The Winter Share: What do I do with all of this stuff?

Welcome to winter eating in New England. While we have put together a fairly diverse group of storage crops for you, we know from personal experience that it can be a fun challenge to keep putting together interesting meals. There are, in fact, several different ways to prepare most of the storage crops, and together with the varying flavors and textures of these crops, it is possible to achieve a higher level of diversity than is immediately apparent. We have a section on the website where you can post your favorite recipes; we’d love to have more recipes posted up there. Go to http://www.simplegiftsfarmcsa.com/RecipeDirectory.cfm to check it out! Below, we provide a description of our favorite general techniques, along with our favorite candidates for each technique, followed by a description of each of the crops along with a forecast for this year’s supply.

Boiled in soups or stews: A nice warm soup or stew is just the thing for a cold winter night. All of our storage crops can go into these, and mixing them adds flavor to the whole pot as well as diverse nutrition and a sequence of flavors in the chunks. Blending the soup can change the whole thing to a thicker, smoother experience. Our favorites: Potato, Carrot, Celeriac, Beet, Turnip, Parsnip, Squash


Mashed: If you boil a mixture of roots, and mash them like mashed potatoes, you get a special twist on a favorite comfort food. Don’t skimp on the butter or olive oil. We recommend at least 50% potatoes or sweet potatoes. Our Favorites: Potato, Sweet Potato, Celeriac, Beet, Turnip, Parsnip, Squash.

Roasted or “oven-fried”: Roasted roots are a favorite of our kids. Baking them at 375-400 in long, skinny shapes in a single layer with a generous coat of olive oil and salt makes them more like an oven fry. We also like to bake them for about 3 hours at 450, with a combination of water, lemon juice, olive oil, salt, and spices (see the recipe “Greek Potatoes” on the website. Keep adding water so that the roots are covered for the first 2 hours, and then uncover and let the water boil off for the last hour. This takes some time, but is really fantastic. Our favorites: Potato, Sweet potato, Beet, Celeriac.
 
Grated or thin-sliced salad: something raw and crunchy can really chase away those winter blues. Roots can be grated over your greenhouse greens, or made into a “slaw”-type salad of their own. We like lemon juice or vinegar and olive oil instead of mayonnaise for slaws. Slicing crunchy roots into matchsticks and serving them with dip is another winner, especially with the kids. Our favorites: Carrot, Beet, Kohlrabi, Celeriac, Daikon.

Your winter share:
Following is a list of what you’ll be getting from us over the course of the winter. Store everything in your fridge, unless otherwise indicated below.
Salad greens (Simple Gifts Farm, Certified Organic):
We offer salad greens as a special treat during the winter. The greenhouses are all planted; we have a heated greenhouse that will provide salad for the depths of the winter, and five unheated greenhouses that will provide fresh greens for the slightly milder months (December, February and March). We have also added two “caterpillar tunnels,” and a whole field section in “low tunnels;” lower cost alternatives to building a whole greenhouse. Many people are surprised that it is possible to grow greens without heat in the winter here; the trick is to plant things that can really take some cold, and plant them early enough that they can grow while we still have some daylength. We also have some plantings that went in later and are just teeny seedlings waiting for the longer days of February. These little seedlings will provide greens, scallions, radishes, and other treats for the upcoming Spring share. You are guaranteed at least 10 one-half pound bags over the course of the winter share. We try to mix it up so that sometimes you will get salad greens and other times spinach or arugula. We have more salad greens planted this year, so there will likely often be extra greens for sale.

Winter Squash (Czajkowski Farm, Certified organic):
We have butternut squash this year. We'll be giving you your whole share at once, since the squash takes very different storage conditions then the other storage crops--you can store a box of them much more cheaply than we can store crates of them. These are best stored at room temperature (a little cooler is better if you have a cool basement or attic that won't freeze) after you get them home.

Potatoes (Simple Gifts Farm, and Red Fire Farm, Certified Organic): This year our potatoes are almost all the "Keuka

Gold" variety. Keukas are similar to the famous Yukon Gold, butr were bred at Cornell for production in the Northeast  and in organic cropping systems.  Not everyone realizes it, but potatoes are high in Vitamins A and C and Potassium; they are true vegetables and not just starch! We also have a little bit of All-Blues, which are rich in those anti-oxidants we are all supposed to be eating more of. If you cook them just until they are done, the purple color will hold better.

