Week 3; June 22, 2023

What’s in the box?

Notes on the box.

Garlic Scapes are here! If these are new to you, they are a treat of this time of year. They are the stem and flower bud from a head of garlic. We remove them to encourage the plant to put more energy into making a nice big bulb instead of a pretty flower. The other benefit is that we get to eat them! They can be used in the same way as a green onion, but they will add a garlicy flavor instead of an onion flavor. They are great in salad dressing or you can dice them and cook with them by sauteing or adding to stirfry. They are great on the grill whole to serve with a steak or grilled chicken. They can be pickled or made into pesto. So much possibility!

Fresh greentop carrots! Hooray! Be sure to remove the tops from the carrots right away before you put them in the fridge! Otherwise they will go bendy pretty quickly. The tops are edible and can be used as you might use fresh parsley. Have a taste and see if you like the flavor to determine if you want to save them for eating. The carrots themselves should be stored in a plastic bag or container in the fridge.

Cosmic Wheel Creamery Cheese Shares.

This week I packed some feta cheese and some of our Antares which is our cows milk manchego. They are both super flavorful and great for salads, pizza, or pasta dishes. If you don’t think you will eat the feta within 2 weeks, you can make a brine to store it in longer. Just mix a couple of tsp of salt into a cup of water and put the cheese into the brine so it’s covered in an airtight container.

With this hot weather, a feta dip for carrots, radishes, and pita chips is a great dinner.
Antares is excellent grated on pasta or cut into cubes and added to a salad. If you want to make a garlic scape pesto, the Antares would be a great cheese to add to that!

All of our aged cheeses are nice to cut off a bit of and snack on with some wine or a bubble water or another favorite beverage while you prepare dinner or just to have a snack and relax.

recipes.

Whipped Feta with Lemon and Dill

How to Cook with Garlic Scapes - Great suggestions here!

Garlic Scape Kale Pesto

on the farm.

Dry Dry Dry, ground so hard, grass will die. Love your mother be kind to your brother, only once chance, you don’t get another

It’s been almost 2 months with no significant rain out here and we are heading into the driest part of the summer. Typically, but nothing is typical anymore when it comes to weather. Vegetables require 1” of water every single week for optimum growth and quality. We are irrigating everyday all day. Wobblers, big water guns, and drip tape, anything we have is out there, throwing water. We started a seed garlic enterprise this year(selling seed), so you will be getting a lot of scapes (garlic flowers) and eventually a good amount of garlic. We had said we would have rhubarb, but there has been so many items to put in the box and so many weeds to pull and so much irrigating to do we just ran out of time to drive over to the rhubarb patch at Sleepy Root Farm and get it. Next time... Solistice is upon us and the days are long, which mean LOTS of growth for the next month to 6 weeks (as long as we keep the water flowing). Summer squash is flowering, cucumbers are ramping up, tomatoes are climbing every time you turn your head, corn leaping out of the ground, winter squash sending out vines to cover the ground and set fruit. Its dizzying. And to top it off we are now starting to think about fall. yep. we just got started and now we are thinking about it being over. But if you do the math on broccoli, 30 days as a seedling in the greenhouse puts us at 3rd week in July, and harvest is in 60-70 days from planting so we are at the 3rd week in Sept, or early October, with a typical 2-3 week harvest window. And that puts us with the leaf drop just around the corner. But so much happens between then and now! So much goodness is growing and will be coming your way.

We hope everyone is breathing a little easier as the air quality improves. Hoping for some good soaking rain even if it means our ice cream social gets rained out… If it does get rained out, there’s always next month! Last Sunday of each month 1:00-4:00 for our Sunday Sundaes Ice Cream Socials. Farm store is open Thursday-Saturday 12-6. Meat, cheese, veggies, maple syrup, honey, and soft serve ice cream available. Farm store is also open during the ice cream social. Hope you can make it out sometime!

next week.

carrots
scapes
lettuce
salad mix
beets?
radishes
zucchini?
cucumbers?
broccolini
romaine lettuce

Week 2; June 15, 2023

What’s in the box?

If this is your first delivery….

Just a little orientation for new members and reminder for returning members… please only take the box with YOUR NAME on the label. Can’t find your box and you are sure you are supposed to have one delivered that week? Text or Email us and we will work quickly to figure out what’s going on and how to fix it. Mix-ups sometimes happen on delivery and sometimes someone grabs the wrong box. In any case, we will do our absolute best to make it right. Boxes need to be picked up on Thursday! If you aren’t able to make it on thursday, you need to let your host know and see if they can make it available for you to pickup the next day, but there are no guarantees that your share will be there if not picked up on Thursday.

