrass: Lemongrass, common in Thai cooking, is now available in the garden. The part used is generally the fat, fibrous lower portion of the stem (although on this fresh, garden lemongrass, even the tips of the leaves are delightfully fragrant). Harvest by following a blade of grass to the very base of the plant where it meets soil/root system and snap a stem off from there. In Thai soups this fibrous bottom-stem is smashed and cooked into the soup, imbuing it with that distinct lemony-flavor.
Summer sets on field 4 Napa cabbage, Brussels sprouts, Blue Dino kale, frisee and radicchio, beets, and more!
PRESERVING THE HARVEST
Tomatoes 2nds: Still a few.
Bulk White Satin Carrots: Don’t underestimate the White Satin Carrot. We feel it is consistently our best tasting, sweetest carrot. It also happens to be extraordinarily vigorous. We’ll be putting out bulk White Satins on the back table for pickling, juicing, etc. Out of bag. Don’t be shy, take 10 pounds! Check out this wonderful recipe for pickling carrots… or any vegetable!
FALL HARVEST WORKSHOPS
We’re super excited to announce two Fall workshops put on by our neighbor, CSA member, and ecological educator, Lindsay Dailey, one on making dye from farm flowers and the other on making masa for tamales and tortillas. Both workshops are free to CSA members.
Colors of the Land
Saturday, September 28th: 9am - 11am
In addition to providing beauty, pollen, nectar (and joy!), the flowers at GVCF are full of wearable color. Join us to learn the process of natural dyeing, utilizing plants to saturate fibers with various hues from nature. We’ll take a walk through the garden, look at some wild and cultivated dye plants that are abundant on the farm, and then harvest a few batches of plant material to cook up some color! We’ll discuss the process of natural dyeing, while the pots simmer, and you’ll have a colorful scarf or hankie to take home at the end of pickup. Silk bandanas and scarves (pre-mordanted) will be available to dye during the class and take home for a suggested donation of $5 - $10.
The Magic of Corn in the Kitchen and Garden
Saturday, November 2nd: 10am - 12pm
Want to make tortillas and tamales from Green Valley corn? Learn to work with the magic of corn. Lindsay — a deep student of corn — will demonstrate how to grind corn for flour, discuss recipes, and explore the alchemy of nixtamalization which makes corn sticky in order to make masa for tortillas and tamales. While we work, Lindsay and the farmers will talk about the natural history and mythology of corn and discuss planting, growing, and saving seed from this amazing plant in the home garden! And then we'll eat some fresh made tortillas! Yum! .
FRESH BREAD SATURDAY!
Gaby Tiradani fired up her oven and is baking us 20 loaves of country sourdough and olive bread loaves for Saturday. Any leftover loaves will the available frozen in the freezer. $9, cash only.
MUSHROOMS COMING SOON…
If the what our forest friends are telling us is true, we will have mushrooms available for sale at CSA pickup very soon. Check it out…
Hello CSA members!
We are Moon Fruit Mushroom Farm and are excited to announce that our first year of fresh shiitake mushrooms is coming to the Green Valley Community Farm CSA very soon! Let us tell you a little bit about our farm.
Ryath Beauchene and myself, Cory Brown, both have a deep affinity for fungi not only because they are delicious and medicinal, but also because they play very important roles in terrestrial ecosystems. Our first year has been all about shiitake and reishi. With the help of our friends and community, we inoculated almost 200 logs with shiitake spawn at the beginning of 2019, and now our first batch is about to begin fruiting. We believe in imitating the natural processes of forest-grown fungi for maximum medicinal and nutritional content. We are located in the neighboring forest to the north of the vegetable farm, which means we can walk to deliver these beauties to your goodie bag!
Our shiitake logs have let us know they’re ready to begin fruiting by offering us two beautiful mushrooms, and we’re anticipating a strong flush within the next month or so. If all goes well, we will have plenty of shiitake for purchase in October and through the rest of the CSA season.
Next year, we will inoculate even more shiitake logs and begin reishi production as well. We will be hanging around the CSA pickup area for you to meet us and potentially take home some extras in your bag.
We will update you through the newsletter to let you know the exact days we will start selling. See you soon!
-Ryath and Cory
GARLIC TRIMMERS WANTED
Thank you to Susan Bendinelli, Ralph Elder and Kathy Meechan for trimming up so much garlic! We are looking for a few more lovely volunteers to finish off trimming for the year. Let us know if you are interested!
VOLUNTEER WEDNESDAYS, 8:00-10:00 AM
Interested in some farm therapy? Come out on Wednesday mornings to help us tend the garden and farm together! Find us in the garden or out in the main fields on Wednesdays from 8:00am 'til 10:00 am. People of all abilities welcome, we’ll find something comfortable for you to do!
FARMER’S LOG
Autumn Greetings
At 12:50 AM Monday morning, the Earth will wobble its midline back straight in line with the sun. At that moment a loud "WAAHOO!" will be heard from space, coming from the Northern Hemisphere. That would be the farmers…
The coming of Fall is a special time on a temperate farm like ours for many reasons.
With the Equinox begins a slow changing of the guard on the harvest table. This past week, a mysterious internal switch seems to have been flipped in our summer crops; Tomatoes, cucumbers, summer and winter squash all know what time it is, and seem content to let themselves wind down and finish setting their final fruits. Take heed! One by one the sweet, tangy, colorful characters of Summer will be replaced by the rich, earthy, ponderous patrons of Fall.
It is a time of great change in the fields. The big field harvests draw nigh. Soon we will harvest our staple, long storing field crops and enjoy the satisfaction of reaping a season's worth of work in the form of potatoes, corn, and winter squash, which will sustain and nourish us until the Winter Solstice. (The potato harvest is about 3 weeks away, we'll let you know!) Every field or garden bed finished now will be taken out of production and put into buckwheat (a short cover crop) or covered to await Winter cover crop in late October.
Kayta checking on our King Richard Leeks
The Equinox also signifies rest is on the horizon for the farmer! The softer Fall light feels like balm on a sun-scorched skin. We can't work much past seven these days — it’s too dark! The long fall shadows play beautifully on the flowers. The mornings are crisp. The nights are long. Aye, there are big pushes to be made bringing in the big harvests, planting next year’s garlic, and putting the fields to bed — rest is near.
Change is afoot in the wild plant and animal worlds as well.
In a Mediterranean climate like ours, the Autumn Equinox is akin to the Spring Equinox in a place like Maine. The great annual dormancy — here caused by dryness, in Maine by cold and snow — hasn’t lifted yet, but relief is near. And everyone is antsy with anticipation…
The baby Turkeys we first glimpsed as tiny fluff balls in June have matured into birds nearly indistinguishable from their parents. With corresponding appetites they stalk the fields for tasty bites. Likewise, Turkey, Deer, Hare and Gopher have all have developed voracious appetites for succulent farm fare lately as they forage the landscape in this, the driest, hungriest month before the first life giving rains. The countdown is on.
Until then, the irrigation system is running full bore fattening up our Fall crops greedily drinking the waning sunlight; Coyote, Bobcat, Fox, Hawk and the Owls are keeping the ravenous gophers in check; we’re sharpening our harvest knives, doing our backbends, and girding for the big Fall final push. And we're excited to begin sharing the magic and bounty of Fall on the farm with you…
See you in the fields,
David and Kayta
