*After Bryan and Cindy finished mulching tunnel paths... We have rows of winter kales, spinach, lettuce, and scallions in this tunnel, photo by Adam Ford*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have

Greens: baby lettuce, spinach, arugula, green curly kale bunches, lacinato kale bunches, rainbow chard, brussels crowns, bok choi, mini romaine heads, green head lettuce, red head lettuce, green cabbage, Napa cabbage, mesclun mix, and pea shoots
Roots: carrots, new red potatoes, yellow potatoes, rutabaga, red beets, watermelon radish, and fresh ginger*
Alliums: onions, garlic, shallots, and leeks
Fruiting Crops: Painted Mountain corn, tomatillos, sweet Italian Carmen peppers, jalapeno peppers, aji rico hot peppers, spaghetti squash, green tomatoes, delicata squash, and green beans
Herbs and Miscellaneous: parsley, rhubarb, celery, fennel, and broccolini

*Years ago we grew fresh ginger, and we grew a small bed again this year. It’s looking great, but we won’t know how much we will harvest until we start harvesting it next week. If you order it this week, please list a preferred substitute in case we don’t have much to harvest. Thanks!

We listed several items available for bulk purchasing at wholesale pricing on the online platform. This week we have garlic, onions, carmen peppers, green cabbage, and frozen elderberries available in bulk amounts if you do any preserving for winter. If you pick up at the barn and want to order any of those items in bulk, just send us an email.

Click here to order your veggies for a delivered bag to Ludlow or Rutland

Community News

Getting my general election ballot last week reminded me that I wanted to highlight a fellow CSA member, Adrienne Raymond, who is running for our Rutland-Windsor District to represent the towns of Shrewsbury, Mount Holly, and Ludlow as our representative in the Vermont statehouse. If you live in Shrewsbury, Mount Holly, or Ludlow, check out Vermont Digger’s handy candidate guide to learn more about Adrienne, and why we trust her to be an effective representative for our town and district.

Farm News

This week we finished all the tunnel transplanting, and began harvesting out a few storage crops from the field for the root cellar. We discovered we accidentally grew some 10-pound cabbages, and we also discovered that our experiment into growing a row of sweet potatoes grew some beautiful sweet potatoes. (We grew them many years ago unsuccessfully, but on a whim, planted a bed this June.) Right now they are curing for a week in a warm, humid room in the root cellar before we can distribute them. The curing process is necessary so they actually taste good (the starches are converted into sugars), and also so they are able to store. We look forward to having them out for CSA eventually!

This week I just have to highlight the grain corn we grow. Cooking with grain corn isn’t the most common daily ingredient, but our family of four plus Bryan and Vanessa centers a lot of time around the kitchen, celebrating the abundance of this work with delicious meals. And grain corn is a wonderful food to celebrate. We grind it into a coarse meal for cheesy breakfast grits covered with fermented hot pepper sauce. We grind it a little finer for a sweet, naturally gluten-free cornbread for chili nights. We also nixtamalize corn—soaking and cooking the grains in water with hardwood ashes. This technique creates a variety of chemical changes in the corn that make it more digestible, nutritious, and flavorful:. The resulting cooked corn is ground to make empanadas, arepas (thanks to learning those from Aunt Vanessa!), and fresh tortillas. The taste and texture of a fresh grain corn meal can be wonderful. Because we have gotten into a lot of its uses, we have gotten ourselves a few extra kitchen tools to make it easier, but we were dabbling in this before we had those tools. You can pop the kernels off by hand, and use a clean coffee grinder for a good enough grinding experience. We finally got a simple tool to remove the kernels, to make that go a lot faster. And we have a simple hand grinder that we can set to grind to different levels of coarseness. And we press the tortillas in between two plastic bags, between a cutting board and a countertop: it works just fine, no tortilla press needed. Below are some pictures of our home cooking with grain corn.

That meal pic deserves a description of all the farm treats that are happening in there:

That’s a fresh salad in the foreground of napa cabbage, red carmen peppers, cilantro, garlic, shallots, lime and salt.
The red jar is a fermented hot sauce made from Aji Rico hot peppers, carmen sweet peppers, carrots, garlic, and onions, all finely sliced, lacto-fermented, and then blended with maple syrup when the fermentation was done.
The smaller jar is a simple jalapeno, carrot, onion vinegar-based fresh pickle.
The small bowl behind the jars is fresh dry bean salad with a variety of dry bean we grow for our family.
Hidden behind that bowl is a fresh garlic cilantro aioli.
There's a black crock pot of slow cooked Squire Family Farm beef, cooked in the juice from roasted red peppers.
And there are two trays of tortillas because we wanted to compare the taste difference between the Abenaki Calais Flint corn variety, and the higher protein all yellow variety. (We couldn't taste a difference, they were both very good!)

We will have painted mountain corn available for the next few weeks. Processing corn into cornmeal is fun, but perhaps more of an adventure than everyone is ready for. (And if cooking it is too much of a project, it really makes a beautiful decoration. ) Fortunately there are so many vegetables to choose from this time of the year…this long mild early fall has grown some vibrant and wonderful produce. We hope you have been enjoying it as much as we have.

Don’t forget to sign up for the fall CSA season if you are planning on that.

And don’t forget to order your hoodie if you want one.

Have a great week,

-ESF Team: Ryan, Kara, Taylor, Galen, Bryan, Cindy, K2, Katie, Vanessa, Evan, Leah, and Natalie (and Sky and Soraya)

Weekly Recipe

Mashed Potatoes-Rutabaga Style