There is quite a bit of food coming off the farm right now, heading into late August after all. This abundance can bring both excitement and anxiety. So many different things to eat…how can we eat all of it? What we try to remember is that vegetables harvested at the same time generally work well together in a dish. This was the only way people could make a meal before the advent of air freight from South America and flash freezing. This is the time to get creative and jump in. A few ideas from this week’s share that are simple and delicious…
Tomatoes and kale braised in a heavy skillet with olive oil and balsamic vinegar.
Leeks and Broccoli roasted in a hot oven and tossed in butter and finished with fresh pepper.
Carrots and Cukes sliced and allowed to sit for a few minutes in rice vinegar and sprinkled with sea salt.
Beef Shares
Starting this week we will have beef shares available for sale at pick-up. This is grass-fed, grass-finished beef from the cows we had here at the farm over the past year. Enjoy some great grilling before summer comes to a close and fill your freezer with Crystal Spring Farm Grass Fed Beef this winter. Grass-fed beef is high in healthy Omega-3’s and cancer fighting CLA’s not to mention it tastes great. This is a smaller beef package than last year and contains 30 pounds of cuts that come frozen and vacuum packed. The price per share is $225 and we have 15 to offer this season and they will be sold first come first served at Tuesday and Friday CSA pick-up. This amount will fit into the standard size family freezer.
Each package will include:
- 10-14 oz steaks including Delmonico, Sirloin, and NY Strip
- Several 2-3 lb Roasts
- 1lb packages of Ground
- 1lb packages of Kebobs and Steak Tips
- 1lb packages of Stew Cubes
Pork for the Freezer
We have a great group of pigs this year. Fed on grain from Maine Beer Company and Allagash Brewing, all of them look great. Order forms for our first round of farm raised pork will be available this week. Pigs are sold as whole or half and processed into cuts as you like them (all bacon is currently not possible). If you have freezer space and would like to enjoy high quality farm-raised pork this fall and winter talk to us about the details at pick-up.
Farm Yogurt
Incredible farm yogurt will be a regular offering for sale at CSA pick-up…once again low for Tuesday unfortunately, but we will have a new delivery for Friday’s pick-up this week. This rich cream-at-the-top product of Wholesome Holmstead Farm in Winthrop is some of the best I have ever had. Perfect with fresh blueberries! We are gauging your interest with the hope of having them deliver a yogurt/cheese share next year, so please continue to give us your feedback – so far it’s been very positive!
Crystal Spring Pork
We will have pork for sale by the cut this week. These are a group of pigs that spent the winter with us eating brewery barley and gelato-based dairy products and so far, they taste great. Browse through the freezer to shop for your next grilling event or Sunday breakfast.
What’s in the Share this week?
Broccoli
Leeks
Watermelon
Melon
Tomato
Kale/chard
Carrot
Lettuce/arugula
Cukes
What’s in Upic?
Green Beans
Flowers
Cherry Toms
We have garlic drying in the barn this year for this first time in a long time. Back in 2007 we grew a lot of garlic. That year we harvested a quarter of an acre and the yield was about 2000lbs. This was great crop for us and we used to put heads in everyone’s shares for weeks and weeks. We grew two varieties that were very complimentary in flavor and in the years we had been growing them had improved in our soil to produce big head with big cloves. Then in 2008 everything changed.
Blueberry harvest begins this week and I can’t wait for two reasons. Mostly because I’m excited for the process of pulling what will hopefully be thousands of pounds of berries from these little wild bushes, but also because I am tried of the preparation! Since June, getting ready to harvest has consumed my spare time. So much so that my family and the farm crew get glassy, uninterested stares when the word “blueberry” is mentioned. Our lease on 70 acres of blueberry barren right next to the farm was signed this winter and after some spring weed control most of my efforts have been focused on the logistics of getting a whole lot of little berries off their mother bushes and up to Ellsworth where they will be cleaned, frozen and sold. This involved buying a harvester, hiring folks to run it with me, lining up a trucker and lastly figuring out how to get the berries on the truck!
Most Mondays I sit down to write this post and have to shake of the obsessive desire to talk about the weather. This one variable of what I do is so big, so uncontrollable that I can never get it completely out of my mind and quite often can’t help but want to burden you readers to boredom with the tidbits of rainfall per hour or sustained windspeeds. Weather makes farmers feel like a kids on the playground trying to have fun amongst the next possibility of pain or humiliation at the hands of an older child. When I was a younger farm hand in Western Massachusetts I watched a hail storm blow through our farm and in the matter of 30 seconds take all the crops of late June and transform them into mud. My boss, who was superhuman in his skill and insight, fell to his knees and cried in front of all the crew that day, then we started re-planting. Come to think of it that really tells the whole story of what its like to farm (minus the good days of course).
Working outside everyday I often forget the forest for the trees. The daily list of tasks and the infinite adaptations often needed to get them done is all-consuming to the point that I tend to hit my head on things a lot, focused on the task at hand and not the branch overhead. Lately for some reason I have been looking up and finding some amazing things above. The sky has been particularly dramatic this year with color and clouds. Watching cold fronts blow in as solid lines of rolling grey or the heat of the morning sun evaporate away the fog, it’s been a good year. Hopefully I can continue to keep my head up, at least to avoid the branches.
Some interesting new items in the share this week…
The road ahead this season looks good. It’s crazy that it takes almost the end of June to be able to say that, but that’s farming. If we really looked closely at the just how little effect our planning and skills have on the outcome of a season none of us would probably do this for a living!
neighbors farms. The first cut of hay fields starts a clock that moves slowly but surely towards the fall. We sell our first cut of hay so that we can cut these same fields later in the summer for our own animals. If we are lucky we can cut some of these fields 3 times and have plenty of forage for our sheep and over-wintered cows. If the fall comes early or September is filled with wet weather we can’t always cut what we need, leaving us in a pickle. This year the gamble is especially risky as we waited intentionally late so as to avoid having to make forage during blueberry season which will monopolize our time the last week of July and the first week of June…
The formula is slowly coming into balance here at the farm. Just as our harvest started last week the heat and a little water from the sky came together with our warming soil and regular sun to get things going. Maura and I left the farm for a few days to attend my cousins wedding down in Georgia (it was hotter here on Friday!) and came back sunday evening to taller more robust fields of crops. This was heartening as last week’s harvest was lighter than we would have liked, due mostly to the low temps and below normal rainfall. We are slowly starting to build volume and diversity for your shares. This week we add salad turnips and broccoli with strawberries and summer squash coming next week.
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