Saturday, October 6, 2012

CSA BOX 16

Hi CSA members!!

Have you ever noticed how your senses are such a huge part of your memory??  If you hear a song from way back, all of a sudden you are in high school again.  Anytime we smell crayons and paste, we are back in elementary school.  Tastes do the same.  I know every Saturday night when I was young, my family would gather for a great feast of clown.  And every Saturday night, I would say, "Doesn't this clown taste kind of funny??

This week's box will excite your taste buds and make new memories!!  I think it is the best box of the season.  Yes, I know I have said that before.  This is salad week!  In one bag, you have leaf lettuce.  In the other bag, you will find spinach at the bottom of the bag.  Kyoto Mizuna is in the middle.  It looks a little like an oak leaf.  Totsoi is at the top of the bag.  It looks a little like small bok choi.  In the sandwich bag is lemon pepper grass.  It is totally refreshing with a flavor that begins in your mouth as lemon and transitions to a pepper flavor.  If you taste any of these, you may think you don't like one of them.  BUT the secret is to mix them all together in a salad and let the many flavors swirl together as one.  Other items in the box can become part of the salad...the Easter Egg radishes, the peppers, the cucumber and the tomatoes.  You can even cut off some of the sweet corn raw and add that to the top of the salad.  Or cut off some corn, fry it crisp in your favorite oil, and add that to the top.  Your salad this week will make a memory.  And you know me, I never clown around.

If the frost is hard Monday night, it will be the last corn in the box so treat these last kernels like jewels.  We have two big patches to come but their future lies in a silly instrument called the thermometer.

Harvest events are at a bit of a lull.  I will be updating the website as soon as I know the effect of the temperature.  As of four this morning, there is ice on the cars but no grass has frost yet.  There is a bit of wind which will help.

The tomato harvest event went on for a month.  The September tomatoes in the field were incredible.  I watched many of our members haul beautiful tomatoes out of the field.  Then we had the frost party free pick.  What an exciting celebration of many gathering tomatoes, peppers and sweet corn.  It is so much fun to watch kids be involved in the making of this food memory!  So many seized the moment to come after work and school and pick til dark.

The sweet corn harvest event is our most popular one and went on for two months with rare breaks between patches.  

As you know, the fall harvest events will begin on Saturday, October 6 and go each day until Oct 19.  Kirk and Josh will be selling honey on the 6th from ten to one.  The same bees that brought the bounty of food through their pollination now give us the royal taste of their work.  What a sweet full circle.  Nature just might know what it is doing.  

The fall harvest events will be exciting weeks.  You receive 8 pumpkins for a ticket, 12 squash for a ticket, a hundred pounds of potatoes for a ticket and a pail of beets for a ticket.  The choices of squash are buttercup, delicata, spaghetti, butternut, sweet lightning and pik a pie pumpkins.  Whatever carrots are left from the next boxes will be in the harvest event.  Gourds are also a pick during this time.

On October 20 and 21, just like the frost party, we will have the final grand finale free pick.

Fall pushes summer aside in next week's box.  You will find more salads, get ready for pumpkin pie or bars and crank up the oven for your first squash.  We have had the first samplings of squash and it looks to be an amazing fall season!

The last box of the season is the week of October 15.  Most CSA's do 18 boxes but we do twenty.  So even though it looks like fall, remember to pick up your box each week.  Drop off hosts should not have to remind you.

From YOUR farm!!

Mark

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