CSA Week 18: September 28th

CSA Week 18

Happy Friday everyone! Sorry this message is getting out to you a little later than usual, the day just got the best of me. I’d like to say thank you to everyone for signing up for the Winter CSA. We sold out in about four days and required zero advertising apart from letting all you fine people know about it! It’s really great to have you all a part of our farm and we’re excited to share the winter season too. This week is full of some great fall goodness:

Half Share:

Koginut Squash

Romaine

Spicy Mix

Slicer Tomatoes

Parsley

Green Tomatoes

Garlic

Full Share:

Beets

Carrots

Spinach

• Full Shares will now be packaged in large brown bags and Half Shares in small brown bags. So no need to worry about bringing back boxes any more!
• I’ve had a few people ask, so just to loop everyone in: the last pick up days are October 12th and 13th.

Fall Flavors: Koginut Squash and Spinach

The adorable pumpkin in your share this week is the Koginut Squash. It is a new squash that was bred by the seed company Row 7, which is a collaboration between plant breeders and chefs to create vegetables that taste amazing and grow well. While I was a little skeptical of the elitism I perceived from their website(and seed prices), I am pretty blown away by the product. Koginut was prolific, resisted disease, cured in hot temperatures, and has stored extremely well. And I haven’t even gotten to how amazing they taste! It’s like a very sweet and tender butternut squash but with that great savory punch you want from a pumpkin. Full disclosure, we don’t have a functioning kitchen right now, so I resorted to a super simple preparation that did not disappoint, which I will lazily call the recipe for the week in the next section.

The slicer tomatoes decided to all ripen up in the end! The plants are mostly dead, so the flavor might not be the deliciousness we are used to in July, but they are still great for cooking or preserving. I will probably pull them out this weekend though, so be sure to give them a nice send off!

Spinach season is upon us! After the hot conditions of the summer, this popular green can finally thrive. Only full shares will receive spinach this week, but there will be some for everyone in the last couple of weeks. Spinach takes a lot longer for us to harvest than our regular greens because we have to do it by hand instead of with our quick cut greens harvester. This tool is power drill operated and saves us hours of labor time. Spinach, however, doesn’t stand up straight and therefore doesn’t work well with the tool. We are hoping that we can figure out a way to plant densely enough that we can use the harvester, but spinach is also difficult to germinate so we may be hand harvesting for a while!

Recipe Time!

So, my kitchen-less easy but amazing Koginut dish went something like this: 

After cutting the squash in half and scooping out the seeds, I cut it into ½ inch-ish wedges (they look like crescent moons). I drizzled them with olive oil, salt, pepper, za’atar, and some torn fresh rosemary. Then made a tin foil pouch and threw them on a high heated grill for around 15-20 minutes. I served it with rice and topped it with some green goddess dressing I made the day before with some wilthy cilantro and dill (and yes I washed my vitamix in the bathtub). Andy and I were gushing over it! The skin was so tender you could eat it and barely need more than a spoon to cut through it. It was totally perfect as the first dinner cooked at our house.

Field Notes

This week (and my plans for the weekend) are in the theme of destruction. I spent pretty much all day on Wednesday pulling out the cherry tomatoes in our hoop house down on Humboldt. This is a pretty time consuming task because the tomatoes are trellised by wrapping around a string that is attached to the perlines of the hoop house. This means the plants are all over ten feet tall and need to be detached from the string, anchor, and clips that hold them in place by going up and down a ladder. Then you pull the plant from the roots, which at this point are super well established and take some tugging to loosen up. It’s a bittersweet day to part with the poster vegetable of summer, but also fulfilling to rid ourselves of what no longer serves us. The hoop house will soon be planted with winter greens that will keep us healthy through the winter!

It’s hard to believe that we are approaching the last few weeks of the CSA! This year has felt oddly long and quick at the same time. It seems like we just started the CSA, but the first pick up in June seems like ages ago. And I’ve learned so much in the time from that first week. Figuring out what to put in the shares seemed so daunting and I felt self conscious about what to write in the weekly updates. But now I’m thinking about what veggies will be in shares all week and get excited to write about it all! I’ve learned to squeeze in some productivity during pick up times without it getting in the way of disbursing shares. It feels like we’ve been doing this for years! Which is why we will definitely be back next year with shares to offer. Have a happy weekend everyone!

Peace,

Amy and Andy