Snow Day!

So far we've had about a foot of snow and it's still coming down. We told the packing shed crew not to come in today, but the guys who live here in the valley came in to help us clear some snow. I'm not sure how much experience any of them have with the snow - I know José Manuel has worked winters in Canada, so he's probably non-plussed, but Danielo, Vicente, Antonio & Juan may have not worked this far north, this late in the year. Danielo goes home on Monday and the rest of remaining H2A visa workers leave December 20, hopefully making it home for Navidad/Christmas with the family.

(Most of the H2A crew left mid-November, we just had a few stragglers who wanted to work another month, for various reasons. Here they are on the way to the airport or waiting at the airport)

We're snowed in for the day, so we'll have to delay our Twin Cities CSA meat delivery until Friday. Other than that slight inconvenience, we'll do some office work, have some cocoa & let Jack the dog out as much as he'd like - he loves the snow! Stay safe & warm and enjoy the snow!

All About Parsnips

While many CSA farms are winding down their season and tucking away their farm for the winter, at Harmony Valley Farm we are still hard at work harvesting and packing vegetables! It’s always exciting to be a part of the fall harvest….the culmination of a season’s worth of work to produce a crop. But there’s also some nervousness as this time of year can be rather unpredictable. Richard tells stories about the year they got 3 feet of snow on October 29. Just two weeks ago, we scrambled to get the sweet potatoes harvested and put covers on lettuce, fennel, chicories, and mini-sweet peppers before the frost arrived. The weather turned cold quickly with freezing temperatures over the weekend and we were fearful that the daikon, turnips and other crops would be damaged, but thankfully they were not. The cold snap was followed by more cold along with rain. It’s hard to harvest roots in slippery mud; it just doesn’t work. How many more days do we have to get everything done? You never know so you just keep forging forward—you can’t wait for the perfect day. On the flip side, we could get a couple more weeks of nice, dry days with moderate temperatures. We aren’t counting on it this year, but there have been years when we’re able to harvest salad greens until the end of October/first of November!
We still have daikon and turnips that need to grow, but they’re growing slowly in the cool weather. We have parsnips that are getting too big, but the forecast for the rest of the week is for rain so we’re not sure we can get the rest out of the ground. We still haven’t harvested the sunchokes and we are only in the middle of garlic planting. We’ve never missed a garlic planting, but we have planted into mud just to get it in the ground before it’s too late. The beauty heart and black radishes need to be dug as do the rest of the rutabagas. In the meantime, we can’t forget about the cabbages or the rest of our responsibilities. We’ve had to change our strategies along the way. Instead of relying solely on our FMC (the machine typically used for harvesting roots), we’ve brought the old potato digger and another piece of machinery into the picture along with a lot of hand harvesting. We had a digger breakdown yesterday and we are down two tractors right now…we are praying we don’t have any more breakdowns. The coolers are filling up fast….where are we going to store all these veggies until they are washed and packed for their final destination!?
Since this is the first week you have parsnips in your box this fall and this is “parsnip push” week here at the farm, we thought perhaps you might enjoy learning a little more about this interesting white root. Parsnips are one of our major crops—this year we planted 8 acres. Since they have a long growing season, it’s important to plant them early. If you miss the window of opportunity, you miss having a crop for the year. The parsnip seed is very interesting—a small, flat disk referred to as a winged seed. Don’t cough, sneeze, or stand near a fan while you are dealing with these seeds, they are so lightweight they can easily blow away. It’s important to plant them into moist soil at just the right depth—1/4” deep. Plant them too shallow and they might just lay there. Plant them too deep and they might not be strong enough to push through. It takes 2-3 weeks to germinate a parsnip seed, partly because the soil is still cold at that time of year. In the meantime, a blanket of spring weeds can sprout up all around the little seeds. One of the first methods of weed control we use for this crop is called flaming. We literally burn off the weeds in the bed to get rid of them. But you have to do this right before the parsnips pop from the ground. Do it too early and more weeds will grow up, do it too late and you burn your crop as well. This year we had a field of parsnips planted on one of our newly acquired fields. What a nightmare of weeds! The weeds seemed to grow three times as fast as the parsnips! We mechanically cultivated as much as we were able and then sent a hand weeding crew through twice. We debated if it was even worth investing the time and effort into to save the crop. In the end we decided to keep it, and invested the labor to remove the weeds to improve the land for future years.
We won’t harvest all the parsnips this fall—just enough to hold us through January. We will leave two acres to overwinter until the spring. Not only do parsnips tolerate the colder weather, but they actually improve in flavor and texture after a freeze. Our sweetest parsnips, in fact, are the overwintered parsnips that are left in the ground throughout winter, and dug in the spring. Don’t get me wrong, they are pretty tasty right now. Before refrigeration, parsnips were a wintertime staple that could be stored for months in a root cellar or packed in a mound of sand. So, if you find yourself accumulating parsnips throughout the upcoming deliveries, don’t worry—they won’t spoil quickly. Store them loosely wrapped in a plastic bag with some moisture and they will hold just fine for several weeks in your refrigerator. Parsnips may lose moisture over time and become shrunken and rubbery, but this is no reason to discard them. Go ahead and add them to your next soup, and they will perk right up.
Like the other members of the Umbelliferae family we have featured this year (such as celery and celeriac, fennel, carrot, etc.), parsnips originated in the Mediterranean basin and have been cultivated for several thousand years. They have been a fixture of European cuisine, particularly the northern countries with cooler climates and shorter growing seasons.
Parsnips are closely related to carrots, with an arguably more complex flavor. They can be prepared in many of the same ways as carrots, although eating raw isn’t nearly as common. Parsnips need not be peeled, but depending on the usage you may wish to, if the skin is thick or stringy. With their high sugar content, parsnips caramelize well. Roasting them at a high temperature, then reducing heat slightly and finishing cooking with a lid will create a chewy, browned exterior and a soft interior. Steaming is also a good way to retain and concentrate all of the parsnip’s flavor and create a soft, smooth consistency. Besides for soups and stews, boiling isn’t recommended because the parsnip will lose flavor (and nutrients) into the cooking water. In American cuisine, the most common uses of parsnip are in purees and root mashes, either alone or with other roots and tubers, and simmered with soups, stews, and roasts. In her book Vegetables from Amaranth to Zucchini, Elizabeth Schneider notes that although American recipes from the 19th and 20th centuries have tended to use parsnips in rich, heavy preparations such as creaming and frying, the versatile parsnip really shines in more complex preparations as well. Records of ancient Roman recipes show that parsnips were sometimes combined with white wine and olive oil, fresh coriander and pepper, cumin and chives, celery seed, honey, and nuts, among other things.
So whether you jazz it up with exotic spices, or simply toss it in the pot with the Sunday roast, it’s hard not to enjoy the sweet flavor of parsnip.

