This week you’ll find in your share:
•Potatoes*
•Onions*
•Garlic*
•Cabbage
•Cucumber
•Swiss Chard
•Carrots!
•Turnips
***Beets
***Green Beans
•Garlic
Next week you might find in your share:
• Squash
• Kale
• Chard
• Beets?
• Cabbage
• Potatoes?
• Garlic?
• Herb
From Your Farmers…
Included in your share this week is a nutritional survey. This information helps us learn how to better serve you, and allows us to both gauge the impact of our program and allows us to keep doing what we’re doing. Please return it in your bag with your next pick-up.
* With yesterday being the 4th, who could resist digging some potatoes? Deidre, one of our practicum students, and I, could not, and pulled a few as a test run to see how they’re coming.
Potatoes, garlic, and on ions are all fresh dug and therefore uncured. With potatoes, this means they’re extra delicious. This week’s potato quantity is small, but more will be coming if you want to hang onto them until more come out of the ground. If you find that a little green on a potato slipped by us, please cut it off, as it contains solanine, and can cause a bit of a tummy ache. Store your potatoes out of the light to keep the green from developing.
*Onions are uncured, and are just developing skins. I’d suggest refrigeration, and using them quickly.
*The garlic will be fine left on the counter, but handle it gently, as it can easily bruise at this stage. Refrigerating the garlic can cause it to sprout. Keep in mind that the smallest bulbs are the most potent.
We’d still like to hear your thoughts about the spring shares. How do you feel overall about what you’ve received? Would you like to see more of something, less of another, or something not at all? Were the shares too big, small, or do we need diversity? We can’t improve without your feedback, so please let us know how you feel. Email me at ghahn@caastlc.org or call 314.566.8643. Really, we’d love to hear what you think.
We have decided that starting July 13, we will be hosting a monthly open house the second Saturday of each month. Each event will feature a tour, farm fresh food, and the opportunity to take part in the growing of your food. The amount of satisfaction received from jumping in is quite surprising, in a really good way. We are inviting you, our members, neighbors, and anyone who is interested in getting to know our farm, how it works, how to grow their own food, or who just wants to lend a hand or spend a morning under the golden sun in a beautiful setting.
Food For Thought…
Eat more vedge! And you can get more vedge by helping us out at the farm. Remember, there is a $4 discount for each share for every 2 hours worked at the farm. We’ll also send some stuff home with you if you come help out. With the soil still being wet, digging our root crops is taking much more time than usual, and we could really use a hand.
Upcoming Events: Join us Saturday, July 20 for Family Fun at the Farm, from 9 AM to 2 PM. We will have activity stations featuring vegetable face painting, making bird feeders, learning about bees, how they make honey and contribute to the farm, and harvesting cherry tomatoes, attendees will receive a potted herb to take home. And more!
Recipe of the Week: comes from Helen Nearing’s Simple Food for the Good Life
With a few local Red Delicious and Jonathan’s still showing up in local shops, and our cabbage coming through, here’s a quick recipe for Apple Slaw.
I like Helen’s recipes for their simplicity. We had this today for farm lunch, and it was tasty. I substituted Swiss Chard for the lettuce. I stemmed the chard, and rubbed it with a bit of lemon juice to soften it down. I also added some crushed walnuts. We had no honey on hand, so I tossed in a little maple syrup from our friends at LaVista CSA in Illinois. We also had no celery, and it went down just fine.
3 apples, grated
½ head cabbage
2 cups celery
¼ cup raisins
1 tbsp honey
1 tbsp lemon juice
2 tbsp oil
Lettuce leaves
Combine the apples, cabbage, celery, and raisins. Add the honey, lemon juice and oil, tossing well after each addition to coat the ingredients well. Serve on a bed of lettuce (or some nice swiss chard). Topping with some almonds or walnuts might be pretty nice as well.
Enjoy!
Farm Wish List:
-empty gallon jugs
-compost (your food scraps, coffee grounds,
-hands to help control bindweed and Bermuda grass
-empty electrical wire wide spools from 2-8 feet wide. (we use them to store greenhouse plastic and row cover)
CAASTLC's Seeds of Hope Farm 