Primrose Community Farm, LLC

CSA Newsletter: Summer 2010 – Week 13

cassie — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 22:10:32 +0000

Hello folks! Week 13 is here, and so is back to school. Good luck for all you moms and dads getting your kids back into the swing of things. In the hustle and bustle of the first day back, please don’t forget to pick up your share!

From the Fields: It’s definitely starting to look and feel like September out there. Melons and tomatoes are waning, the conventional fields surrounding us are all yellowing as the corn begins to dry out, and meanwhile we are out doing very typical late summer activities. We’re beginning to take down some of our tomato trellis in beds that have stopped producing. The fall brassicas (cabbage family) are beginning to come in. Meanwhile, we are harvesting leeks and potatoes, as well as dreaming about soups, as the cooler nights begin to descend.

The weather has been downright pleasant lately, though a little dry. As farmer’s we almost always have something to say about rain – either too much or too little. In a perfect world, we would have a nice, soft 1 inch of rain fall every week…. on Sunday. Rarely this is the case, however. For the last eight days we’ve been moving pipes around the field to give our thirsty plants a drink. This week’s rain will be welcomed with open arms on the farm.

The Winter Share: As promised last week, I’m going to talk about our winter share this week. We are one of a handful of farms that offers a winter share. The idea of the winter share is to help you keep eating locally even though the warm weather has passed. There are quite a few different vegetables that will store well into the winter. Since few folks have root cellars these days, we do the work of storing the veggies and then get them out to you via our winter share. Vegetables to expect in a winter share include: winter squash (butternut, acorn, delicata, spaghetti), onions, potatoes, beets, carrots, beauty heart radishes, celeriac (celery root), brussel sprouts, garlic, rutabaga, parsnips, and often some greens that we grow in our hoophouse (tatsoi, spinach, sometimes lettuce).

2009 winter share box

The winter share begins in November and ends just before Christmas. The winter share works much like the summer share: pick-ups are on Wednesdays at the same sites we use for the summer share, and there are two share options – Regular and Everyother. The big difference is that a regular share member picks up two boxes per month, while the everyother picks up one box per month. The boxes are larger than the summer shares and have an average value of $50 per box. Regular shares are $225, and everyother shares are $120. If you are interested in signing up, you do just as you did to sign up for the summer. Registrations forms can be downloaded from the site and sent into us with payment. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate! We plan to accept about 175 members for the winter share this year.

This Week’s Share: New this week: a poblano pepper. These are a a mild hot pepper, used most commonly in the dish, chillies rellenos. With just one, you may want to use it for salsa. The tomatoes are still hanging on. We are delighted. When we first spotted late blight a few weeks back, we expected the worst. Luckily, it hasn’t been nearly so bad! Another bag of tomatoes is coming your way this week. In your share you will also be receiving red peppers – either red bell or sweet carmen. We are at the height of them right now. Last week we made the lentil tomato soup that was in the newsletter and added the sweet carmen red peppers – it was fantastic. Try it if you haven’t yet! Like last week, we will put your hot peppers in with the green beans. This week you will also receive some of the last sweet corn. This corn comes from our 4th planting.We know you all love sweet corn and we’re sad we haven’t been able to get more to you this year. Our 2nd and 3rd plantings really didn’t do much. Remember earlier in the season when it just wouldn’t stop raining and we wrote about how we couldn’t get the corn in the ground? Our 3rd planting produced just 300 ears of corn out of 4,000 plants. The plants just weren’t able to snap out of the stress they experienced from their delayed transplanting. We don’t usually do a 4th planting, but with the failure of the other ones we thought we’d give it a shot this year. It’s rare to have sweet corn so late in the season, so enjoy this special treat! You should expect the typical corn borer bugs on the tips like before, and perhaps some uneven pollination due to the high heat during which it pollinated. (We can’t see this when we’re harvesting).

Community News: Did you mark your calendar yet for the 1st Annual Barn Party on Saturday, October 16th? We’d love to see you there! We’ve just booked the band, called the Point Five Band. Click on their name and check them out!

