CSA Newsletter – Week 12 – August 31, 2016

I finally got a crew picture, though not a complete one. I have been trying for over a month to get a good picture of everyone, but it seems like each day someone is on vacation, at market, at an appointment, or we are too crazy-busy to stop and pose. As my mother likes to quip, “it’s like herding cats.” Anyway, with 3 of our crew leaving this week, we had to just do it, although we are missing a key person-Jim! He was back east for a week visiting friends and family that he hadn’t seen in years. (That is partly why there was no newsletter last week!) I was so grateful for our awesome crew for picking up the slack so I didn’t go completely insane. A special shout out to Alex for keeping the irrigation flowing and Trine for helping to manage and orchestrate the crew.

This is the time of year when the crew starts to shrink. Like autumn leaves falling from the trees, a lot of our crew will drift off to new adventures: school, travel, other seasonal work, hibernation…. Three people will leave us by week’s end and 2 more will go in mid September. We will try to bang out a bunch of big projects before they go.

We are feeling mixed about the rain. On the one hand the plants, both wild and cultivated need it badly. The air smells fresher, and everything looks a little more alive and perky. The crew is happy to not be roasting to death out in the field. On the other hand, the onions and dry beans were all perfectly dry and ready to be hauled in to the barns and greenhouses for final curing. Now they are all wet. We don’t want to store them that way, so now it is a waiting game until the next dry stretch. We’ll get another one, right? It was odd packing the boxes today. It was cool, rainy and feeling like deep fall, but all of the veggies were height of summer fare. Strange to eat a watermelon on a cold day. All I could think about was soup-broccoli cheddar to be precise.

WHAT’S IN THE BOX:
carrots
beets or chard
potatoes-Yukon nugget
green beans
yellow wax beans
broccoli or green cabbage
watermelon-yellow flesh
red tomatoes
corn
storage onions
pickling cukes or lemon cukes
an assortment of summer squash
green bell pepper

VEGGIE DETAILS:
Potatoes:Yukon nuggets are super versatile. Bake ’em, mash ’em, fry ’em, roast ’em. I made pan fried potatoes last night with tons of garlic. So good.
Yellow Beans: They taste and behave like green beans. Use them together or separate.
Storage onions: They may be small, but they are potent. These babies will make your eyes water when you cut them. They are more of a cooking onion, unless you are needing a lot of personal space, then by all means eat them raw.
Watermelon: This variety is called Yellow Doll and has sweet, yellow flesh. We love this time of year when we can gorge on watermelon daily. We will have more for sale at the Olympia and Proctor Farmers Market if you need another fix.
Broccoli and cabbage: You’ll get one this week, and the other next week.

That’s all for this week. Happy eating!
Jen, Jim, and the Rising River Farm Crew.