THE BEET: VOLUME 19; WEEK 20
FULL SHARE & GREEN HALF SHARE
PICK UP TONIGHT
5pm–7:30pm at JACK Theater
18 Putnam Ave (between Grand and Downing)
Please wear a mask and practice social distancing!
It's hard to believe, but there are only 3 weeks left in our season! The final pickup will be November 5th, with yellow half shares ending a week earlier on October 29th. We'll be having a Halloween celebration during distribution on the 29th, and we'd love to see your little ones in costume! We'll be safely handing out some individually wrapped treats. To get in an autumnal mood, click here for some virtual leaf peeping via the Windflower Farm Instagram page!
A few important items:
Please take a few minutes to complete our end of season survey!
Sign up for your winter shares! The winter share consists of four monthly deliveries beginning November 21st. You'll receive a big box filled with greens, winter vegetables, fruit, and goodies like cider, jam, and honey. You can also sign up for egg and maple shares!
And if you missed last week's letter from JACK founder Alec Duffy, you can read it here. If you are able, please consider donating to JACK during this strange and difficult time. You'll be directly supporting mutual aid work in our community, and helping to ensure that JACK will be able to continue to offer more of their adventurous programming in the future.
The News from Windflower Farm
Distribution #20, Week of October 19, 2020
Hello from Windflower Farm (where winter CSA shares are now available!)
This week’s share
Spinach
Arugula
Bok Choy or kale
‘Covington’ sweet potatoes
Red and yellow onions
‘Rainbow’ carrots
Cilantro
Chiles (small, HOT, not sweet!)
Potatoes
Eggplants (or sweet peppers)
Ginger
Your fruit share will be a mix of early ‘Fuji’ and ‘Empire’ apples from Yonder Farm. The ‘Fujis’ are the lighter colored apples.
Please use care in handling the chiles in your share, particularly around children - they can be painfully hot. The small, blocky orange-yellow ones are habaneros and are very hot. They will be the last of the season. You might find a way to combine these with the cilantro in your share.
Some shares will contain eggplants, others will have sweet peppers. This week’s eggplants, also the last of the season, may not be the prettiest, and I’m sorry about that, but I hope you’ll still enjoy these last flavors of summer. Try to ignore the spots - a good deal of the waste in our food system can be attributed to shopping too much with our eyes. Breaded and fried, they make great additions to any pizza, especially with dollops of Ricotta and pesto. They are also an excellent addition to any vegetable lasagna.
You’ll be getting some of Nate’s ginger this week, and very likely again next week (the pieces won’t be large). He ordinarily gets his planting stock from a guy called “Biker Dude” in Hawaii, but he had a crop failure last winter and referred Nate to a Peruvian supplier. Have fun with it. One of my favorite ways to enjoy this tropical crop is in the form of a gingersnap cookie.
What’s new on the farm?
I took a road trip on a rainy Friday last week to a farm in northern vermont. Earlier in the year, I mentioned that I might more frequently include the produce of other organic farms in your summer shares beginning next year. (The idea, by the way, received overwhelming support.) Among the best candidates for that are beans and carrots. Beans because a friend and experienced organic farmer - Martin Stosiek - has a bean harvester. Carrots because we do not have a soil suitable for growing carrots, at least not on a commercial scale. Ours is too stoney to grow straight carrots or to cultivate a carrot crop using tractor mounted tools.
My trip north took me to Jericho Settlers Farm, just east of Burlington, VT, near Mount Mansfield’s backside. The farm sits on 90 acres of Winooski River bottom soils, level, stone-free and well suited to the production of carrots, parsnips and beets. The winter share’s carrots will come from them this year. My hope is to barter onions, which grow better here, for their carrots.
There is a third crop I’ll mention - potatoes. We have never had to buy potatoes before, and I don’t intend to include them among the crops we’ll source in the future, but I have just purchased some to help finish out this year and to have them for the winter share. Our own potatoes were planted in a back field that our irrigation system could not reach and yields were miserable. Sometimes things don’t work out. The potatoes I have purchased came from Williams Farm and are certified organic. You’ll get more next week.
Have a great week, Ted
Recipes
Ok, Ted - here are a few ideas for incorporating your chilis and cilantro! Remember to be careful when handling hot peppers - wear gloves, keep kids away, and don't touch your eyes!
1. Make a salsa. This charred habanero, garlic, and cilantro salsa calls for more habaneros than we will likely receive, but you can still make it - you'll end up with a smaller and slightly milder batch of salsa.
2. Make fried rice - sautée a diced chili with the rest of the ingredients in step one (and maybe omit the sambal in step 2, depending on your heat tolerance)
3. Make a curry paste!
And here's a gingersnap recipe from James Beard! Have a great weekend!