Sweet Potatoes: They're Not Really Potatoes & they're not Yams Either

Written by Farmer Richard and Chef Bri

As the first snow of the year falls on the valley this week, our newest vegetable to reach your box is of tropical origin. (Strange!) Sweet potatoes are native to tropical areas of South America and were first cultivated there about 5000 years ago. They like hot, sunny days and warm nights, growing best at an average temperature of about 75°. Even with the great diversity of foods we have learned to grow here in our region, sweet potatoes are a remarkable accomplishment.

Sweet potatoes are traditionally a southern crop, requiring high heat units to produce a sizable/marketable crop. It is not recommended to grow sweet potatoes in Wisconsin – after all, they are a tropical plant! There has never been a commercial sweet potato industry anywhere in the Midwest, and for good reason. Almost all sweet potato varieties have been developed in the south and will not produce sizable tubers in the Midwest. So once again, your contrary farmer, who ignored and defied conventional wisdom (remember when they told me “you can’t make a living growing organic”?) said, “I’ll give it a try!” After several years of experimenting, we found two varieties that would produce sizeable tubers in a normal year, in a special production system. Georgia Jets are the most productive for northern climates but oh are they ugly! Our choice is Beauregard, which does fairly well in the north, but tends to set fewer tubers per plants. They often get very large (think scary 3-5 pound potatoes) in a normal summer, so based on advice from growers we visited in Livingston, CA we went from 12” to 8” spacing in rows to get more modest sized tubers.

