Season Extension Week 4; October 24, 2019
What’s in the box?
Brussels Sprouts on the stalk
Flat Leaf Parsley
Radishes
Purple Potatoes
Cabbage
Salad Turnips
bell peppers
onions
spinach
cauliflower
kale
carrots
beets
Notes on the box.
Brussels Sprouts on the stalk this time. It’s fun to see how they grow and a fun project to pop them off before cooking. Brussels sprouts are one that our kids like helping to prepare by taking them off the stalk and cutting them in half. You can take them off and cook them right away or put them in a plastic bag for storage.
Remove tops for radishes and turnips for storage. Turnip tops are edible.
Purple potatoes! I love roasting these. So beautiful!
Cosmic Wheel Creamery Cheese Shares.
Lyra and First Snow, our soft-ripened cheese. You can keep the First Snow in the fridge for another week to allow it to ripen further if you like. Or you can enjoy it now. It’s best if you allow it to get to room temperature before eating.
The Lyra is a great melter. A grilled cheese with wilted spinach… Yum.
Recipes.
Crusty Baked Cauliflower and Farro
Baked Eggs with Spinach and Mushrooms
Purple Potatoes with Rosemary and Olives - if you don’t have fresh rosemary, parsely pairs well with potatoes.
Roasted Potato Hash with Bell Peppers
On the Farm.
We’ve been celebrating a small win in which a moratorium on hog CAFOs (Confinement Animal Feeding Operation) has been passed in our county. We are facing the unfortunate reality that large scale hog CAFOs are trying to move into our county, threating our water, air quality, property values, and quality of life. You can visit knowcafos.org to learn more about what we are fighting. At our county board meetings we have been surprised to see that some local conventional family farmers in our area are feeling threatened by people trying to prevent large scale CAFOs owned by out of state agribusiness from coming into our community. We’ve been doing our best to communicate that we aren’t against locally owned conventional family farms and that while we farm differntly, we care about their well being and want them to be successful, but that the hog CAFOs would be bad for our entire community. While the moratorium has passed, we will no doubt still be active in this cause.
We are so grateful to our CSA members who support and want to see small, diversified family farms like ours on the land. One thing we have heard over and over by conventional commodity farmers, by agribusiness, and by the Secretary of Ag is that there’s no room for small farms anymore. They say that it’s inevitable small farms won’t exist anymore and that farms will have to “get big or get out”. We thank you for allowing us to provide an example of an alternative to that fatalism. I don’t think that it’s inevitable for small farms to fail and large CAFOs to take over as long as we understand that the food system is currently set up to make that happen. If we value family farms, that system needs to change. Small, family farms like ours are able to make it because we are working in a different system that we, together are creating in which farmers and consumers have the power and determine our success. We thank you so much for the opportunity.
Tonight in Amery our local Farmer’s Union chapter is hosting food economist Ken Meter and his presentation “Feeding Our Community: Family Farms and Rural Economic Development”. If the event is recorded, we will be sure to share a link.
Thanks again for your support this season! We will soon be reaching out about sign-ups for next season. We continue to try to find ways to make CSA accessible and practical for our members. We love to hear your suggestions for ways to improve, things you like or don’t like. We are going to have to move to a new program for sign-up and organizing shares as the one we have been using for the past few years is being discontinued. We are taking this time to try to improve and make things easier on our members. Any input you might have is appreciated!
