Sogn Valley Farm CSA Newsletter Fall Week 5 | Nov 6-7, 2018

What's In The Box

Spinach: Harvested just before temperatures plummet this week, this spinach is frost-sweetened and good to eat both fresh and cooked. Try making a salad topped with beets - the recipe is linked below.

Beets: We love adding roasted beets to green salads with walnuts and goat cheese, such as the one described in this recipe. We also ate beets last weekend using an out-of-the-box idea from farm crew member Elyssa - on pizza! Simply sauté or roast beets (1 large or 2 medium) until tender, then puree with a little tomato sauce. Be liberal with the olive oil when cooking the beets. Use this as the sauce for your pizza. It should do two medium crusts. We topped ours with carmelized onions and some hard cheese.

Delicata squash: This sweet winter squash is one of my favorites for cubing and roasting and sautéing. Its tender skin is edible, but they are also easy to peel should you desire to remove it. We have a market customer who eats sautéed delicata squash in her scrambled egges each morning. We actually ate this for breakfast this morning.

Sweet potatoes: This week's recipe also calls for sweet potatoes, this time in a simple puréed soup, perfect for this chilly fall weather. This variety is 'Bayou Belle,' a specialty variety with purplish skin and nice orange flesh. These tubers tend to be more elongated than others, and you may find a few small sprouts here and there. Just scuff or peel them off.

Carrots: These are at their peak right now. Sweet, crunchy, and perfect for fall cuisine. Use in this week's recipe.

Gold potatoes: As usual, these potatoes were grown by Driftless Organics in western Wisconsin. Members usually have plenty of go-to potato dishes, but we've been enjoying them in hashbrowns with some onion and garlic, in soups, or—predictably—roasted in olive oil, salt, and pepper.

Onions: Weekly members received a good helping of onions last week, but we wanted to make sure every-other-weekers had some in their pantry, as well. Use in this week's recipe.

Garlic: I've mentioned this in a newletter before, but did you know that by mincing up garlic and allowing it to sit on the cutting board for about 15 minutes before cooking, an enzymatic reaction takes place which increases healthy compounds?

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.

Butternut squash — Daikon radish — Red potatoes

Greetings,

Well, in keeping with this year's tradition of truncated transition seasons (remember our snowy April that turned qiuckly to a steamy May?) we enjoyed about a week or two of autumn, as well.

The forecast for the next week is pretty dismal. It's looking like we won't get above freezing for a solid week, with lows dropping into the teens multiple nights. Temperatures that low are enough to damage even the cold- hardiest crop we grow.

And we have a few planted out there that we were hoping to include in the last couple of boxes. We have a planting of spinach that is too small to harvest and now likely won't ever get to maturity. So, too, with some head lettuce, which admittedly was transplanted later than it should have been, but with an average or warmer- than-average year should have sized up by mid-November.

Our best hopes for some fresh greens before the end of the CSA season are salad mix and microgreens. We currently have a lot of salad mix planted in our high tunnel, and while it's still on the small side right now, the tunnel provides warm daytime temps with just a little bit of sunshine. Plus, we can seal the structure up tightly for cold nights and cover the lettuce with additional frost blankets to retain some of the heat gained during the day. With any luck, it should be big enough to harvest for the final box.

We also just seeded a round of microgreens for the last week of CSA.

Barring a heater failure or some other unforeseen production challenge, they should be ready to go in two weeks for your Thanksgiving box.

Extending the growing season into the fall can be such a gamble, as the weather will do what it wants to do. The safest best is to plant winter greens (we're talking lettuce, spinach, kale) early enough so they size up when weather is reliably warm, and then can hunker down in stasis under row cover once it gets cold. The challenge for us is we use our greenhouse space for warm season crops (tomatoes, cucumbers) during the summer. And since the harvest season for tomatoes can extend weeks beyond the ideal planting date for winter greens, the tunnel is usually occupied.

The good news is we have loads of beautiful storage crops stowed safely in our coolers, so there'll be plenty of good food coming your way over the next two weeks.

Dana