In other news, we need your ideas… Cassie serves as the president of the Westside Community Market board. For a couple of years now we’ve been looking for a suitable westside location for a winter farmer’s market somewhere near our current summer market on Segoe and Sheboygan Ave, across from Hilldale. We’ve had several leads here and there that haven’t quite panned out. If any of you have ideas of a large open space that vendors could easily load and unload their local food wares for sale on Saturdays during the cold winter months, please share your idea with me!

Enjoy your veggies!

Sincerely, Mike, Cassie, Zea and crew

Roasted Tomato & Pepper Soup

cassie — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 22:02:00 +0000

Recipe: Roasted Tomato & Pepper Soup

Ingredients

5 tomatoes, cored (if necessary) and quartered
1 large red bell pepper or 2 sweet carmen peppers, seeded and quartered
3 medium yellow onions, peeled, quartered
extra-virgin olive oil
5 plump cloves of garlic, unpeeled
fine-grain sea salt
2 – 3 cups light vegetable stock or water
1/4 teaspoon smoked paprika
mined fresh basil, used as garnish

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 375F degrees and position 2 racks in the middle of the oven. Line 2 rimmed baking sheets with parchment paper, alternately you can just rub them down with a thin glaze of olive oil.
Arrange the tomatoes, skin side down, on a baking sheet. Coat the bell pepper and onions with olive oil and put them on the other baking sheet along with the garlic, place the pepper skin side down as well. Give both sheets a light showering of salt, then bake until the tomatoes start to collapse and the onions start to brown and caramelize, about 45 minutes. Turn the onions if they start getting overly dark on the bottom.Check on the garlic as well, once the cloves are golden and oozy inside, pull them from the oven.
Peel the garlic, dump all of the roasted vegetables into a big, high-sided bowl, and puree with a hand blender. Alternately, use a conventional blender or food processor and work in batches. Blend in a cup of the stock, and keep adding the rest 1/2 cup at a time until the soup is the desired consistency. I like a little chunk and texture to this soup particularly if the weather has a bit of a chill, but smooth or chunky is your call.
Add the paprika and a bit more salt if needed – adjusting to your taste.

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Two-Bean Pepper Salad

cassie — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 21:56:15 +0000

Recipe: Two-Bean Pepper Salad

Ingredients

1 pound green beans, cut into 1 inch pieces
1 can ( 15-16 oz) red kidney/garbonzo/or cannellini beans
1 cup purple onion, sliced into thin rings
1 cup sweet red pepper, finely chopped
1/2 cup apple cider vinegar
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup granulated sugar
salt and pepper to taste

Instructions

Blanch the green beans until just tender.
Drain and rinse the beans and the canned beans.
Combine the beans with the sliced onions and peppers.
Mix together the cider vinegar, vegetable oil and sugar until the sugar is well dissolved. Add salt and pepper to taste. Pour over beans and onions and toss well.
Refrigerate for several hours before serving.

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Steve’s Carrot Zucchni Bars

cassie — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 21:38:51 +0000

Recipe: Steve’s Carrot Zucchni Bars

Ingredients

1 1/3 C brown sugar
1 C margarine or butter
6 oz. cream cheese
2 eggs
2 t vanilla
3 C flour
2 t baking powder
1/2 t salt
1 1/3 C grated carrots
1 1/3 C grated, unpeeled zucchini
2/3 C raisins

Frosting:

1/4 C butter
3 oz. cream cheese
1 1/2 C powdered sugar
1/2 t vanilla

Instructions

Beat sugar, margarine/butter and cream cheese in a large bowl with an electric mixer until fluffy.
Beat in eggs and vanilla, beat in dry ingredients. Then stir in zucchini, carrots, and raisins and spoon into a greased 9 x 13 pan.
Bake at 350 F for approximately 38 minutes.
Cool.
Prepare frosting: Beat all ingredients together until fluffy.

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CSA Newsletter: Summer 2010 – Week 12

cassie — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 21:48:08 +0000

Community News: This year we’re trying some new social events to celebrate the Primrose community. In addition to the mid-season crew party we hosted for everyone who works and volunteers at Primrose, we want to throw our first ever end of the season bash. We want you to stop whatever you are doing, grab a pen, and mark your calendar RIGHT NOW for Saturday, October 16^th. This will be Primrose’s first annual Harvest Barn Party! Here’s the concept… the entire Primrose Community (all CSA members, employees, worker shares, and friends of Primrose) will be invited to share dishes, drink warm cider, and dance to live music in the barn at our Pioneer Road farm location. We’re imagining a nice, crisp October night, where a coat, food, and great company is just enough to keep you warm. Mike and I celebrated our wedding in this barn, so we know how great it can be for parties! Guests will be asked to bring a dish to pass and it’s byob. We’ll provide the warm cider and the live tunes. Come ready to eat and with your dancing shoes on. MARK YOUR CALENDAR!

