Not much time to write so just a bunch of interesting things to know.
Our fall farm event — The Fresh Earth Farms Garlic Planting Extravaganza is scheduled for Saturday October 12 from 1:00 until done followed by a pot luck dinner with bonfire. This is a great opportunity to see the farm, meet the people who grow your food and meet some of your fellow farm members. Garlic planting has tasks for all ages and physical abilities. We’ve had members from as young as one year old to members in their seventies! The more people we have the faster it gets done and the sooner we get to eat good food. Please let me know if you can make it. We’d love to see as many of you as possible.
The herb this week is garlic chive flowers. As the name suggests they are the flowers of the garlic chive plants. We gave them out in bouquets last week. This week we are giving them out as an herb. Garlic chive flowers can be used wherever you want to have a mild garlic flavor. If the flower has become a seed head you can still eat it. The seed heads are a bit more flavorful than the flowers. Even the stem is edible. Throw some flowers on a salad. Add it to a stir-fry. Be adventurous. They are delicious!
Speaking of adventure, for those new to the winter squash scene this week we are giving out two varieties of squash: acorn and spaghetti. The acorn squash is the dark green squash shaped like an acorn. It is a good all-purpose winter squash. It doesn’t store for long — maybe a month or two — so eat it sometime in the next few weeks.
The more adventurous squash in the spaghetti squash. Spaghetti squash get its name from the long strands of flesh that look like spaghetti. It can be used like spaghetti as well! It is the yellow elongated squash that doesn’t look like the other squash we grow. We cook it by boiling it for 45 minutes or more depending on its size. It can also be baked or microwaved. We leave the squash whole and cook it until it is soft enough to pierce with a fork. Then — here is the most important part — we cut it cross-ways, not length-ways. In other words, cut it in half the short way across. Why you ask? The strands of the spaghetti squash circle around the squash so if you cut it across the short way you leave the strands intact and end up with longer strands. If you cut it the long way you cut across the strands and therefore have shorter strands. It still tastes the same but isn’t quite as fun. Once cooked, cut in half, scoop out the seeds and seed goo (sorry to use the technical term here but I don’t know what else to call it), then “Luke, use the fork” to scrape out the flesh into strands. To serve put your favorite pasta sauce on it or simply butter. A delicious, gluten-free pasta!
We are giving out a lot of onions again this week. All the onions we have given out, including those we give out this week (and for the next few weeks) are sweet onions. Near the end of the season we will give out the storage onions. You are probably wondering, “What’s the difference between sweet and storage onions farmer Chris?” Well, the sweet onions are sweet when raw. The storage onions are not. So if you are making a dish with raw onions you want to use a sweet onion. If you are making a dish with cooked onions you can use either. However, when cooked, storage onions become sweeter than sweet onions. Storage onions caramelize better. But the most important part is storage onions store longer. So once we start giving them out be sure to use up your sweet onions first. They won’t store nearly as long as the storage onions.
We are also overloading you with bell peppers again. But who doesn’t like sweet bell peppers? Last week I used a lot of the onions and peppers to make fajitas! I used a “Fajita Blend” spice mix so I don’t have great insight in how to make them. But they do use a lot of the peppers and onions and are simply delicious.
The potatoes we are giving out are Kenebec potatoes. They are a good all-purpose potato with one drawback — they turn green fairly easily when exposed to light. So treat them like children before Christmas and keep them in the dark.
We will also have tomatillos, hot peppers, and cilantro to make salsa verde. We also have some tomatoes, some cherry tomatoes, a few cucumbers, lots of green beans (might be a nice place to use the garlic chive flowers!) and then various odds and ends.
FruitShare, CheeseShare and CoffeeShare are this week. CheeseShare arrives today (Tuesday) so if it is here before the boxes leave for delivery we will include it in the box. If not it will go out net week.
FlowerShare is also this week. We are slowly losing flower varieties to age and disease. We still have a reasonable number still producing though so we will keep making bouquets until they die.
Garlic should be here this week as well for those of you who ordered garlic.
That is all for now. As always do not hesitate to send in questions, comments, suggestions, etc. Oh, and starting in October we will be selling shares for next season!