Reminders:

Sign up for your volunteer hours now! The CSA is a community endeavor that runs primarily on member labor. Shifts tend to fill up toward the end of the season, so get your work in now! Sign up HERE.

If you're out of town, feel free to have a friend pick up your share for you. Just have him or her say your name at the front desk and be sure to let them know if you have extra shares (fruit, flowers, eggs) to collect, too.

When you're picking up your share, remember to take only the amount indicated on the whiteboards to ensure that there's enough for everyone. There's a swap box at the end of the table for those veggies that might not be up your alley (cilantro, anyone?).

Bring bags for your veggies! We have a few plastic bags for those who forget, but it's important to remember to bring your own bags and containers for your veggies and other shares.

If you have any Beet submissions, please feel free to contribute! We'd love to have our members represented in these pages. Send recipes, neighborhood news, food articles to newsletter@clintonhillcsa.org

This Week's Share

· Kale or Koji

· Hakurei Turnips

· Cucumbers

· Lettuce

· Scallions

· Garlic Scapes

· Swiss Chard or Spinach

· Yellow Squash or Zucchini

· Broccoli or Happy Rich

· Fruit Share: Strawberries and Rhubarb from Yonder Farm

From Windflower Farm

Lettuce, scallions, the season’s first cucumbers, sweet Hakurei turnips (simply slice and saute in olive oil, or eat fresh in a salad) and garlic scapes. And these items, which will likely come in the form of choices: Swiss chard or spinach, kale or Koji, yellow squash or zucchini, and broccoli or Happy Rich. Your fruit share will consist of strawberries and rhubarb from Yonder Farm. I hope you enjoy your share. The cucumbers show a little damage, but they taste good.

I’ve just come in from cultivating sweet corn and green snap beans with my old International 140. The soil was dry and the sun was hot, ideal conditions for killing weeds. Candelaria has dropped off tamales, and Monica has brought over sweet corn with mayonnaise and chiles. Perfect timing. They perform these acts of neighborly kindness regularly, and I am grateful for our good fortune. I snap open a tall “Sip of Sunshine” and enjoy a few moments before heading back out.

Instead of using herbicides, organic farmers pull weeds by hand, they suppress weeds by applying organic or plastic mulches, they kill weeds with fire, and its modern variant – the propane-fueled flame weeder. Some organic farmers spray vinegar, which is a herbicide of sorts, and others spray steaming hot water to kill their weeds. And organic farmers use a variety of hoes: the colinear hoe, the stirrup hoe, the Dutch onion hoe, the push-pull hoe. But, most of all, they cultivate.

To me, cultivating means using a tractor onto which I have mounted one of a number of gadgets designed to bury, uproot or mangle weeds. We use torsion weeders, flex-tine weeders, finger weeders, basket weeders, Dutch hoes on parallelograms, Danish tines, hillers big and small, spiders, beet knives and sweeps of every stripe. Some of these gadgets are mounted behind my tractor, others are mounted on its underbelly where I can see them. Cultivating is something I can do alone, as I did today, when the farm is otherwise empty, listening to Bela Fleck on Pandora. Corn row after corn row, bean row after bean row. Weed after weed buried or mangled. It’s gratifying work.

This morning, Nate and Jan used the steerable cultivator to weed zinnias and sunflowers. Everyone calls it the X-wing. It’s got Dutch hoes on parallelograms. A neighbor made the X-wing for us, and we imported the hoes. We’ll post an image on Instagram soon. The cultivator requires two people – one to drive the tractor that pulls the X-wing and another to steer the X-wing itself. My wife and son are a good team, as are Martin and his son, Jesus. It’s the kind of work that tests communication skills: slower, higher, faster, stop! For husbands and wives, it’s like couples therapy without the therapist.

Have a great week! Ted

Recipe

Arch Bernard, Clinton Hill CSA member and bartender at a farm-to-table restaurant in Gramercy Park, passed along a mouthwatering recipe for Strawberry Basil Margaritas, his vehicle of choice for the strawberries that he gets in his fruit share. Simple, delicious, bold flavors, and perfect for July Fourth celebrations. Thanks Arch!

Strawberry Basil Margaritas

2 strawberries muddled in a shaker pint

4 leaves of basil, muddled between your thumb and palm, then thrown in with the strawberries

2oz tequila (I used Herradura Reposado but any blanco or reposado will do)

Juice from 1 whole lime

3/4oz simple syrup

Splash of triple sec

Shaken with ice and poured into a rocks glass

THE BEET: VOLUME 16; ISSUE 4

Reminders:

From Windflower Farm

Recipe

Together We Grow