Cheese shares are kept all together at each drop site in a box with a freezer pack to keep cheese cool. The box will be labeled “cheese”. Please don’t grab the whole box! There’s a list of the people that ordered cheese shares in the box. DO NOT take a cheese share unless your name is on that list. After you get your cheese share, be sure to close the box to help keep things cool for other members. Shortcut… if you signed up for cheese every other week and aren’t sure if you have cheese to pickup that week, check the label on your CSA box. If you have cheese to pickup, your name label will say Cheese share. If no cheese, it won’t be listed on the label. If there was an error, let us know ASAP and we will do our best to make it right. If your name is on the list, but no cheese was in the box, let us know and we will make it up to you. Also, if you have any insulated liners you’d like to pass along to us, please do! You can leave them at the drop site and we will gladly pick them up and reuse them!

For everyone! We reuse the boxes! You may bring your box home and return it the next week when picking up your share, or you can bring a bag to transfer your produce into and leave the box at your drop site. Please flatten the box and stack neatly to help make things easier for the dropsite host.

notes on the box.

Salad season continues! This week with some lovely baby beets. You can remove the tops from the beets, halve or quarter the beet roots (no need to peel), coat with a little oil, sprinkle of salt, and roast them till tender. They are a lovely addition to salads!
Also included this week are some salad turnips. They are really tasty sliced or match-sticked and added to salads. They are also nice roasted or sauteed. The turnip greens are also edible. I like to saute them after cooking the turnips. Add greens once the turnips are tender and have caramelized a bit. They wilt very quickly and the roots and greens together make a really nice side dish.

Cosmic Wheel Creamery Cheese shares.

Fresh cheese curds! A great snack and a favorite for sure. If you let them get to room temp, they will have the squeak that only fresh cheese curds have!
This week I’ve sent another round of our farm original, Circle of the Sun. Admittedly, I hadn’t meant to send the same cheese two weeks in a row, but I think there’s enough people that are getting cheese every other week that will be getting it for the first time. Also, if you got Circle of the Sun last week, this week’s cheese is from a different batch, so you can compare the two! I hope no one minds. It’s one of my favorites, so I know I don’t have trouble eating it!

recipes.

Stir fried Beef with Turnips and Bok Choy

on the farm.

The smoke settled in on packing day. Our crew worked though it and we hope it clears out soon.

Irrigation has been being moved all over the place all the time trying to make sure that all the crops get the water that they need. We much prefer rain to irrigation (and the plants do, too.) But we are glad to have the irrigation that we need.

Exciting development on the farm… our on farm store will be opening! Hours are Thursday, Friday, and Saturday from 12-6. Our store will have produce, cheese, and meat from our farm as well as local honey, maple syrup, artisan bread, and SOFT SERVE ICE CREAM! That’s right! Cosmic Wheel Creamery is making softserve mix and we put a machine in the store. The ingredients of our softserve are whole milk from our 100% grass-fed cows, organic sugar, organic milk powder, and a little salt. We make plain (no vanilla even because the milk tastes so good that it doesn’t need anything extra. We are calling the plain flavor Cosmic Cream and we also have Astro-Coco. We are excited to have a space where people can come and stockup on great food from our farm and our near-by farm friends.

The last Sunday of each month, we are having Sunday Sundaes at the farm! Our farm store will be open and we will be serving seasonal Sundaes and soft serve cones and having an ice cream social! So mark your calendar! Our hope is that having a day to gather each month will allow for more of our CSA members to be able to make it out to the farm. We know if there’s only one event for the season it makes it challenging, so we hope you are able to connect with the land where your food is being grown and the people who are growing it!

Let us know if you have any questions!

next week.

lettuce
salad mix
broccolini?
carrots?
cucumbers?
rhubarb (sorry for my mistake last week thinking it was going to be in this weeks box!)
spinach
radishes
beets
garlic scapes?
green onions
dill

Week 1; june 8, 2023

Welcome to 2023!

Just a little orientation for new members and reminder for returning members… please only take the box with YOUR NAME on the label. Can’t find your box and you are sure you are supposed to have one delivered that week? Text or Email us and we will work quickly to figure out what’s going on and how to fix it. Mix-ups sometimes happen on delivery and sometimes someone grabs the wrong box. In any case, we will do our absolute best to make it right. Boxes need to be picked up on Thursday! If you aren’t able to make it on thursday, you need to let your host know and see if they can make it available for you to pickup the next day, but there are no guarantees that your share will be there if not picked up on Thursday.