About Your Share: A new item this week is a Joe Parker Hot Pepper. These are great for salsa! Since they can look a lot like sweet carmen peppers, we’ve put them in your bag of green beans so you can distinguish between the two. Also new is red onion for the Regular members. You’ll be happy to see that the tomatoes are still coming. There are less than there have been, but they have been hanging on. What a relief! Remember to relish these…soon they will be gone. Speaking of finished for the season, this is the first time in a while that you won’t receive cucumbers in your share. We still have one planting producing, but its volume is quite low. So if you have a lingering cucumber in your fridge, realize it may be your last local one for a while!

Speaking of shares…. It’s time to start thinking about signing up for our Winter Share. We’ll provide much more information on it in next week’s newsletter. In the meantime, online readers can check out this link for more information. To sign-up, you can download our registration form from the site, just like you did to sign up for the summer share.

From the Fields: As we begin finishing crops (like melons, cucumbers, zucchini plantings, etc.), it is time to start thinking about prepping the soil for next season. We have begun cover-cropping many of our fields in an attempt to protect and rebuild soil for the next year’s growing season. Cover-cropping simply means that we plant a crop that we don’t intend to harvest. It’s main purpose is to add organic matter to the soil, prevent soil run-off, and to suppress weeds. We use two main cover crops: winter rye and hairy vetch. Winter rye is great at keeping weeds down and it survives the cold Wisconsin winter. It’s a great soil builder too. Hairy vetch has a different purpose. It grows quite slowly, meaning it’s not as good at supressing weeds. What it excells at is fixing nitrogen, or taking nitrogen from the air and making it available for plant roots to take up. So quickly it seems we go from tilling up cover-cropped fields, to covering them once again. The cycle continues!

Alright… mark that calendar and enjoy your food!

Sincerely, Mike, Cassie, and Zea

Green Beans Simmered with Tomato

cassie — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 21:43:06 +0000

Recipe: Green Beans Simmered with Tomato

Ingredients

2 T olive oil
1 onion, sliced into thin rounds
1 garlic clove, finely chopped
1.25 pounds of green beans (this is what your bag weighs this week)
1 large ripe tomato, peeled, seeded, and diced
2 t chopped parsley
2 t dried dill
salt and fresh ground pepper

Instructions

Heat the oil in a medium or large skillet, add the onions, and cook over medium heat until soft and translucent, about 4 minutes.
Add the garlic, beans, tomato, and enough water just to cover.
Simmer until the beans are tender, then add the herbs and simmer 1 or 2 minutes more.
Season with salt and pepper to taste.
Serve hot, tepid, or even shilled.

Quick Notes

Adapted from: Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone

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Kale with Olives

cassie — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 21:25:42 +0000

Recipe: Kale with Olives

Ingredients

1 bunch kale, stems and ribs removed
4 T olive oil
1/3 C pitted Kalamata olives, coarsely chopped
1/4 t red pepper flakes
salt
1 lemon, quartered
minced garlic added is a great variation

Instructions

Chop and rinse the kale.
Lightly stir-fry the kale in the oil for 3-5 minutes, until tender and bright green. The water used to rinse the leaves will be enough to steam the leaves.
Remove from heat and toss immediately with the oil, olives, pepper and salt. Serve with lemon wedges.

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Lentil and Fresh Tomato Soup

cassie — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 21:18:41 +0000

Recipe: Lentil and Fresh Tomato Soup

Summary: Still have parsley and celery in the fridge? Here’s a wholesome way to use them up!

