2020 CSA Newsletter #14
Whew, this past week was something else. The college continued with remote instruction last week and it made things a bit interesting, especially with the holiday, but we made it. Not much happened out here at the farm except for harvesting for the CSA, Coltivare and the food preservation class. Although, I did manage to seed 2 beds of Japanese salad turnips hoping that they’d have enough time to mature. But looking ahead to the forecast this weekend, it appears that we have some chilly nights coming our way.
Just to throw it in here, the remote learning for the food preservation class was a trip. Since that also is a very hands on class, our plan when/if we have to go remote is to set the students up with kits with all the supplies/ingredients for that week’s recipes. Chef Amanda and I plan to then do a live cooking demonstration of the recipes. So, I channeled my inner Julia Child and along with Chef, put together a demonstration for pesto two ways, kale chips and oven-dried cherry tomatoes. Our timing was a bit off when we tried to pull out finished kale chips from the oven when we were putting in the batch that we had demonstrated, but overall, it went really well. I’m glad I tasted them in the kitchen because when I brought home some of the extra to share with the family, they were gone before I finished working for the day.
Okay, let’s talk about some of the veggies in this week’s share. The sweet peppers are starting to crank right now. There’s a good mix of the yellow and red bells, along with yellow, red and orange Italian frying peppers. My wife made a great batch of stuffed peppers with them and they were delicious. The heirlooms are starting to slow down but they are still beautiful. I decided to harvest the shishito peppers from the field this week due to the projected forecast over the weekend, so they are a bit smaller than previous weeks. The carrots are a mix of baby and full size. They were harvested from a bed near our hoophouses that needs to get prepped for winter plantings. There’s a mix of mini russets in this week’s potatoes. You may notice some black clay-ish scabbing on some of the taters. This is a fungus called rhizoctonia and is totally cosmetic and doesn’t affect the potatoes in storage or taste. Since these are new potatoes and the skin is tender, I didn’t want to rub too hard.
Have a great week!