Cheese shares are kept all together at each drop site in a box with a freezer pack to keep cheese cool. The box will be labeled “cheese”. Please don’t grab the whole box! There’s a list of the people that ordered cheese shares in the box. DO NOT take a cheese share unless your name is on that list. After you get your cheese share, be sure to close the box to help keep things cool for other members. Shortcut… if you signed up for cheese every other week and aren’t sure if you have cheese to pickup that week, check the label on your CSA box. If you have cheese to pickup, your name label will say Cheese share. If no cheese, it won’t be listed on the label. If there was an error, let us know ASAP and we will do our best to make it right. If your name is on the list, but no cheese was in the box, let us know and we will make it up to you. Also, if you have any insulated liners you’d like to pass along to us, please do! You can leave them at the drop site and we will gladly pick them up and reuse them!

For everyone! We reuse the boxes! You may bring your box home and return it the next week when picking up your share, or you can bring a bag to transfer your produce into and leave the box at your drop site. Please flatten the box and stack neatly to help make things easier for the dropsite host.

What’s in the box?

Notes on the box

It’s big salad time! There’s a lot of greens and lettuces in this box. Our greens are washed before we send them out to you, but you should still give head lettuces and things like bok choy another washing because dirt gets trapped between leaves in a way that’s not possible to clean until you pull leaves apart. We recommend getting them well washed and bagged/ put into containers as you are unpacking your share at home. This way things are cleaned off and ready to go and you are much more likely to eat them! So plan on at least a side salad with each meal, or a big salad for dinner a couple of times.

Green garlic is a nice spring treat. You can use it as you would scallions, but it will have a garlic flavor. Great on tacos or rice bowls or minced and made into garlic butter.

What should you do with that fresh dill? We like to add it to salads to add some nice bursts of flavor. Also great chopped and sprinkled on top of scrambled eggs or salmon. You can also chop it up and mix into plain greek yogurt with a little lemon juice, minced green garlic, and salt to make a super simple and yummy dip. We love it with potato or pita chips, but it’s also very good with other carrots, radishes, or any other veggies that you might like to snack on.

Remember to always remove the tops from root veggies for storage. The tops of the radishes are edible and you can use them to add a bit of spicy kick to your salad mix, or you can make them into a pesto with the arugula and green garlic.

Cosmic Wheel Creamery Cheese shares

I started us off with two of my most favorite cheeses. Circle of the Sun is a farm original that I love to make. It’s a super simple cheese make that lets the quality of the milk shine. This batch was made Spring of 2022 right as the pasture was coming in. I’ve also included some Garlic Dill Quark which is one of my most popular cheeses when I go to farmers market. It’s fantastic on crackers, but one of my favorite ways to enjoy it is on a slice of baguette with thinly sliced radishes. It’s also super great as a spread on a wrap style sandwich. Truly you can eat it on just about anything and it’s delicious.

Recipes

Sauteed Baby Bock Choy
Pull leaves from stem and wash off any dirt that might be hiding near the base of the bock choy (if you aren’t seeing dirt there, you can cut each head into quarters lengthwise). Heat a tablespoon of neutral oil in a pan. Add thinly sliced green garlic, minced fresh ginger, some soy sauce, and clean bock choy leaves to the pan and sautee till stems of leaves are tender-crisp. Great as a side dish or in ramen soup or as part of a stirfry (if adding to stirfry, add at the end as it cooks quickly).

Cheesey Stovetop Barley and Rainbow Chard by Martha Stewart

Rainbow Chard Quiche by Martha Stewart

Arugula, Green Garlic, and Walnut Pesto by Dishing up the Dirt

On the farm

Welcome to the 2023 season of Turnip Rock Farm! We are excited to be getting deliveries out again! It was another interesting spring with a little heat wave followed by a loooong drawn out period of cool weather. It made for lots of waiting for the soils to be warm enough to plant and made us quite happy to have a few high tunnels so that our season didn’t have to start too late. We are super excited and lucky to have our full farm crew returning! Everyone is back at it like pros!

We know it’s really the growing season when we get to share the farm with students from Lucy Laney at the Kids At The Farm Day that we are lucky enough to host. A HUGE thank you to those that contributed money to help make the field trip happen. Students got to learn about growing veggies, sheep and lambs, baking bread, making cheese, local reptiles and amphibians, and honeybees! It’s one of our very favorite days on the farm and such a delightful way to start the season!

Next week

cilantro
green onions
rhubarb
head lettuce
salad mix
turnips
radishes
spinach
kale
beets?
cucumbers??