In Your Box
Broccoli- big/giant broccoli heads or bunches
Fennel- a white bulb with feather green fronds. Remove the fronds for best storage. Use finely chopped in ground pork on pizza, caramelized or raw on salads.
Cucumbers:
Zucchini and Summer Squash- lots this week perfect time for grilling or pickling or topping pizza!
Garlic scapes –
Basil –
Fresh Sweet Onions with tops- store these in the fridge and use the tops like scallions.
Beets- remember to use your greens (like cooked spinach). These babies are sweet.
Arrowhead cabbage- fulls only
Next Week’s Best Guess: garlic scapes, broccoli, carrots, zucchini, cucumbers, mint or other herbs, snap beans, cauliflower/cabbage, kale.
Important Reminders
Please make sure to return and DO NOT TAKE HOME CSA boxes. We were several short last week at Wausau and Merrill sites.
If you are a zucchini enthusiastic you can pick up 8 free zucchini or summer squash at the farm, Wausau or Marshfield Saturday farmers markets
News from the Farm
It has been a great growing week on the farm – while many people may not love the humidity we can almost hear the plants grow. We were able to get in timely weeding, hay making and planting between the storms and only had minor wind damage to 2 hoophouses. A big thank you to Logan who continues to stay late for weeding, to close the greenhouses after dark (when we have forgotten) and the wonderful workershares and workers who got all our weeding and harvesting checklist done early this week! We have had a great week as a farm crew.
This week is Ted’s 6th birthday (Friday) 6 years ago, early Thursday morning before the CSA pack (we used to pack the morning of delivery) Ted was born after a thunderstorm and after Kat picked a couple of bushels of beans and just in time for breakfast! Time has flown by.
In veggie news we are battling a little bit of disease in our hoophouse cucumbers but are trying heavy pruning and more airflow as preventative measures. We are hoping for cherry tomatoes within 2 weeks, and summer crops are starting to boom in. Our broccoli is magnificent and we are excited for cabbages, beans, and new potatoes on the horizon. Stop by the farmers market this week for free extra zucchini J
Have a delicious week – Kat, Tony, Ted, Riley and Maple
Recipes from Heather Busigs Kitchens
Garlic scape pesto: Adapted from Vanilla and Bean. Makes 1+ cups of pestp. Ingredients: 10 Garlic Scapes, 1/3 C Pecorino Cheese (or Parmesan, Asiago mix), shredded, 1/3 C of Pine Nuts (or almonds), 1/3 C of Olive Oil, juice and zest from half a lemon, Pinch of Salt, A few grinds of Pepper. It is okay to omit the nuts or the cheese. If you have fresh herbs, such as dill, basil or parsley around, you can add 1/2 cup. And you can also add up to 1 cup of chopped greens. Prep: 1. Trim garlic scapes cutting just below the bulb. Discard / bulb and roughly chop. In a food processor, add the nuts, cheese, lemon zest and juice, optional herbs/greens and scapes. Process by pulsing until the mixture begins to break down. Add the salt and pepper. With the processor running, slowly add all the olive oil. Continue to process until all the ingredients are incorporated and broken down, about one minute. Store in a covered container in the fridge and enjoy within a week. Also, you can freeze the pesto in a jar or in an ice-cube tray. Once frozen, tray, remove and place in a ziplock bag in the freezer.
Jim Lahey's no knead pizza dough. Makes enough dough for about 4 pizzas. Ingredients: 500 grams (17 ½ ounces or about 3 ¾ cups) all-purpose flour, plus more for shaping the dough, 1 gram (1/4 teaspoon) active dry yeast, 16 grams (2 teaspoons) fine sea salt, 350 grams (1 ½ cups) water. Directions: In a medium bowl, thoroughly blend the flour, yeast, and salt. Add the water and, with a wooden spoon or your hands, mix thoroughly. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap or a kitchen towel and allow it to rise at room temperature (about 72°F) for 18 hours or until it has more than doubled. It will take longer in a chilly room and less time in a very warm one. Flour a work surface and scrape out the dough. Divide it into 4 equal parts and shape them: For each portion, start with the right side of the dough and pull it toward the center; then do the same with the left, then the top, then the bottom. (The order doesn’t actually matter; what you want is four folds.) Shape each portion into a round and turn seam side down. Mold the dough into a neat circular mound. The mounds should not be sticky; if they are, dust with more flour.If you don’t intend to use the dough right away, wrap the balls individually in plastic and refrigerate for up to 3 days. Return to room temperature by leaving them out on the counter, covered in a damp cloth, for 2 to 3 hours before needed. Preheat the oven to 500 degrees. Assemble your pizzas. We love pesto as a base, top with cheese, left over meat, and slices of fresh veggies. Bake for 10-12 minutes and check pizzas. If you have a thick layer of toppings, it may take up to 25-30 minutes. Enjoy your pizza!
