POTATO HARVEST PARTY!
TOMORROW MORNING, SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 3RD, 8am - 11:30 am
Join us for our 5th annual CSA Potato Harvest Party this Saturday morning!
The potato harvest is a fun, awe inspiring harvest that is great for all ages and farm experience levels. The tractor drives down the beds, showering up multitudinous tubers from out of the soil (a site to behold once in your life). Then, we bag the taters and chat with our neighbors!
We’ll be in the Farfield, a short walk from the pick-up barn. Instructions on how to find us will be posted by the parking lot. Come just to see the action, or, if you plan to get in the mix, we recommend light gloves, a water bottle, and clothes you don’t mind getting dirty.
THIS WEEK’S HARVEST
Assorted Lettuces, Escarole, Red Russian Kale, Bok Choi, Celery, Fennel, Romance Carrots, Bridger Yellow Onions, Heirloom Tomatoes, Sweet Peppers, Poblano Peppers, Summer Squash & Zucchini, Purple Daikon, Harvest Moon Potatoes, Farao Cabbage
U-PICK
Please remember to check the u-pick board for updated weekly limits before going out to pick
Albion Strawberries: 3 pints per share this week
Cherry Tomatoes: 4 pints per share this week | See week 8’s newsletter for variety descriptions
Frying Peppers: Shishitos & Padrons | See week 4’s newsletter for harvest and preparation tips
Hot Peppers: Buena Mulata, Habanero, Ali Limo and Jalapeño Hot Peppers | Check u-pick board for limits
Tomatillos: Check u-pick board for limits
Herbs: Dill, Thyme, Oregano, Marjoram, Tarragon, Onion Chives, Garlic Chives, Vietnamese Coriander, Culinary Lavender, Culinary Sage, French Sorrel, Lemon Verbena, Cilantro, Tulsi, Various Mints, Catnip, Chamomile, Purple Basil, Genovese Basil, Thai Basil
Flowers!
HARVEST NOTES
Escarole: An Italian staple, this leafy chicory (related to radicchio and endive) is a hardy, sweet, and slightly bitter green that’ll add punctuation to any rich and fatty feast. It has a substantial, juicy texture and slight nutty flavor that make it great in salads, and it also stands up to braising or broiling. Our favorite way to prepare escarole is to cut at the base, toss the leaves in olive oil and to broil it in the oven until it is nice and melted and the tips are crispy. Toss with garlic, salt, and lemon juice and voila!
Harvest Moon Potatoes: Let potato feasting begin! This is our all-time favorite potato. Numerous crew and CSA members agree — this is the best potato there is. The Burpee’s catalogue copy writer says it best: “Potatoes as objects of beauty? Let your eyes linger on ‘Harvest Moon’, with her velvety dark-purple skin and dense, sumptuous golden-yellow flesh. A seductively gorgeous purple potato princess, she’s as gorgeous to behold as she is tasty. Infused with creamy, nutty flavor, ‘Harvest Moon’ is a culinary triumph on her own, no butter or salt required.” Enjoy every which way: mashed, baked, boiled, fried—or adding color and flavor to a potato salad.
Abundant Italian Basil, Dill & Cilantro: We are swimming in great basil right now! There is a beautiful patch of new Italian Basil ready for picking on the West side of the garden and with this summer heat the first succession is looking great too! Also check out the newest planting of dill and cilantro also on the West side of the garden (closest to the cherry tomatoes).
preserving the harvest
Bulk Tomatoes are here! From now until the end of tomato season, bulk quantities of Speckled Roman Sauce Tomatoes and all Seconds (tomatoes that are blemished or quite ripe but still tasty) will be available! Bulk tomatoes will have a season limit, meaning the total tomatoes available per share over the course of the season. You’re welcome to take them all at once or a little bit here and there, whichever you like!
The easiest way to put up tomatoes is freezing. While you can freeze tomatoes without processing first, we particularly love halving them, drizzling with olive oil and roasting in a low-temp oven to concentrate the flavors. Or, if you have the time now and want to make a sauce that truly bottles the taste of summer, consider making fresh tomato sauce!
Fresh Tomato Sauce
For the simplest tomato sauce, we recommend sautéing onions and garlic in more olive oil than you might think you need. Then add tomatoes and salt to taste and cook down for 45 minutes to an hour until your sauce has reached the desired consistency and flavor. Depending on your preferred consistency, tomatoes can be peeled and de-seeded before cooking, or if you prefer a more rustic sauce, just chop and them throw them in the pot seeds and all. For more detailed instructions, and some good ideas for variations on tomato sauces, check out this Smitten Kitchen post on Fresh Tomato Sauce.
WINTER SISTER FARM CSA SIGN-UPS NOW OPEN!