Ingredients

2 t sunflower or olive oil
1 large onion, chopped
2 celery ribs
3/4 C split red lentils
2 large tomatoes, seeded, peeled and roughly chopped
4 C vegetable stock or chicken stock
2 t dried Italian herbs
salt and pepper to taste
parsley to garnish

Directions

Heat the oil in a large saucepan. Add the onion and celery and cook for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add the lentils and cook for 1 minutes
Stir in the tomatoes, stick, dried herbs, salt, and pepper. Cover, bring to a boil and simmer for about 20 minutes, stirring occasionally.
When the lentils are cooked and tender, set the soup aside to cool slightly.
Puree in a blender or food processor until smooth. Season with slat and pepper, return to the saucepan and reheat gently until piping hot. Ladle into soup bowls to serve and garnish each with chopped parsley.

CSA Newsletter: Summer 2010 – Week 11

cassie — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 22:16:43 +0000

Community News: We just wanted to say thank you to our membership! In light of the late blight news, there has just been an outpouring of support from you, our membership. Your notes and messages have been really uplifting. Here we are, frustrated that we won’t have as much to give you as we would like, and you are reassuring us that you understand. Many thanks.

From the Fields: All of your well wishes must have somehow communicated with the winds, because the blight has not advanced as quickly as we expected. With Friday’s downpour, we thought for sure we’d come back to blackened fields, but not so! We were able to harvest quite a bit yesterday and today, so you can all expect another week of tomatoes. We wanted to prepare you for the worst last week… it makes this week’s tomatoes that much more special, because we weren’t sure we’d have them!

So what is this late blight, any way? Well it is the same fungus that caused the Irish potato famine in the 1800s. The spores of this fungus can travel up to 40 miles from their source. On a tomato plant they tend to attack the leaves first, as they have done on ours. The tell-tale sign is a blackish, gray lesion. The blight travels through the plants and kills off the greens. Sometimes it spreads to the fruit. We try to avoid picking these fruits, so they shouldn’t be

Late Blight on Tomato Fruit

ending up in your share. It is possible, however, that a fruit could be picked with a small lesion that we don’t see and it progresses once with you. If you see your tomato develop what you see in the picture posted in this newsletter, bag it up, throw it away, and wash your hands to avoid unintentional spreading to backyard gardens, etc. ** Remember, it is normal to have lots of little black spots on your tomato, like there have been in previous weeks – this is NOT blight.**

Okay, so what else is going on besides the blight? The season’s onions have all been harvested, and they look great. Meanwhile, the red peppers are starting to come in strong. Carmen peppers are a favorite of mine. They are so sweet and delicious. We can eat them raw like an apple. Slice some up with an heirloom and parsley over cottage cheese… a favorite summertime lunch. In other news, the green and gold zucchini and cucumbers are starting to wane. Can you believe it? You probably felt like you were swimming in them at times, but there is only one planting left. After that we’ll have to leave the green and gold to the Pack. (Sorry – first pre-season game was this weekend – couldn’t resist the reference!)

Share News: The new items continue…. It’s week 11 and there has been something new every week so far! This week our new item is leeks. See the super yummy linguine recipe for this week.

Enjoy! Sincerely, Mike, Cassie, Zea, and Crew

Linguine Spicy Leek and Tomato Sauce

cassie — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 21:08:05 +0000

Recipe: Linguine Spicy Leek and Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
2 garlic cloves, chopped
1/2 teaspoon dried crushed red pepper
1/2 teaspoon fennel seeds
2 medium leeks (white and pale green parts only), split lengthwise, sliced crosswise
1 1/4 pounds tomatoes, diced
1/2 cup dry white wine
1 tablespoon white wine vinegar
12 ounces linguine
1 3/4 cups freshly grated Parmesan cheese, divided

Instructions

Heat oil in large skillet over medium-high heat. Add next 3 ingredients; sauté 1 minute. Add leeks; sauté until beginning to soften, about 4 minutes. Add diced tomatoes; stir 1 minute. Add wine and vinegar; bring to boil. Cover and cook until tomatoes break down, stirring often, about 5 minutes.
Meanwhile, cook pasta in large pot of boiling salted water until tender but still firm to bite. Drain, reserving 1 1/4 cups pasta cooking liquid.
Add pasta, 1/2 cup reserved pasta liquid, and 3/4 cup cheese to sauce in skillet. Toss over medium-high heat until sauce coats pasta, adding more liquid by 1/4 cupfuls if dry. Season with salt and pepper. Serve, passing 1 cup cheese separately.

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