Week of 8/22/08

This week's vegetables: lettuce, salad mix, leeks, zucchini, summer squash, cucumbers, basil, yellow and green beans, sweet corn, tomatoes, cherry tomatoes (half shares), roma tomatoes, eggplant (half shares)

Next week: lettuce/salad mix, onions, zucchini, cucumbers, sweet corn?, beans?, tomatoes, carrots, parsley, swiss chard

Soon: melons/watermelons, potatoes

Vegetable tidbits: We had planned to give out chard this week, but harvesting everything else took way too much time, and the chard should still be in excellent shape next week (unlike the corn, the salad mix, the tomatoes, etc. which do not last anywhere near that long in the field. ) To save transplanting time, we put a couple of leek seeds together in our seeding flats, and then transplanted them together in the field. Without a lot of elbow room in the field, the leeks didn't develop into the full-sized leeks that is possible, but instead turned into more of a 'baby' leek size. The flavor will be the same; only the diameter of the leeks is smaller than what we may be accustomed to.

Today's salad mix had a relatively high (35?) percentage of chard and beet greens as components of the mix. We wonder if you like this addition, or would rather have us rely predominantly on different varieties of lettuce, and not include the immature beets and chard. It's a bit more of a hassle for us, but if it were up to us, we would opt for a greater variety of components of the salad mix, including both the beets and chard, as well as the assorted spicier greens, which were also in today's mix.

For the rest of this season, just a couple more times we will include the beets/chard in the lettuce mix, though in the future, we could make it a regular addition to the mix.

Speaking of the spicier greens, in addition to putting some arugula in the mix, we also put bunches of arugula in the Exchange Boxes, for those who like it, or for those who wonder what it may be if you see it in the Exchange Box. In the summer and fall, arugula is not very difficult for us to grow, so if the demand were there, we could give everyone bunches of it a few or several times during the season.

Be forewarned that a percentage of the sweet corn will have some critters (e.g. worms) accompanying them. One common method of organically preventing the worms from entering the ears of corn is to 'inoculate' each ear of corn at an early stage of the plant's tasseling, introducing a (organically approved) bacteria which when ingested by the larvae ends up killing the larvae. To actually apply this bacteria, though, requires taking something similar to an intravenous needle, and manually injecting (by hand) the bacteria into every (future) ear. Practically, I refuse to take such an inordinate amount of time to attempt to prevent worms from establishing themselves into our ears of corn. But another possible method involves spraying the bacteria, using a high-pressure misting sprayer that we now have, over the entire planting of corn, which would take us less than an hour vs. the hours the hand-held injecting system requires. We are trying this system on our later plantings of sweet corn; we'll see how successful it is!

Recipe/Serving Suggestion: Grilled Corn
Remove all but the innermost layer of the husk of the corn. (Grilling with the husk completely removed loses some of the corn juices, while keeping the entire husk on doesn't allow the grilled flavor to come through.) Cut the long silks showing through the tip of the ear. Grill the corn over medium-hot heat, rolling 1/4 turn every two minutes for a total of 8 minutes. The husk will be charred, and you'll be able to see the dark outlines of the kernels. Remove the husk, and dip in butter! (Source: Outpost Exchange, July, 2008)

Dilled Cucumber Dressing

3 Cups
1 cup mayonnaise
2 Tbs fresh dill leaves, chopped finely
1 clove garlic, minced
1 Tbs chives, minced
1 tsp lemon pepper
2 cups cucumbers, pared, seeded & chopped
1 cup yogurt, plain

Stir the mayonnaise, dill, garlic, chives and pepper together. Add cucumbers. Fold in the yogurt. Chill.


Cucumber Salad with Mint and Feta from simplyrecipes.com
INGREDIENTS
Salt and freshly ground pepper
1/4 pound feta cheese
Olive oil
White vinegar
10 mint leaves thinly slice
2 or 3 red radishes thinly sliced
1/4 red onion thinly sliced and cut into 1-inch long segment
1 lb cucumbers.
METHOD
In a medium sized bowl, gently toss together the sliced cucumbers, red onion, radishes, mint leaves with a little bit of white vinegar and olive oil, salt and pepper to taste. Right before serving, sprinkle on crumbled bits of feta cheese. Serve immediately. Serves 4.


A Springdale Farm website: Thanks to Sheboygan's Josh Harvey, of snowshoefilms.com (which, incidentally, we encourage you to visit to learn of many stories that our conventional media has chosen not to pursue as significant), we are now the proprietors of the website www.springdalefarmcsa.org. Although still in its infancy, the site will eventually be a home to the recipes that we have sharing over the past years, along with some basic information about what the farm offers and aspires to. For now, we would call your attention to the 4-minute clip that can be accessed through the home page of the site, (in fact, it's almost the only thing on the home page), which instructs you as a shareholder who receives our produce in waxed boxes, how you might best unfold the boxes upon returning them to the pick-up sites so that they may be re-used multiple times. Next week we will also be including in every box a single paged sheet with pictures that depict the same procedure, forcing all of you to entertain the idea that there might be a wrong way and a right way to unfold the boxes, but the video will definitely be a bit more humorous to watch than the single paged sheet, so for those with (high-speed) internet access, you may choose to check it out directly. (P.S. my chipped tooth has, in the meantime, been fixed.) Josh is also helping us put together a collection of interviews and documentaries that present an assortment of issues related to our food and agriculture that might be of interest to any or all of us; look for it sometime in the near future!


Have a great week!

The Seelys