THE BEET: Volume 14, Winter Letter 3
Greetings from Windflower Farm and Happy New Year!
Pick Up at: 35 Irving Place
2:30-4pm Please be on time.
What’s in your share? You’ve got a hefty box coming your way! You’ll get a bag each of yellow potatoes and mixed reds. You’ll get a bag of sweet potatoes and a bag of assorted yellow and red onions and either a garlic bulb or shallots. You’ll get a butternut squash. You’ll get a bag of carrots and beets and another of either daikon radishes or purple top turnips. Remember, when all else fails, simply puree those turnips and add them to soup stock. Or, chop them, sprinkle with oil and salt, place them on a baking dish along with some of these other root vegetables, and roast them. You’ll get three bags of greens, including Koji, Red Russian kale and Dinosaur kale. You’ll get a bag of the Borden’s apples that will contain Jonagolds (the red-orange-yellow variety) and either Ida Reds or Empires (both of which are crispy and dark red). And you’ll get a half-gallon of the Borden’s excellent cider. We hope you enjoy your share!
Your optional items, including eggs through our farm’s partners, frozen shares from Winter Sun and/or pre-ordered items from Lewis Waite Farm, will be available at the same time.
Your next winter delivery will take place on February 6th. Our best wishes for the New Year!
Warm regards, Ted and Jan
Winter Reading
Looking for something inspirational and informative to read during these sometimes chilly days?
I recently picked up a copy of ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MIRACLE by Barbara Kingsolver. It's Excellent. Barbara Kingslover- is a well known fiction writer, but this book is her first non-fiction; and documents a year in her life- when she, her husband and their 2 children live entirely off what they are able to grow in their own garden- or purchase items that were produced within 50 miles of their home. In addition to their interesting story, her book is well researched and offers a lot of information on food production in this country, CAFO's, the structure and history of small family farms, and how to start your own home garden.
Here is the book's website, which also offers some of the seasonal recipes her family used and developed over the year.
I also just finished WALKING ON WATER: READING, WRITING AND REVOLUTION by Derrick Jensen, which was definitely the best book I read in 2015. Jensen is a creative writing teacher in San Diego, but offers poignant insights about our culture and future on this earth while walking the readers and his students through our current systems of teaching, learning and writing.
“One of the great failings of our culture is the nearly universal belief that there can be anything universal. We as a culture take the same approach to living in Phoenix as in Seattle as in Miami, to the detriment of all of these landscapes. We believe that students can be given standard lesson plans and standard tests, universally applied, to the detriment of all of these students. We turn living wild trees into standardized two-by-fours. We turn living fish into fish sticks. We turn living carrots into carrot sticks. Every fish is different from every other fish. Every tree is different from every other tree. Every student is different from every other student. Every place is different from every other place. If we are ever to remember what it is to be human beings, and if we are ever to hope to begin to live sustainably in place (which is the only way to live sustainably), we will have to remember that specificity is everything. It’s the only thing we’ve got.”