Carrots (Simple Gifts Farm and Red Fire Farm, Certified Organic):
We have nice sweet carrots this year, though our yields suffered from the hot dry conditions in late summer when we were trying to get them to germinate. We have some of ours, and got some additional carrots in from Atlas Farm as well.

Beets (Simple Gifts Farm, Certified Organic, and Crimson and Clover Farm, Chemical free): Try baking them—the skin should peel right off. They are also nice grated into a salad or as the featured ingredient in borscht. There’s something about eating colorful food that takes the edge of a grey winter day, and beets are perhaps the most colorful vegetable there is!

Onions (Simple Gifts Farm, Certified Organic): There should be plenty of these for the winter. Onions like cold and dry conditions; don’t put them in the vegetable drawer in your fridge.

Sweet potatoes (Simple Gifts Farm, Certified Organic):
Use these up quick because they will not store for the whole winter. They make a nice change to any of your potato routines—try making some oven fries the next time you want a side dish for hot dogs or burgers (or not dogs or veggie burgers). Store these at room temperature, in a dry, dark place.

Turnip (Simple Gifts Farm, Certified Organic):
We have several different kinds of turnips this year. Along with the typical purple-tops, which are nice mashed with potatoes or in a stew, we have Scarlet Queens, and Gold Balls, which are both particularly sweet and therefore nice grated onto a salad.

Celeriac (Simple Gifts Farm, Certified Organic):
Not everyone is familiar with these: cook them like a potato, and then appreciate their aromatic flavor which is like celery but so much more. We hope you come to love them like we do. We tend to put 20% celeriac into anything we are doing with potatoes; mashed, roasted, stews, or home fries are particularly great.

Parsnip (Simple Gifts Farm, Certified Organic):
These are like a sweet, aromatic carrot, with a slightly starchier texture. They aren’t usually eaten raw, and are nice with a sweet mustard glaze.

Rutabaga (Simple Gifts Farm, Certified Organic):
These are like a turnip, but much sweeter and creamier.  They are great mashed with potatoes or winter squash.  Parsnips and rutabaga are both crops we have struggled with in the past, but that came in great this year!

Kohlrabi (Red Fire Farm, Certified Organic):
These are a recent discovery for us; they are sweet and delicious thin-sliced or grated in a salad. They can also be lightly sautéed or stir-fried. They are the same species as broccoli, and taste a little bit like a sweeter broccoli stem.

Cabbage (Riverland Farm, Certified Organic): We got a nice load of cabbage from our neighbors at Riverland Farm.  They keep surprisingly well, though you may want to peel a layer off of them late in the winter.

Watermelon or Daikon Radish (Simple Gifts Farm, Certified Organic): These are both great for a grated raw salad. The watermelon radish is an unassuming pale green on the outside, with a stunning psychedelic red interior. The flavor is sweet, and the skins are a little spicy, so peel them if you want the mild flavor. Daikons define mild flavor—the white roots are nice grated in a slaw with some carrots and other roots. They also make a great lacto-fermented pickle—if you make these, please post a recipe on the website

Simple Gifts and the Complexity of Gratitude

Rutabaga painting by Jaimie Wolf.

It is November, and about to rain. I decide to make beef stew for dinner as I hold a giant rutabaga. For many years, calamities have befallen the rutabaga crop at Simple Gifts Farm. An apprentice accidentally plowed them into the ground one season. Another year they were infested with root maggots. The following season we covered them with row cover to keep out the flies which lay root maggot eggs, and the plants rotted in the humidity under there.  But this year, there are bins of enormous, bulbous, purple-yellow rutabagas at the farm. For these, my favorite of all root vegetables. I am grateful. They are a simple gift, but the simplicity is deepened with a counterpoint of complexity.

A farm plunges us into the complexity of gratitude. To plant our hopes and livelihoods in this particular place gives us – gives us – so much to lose. To have so much to lose is a gift. As we plant and tend and harvest with love, loss and abundance intertwine. Gratitude is not turning one’s back on what is terrifying or what we have lost. It is pausing in the perfect stillness in the world, to be sure, and it is also the tenderness toward what we care about enough to be afraid.

Our little family went to a performance by the Royal Frog Ballet recently, titled “All Things Fall.” That the pageant on this theme played out on a neighboring farm was fitting. The performance, like farming, was expansive and physical, sometimes raw and inconclusive. The program included an essay, which asserted this truth: “We realize that all things fall. The more life we have, the more we have to lose, and we do, and we will.”