The hottest tickets in town are now on sale — Winter Sister Farm’s 2023 Winter CSA program is now open for registration! Winter Sister Farm, right next door to us, was started by our dear friends Anna and Sarah Dozor. Their CSA runs runs from December through May and includes 24 weeks of specialty winter veggies, flowers, herbs, and more — all picked up by CSA members, free-choice market style, on their beautiful farm here on Cooper Rd! Sign-up today!
FARMER’S LOG
5th ANNUAL POTATO HARVEST
Tomorrow morning, we'll come together as a community to perform a quintessential agricultural ritual: A potato harvest. As we kneel down, on the Earth, bagging the cool, bulbous tubers, we will join in concert thousands of people around the world performing the same act. We will also join untold millions of ancestors who, in the late summer and fall, knelt together and harvested potatoes. We will be joined, by a real, living, breathing chain of seed potatoes to hundreds of historic potato harvests in Europe and Asia and to the thousands of harvests in the Andes and Northeastern Bolivia — the birthplace of this amazing plant.
There is nothing quite like an abundant potato harvest and the feeling, afterwards, of storing them away — in a pit, a cooler, a cave; the potatoes themselves alive, breathing slowly, promising food, promising life, throughout the winter months.
Potatoes are the highest caloric food crop per-acre of any crop (over maize, wheat, and rice). And they are the only one of these “staff-of-life” crops that grows (the food part, at least) deep in the Earth — shrouded in the dark and in mystery until they harvested and lifted up into the light.
While we check the potatoes as they grow every so often, every potato harvest is a mystery until it happens: How will the crop turn out this year? Will it be an abundant?
Many have known the feeling of incredible abundance that potatoes can give and, sadly, many have known the opposite. In 1845, due to limited potato genetics in the region and the cold shoulders of powerful men, a million people starved in the poorer parts of Western Ireland and the Scottish highlands as a blighted potato crop rotted in the fields. Aye, the potato has been a powerful and painful bond between people and Mother Earth, in feast and in famine, for millennia.
The Nobel Prize winning Irish poet, Seamus Heaney, speaks to this history in his poem, At a Potato Digging.
I.
A mechanical digger wrecks the drill,
Spins up a dark shower of roots and mould.
Labourers swarm in behind, stoop to fill
Wicker creels. Fingers go dead in the cold.
Like crows attacking crow-black fields, they stretch
A higgledy line from hedge to headland;
Some pairs keep breaking ragged ranks to fetch
A full creel to the pit and straighten, stand
Tall for a moment but soon stumble back
To fish a new load from the crumbled surf.
Heads bow, trucks bend, hands fumble towards the black
Mother. Processional stooping through the turf
Turns work to ritual. Centuries
Of fear and homage to the famine god
Toughen the muscles behind their humbled knees,
Make a seasonal altar of the sod.
II.
Flint-white, purple. They lie scattered
Like inflated pebbles. Native
to the blank hutch of clay
where the halved seed shot and clotted
these knobbed and slit-eyed tubers seem
the petrified hearts of drills. Split
by the spade, they show white as cream.
Good smells exude from crumbled earth.
The rough bark of humus erupts
knots of potatoes (a clean birth)
whose solid feel, whose wet inside
promises taste of ground and root.
To be piled in pits; live skulls, blind-eyed.
III.
Live skulls, blind-eyed, balanced on
wild higgledy skeletons
scoured the land in 'forty-five,'
wolfed the blighted root and died.
The new potato, sound as stone,
putrified when it had lain
three days in the long clay pit.
Millions rotted along with it.
Mouths tightened in, eyes died hard,
faces chilled to a plucked bird.
In a million wicker huts
beaks of famine snipped at guts.
A people hungering from birth,
grubbing, like plants, in the earth,
were grafted with a great sorrow.
Hope rotted like a marrow.
Stinking potatoes fouled the land,
pits turned pus in filthy mounds:
and where potato diggers are
you still smell the running sore.
IV.
Under a white flotilla of gulls
The rhythm deadens, the workers stop.
White bread and tea in bright canfuls
Are served for lunch. Dead-beat, they flop
Down in the ditch and take their fill,
Thankfully breaking timeless fasts;
Then, stretched on the faithless ground, spill
Libations of cold tea, scatter crusts.
******
At West County Community Farm this year, we are thankful. If this morning was any indicator, it looks like we’ve been blessed with a healthy, abundant potato crop. The potato field in purple and white flower in June and July was a vision to behold. They scented the foggy mornings. The shimmering green foliage reached above your waste and covered every inch of ground so it was hard to walk. All that energy, all that delight, all that sunlight, was sent down below to the tubers, which are waiting for us now. They’ve been coming out of the ground “sound as stone” and will nourish us all through this fall and winter.
And that is cause for celebration.
Join us this tomorrow for Part Two of our 5th annual potato harvest as we "shower" up the living roots and scatter libations in remembrance and thanks.
See you in the fields,
David & Kayta
