Welcome to the 13th week of the 2014 Pitchfork & Crow Summer CSA!

Here’s what’s in the share:

• Bunching Onions
  
• Parsley – Not sure about parsley or looking for inspiration?  Check out the recipes below
  
• Golden Detroit Beets – an heirloom variety that was first sold in 1828, these gold beets won’t bleed like their red counterparts and may be the sweet trick to winning over your friends who are less than enthused about earthier tasting beets
  
• Adirondack Red Potatoes – a variety bred to be red both inside and out, it’s high in antioxidants too!
• Salad Mix
  
• Summer Squash
  
• Cucumbers
  
• Tomatoes
  
• Rattlesnake Pole Beans – a tasty heirloom bean with purple streaks that fade when cooked.  These are classic string beans in that they have a string along their seam that you’ll want to remove during prep.
  
• Melons – a mix of cantaloupes and honeydew
  

CSA Open House Saturday!  I forgot to remind folks last week that the next CSA open house is coming up.  Check your weekly email for the official details, but we’d love to see you all on Saturday evening here at the farm!

Last week a member asked us about creating a Facebook group for P&C CSA members to share recipes, suggestions, and photos of how folks are using up their shares each week.  She lamented having photos of tasty dishes without a great place to share them with people who would appreciate them.  And who would appreciate them more than those of us with the very same vegetables to eat up?!

Well, we listened, and we hope you’ll join us over at the new Pitchfork & Crow CSA Facebook Group.  It’s a closed group for members of the farm, so join up and feel free to post any tasty recipes, helpful tips, and inspirational photos of how you’re making use of your share of the harvest each week.

After a day off at the beach (whoa!), we hunkered back down on the farm this week.  Our work was filled with transplanting the last of our overwintering and fall brassicas, direct sowing a plethora of winter greens, fall radishes, and turnips, and harvesting the majority of the pear orchard.  That was in between the weeding, cultivating, and irrigating of course.

I believe we’ve made it through the height of another season of planting.  Now we focus on catching up on all of the tasks we’ve been meaning to get to for months.  And we continue weeding and irrigating and begin the big harvests, such as this week’s pears.  Onward!

Many thanks to the volunteers that have helped out with the pear harvests recently.  Our fruit cooler is filling up with stacks of ripening pears, and we appreciate your help!

I think this is the best year yet for pears from this orchard.  Although the resident gang of starlings took a good portion of the Asian pears, the stacks of pears in the cooler suggest we still have plenty to go around in future CSA shares.  Unfortunately the plums did not fair so well this season and their production is minimal.  We do have more apples both in our stores and still on the trees, and we’re looking forward to the fall CSA cidering event!

We’re lucky to have so many established fruit trees on the farm, thanks to previous owners of this land.  Each year we’re learning more about managing this resource and continuing to share the literal fruits of that labor.

 

Enjoy the vegetables and we’ll see you next week!

Your farmers,
Jeff Bramlett and Carri Heisler

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Here are a few recipes to get you inspired:

Pickled Beet and Cucumber Salads

• 1 cup rice vinegar
• 1/2 cup chopped shallots
• 10 teaspoons sugar

• 2 pounds small red beets, trimmed

• 2 large English hothouse cucumbers (about 1 pound each), halved lengthwise, seeded, cut crosswise into 1/4-inch-thick pieces

• 2/3 cup chopped fresh chives