And sometimes it is the abundance that is overwhelming. While immersed in life’s waterfall of obligations – even when it is what we love – it is sometimes hard to breathe. Farmer Jeremy, my husband, is coming home today from California, from a board meeting of the Organic Farming Research Foundation, from another loving task he does to engage with the world. I am making beef stew for dinner, and proofreading a beautiful book, and wrestling with the compost bins, and parenting my large and hilarious children. It is all so much.

The refrigerator is overwhelmed, too. The vegetable drawer is completely inadequate for the bags of greens and burly vegetables that march in from the farm. They spill into the cheese drawer, crowd out the pot of leftover rice, push the quart of maraschino cherries to the back (yes, even organic farmers have their little red-dye-number-five secrets, which are quite tasty in manhattans). Yet I take a deep breath and plunge in to find the potatoes, the carrots, the onions, the celeriac, and the parsnips. Parsnips always make me think of Farmer Dave. They are a favorite of his, and I think of how his eyes gleam with joy and a dash of mischief as he describes how good they are grilled, or roasted.

It is a complex joy to share this farm with all of you. Running a CSA is a far more personal, more complicated way to run a farm than wholesaling the goods we produce. But it is because of that complex web of connections that we are so overwhelmingly grateful to you. We hope you feel that nourishment of gratitude, as you nourish us with your presence and your stake in the farm.

The main season at the farm is coming to its pause. Most fields wear a green blanket of cover crops. Yet – we keep at our work all year. The hoophouses are full of greens, some just planted. The fallen leaves of this summer’s abundance steam their way to compost that will build this farm’s soil. The walk-in cooler is stacked with carrots, potatoes, and parsnips, and rutabaga. We look forward to sharing our gratitude through the winter season ahead.

Ode to the Potato

Jean-Francois Millet, Potato Planters (19th century, France)

Behold the potato. This staple crop, from the high Andes to Europe and then to New England, grounds many a meal. What would Thanksgiving dinner be without a bowl of fluffy mashed potatoes? What would be a burger without the fries, or a summer picnic with no potato salad? Potatoes do double duty as starch and veggie; they provide complex carbohydrates, fiber, Vitamins A & C and potassium. They are filling, wholesome comfort food.

We love to grow potatoes at Simple Gifts Farm. Potatoes are one of the earlier crops that we plant, in April when the fields dry out enough to work. We start even earlier, ordering the seed potatoes in February.  If we keep them warm in the greenhouse, they will start little sprouts, and then we expose them to light by taking them out of the bags, which makes the sprouts green and harder to break off.  This process, called greensprouting, allows us to harvest the first new potatoes at least a week earlier, and also lets the potatoes get that much bigger before the aboveground plants die back in late July and early August.

The potato harvest begins in early July, with new potatoes. We aim to harvest some precious pint-fuls of red, white & blue potatoes for July 4. My favorite way to serve the first tiny potatoes is with tender, sweet peas. Later in July, we harvest new potatoes in larger quantities for great summer potato salads. The thin, tender skins and a crisp, waxy texture define new potatoes.

Now is the time to harvest the fall potato crop. These spuds have thicker skins and a starchy texture. They keep well under cool, dry conditions, and are a food to sustain us through the cold winter months.

These are the aboveground virtues of the potato. They are dirt-nestled tubers, though, and the potato harvest is an invitation for us to commune with the underground, the soil, and to behold the unseen. Harvesting potatoes is deeply satisfying, at a visceral and maybe even poetic level. Farmkid Jesse’s superhero name is Spudicto. When his sixth grade class received the assignment to write (with inspiration from Neruda) an ode to an everyday thing, his subject was The Potato.

So, come join our Second Annual CSA Potato Harvest! Farmer Jeremy will pull the potato digger behind the tractor to loosen the soil and get the potatoes to the surface. The community effort is to gather these potatoes into bags and safely to the barn. Of course, it would be a tease to harvest the potatoes, and not get to eat any. So, we will follow the harvest with a simple lunch of fire-roasted potatoes and chili.

Details:

When:  Saturday, October 26^th from 9 A.M. to 1P.M.

