Current 2007 Weekly Newsletters back to CSA Home
1 st Week – 2007 Season
Growing and eating for greater purpose
What it’s all about. – . Every spring, Dela and I feel the same strange mix of sensations. In a progression that starts in January, we plan, budget, finance, order, purchase, seed, tend to the start of a whole season of vegetable and herb crops. The first few weeks of delivery, we sing in our hearts a joyful praise of delicious spring greens and herbal delicacies that arrive first among more than 100 wonderful plant varieties our subscribers will experience over the next 5 months. Yet as closely as we work with the cycles of life, we catch ourselves thinking these first weeks we should be able to give you the same uniformity, weight and variety you can find in any convenience-oriented store, any day or night of the year. Here we all are trying to be conscientious about the Earth, trying to do something daring and different, eating outside the Happy Meal box. We read and hear about what’s happening to the Earth and its resources every day. We all know human beings cannot conveniently and efficiently deliver mass quantities of plants and animals without mass quantities of synthetic chemicals, fossil fuels and farm and business practices that ironically kill Natural diversity, kill local economies, kill families. Yet when we have to adjust our appetites, food schedules, meal expectations to Mother Nature, we still feel somehow that she should be like a modern grocery store manager and warehouse distribution center. Seasonal eating can be delightful and frustrating. You are called on to be creative with each week’s fresh produce. We’ll do our best for you. We’ll offer suggestions. We’ll give you what Nature gives us, on her schedule for this climate, these soils, this year’s rain and temperature. Yet we share in the discipline and the mental work of healthful change together. Quality – This time of year, the flea beetles are attracted to certain leafy plants, particularly the brassica family, which spring up first in the garden. We never use chemical sprays and only use botanical, organic-approved applications in serious infestations. Don’t be alarmed, though, by some imperfections. We are not aiming for picture-perfection made possible only by poison. We promise to deliver the most healthful food we can grow without chemical shortcuts. Questions – Email is the best way to catch us, especially during the growing season when we’re out among our plants and animals often from dawn until dark. You can also leave us a phone message about evening or early-morning hours we can return your call. Contact us at 608 897-4288 scotchhillfarm@wekz.net
This Week’s Vegetables are:
Recipe for the Week From Dela
Spinach Egg Bake Vegetarian Dish from Joel’s 2007 graduation party
Butter an 8x8-inch baking dish. Place 3 cups of cooked rice in the bottom of the dish. Chop 3 cups of spinach. Sauté several garlic scapes or a clove of garlic and one small chopped onion in butter. When soft, add spinach and 1 TBSP of tarragon. Stir into the garlic and onions for just a couple of minutes. Pour this mixture on top of the rice. (You can add your goat cheese, crumbling evenly across this dish). Beat 4 eggs and pour with 1 cup of milk, salt and pepper onto the rice. Top with grated mozzarella or parmesan cheese. Bake at 350 degrees F for 45 minutes. .
2nd Week – 2007 Season
Thoughts from along the rows of plants we tend for you
We’re all busy here weeding, harvesting, putting up hay, fixing flat tires, planting seeds, transplanting the last of our bedding plants. One morning, as I pushed an ancient metal wheel hoe along rows of sweet corn, I thought about changes in my life. For nearly 14 years, I worked as a copy, wire or special sections editor for newspapers. It was my job to read, read, read, read – usually under tense deadlines. Often I picked which 15 to 20 stories out of 1,000s of stories would fit into the day’s available news space. What I read about food and farming during these years was often worrisome. What was happening to the farming people who saved my family when I was a child in the 1950s? What was happening to the resources we depend on for survival? What was happening to the food my wife and I fed our children? A longtime friend chides me that every job is the same, every person’s life a mix of joys and sorrows, challenges and struggles. On one level, this is entirely true. All the years I worked in newspaper, I was forced to work other jobs, too. There was never enough money. And thus I swept floors and dusted furniture as a janitor, changed water pumps and radiators in a garage, taught grammar and spelling in community colleges. I worked part-time wherever I held a job in journalism. It was painful. It was exhilarating. We all do whatever we need to. Rarely, however, did what I do hold life in the balance – except farming. It snows and freezes in May, and 1,000s of plants in greenhouses and early field beds can die. We neglect one or more sections of scores of sections of tender young plants, and weeds spring up to choke them out of moisture, minerals and sunlight. We forget to close a gate, and at dawn turkeys, ducks or chickens slip into the garden to devour, kill all our work. We forget to water a greenhouse, poultry house or paddock, and plants, animals, and birds can die of thirst. At the deepest level of survival for our planet, if we do not farm as we farm – without chemicals, with a minimum of fossil fuel, within a 100 miles of people (instead of the average 2,000 miles food now travels) – and whole communities of people will suffer from global warming and food insecurity. What you do in buying food in a direct market relationship shares this meaning. It may be the most important thing we all do together with our time, with our lives.
