Week 16; September 20, 2018

What’s in the box?

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Parsley
heirloom tomatoes
beets
Black Futsu Squash
Arugula
Spinach
Butternut Squash
Cilantro
Radish
Onions
Bell Peppers/ Sweet Peppers

Notes on the box.

This is the second to last box! Next week is the last week of the main season delivery. Season Extension will continue on for four weeks for people with Eat Like a Farmer, Eat Like a Vegetarian Farmer, and Season Extension shares.
Winter Squash! Black Futsu and Butternut Squash will hold for quite a long time, so no pressure to eat them all in a week. They will keep for at least a month and possibly two months. They should be kept dry and out of the fridge. The skin of the Futsu is edible and I like them cut into moons and roasted or cut in half and roasted and used for stuffed squash. The Butternut should be peeled and can be used for squash soup, curries, or ravioli or pie filling.
Happy to have parsley and cilantro at the same time. It means you can make Chimichuri! See recipe below. Put it on roasted Futsu moons, carrots and beets, or really just about anything for a wonderful bright flavor.

Cosmic Wheel Creamery Cheese Shares.

The Herdsman. You got this one earlier in the season, but this batch is quite different. The earlier one was made in early spring before the pastures were really growing. This batch was made in June and it’s a nice little golden nugget that tastes like grass and sunshine! I send Cheese Curds again this week so that I would have some for people to snack on at the Harvest Party and to bring to a cheese making demo that I’ll be doing for school kids. Enjoy these little squeakers!

Recipes.

Chimichurri

Sausage and Apple Stuffed Squash (recipe calls for acorn, but Futsu would be great)

Black Bean and Butternut Squash Quesadillas

Stovetop Butternut Squash Mac and Cheese

On the Farm

We hope you can make it to the farm for the Harvest Party this Saturday the 22nd. It’s a potluck, but don’t feel like you can’t come if you don’t bring a dish. Bring your friends and family. All are welcome! We will get started about 4 and we will be making some kabobs and veggie dishes to share. There will be tours, tractors to play on, fields to explore, and animals to see. At sundown we will have a little fundraiser for the Land Stewardship Project. We will share some info about LSP and show some short documentaries in the barn. Then we will show a fun movie for the whole family. The suggested donation to see movies is $10 and that will get you an LSP membership. We really appreciate this organization and think anyone that cares about local and sustainable agriculture will appreciate them, too!
Send us a quick RSVP if you plan on coming so we can get a rough count of people coming out. Let us know if you have any questions. For directions you can put Turnip Rock Farm into google maps and you’ll get here!

Below is a message from our dear friend, neighbor, and herbalist Nancy of Red Clover Apothecary. She is offering her Seasonal herbal CSA share for Fall/Winter. Be prepared! Your herbal share can be delivered to your Turnip Rock CSA drop site. Order soon!

Happy Autumn to all,
It's that time of year. Our Earth in this part of the world is moving further away from the Sun. And the plants are moving their energy down into their roots to be stored for the winter. We know what's coming. It's both beautiful and harsh.  
It's the perfect time of year to sign-up for our Fall/Winter Herbal Share. The herbal remedies in our share help build immunity and protect us against the flu.

What's in the share this year:

Elderberry Syrup – 6 oz.
Winter Warming Elixir – 10 oz.
Winter Wellness Formula Extract – 2 oz.
Herbal Sore Throat Spray with Calamus Root – 1 oz.
Herbal Cold Season Tea – 1.5 oz.

For detailed information on each herbal remedy and to sign-up, please go to http://www.redcloverapothecary.com/…/whats-in-the-herbal-c…/

Wanted to share some of the great pictures that Joel took when he visited the farm. So great to connect with fellow farmers! Joel said he grows a lot of butternut squash and it’s a favorite. We are dreaming of visiting and working on his farm in Kenya some Winter!

Turnip Rock FarmerComment
Week 15; September 13, 2018

What’s in the box?

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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?!).

Turnip Rock FarmerComment
Week 14; September 6, 2018

What's in the box?  

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Carrots
Tomatoes
Cilantro
Radishes
Sweet Peppers and Bell Peppers (none hot)
Delicata Squash
Baby Kale - bagged
Arugula - Bunched
Onions

Notes on the box.

Tomatoes, Onions, and Delicata Squash should all be stored out of the fridge (though you can put tomatoes in the fridge if you plan on cooking them). 
The Delicata Squash has edible skin.  That makes it the perfect squash for making roasted half-moons.  Cut in half lengthwise, scoop out the seeds, then cut into half moons.  Toss with a little olive oil and salt.  You can add spices at this point, too.  Chili powder, berbere, parmesan and Italian seasoning, etc... Roast at 400 for 15 minutes, flip and cook for another 15-20 min.  
Everything else can go in the fridge.  Arugula is the bunched greens and can be chopped for fresh salad, made into a pesto, or chopped and added to hot pasta to wilt it before eating. It has quite a bit of holes from flea beatles (the bugs that destroyed our fall brassicas like broccoli), but don't worry, the holes don't taste like anything!  Remove greens from the radishes.  Radish Greens are edible if you can't get enough greens!    

Cosmic Wheel Creamery Cheese Shares.

This week we have two different batches of Circle of the Sun.  One was made in early Spring of this year and the other was made in early November of last year.  It's fun to taste them together to see the variation and how much the cheeses change based on how much hay vs. grass the cows are eating, the time of year, and how long it has aged.  

Recipes.

Warm Kale and Delicata Squash Salad
Roasted Squash Bowls with Arugula and Apples
Roasted Delicata Squash with Cilantro Chimichurri
Sheet Pan Roasted Red Pepper and Tomato Soup

On the Farm.

REMINDER:  Harvest Party and Land Stewardship Fundraiser on September 22!  We do hope you can make it out for delicious food, fun farm tours, and movies in the barn.  We will start at 4 PM and we do hope you can make it out!  

More rain.  After so many dry weeks we've really gotten quite a lot of rain in the last 2 weeks.  Almost 6 inches!  Thankfully not nearly as much as some of our farmer friends in Southern Wisconsin.  We've seen some photos of washed away top soil and drowned crops that are heartbreaking.  We hope everyone there gets a chance to dry off!  

Squash is harvested, and safe in the shed. Potatoes are dug and stored. Tomato trellis is pulled. And the weather has cooled down and the light is looking like fall. We still have a big carrot harvest and Brussel sprouts to look forward to and garlic to plant in Mid October. But this is the time that things begin to slow down a bit.

This transition back into fall crops is going to be a little awkward with so many brassica crops missing due to dry hot weather and more flea beatles than we have ever seen. But we have tried to fill in with some new crops, and we'll see how it goes. By no means will the box be empty. This season marks my 15th year managing a CSA. Every year is a new adventure.  

3 more weeks to go for the main season which ends September 27. 
We have chosen to roll out the last 4 season extension boxes right after the main season is up. Putting the last of the vegetable deliveries October 25. 

We are anticipating another meat share delivery, October 4, we will have pork and lamb! Just in time for a delicious fall roast.  We do have extra meat, so inquire for more details. 
 

Turnip Rock FarmerComment