Where:  Near the barn that can be seen from Pine Street.  Park by the distribution barn and walk back through the farm.  The potato roast will happen on the Festival Hill

Bring: Toppings you would like to eat on baked potatoes (if you want—we will have plenty of chili to top them off with). Kids and dogs welcome, but please know you’ll need to keep them back from the machinery.

Wear: comfortable, warm clothes that you don’t mind getting dirty

See you there!

Audrey, newsletter editor (and whose ancestry traces to great potato-eating countries of Ireland and Germany)

Pollinators on the Farm

Yesterday morning, I was picking raspberries from the small planting in the front yard of our house. At first, I didn’t notice the multitude of bumblebees on the flowers, because they were so quiet. I don’t know if they were actively collecting pollen and nectar from the many-pistiled flowers, or if they were coming to the end of their season. Only the queen survives the winter. But I felt an unexpected tenderness for these fuzzy invertebrates. And gratitude. Without bees and other pollinators, much of the food we grow at the farm would not come to fruition.

 

Just a few of the native bees in North America. Source: pollinator.org

Honeybees are in the spotlight because of their plight with Colony Collapse Disorder, which has decimated many hives and directly affected honey producers and farmers who rely on honeybees to pollinate crops. As with many serious illnesses, there is likely a web of direct and indirect causes. Pesticide exposure is clearly one (you can read this nice article from the Boston Globe magazine if you’d like to learn more. )

The perils may be greater but less understood for native bees. Like many of our beloved agricultural species, honeybees were brought to America and are not native to this place. However, there are approximately 4,000 species of native bees in North America. Over 80 species of bees pollinate berry crops in Maine and Massachusetts! This nearly overwhelming diversity of wild creatures directly supports our designed farm ecosystem. In turn, we must make a place for these wild citizens in our farm.

Native bees often do a better job of pollinating crop plants than do honeybees. For example, native bees increase the yield of cherry tomatoes. Although self-fertile, tomatoes cross-pollinated by bees produce more fruit. To release pollen, the flower must be vibrated at a specific frequency. Honeybees cannot do this, but a suite of native bees has the right vibration, an ability called ‘buzz pollination.’ How cool is that?

Bees need flowering plants throughout the growing season, nesting habitat, and are sensitive to pesticides. Many native bees are in decline because of habitat loss and pesticide exposure. We could do more to enhance flower resources and habitat for bees at our farm, but our hedgerows, flower plantings, and organic practices go a long way to creating conditions for these insects to thrive. Our you-pick flower and herb plantings are for your enjoyment and use, and also provide a variety of flowers throughout the season for pollinators. The hedgerows across the farm provide food and nesting habitat. Although our farm is in a residential area, the Mill River Conservation Area and well-loved flower gardens of many of our neighbors help too.

It isn’t only for our needs that we care about native bees. This is their world too, and they belong here. It is near the end of the season for many of these creatures, and I hope you will join me in wishing them every success as they prepare for winter.

If you want to learn more, the Xerces Society has lots of great information not only on native pollinators, but the wild wild world of invertebrates and their conservation needs. I also enjoyed visiting Tom Sullivan’s booth (Pollinators Welcome) at the Garlic & Arts Festival this past weekend.

Picnic at the Farm

Here are some pictures from our member potluck!  We had a great time--hope to see you all next time!

Road Trip!

Farmer Jeremy talks up organic farming at Farm Aid 

Over the weekend, Farmer Jeremy and I took at field trip to Saratoga Springs, NY. While we didn’t have the chance to visit any farms, we spent time with thousands of farmers, farm advocates. . . and rock stars. Farm Aid 2013 was a sensory overload, with 25,000 concertgoers, a ridiculous number of beer vendors, giant pixilated screens, a rainstorm, and some excellent tunes.

Willie Nelson, Neil Young and John Mellencamp started Farm Aid in 1985 in response to the farm crisis. At the time, farm foreclosures were epidemic. Now, after 28 years, these musicians (now joined by Dave Matthews) put on a benefit show each year, and Farm Aid helps to fund and coordinate a variety of farming organizations.

In 1985, as a suburban teenager, I heard about Farm Aid and imagined that farmers were all Midwestern white men, with faded wives, like Uncle Henry and Auntie Em. I saw those folks at the concert (as of 2007, only 14% of farm primary operators were women). Much of New York state is more Midwest than Midtown – I know this first-hand, having grown up in Rochester. The big-screen images on the main stage reinforced the American archetype of farm: round hay bales dotting flat country, sunflowers, a silo next to a red barn, Holstein cows crossing a lonely road, a John Deere tractor.