In the sweet potato growing regions of the south, they select planting stock and plant those tubers in outdoor beds of peat moss to grow the “slips” for planting in the field. The “slips” or sweet potato plants are cut off above the original tuber to prevent diseases from the seed tuber from transferring to the new plant. Those slips are planted into the field to produce a crop. The only way we could produce slips of our own would be to store tubers and plant them in a greenhouse, meaning a huge new and expensive greenhouse just for sweet potatoes. So we depend on our southern friends to ship us slips that grow up after they have planted their fields. Our Livingston, CA organic growers are very inconsistent but the new organic growers in Delaware had a very good price. Sadly, they were plagued by wet weather and delivered poor quality plants too late. Thankfully, our friends at Steele Plant Company in Gleason, TN once again came through for us with a second late supply to fill our field.

We plant in late May or early June, just before the heat of summer. We plant the slips 8” apart on a raised bed, covered with dark green plastic to absorb and hold the sun’s heat and mimic the hotter southern soils where sweet potatoes are traditionally grown. But this year we didn’t have the summer heat they needed and our fear was a low yield of small tubers. I had dug a few potatoes out around the edges and thought there was just not much there. I even told the harvest party tours that they should not expect to find much, but when we dug a couple dozen plants, we found some very nice sweet potatoes. Not jumbos, but nice size and shape!
I started to think more positively about the whole crop, but only digging them would tell the whole story. When the weather forecast called for a week of freezing nights, we knew it was time to get them out of the ground, since they are very sensitive to any temperature approaching freezing.

So on Wednesday of last week, we tackled the 1+ acre field with all the crew we could manage to spare from other harvests and set a must do goal of all out of the ground before the freezing forecast for Friday night. Angel & Nestor started mowing vines and leaves, then cutting the stems off from the vines, using their own homemade invention of a vine lifter stick to lift the vine and cut it off without cutting the largest sweet potatoes that stick up out of the ground.
A crew of 7 or more followed, walking behind the digger, gently pulling the banana like clumps off the digger and onto the bed so they did not get buried in muddy clods of dirt. Oh, did I mention that it rained every day? Not too much though, and we continued non-stop until Friday at 4pm, when all the sweet potatoes went into the greenhouse to begin the curing process.
Sweet potatoes come from the field at only 4 or 5 brix, which translates roughly to that percentage of sugar. The 5-6 day cure at high humidity and 85° F temperature will double the sugar content to 10-12%. Now that is a sweet potato that tastes good and sweet without adding anything!

So dig samples as you will, but it is the actual field dig that shows you what you really have for the season. I was nervous and I felt foolish, a grown man who has raised sweet potatoes for 20 years, and yet the morning of the dig I could not wait to see them come up and over the digger. I walked the first four beds with Lucio, grabbing banana shaped bunches and gently tossing them on top of the moist earth. After those four beds, I was ready to leave catching them to younger hands. I hauled loads home and stacked the pallets close and high for curing.

The final estimate: 23,000 pounds of sweet potatoes! Just over the national average yield, and not bad at all for a heat loving crop during a record cool summer.

Here in the U.S., sweet potatoes do not represent a food crop of great significance. Most Americans think of sweet potatoes as a Thanksgiving accessory and not an everyday food. But in other areas of the world, particularly certain countries in Africa and Asia, sweet potatoes are a staple crop and represent one of the largest sources of caloric intake. The various cultivars of sweet potatoes grown throughout the world vary in color, texture, sweetness, moisture content, etc. It seems that the bright orange varieties most enjoyed in the U.S. are really only popular here, as well as Canada and Australia. Most of the rest of the world likes to grow sweet potatoes that are white, and also a bit starchier and less sweet. This is a shame, because it is the bright orange color that makes sweet potatoes such a nutrient-dense vegetable. In a 1992 study that compared fiber content, complex carbohydrates, protein, vitamins A and C, calcium, and iron, the Center for Science in the Public Interest ranked the sweet potato as the most nutritious vegetable.

The possible preparations for sweet potato are as diverse as the cultures that eat it. As a moist, firm starch with smooth texture, it lends itself to both dry heat and moist heat cooking methods- basically, nearly anything you can dream up. Some of the most popular preparations for sweet potato are baking, frying, and mashing. For some, it may take a small leap to get past sweetened dishes that involve sweet potatoes doused in butter, brown sugar, and marshmallows. To start out, you can substitute sweet potato for nearly any dish you’d otherwise use potato, and in doing so you reap the benefits of all the extra vitamins. Sweet potato also lends a rich flavor to savory preparations and pairs well with cheese, garlic, herbs such as rosemary, and spicy or smoky flavors. They can be cooked either peeled or with the skin left on. Although sweet potato skins are considered edible, the skins can sometimes be tough or fibrous depending on the plant. Try it to see if you like it.

