What’s in the box?

Pie Pumpkin!
onions
peppers (sweet and bell, none hot)
sage
carrots
salad turnips
potatoes
spinach
tomatoes
tender kale
celery (some is cut and bunched)
cilantro

Notes on the box.

Please move your potatoes from the plastic bag to a paper or fabric bag and store in a dark place but not in the fridge.
Pie pumpkin, onions, and tomatoes should also be kept out of the fridge.
If you’d like to dry the sage, just hang it upside down in a dry space and you can keep it for later.
All greens will store best in the fridge in plastic bags in the crisper.

Cosmic Wheel Creamery Cheese Shares.

Some of our delicious fresh ricotta and a grating cheese aged one year called Tarazed. A perfect pasta dinner pairing. Enjoy!

Recipes.

Smoky Harissa Red Pepper Carrot Soup

Pumpkin Sage Polenta

Quick Fridge Clean Out Veggie Soup
Carrots - sliced
onions - diced
celery - sliced and leaves reserved to add at the end
potatoes (optional) - diced
beets (optional) - diced
peppers - diced
garlic clove - minced
Add above with cooking fat (oil, butter, lard, etc) and sauté until veggies are near to tender. Add
tomato puree, stock or broth, or even just water to cover veggies. Add a bay leaf. Season with salt and pepper and add herbs of your choice. Simmer till veggies are cooked through. You can add cooked beans (we like it with white beans), cubes of ham, cooked bacon or chicken, etc. At the end of cooking add the celery leaves and whatever chopped greens you would like (spinach, kale, turnip greens, etc.) Taste and season more as needed. Good with cooked pasta added in or served with bread, rolls, or biscuits.

On the Farm.

We are really looking forward to the Harvest Party and Land Stewardship Fundraiser at the farm on September 22! Please come out and bring a dish to share. We will provide some meat from our farm. There will be bad apples to throw to the pigs. There will be cheese to taste. There will be a nice Photo Booth area. There will be tours and wagon rides. At sundown there will be a short presentation about Land Stewardship Project and all they do for small farms, rural communities, and their great work of promoting local food systems. There will be a few short documentaries about these topics shown in our beautiful barn! This will be the fundraiser portion and the suggested donation is $10, but any amount is appreciated.

If you have a stash of CSA boxes, please return them to your drop site so that we can re-use them! We are running low.

We wanted to share this article from Civil Eats about what’s happening in the world of farming. As a small, direct to market, diversified farm, we are protected from a lot of the issues affecting our conventional dairy farming and commodity row crop growing neighbors. But we care about their well being because we want to see our community continue to have small farms, conventional or not, rather than large consolidated confinement dairy and less people on the land. It’s a hard time for small farmers. Small dairy farms are going out of business at an alarming rate and farmer and agricultural worker suicide rates are alarmingly high. At the Wisconsin Farmers Union conference I attended most of the talk was not about trade, which has gotten a lot of attention and blame for the state of things, but most of the farmers were saying that the problem has more to do with consolidation of land, vertical integration by processors, and the prices they get being less than the cost of production for too long. The farm part of the farm bill, they say, doesn’t have much in it to address these issues. We feel very fortunate to be able to set our prices where we need them to be in order to make our business work, but we know this isn’t possible for every farm to do. And we need our neighboring farmers to continue to exist to keep our rural community functional and vibrant.

We had a nice visit from some students from our local elementary school’s Project Based Learning class. They asked some really great questions, tasted food they picked themselves, and had a great time throwing bad apples to the pigs.

We are sorry to not have the broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage that would normally make this time of year’s boxes a little heavier. We did not win the battle with flea beatles and an extra hot and dry stretch after the baby plants went into the ground. We hope you enjoy this weeks box anyway and what might be the last bits of Summer (but really who knows at this point?!).