Farms and farmers encompass much more than this stock image. At the concert, I also met young farmers, a Cornell Ag Extension agent dressed as a carrot, a sparkle-eyed woman with a plan to strengthen urban-rural connections in New York called “Milk Not Jails.” I saw these groups from differing fields talking about their shared passion for family farms. I paid $2 for a concert-priced NY state apple at a stand next to the corporate beer stalls. I read Neil Young’s press statement connecting how we farm with exacerbating or mitigating climate change.

Farm Aid supports many organizations who work to strengthen family farms, and who advocate and build support for local and organic food. For those who wanted to know more, a tent full of organizations advocating for farmers had the chance to share their passion with the crowd. Jeremy was there to talk up the Organic Farming Research Foundation (OFRF), as a farmer and board member. He spoke with people from traditional family farms who were considering a transition to organic farming, as well people who already farm or garden organically.  OFRF supports research on organic farming methods, as well as pro-organic policies in Washington, and other efforts to advance organic farming in the nation.   

At 6pm, the booths packed up and it was time to join the throngs for the big party. It was fun, though we didn’t last to the concert’s end. Willie Nelson, age 80, came on well past Jeremy’s farmer bedtime.

Sunshine Power on the Farm

As our swiftly tilting planet zooms from summer solstice toward autumnal equinox, I increasingly appreciate the light and warmth of our sun. I’ve been reflecting on this most basic of forces and how we make the most of it at Simple Gifts Farm.

The greenhouse effect, in the original sense

Happy plants in one of our hoophouses

The greenhouse effect has a negative connotation, when used in the context of gases in the earth’s atmosphere absorbing and scattering thermal energy, thus allowing the earth’s CO₂-enriched atmosphere to hold extra heat. However, using the greenhouse effect in its original sense is critical to powering a local food system. Short wavelength light energy passes easily through the hoophouse plastic, but once converted to longer-wavelength heat energy, reduced airflow inside the structure holds in the warmth. Our array of hoophouses, caterpillar tunnels and greenhouses allow us to extend the growing season. At 42 degrees North, we receive enough sunlight for plants to grow for about 10 months of the year, but heat is more limited. Given protection from the cold, we can harvest some crops year-round. We carefully plan fall hoophouse plantings to take into account slowing growth into late autumn, and very little growth in the dark days of December and January (which Eliot Coleman poetically calls “The Persephone Months”).

As a side note, the ability to keep plant foliage dry and control the amount of water the plants receive is also really important. In a wet summer with high disease pressure, like this one, this is possibly an even bigger advantage than extending the warm season.

Photovoltaic and solar thermal
Our farm is not a closed energy system, and some of the largest energy inputs are used to power our electricity needs. In 2010, we installed a 9.8 kilowatt array on the share barn roof. This supplies approximately 60% of our power needs.

We also have a solar hot-water system that supplements the heat in the greenhouse.  During this time of year, we are trying to store some heat in hot-water barrels that we can draw on during the colder months.  In January, the level of heat from the solar system is small, but we circulate that warmer water through a radiant heat system so that the heat goes right to the plant roots. By March, the days will be longer and we will be starting our first seedlings of 2014, so we need more heat to get those seeds to germinate and grow.  At that point, the solar hot-water system will provide a significant supplement to our wood-pellet boiler,

Photosynthesis

This intricate biochemical dance of photons, water, electrons, chlorophyll, and Rubisco is Nature’s true alchemy. The crop plants of the farm make their own food, given sunshine and water. Pasture-raised cows are one step removed from these producers. Need a photosynthesis review? Check out this rap!

 Techno-geek bonus!

In reviewing my facts on photosynthesis and photovoltaics, I came across some provocative lines of research into artificial photosynthesis. I’m a forest ecologist, and know that the wood and food, carbon removal from the atmosphere, beauty, and habitat provided by plants is something that we won’t trump in a lab. However, with the global energy and environmental pressures, an all of the above strategy may have a place for this approach.

Here are a couple of links if you’d like to find out more:

This article from Science magazine in 2011 received a fair bit of attention – here’s a popular write-up from Scientific American, and this article from February 2013 in Optics and Photonics News gives a nice overview of the overall effort.

Warmly,

Audrey