Tropical as they are, sweet potatoes do not like to be cold. Refrigerating them will damage the flavor and texture. They are best stored in a cooler spot in the kitchen, well ventilated, not wrapped in plastic. A hanging basket is great if you have one. If you choose not to eat them right away (but why wouldn’t you want to?), they should keep for up to two or three weeks as long as they don’t become overly dry. Do keep an eye on them to watch for moisture loss or mold.

Try this recipe!
Sweet Potatoes in Curried Coconut Sauce over Kale
From Vegetables from Amaranth to Zucchini by Elizabeth Schneider


1 ½ pounds sweet potatoes
½ celeriac root if you have one, or 1-2 celery stalks
1 ¾ cups water
1 or 2 small fresh green chilis
¾ tsp kosher salt
½ Tbsp curry powder
1 Tbsp minced or coarse-grated ginger
1 garlic clove, minced
¼ to ¾ cup coconut milk
1 bunch kale, collards, or similar cooking greens
Lime wedges

1. Peel sweet potatoes and cut into ¾” dice. Chop enough celery/ celeriac to make ½ cup. Stem chili, seed, devein, and mince.
2. Combine chilis, water, salt, curry, ginger, and garlic in a pot and bring to a boil. Add sweet potatoes and celery and simmer, covered, until tender, about 15 minutes. Uncover and simmer to thicken sauce somewhat, about 5 minutes. Add ¼ cup coconut milk and cook at a bare simmer about 5 minutes to blend flavors. Taste and add more coconut milk to taste.
3. Meanwhile, strip off and discard kale stems. Thin-slice leaves. Set on a steamer rack over boiling water. Cover and cook until tender, 5 to 10 minutes.
4. Arrange kale on a serving plate and spoon the sweet potatoes over. Serve hot, garnished with lime.

Serves 4 as a main dish. Serving with cracked wheat, millet, or quinoa is suggested.

Know your Winter Squash

Here are some pictures of the varieties we grow - Kabocha (orange & pumpkin looking), Butternut (pear shaped), Festival (squat striped) & Delicata (long striped)

Check out this week's super informative newsletter, all about Winter Squash.

Tuesday highlights

Washing dishes today, I noticed that we had dirtied (and I was washing) all 7 hotel pan lids that the farm possesses. Seven lids, new record! I got a little bit geeked about this, thought about posting a blog, and realized that this is why I never post blogs. Inane. Hey readers out there in readerland, today at lunch we used seven lids! Also, your hardworking farm crew put away 98 burritos today. Way to go, team!

In other news, I just cut into my first winter squash of the year. Heavenly. I love that smell. It reminds me of jack-o-lanterns. Tonight for dinner I am making the roasted corn pudding in squash recipe from Heidi Swanson's recipe blog, 101 cookbooks. It looks like it will be pretty awesome.

The farm continues to be busy. Always busy busy busy. Fall is elbowing its way in.

Busy busy busy

I walked down to put a letter in the mailbox this morning and this is what I saw:

Whole Foods truck arrival,

cabbage coming on to the yard,

bagging tomatoes, cleaning turnips, cleaning onions,

construction/adding on to the box shed, wagon repair, chicken manure delivery &

porta potty servicing. I didn't even get into the barrel washing room. Not to mention office work, field work & Chef Bri cooking away (lunch today will be black eyed peas & pork, sauteed kale & a fruit salad. Yum.)

Busy busy busy day (it's also a CSA pack day, so lots to harvest/wash/pack). Actually a busy week. For real, a very busy season! I've been living and working here for two years now so you'd think I'd be used to the level of activity. But today I was astounded. It's a lot to keep track of! Way to go Richard, you captain of industry, you!

Ranting and Raving and Raspberries

Raspberries – To have or have not?
Just taking an informal survey: Should we grow raspberries for our CSA or not?

