CSA Newsletter: Summer 2010 – Week 12
Community News: This year we’re trying some new social events to celebrate the Primrose community. In addition to the mid-season crew party we hosted for everyone who works and volunteers at Primrose, we want to throw our first ever end of the season bash. We want you to stop whatever you are doing, grab a pen, and mark your calendar RIGHT NOW for Saturday, October 16th. This will be Primrose’s first annual Harvest Barn Party! Here’s the concept€¦ the entire Primrose Community (all CSA members, employees, worker shares, and friends of Primrose) will be invited to share dishes, drink warm cider, and dance to live music in the barn at our Pioneer Road farm location. We’re imagining a nice, crisp October night, where a coat, food, and great company is just enough to keep you warm. Mike and I celebrated our wedding in this barn, so we know how great it can be for parties! Guests will be asked to bring a dish to pass and it’s byob. We’ll provide the warm cider and the live tunes. Come ready to eat and with your dancing shoes on. MARK YOUR CALENDAR!
About Your Share: A new item this week is a Joe Parker Hot Pepper. These are great for salsa! Since they can look a lot like sweet carmen peppers, we’ve put them in your bag of green beans so you can distinguish between the two. Also new is red onion for the Regular members. You’ll be happy to see that the tomatoes are still coming. There are less than there have been, but they have been hanging on. What a relief! Remember to relish these€¦soon they will be gone. Speaking of finished for the season, this is the first time in a while that you won’t receive cucumbers in your share. We still have one planting producing, but its volume is quite low. So if you have a lingering cucumber in your fridge, realize it may be your last local one for a while!
Speaking of shares€¦. It’s time to start thinking about signing up for our Winter Share. We’ll provide much more information on it in next week’s newsletter. In the meantime, online readers can check out this link for more information. To sign-up, you can download our registration form from the site, just like you did to sign up for the summer share.
From the Fields: As we begin finishing crops (like melons, cucumbers, zucchini plantings, etc.), it is time to start thinking about prepping the soil for next season. We have begun cover-cropping many of our fields in an attempt to protect and rebuild soil for the next year’s growing season. Cover-cropping simply means that we plant a crop that we don’t intend to harvest. It’s main purpose is to add organic matter to the soil, prevent soil run-off, and to suppress weeds. We use two main cover crops: winter rye and hairy vetch. Winter rye is great at keeping weeds down and it survives the cold Wisconsin winter. It’s a great soil builder too. Hairy vetch has a different purpose. It grows quite slowly, meaning it’s not as good at supressing weeds. What it excells at is fixing nitrogen, or taking nitrogen from the air and making it available for plant roots to take up. So quickly it seems we go from tilling up cover-cropped fields, to covering them once again. The cycle continues!
Alright€¦ mark that calendar and enjoy your food!
Sincerely, Mike, Cassie, and Zea
In the Box:
- Carrots* – EOs
- Fennel* – EOs
- Green Beans
- Garlic
- Kale, Green Curly
- Leeks* – EOs
- Pepper, Hot (either a joe parker or hot wax. It will be packed in with your green beans so that you can tell it apart from your sweet pepper)
- Pepper, Red Sweet (either Bell or Carmen)
- Red Onion* – REGs
- Tomatoes, Cherry* – various REGs (either sungold or large red cherry)
- Tomatoes, Slicing
- Tomatoes, Heirloom
- Zucchini, Gold and/or Green
REGs = regular shares only
EOs = everyother shares only
This Week’s Recipes
Summer Week 12: Wednesday, August 25th – Everyother Group B