In the heat of summer – an essay about falling in love with farming
Tony announced that I was a real farmer this week after I confessed to stopping at a tractor dealership, unprompted, on the way home from the farmers market, by myself. The past three years since I left my teaching job I have actually become more of a farmer. It is not because I do more farm work than I used to or because more people recognize me as “the farmer” in our family. People still consistently laugh at Tony’s statement that I am the farmer and he just lifts heavy things, partially because they see me as second in command and Tony looks the part. I am more of a farmer now because I have literally allowed myself to fall deeply in love with farming. As ridiculous as it sounds realizing I am literally in love with the experience of being a farmer, farming and being of a farm has been a transformative personal experience this season. My employees, friends and family have had to endure the last three months of my insane ramblings about falling in love with seasons, with farm land, with the sensual nature of work. I chalk some of this up to the fact that I have barely slept in the past 8 years due to babies and breastfeeding, and now I have the energy to enjoy that work fully. But, honestly, during the day, at the end of the day, there is no place I would rather be and nothing I would rather do. I want to be in the farm, of the farm, next to and engrossed in the work.
My love of farming is a love of place and earth – when people say salt of the earth this is what they mean. I am painfully and blissfully aware this season of how the rhythm of farming, the smells, the feel of the humidity, cold and heat, wind, weed emergence, crop growth are part of who I am. When people fall in love with each other they often explain the feeling of want to be in or of the other person to share most intimately everything that person feels. Falling in love with the farm, especially this June, has been an equally sensual and amazing experience. Never wanting the harvest to end, wanting more hours in the light, wanting to give the experience to someone else. I could write a 2000 word essay on dragon flies – that’s how I know I am in love.
My love of farming is a love of culture, friendship and community – Our neighbors Stacey and Tenzin have given us so much because they are here with us to share in the farm season, the extreme emotions and stresses and celebration of farming and the promise of 50-60 more years of learning, growing and becoming better. Our farm friend community, our rural neighbor moving back to start a creamery, and last but not the least the young aspiring farmers who are working for us this season allow me to love farming as a shared experience. I am constantly in awe and touched by the depth and strength of work other people do for our farm. Part of that is a shared love of the lettuce, literally, and of the experience. This season more than ever we have been surrounded by other people who are just as in love with the farm as us – who strive for a seamless trellising session or an efficient harvest. I love that the future is beautiful, bright and filled with friends to cooperate with. Also, sneaking away to drink wine and talk broccoli with a best female farmer friend is a weekly routine that can’t be beat.
My love of farming is farm work – I have known this for a long time and when I look at Riley I can see it in him, I love physical work, competition, and constant challenge. The love of the work is the rhythmic familiar pace of hand weeding and hoeing, the feeling of sitting on a transplanter next to someone who you can laugh with while toiling with, the stacking of hay. It is also the historic and constant challenge to care for 80 different crops, complicated by a space, time, and seasonal arrangement and addressing the needs of those crops, and the soil, to best feed you, our CSA members. When I look out at the carrots for next week I see the promise of a great harvest, the weeds left despite our new cultivator, the history of weeding this year, the weeds of past years, and 2-3 things I must change for the future. Holding that and 1000 moments like that each day is harder than anything I have ever done and also far more rewarding. The work, the prized harvest is also a work of art. You might not have sensed this 2 weeks ago but we grew some of the best lettuce I have ever seen on any farm ever this season, my plans for enough but not too much boy choy worked out, and my broccoli this week literally is the broccoli of 10 years of learning experiences.
My love of farming is family – the love of a family farm is deep, complicated, painful and celebratory. Each of the five members of our nuclear family have a district relationship with the farm which is not the same as the others. It is extremely hard to understand each other’s feelings, frustrations, and happiness when our experiences with the same day are not the same. Despite the differences I cannot explain how deeply I love the farm for what it gives us. Quite literally we lay in the blueberry patch outside our house in July and eat berries after long farm days, my kids bike by themselves to grandparents houses for treats and trout fishing, and tony and I get to look out on rare occasions when we can reflect under a double rainbow and see all we have built over the past 10 years. My kids climb a ladder to play basketball in the hay mow that their father, great aunts, grandparents and great grandparents climbed before them. That is not just romanticism – you can feel it in the finger oiled and warn ladder rungs. One of the most rewarding parts of being a CSA farm is getting to share this experience with others and also having the privilege of growing food for your families. It is also having support to do what I love. And when I say love I mean it.