Week 9; July 29, 2021

What’s in the box?

tomatoes! (medium and large shares)
corn
onions
celery
cucumbers
pepper
broccoli
carrots
zucchini/summer squash
cauliflower (small and large shares)

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Notes on the box.

First Tomatoes of the season! Yum! and more to come! Tomatoes are best stored with the stem side facing down on your counter. They tend to get a little mealy and flavor isn’t as great if stored in the fridge, but if you are going to be cooking with them, putting them in the fridge isn’t a big deal. Enjoy!

Sweet corn! Store it in the fridge. We pick it right before we pack it so it’s good and fresh. The sooner you eat it the better it will taste. We go for corn on the cob within the first couple days of picking. Just a pot of simmering water, drop in the shucked and de-silked corn, let it simmer for maybe 3-5 minutes, get it out of the water and put on some butter, salt, and enjoy! If we don’t eat it all as corn on within the first few days, we like to cook it in a more involved recipe like chili, corn chowder, or a sauteed corn in pasta!

Celery is rough this season. We planted it in a higher spot with sandy soil so that it would be well drained if we had another wet year. But this year being super dry, the celery just didn’t size up. It’s got a super concentrated flavor, though. The stems are good in salads and leaves for stock.

Remember to remove the tops from the carrots for storage so that they don’t go limp!

Cosmic Wheel Creamery Cheese Shares.

Whole Milk Ricotta nd Aquilla, our raw milk aged Jack-style cheese. Time for some yummy desserts with the ricotta? The Aquilla is great for veggie cheese sandwiches… just mayo, spicy mustard, cucumber slices, tomato, bell peppers, and cheese. Dinner here almost every night this week! You can also cube it up to add to salads.

Recipes.

Chilled Cucumber, Celery, and Avocado Soup
Heat 2 tablespoons olive oil in a pan. Add a diced onion, a bunch of diced celery stalks, 2 cloves of minced garlic to the pan and saute until tender. Add 2 cups of chicken or vegetable sock and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer until veggies are soft. Chill well. When fully chilled, transfer to a blender and add 1 seeded, unpeeled large cucumber or a couple of medium cucumbers and some chopped cilantro, dill, or other fresh herb of your choice. Blend well. Add 1/2 an avocado, diced and 1/4 cup plain greek yogurt (optional) and blend until smooth. Season to taste with salt. Garnish with more diced cucumber and avocado and serve.

Easy Broccoli Salad This recipe calls for chopping the broccoli into small florettes, but I like to use my food processor to make it go a little quicker. A few pulses and it’s ready to go. Add some shredded carrots, too!

Zucchini, Sweetcorn, and Chermoula I’m so excited to try this recipe!

Esquites Mexican Corn Salad A favorite here!

Creamy Corn Pasta with Basil

Sweetcorn, Ricotta, and Zucchini Fritters

On the farm.

Don’t forget to add mushrooms or coffee to your next delivery through the link with your name in the delivery email! Let me know if you have any questions.

Folks it’s been hot. I’m sure you all have been feeling it, too. We are doing our best to get everything done despite the heat. We got some serious rain last night and thankfully nothing came of the tornado warnings!

Next Week.

cauliflower
cilantro
spinach
lettuce
broccoli
sweet corn
tomtatoes
peppers
squash
cucumbers
carrots



Turnip Rock FarmerComment
Week 8; July 22, 2021

What’s in the box?

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parsley
spinach
green leaf lettuce
fennel
sweet corn
new potatoes (reds of blues)
bell pepper
cucumber
zucchini/ summer squash
broccoli or cauliflower
onions

Notes on the box.

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Notes on the box

We are so happy that we had good germination on this spinach since it usually won’t grow in hot temperatures. Same with the lettuce still tasting good.

We had to make a hard call on whether to harvest sweet corn this week or wait. It was much spottier in it’s maturation than normal and we think that’s due to the temps and drought. So while it might not all be perfectly filled out, we didn’t want to wait another week when it might be starchy or worse, non-existant because the racoons decided to eat it all!

Potatoes will be either blue or red. We hope you enjoy these beauties! They are new potatoes, so should be eaten sooner than later since they are not cured for storage.

Cosmic Wheel Creamery Cheese Shares.

This week is Garlic and Scallion Quark and our swiss cheese! We don’t have the perfect aging conditions required to get the nice perfectly round holds in our swiss, but it still tastes really good! We hope you enjoy it! The quark is a favorite and goes really well with roasted potatoes or on a cold veggie sandwich. Yum!

Recipes.

coming soon!

On the Farm.

Don’t forget that you can schedule holds on your CSA shares by clicking the link in the delivery email! You can also add coffee or now MUSHROOMS to your CSA box through the same link. Check it out and let us know if you have any questions!