The following is just a little ranting & raving, in the hopes that you’ll come to understand where we’re coming from and appreciate the challenges facing farmers & CSA farms:

We’ve been putting raspberries in the CSA boxes, but not listing them in the newsletter as an item in the box. Sometimes we can’t pick enough to put in all of the boxes, so rather than put them on the list and get complaints from someone who didn’t get a container in the box, we put them in as many boxes as we can and consider it a bonus.

We try to harvest the day we pack boxes, but depending on the weather or the other work, we sometimes pick them the day before we pack CSA boxes. Each berry is picked and packed by hand, with care. Raspberries are fragile little things. The bushes ripen at different rates, so a container of berries may contain under ripe, overripe and perfect berries, depending on the person who picks them. (Plus the crew has to deal with the perils of snakes and spiders in the raspberry rows!) We put an absorbent liner in the containers and keep them in a cooler with a fan blowing on them, in an effort to keep them dry and fresh. We visually inspect each container before we pack it in a box – if there is any mold or decay, we don’t pack it. Sadly, after the boxes are packed, closed and put on the truck sometimes mold grows, as quickly as overnight.

We’ve had a few complaints that the bonus raspberries were moldy when the CSA member opened the box or after being in the fridge for a day or two. Moldy raspberries are very disappointing, but some acts of nature are out of our control. I am probably way too sensitive and need to grow a thicker skin, but we take complaints seriously (and a bit personally). We hold ourselves to a high standard and we pack exceptionally high quality boxes each and every week. Considering the number of boxes we pack, we get very few complaints, thankfully. Personally, I think you should only complain if you’ve already complimented – please don’t criticize for one bruised item in the 4th or 15th box you’ve received if you didn’t take the effort to tell us about how much you loved any number of items in boxes 1-14. Look at the whole season with some perspective!

CSA boxes do not grow on trees or sprout fully formed out of the ground. Each item in your box was planted, cared for, harvested, cooled, cleaned and then packed carefully & mindfully in your box. The boxes are not always going to be perfect and there is bound to be differences in the produce found in each box – different sizes, different colors, different varieties.

If you came into CSA with the expectation of a perfect box each week, full of your favorite items (unblemished and faultless) and only containing familiar and favorite items, then CSA may not be right for you.

If you find fault with the box because you saw something on our Farmer’s Market list or an item of ours at the co-op that wasn’t in your box, our CSA may not be right for you. We grow about 100 different crops for three different markets: CSA, Farmer’s Market and Wholesale. This diversity protects our CSA members – if we have a crop failure, we can still pack our CSA boxes by utilizing the crops originally planned for those other markets. We do everything we can (and with almost 17 years of CSA experience & 35 years of farming experience, Richard knows what he’s doing!) to provide for our CSA members.

Richard & Andrea work 7 days a week consistently, generally getting up at 5 in the morning and working until 9 or 10 at night. (I don’t work that much without getting a bit “bent out of shape” as Richard characterizes my crankiness. I try to keep happy (myself & those around me) and limit work to around 45 hours a week)

Our crew of 50 (!!) starts at 8am and works until at least 6 pm, M-F, with an hour for lunch. We’ve had a full crew for most Saturdays this season too! Besides the time invested, it’s blood, sweat, tears and a lot of pride in the work we do. Because we put so much of ourselves into the work and put such great effort into each CSA box, it’s hard not to take complaints personally. I think it’s important that CSA members remember that joining our CSA is not simply purchasing a box of produce –it’s not the same experience as going to the store or market to pick out your own produce. One of the main tenets of CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) is the development of a relationship between grower and consumer. It’s not simply an exchange of goods for cash. It’s a commitment to a farm for the season – good and bad. It’s a connection between CSA members and the farm, a relationship to the place where your food comes from, and recognition of the effort it takes to produce it.

Thank you for listening. Now go eat your veggies!

CSA box pictures - End of July,August & September so far

My favorite vegetable

Eloquently described by Chef Bri in this week's newsletter:

Broccoli Romanesco is perhaps the most dramatic vegetable you can hope to find in your CSA box, or anywhere. Our September 20, 2003 newsletter listed some of the descriptions this unique vegetable has earned, including “it may be part starfish, part wedding cake.” I would like to suggest that dinosaur be added to the list. Although I have never actually seen a dinosaur, that’s what I tend to think of when I look at the pale green vegetable’s spirals of bumpy buds.

