Sogn Valley Farm CSA Newsletter Fall Week 1 | Oct 9-10, 2018

What's In The Box

Sweet potatoes: Fresh out of the curing chamber, these are now sweeter and better suited to storage. The variety you are receiving is Bayou Belle. We grew this last year, too, and planted it again because we loved the flavorful, dark orange flesh and striking purple skin. The tubers, however, tend to grow elongated and irregular in shape, leading to more breakage during harvest and generally less uniform appearance. On some tubers, we sliced off the rough surface of a broken end so they appear a little cleaner for you. We are quite pleased with another variety, Burgundy, which has even darker orange color, great flavor, and much more uniform shape. It's possible Burgundy will become our new standard.

Winter squash: Two varieties for you this week. The first, acorn, is one you are likely familiar with. Summer share members received this a few weeks ago. The second, Sugar Dumpling, is like a cross between acorn and delicata squash. It is exceptionally sweet and fine-textured when baked.

Red and green bell peppers: Despite having received two frosts down here already, we still have pickable peppers out in the field. These bell peppers can be chopped and tossed in scrambled eggs or a stir fry, stuffed and baked, or used in chili.

Jalapeno peppers: Use along with your cilantro in any number of Mexican-style dishes, such as chile rellenos, this week's recipe. These are fairly spicy, so be sure to wash your hands with soap right after chopping. As always, scraping seeds and membrane out of hot peppers greatly cuts the heat.

Poblano peppers: These mildly spicy peppers are commonly used as a stuffing pepper. The most famous dish that uses these is chile rellenos, this week's recipe. It's a bit of work, but well worth it.

Cilantro: Likely the last appearance of this distinctively fragrant herb, cilantro is called for in this week's recipe. It'll store well in the plastic bag in your fridge.

Slicer tomatoes: We're always pleased to have mid-October tomatoes. The outdoor and caterpillar tunnel tomatoes are pretty well spent by now, but our high tunnel slicers are producing, albeit slowly in this cold weather (we don't heat our high tunnel).Some of you have one tomato that's a little under-ripe - keep it in the paper bag at room temp and it should be ready to eat by the end of the week. Use in this week's recipe.

Kale: This sturdy green is versatile - saute it, add it to soups, bake it into chips, or blend it into smoothies.

Yellow onions: These all-purpose cooking onions are used in this week's recipe. Store in a cool, dark, dry place. Due to the moist conditions over the past few weeks, we're finding that these aren't keeping as well as they normally do

On Deck

Each week, we’ll give some hints about what new items may show up CSA shares in the next 1 -2 weeks. Please note, this is not a guarantee, but our attempt to give you an idea of what’s coming up.

Beets or carrots — Potatoes — Leeks — Watermelon radish — Salad turnips — Head lettuce

Greetings,

Welcome to the first week of fall CSA shares. Most of you were also members during the summer CSA program, but we have a good number of folks joining us just for the fall. Glad to have you with us!

Fall shares typically are heavier on storage crops (winter squash, root crops, potatoes/sweet potatoes, onions, etc.) but we try to put as many freshly harvested items in early boxes as possible. This year, having received our first frost earlier than in years past, there will be somewhat fewer of the warm season crops like peppers and tomatoes. But we're glad to include some in this first box.

Out in the field, the big task in our sights is harvest of the remaining storage root crops in the ground: radishes, turnips, rutabaga, beets, and carrots. Most of these have sized up nicely and are ready to harvest and get into cold storage. The problem is all this rain. Seems like we've gotten rain almost continuously for the past couple of weeks, with no sunny, warm days to dry out the soil.

Carrots, in particular, are very difficult and time-consuming to harvest when soil is muddy. And given that carrots are our largest scale root crop, this is of great concern. Really hoping we'll catch a dry spell with some sun and wind in the next week or two to wick moisture out of the soil. Then you'll see abundant carrots in your shares!

This rainy weather is also exacerbating our existing problems with disease of brassica crops (cabbage, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, broccoli). We have completely lost three varieties of green cabbage, and are left with just one semi- disease resistant variety, which is mostly committed to a kimchi company we supply with veggies. The white cauliflower crop is almost a total loss, and Brussels sprouts are also showing lots of disease symptoms. Hopefully the upper sprouts will size up in the coming weeks and remain free of disease. We have one more planting of broccoli that isn't yet mature, but looks relatively disease-free, so let's hope for another flush of broccoli in a couple weeks. It's really quite dispiriting, this struggle with Black Rot on brassica crops. This crop family is very well suited to our soil and growing conditions, and we've taken lots of precautions to try to impede the occurrence of the disease. But it just keeps showing up. We hear the same story from most of our farmer friends in the area. Expect fall shares to be lighter-than-usual on these crops.

All that aside, we have plenty of great produce for your fall shares and are looking forward to the next six weeks. Bon appetit!

Have a great week.

Dana