This Week’s Vegetables are:
Recipe for the Week From a new subscriber at St. Benedict Catholic Church, and compliments of Pleasant Hill Farm
Spinach or Chard & Garlic Scape Pesto
2 1/2 cups packed fresh spinach, chard/endive leaves
1/3 cup parsley, cilantro or other herb leaves
1/2 cup grated parmesan (add goat cheese if you like)
1/3 cup walnuts or other nut favorite
4 chopped garlic scapes
1 1/2 Tbs Basil
3/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
Blend first 5 ingredients in food processor until smooth. With motor running, slowly drizzle in olive oil. Makes 1 1/2 cups. Pour a thin layer of oil on top of pesto before storing in fridge to keep the air out and maintain a vibrant green color for up to three weeks. Tip from Dela : freeze pesto in ice cube tray and put cubes in freezer bag. Use cubes to season food as desired. Find other great recipes and tips in our Madison Area Community Supported Agriculture food book. It’s called Asparagus to Zucchini, and we can sell it to you for $13, a $7 discount off the retail price. We recommend this book. It will help you get the most out of your fresh produce this growing season. It has pictures of the plants.
3rd Week – 2007 Season
Wise design from the past works in harmony with Nature today
Dawn in gardens is the loveliest time to work. Mourning doves break silence in song to one another from separate trees. A lamb calls from across a fence for the organic alfalfa, Timothy and rye grass hay we’ve baled. The hay field we nursed to life with an oat crop last year has already given the first of 3 cuttings, safely put up in barn lofts for winter. More oats we planted this spring are ripening. My sons and I turned our attention to getting ready for harvest, by repairing a 1940s era Allis Chalmers All Crop Harvester. An Amish harness-maker was going to use the torn canvas conveyer from this machine as a model to fashion a new one. Yet he couldn’t find heavy canvas. I went on line and found Yaz All Crop in Pennsylvania , specializing in these old machines. Brand new rubber conveyers for this antique are in the mail. If you can come see the All Crop harvest oats in July, you’ll enjoy it. A wooden paddle pulls the oats toward a cutter bar and down onto this conveyor and into the threshing mechanisms. I reminded a slightly older farm neighbor, of the great weed seed separator in this marvelous antique last week. It revived memories for him of collecting this seed in sacks from the machine with his Dad and burning the noxious weeds. This was before huge modern machines (that dropped this function from the harvesting process) and chemical herbicides came into use. Yaz All says organic farmers all across the country are finding and putting these machines back into use. Unlike modern, self-propelled harvesters, the All Crop runs off tractor power. It looks a little like Sylvester McMonkey McBean’s Star-off, Star-on Machine in Doctor Sues. It isn’t perfect, of course. Nothing man makes is. But organic practices, including mulching garden paths with oat straw to deter weeds, make the most of man’s flaws. We found a wonderful tendency of oats the machine missed in the previous July’s harvest to spring up anew in place of weeds in garden paths. Turned back into the soil, they add fertility. Need incentive to come visit and work? Pick oat harvest time in July. Watching an All Crop keeps us from being Sneeches you can’t teach, on unsatisfying modern beaches.
This Week’s Vegetables are:Cooking Tips for the Week From Dela
Alternate fresh salads with Stir Fry
Gardens in our climate always start out with lighter, quick growing varieties, building in volume and size over months of vegetable delivery. Enjoy the fresh salads while they last. All green tops are highly nutritious. You can eat them raw or lightly sauté them, with or without the root, in olive oil. Use garlic and/or onions, your herbs for maximum vitamin benefit. Radishes and their greens, spinach and beet greens can be lightly cooked. Incorporate all of this week’s vegetables into salads. Use to make sandwiches, too.