Broccoli Romanesco’s spiraling shape, in fact, is that of a logarithmic spiral, or fractal. This unique shape is repeated in surprising places throughout the natural world, from the shells of mollusks, to the heads of sunfl owers, to the shape of the Milky Way galaxy. The simplest way to describe the logarithmic spiral is to say that, as the spiral grows larger, its total shape is unaltered by each successive curve. To say that the shape of Romanesco is a fractal is to say that each smaller section of the vegetable is patterned after the shape of the whole. For instance, you will notice that the bumpy florets on the cone-shaped vegetable are successively smaller as they spiral toward the pointed tip. Within each floret, however, there are also spiraling bumps arranged in this same pattern. For a vegetable, that’s pretty remarkable! So before you dig in, be sure to gather round friends and loved ones, gaze into Romanesco’s logarithmic spiral, and ponder the mysteries of the universe.

Romanesco is more closely related to caulifl ower than broccoli. Like broccoli and cauliflower, the part of the plant we eat is the flower. Its closely bunched buds have a similar texture to cauliflower, but are slightly more tender and have a shorter cooking time than cauliflower. Its light texture makes it good eaten raw as crudités. Like broccoliand cauliflower, its flavors are carried nicely by fats, such as butter or olive oil or a creamy cheese sauce. The entire head of Romanesco can be roasted whole, for a dramatic presentation. Or it can be cut into individual florets and steamed or sautéed. We recommend gentler cooking methods, to help maintain the unique shape of the florets. Like cauliflower and broccoli, Romanesco can quickly become unpleasantly mushy if cooked just slightly too long, so keep a close eye on it.

Romanesco can be stored several days in the refrigerator, loosely covered. It seems to be more perishable than caulifl ower, so keep an eye out for softening or discoloration. You may be tempted to put it on display as a conversation piece, but remember to eat it before it starts to go bad. Take a few photos, then cook it up and enjoy.

Paletas

One of the favorite parts of my job: handing out popsicles to the crew on hot afternoons.

Another favorite thing: Wearing as little clothing as possible on a hot summer day

Favorite thing to find on my desk this week: Hand carved eggplant head (with a tattooed tear for every year he's been away)

Here we are at the end of July already, about halfway through summer, and we've hardly had any summerlike weather. I'm no expert on these things, and I'm not originally from these parts... but it seems this has been an exceptionally cold summer around here. Being from the upper peninsula of Michigan, I don't mind the cool weather. Surprisingly, the veggies don't seem to mind it too much either. They just keep on coming. Even tomatoes and peppers are starting to ripen.
Everything moves so fast here that it can be hard to keep track of all the vegetables coming and going. As soon as one vegetable is done for the season (bye, ramps. see you next year, asparagus) it is replaced by a new vegetable just coming into season (hi, eggplant. good to see you again, tomatoes).
To date, this is a list of all the veggies I have gotten to know for the first time on the farm this year:
Ramps
Nettles
Sorrel
Burdock
Beauty heart radish
Black Spanish radish
Fresh horseradish (I know all about horseradish in a jar.)
Sunchokes
Komatsuna
Mizuna
Dandelion
Yukina savoy
Sweetheart cabbage
Green garlic
Amaranth

My brain has been very busy with all of this learning going on. It's kind of exciting to think about- when this season is over and I graduate from the Harmony Valley Vegetable Academy, I will be such a pro at seasonal cooking and eating. What a cool job.

Eat your Veggies!

Just a list of June & July CSA box contents, to match up with the pictures: Red leaf lettuce, Red Boston lettuce, Kohlrabi, Spinach, French Breakfast Radishes, Purple & White Scallions, Garlic Scapes, Yukina Savoy, Asparagus, Rhubarb, Arugula, Sauté Mix, Basil, Strawberries, Red Radish, Broccoli, Salad Mix, Napa Cabbage, Red Komatsuna, Yukina Savoy, Romaine Lettuce, Sugar Snap and Snow Peas, Summer Squash & Zucchini, Chard, Amaranth, Red Beets, Fennel, Fresh Garlic, Sweetheart Cabbage, White Cipollini Onions, Chioggia Beets, Carrots, Thai Basil, Cucumbers, Baby Bok Choi, Cauliflower, Sweet Spanish Onions, Green Savoy Cabbage, Gold Beets, Green Beans.