This week you get to meet Isaac! We are very grateful to have him here on the farm and are so grateful for his thoughts on what it’s like to be doing this work! Here’s what he has to share about working on the farm:
Working on the farm has been the most fascinating and fulfilling job I have ever had – and beyond that, it feels like a life changing experience. At the end of the first day, I couldn’t believe it had only been one day: I had been involved in such a variety of tasks and done so much. Sometimes even now I stand at the end of a Friday and think back through the week and try to quantify how much I have learned and experienced. In one recent week, I washed, weighed, and organized 660 bunches of carrots/beets/turnips, unloaded haybales into the barn, transplanted corn on the back of the tractor, put out fencing in the fields in 90-degree heat, drove around on the John Deer Gator looking for our bull in the long grass of the north field(!), helped pack our 200 boxes of vegetable shares, and saw and learned about Monarch butterflies – as well as a multitude of other little tasks and harvesting all sorts of yummy veggies!

I love being around the animals: hanging out with the farm dogs, feeding the pigs, and seeing everything from cranes to foxes to snakes. It feels like everything is going through its own journey on the farm. I like asking questions about the science behind the plants and their processes and trying to understand all the variables involved in growing vegetables. I also really enjoy working ‘the pack shed’: bringing in the harvest, washing, drying, organizing, and weighing, and figuring out how much we have of what, and how that will fit into the CSA boxes and our deliveries. Before all that, I put out new fencing each morning, moving reels and posts and water tubs around in the fields for the milking cows, so they have a new paddock to graze each day – the day-to-day practicalities of grass-fed cows! It is incredibly thought-provoking to see the way everything is connected: the cows having good grass to eat, producing quality milk, fertilizing the fields, and encouraging its regrowth in turn.

Working on the farm sometimes feels a bit like you are up-close and personal with Life, maybe like animals always are. You get to see the beautiful complexity and always-changing, interconnected nature of things, and how seasons and environment shapes all of it. It shows all the good parts and doesn’t hide the hard parts either. Every living thing on the farm is battling along, either trying to stand up next to its mom right after it is born, looking for food, or trying to find a quiet corner to remake itself anew, or do what it must while the weather allows. Or its just trying to grow in its planted spot, raging along with 5 other plants that are trying to make the same spot their own.

It feels like we are going into a different part of the season now, with different crops coming to the fore. No doubt working on the farm will remain just as wonderfully challenging, rewarding, and uniquely interesting – and fun! Because you can’t get much more fun than loading up 500 lbs. of seeding potatoes onto the wagon and blasting across the farm at Gator-top-speed, covered in dirt and drenched in sweat on a sunny, blue-skied Friday afternoon. Oh. If I were a vegetable, I would be a Brussel Sprout. They are popular in England, where I am from, and they are kind of weird. And if Anabel’s hair resembles a Broccoli floret, then, perhaps, as my own head of hair enters its autumn years, I look more and more like a balding Brussel sprout. Delicious and dignified though!

Turnip Rock FarmerComment
Week 7; July 15, 2021

What’s in the box?

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celery
rainbow chard
summer squash/ zucchini
onions
oregano
greentop beets
garlic
cabbage or broccoli (medium and large shares)
cucumbers (medium and large shares)
cauliflower (large shares)
cherry tomatoes (large shares)

Notes on the box

Cabbage will be either red or savoy.

Celery likes cool wet weather and with the drought, we have gotten less size on the stalks thanwe normally get. It’s still tasty and is good cut up and added to tuna, pasta, or egg salad or in stirfry. Leaves are edible, too. Best minced up and added to anything you like a nice celery flavor with.

Cosmic Wheel Creamery Cheese Shares.

Deneb is a natural rind gouda style cheese. This Deneb is aged about a year. We also have our cows milk feta. Nice on a pizza with the fresh oregano or in a roasted beet salad.

Whipped Feta and Fresh Herbs

Recipes.

Grilled Beets! These are grilled in a foil packet. They take quite a while to cook through. But I’m thinking of trying them on a campfire, too.

Roasted Beet Salad with Beet Greens and Feta

Fresh Oregano and Garlic Pesto

Zucchini Fritters

On the Farm.

We had a really wonderful time at the Eat Local Coop Farm Tour! We had over 300 visitors on Saturday and were really happy to be able to meet or see some of our CSA members! We hope you had a great time if you came out to the farm!

We are now seeing some of the effects of the heatwave and drought showing up in what’s not in the box when we were planning it. Broccoli and cauliflower looking kinda rough out there. They aren’t big fans of heat. We hope the plants out there start putting on some nicer heads so we can get these crops in more boxes. Potatoes haven’t sized up yet, but hopefully soon. We’ve gotten a bit of rain, we keep on moving irrigation, and the temps have become more seasonal. We are doing our best and looking forward to the sweetcorn and summer crops that will be coming in.

Check out the store this week! We’ve added fresh shiitake mushrooms from our neighbors at Northwoods Mushrooms that can be added to your CSA box. Like the coffee, mushrooms can be added on a week to week basis as you like. Because of order deadlines, mushrooms must be ordered by Saturday for delivery on Thursday. Let us know if you have any questions or need any help.


Next Week.

cauliflower?
broccoli?
beets
onions
sqush
cucumbers
potatoes?


Turnip Rock FarmerComment