Welcome Free Choice Fall Shareholders! We are glad you have joined us for the final 8 weeks of the season. It’s bountiful time of year and there’s many choices for our meals.
Coming soon: bok choy, salad turnips, and fall carrots.
Have you mapped out your adventure for Local Foods weekend yet?
At littleGrasse: 9/10, 10am-noon- Breeding Climate Resilient Grain Corn
Noon-1:30pm- Guided tour of littleGrasse
It’s 1 week away, check out the full schedule of Local Food Weekend events here. Try a different activity every day and play an active role in building a strong local food system.
You are invited to the annual littleGrasse Swap it! Community Trading Event. It’s free, it’s fun, just bring something you grew, made or created. Find all the details here: Event link here.
Goodies from the 2021 Swap.
A glorious sight from our back window, when a rainbow sprouted from the field after Wednesday’s storm. The green patch below right of the rainbow is where this seasons garlic was harvested. Now it’s in a cover crop of oats to enrich the soil before next years food crop. On the left is a no till area that is tarped after the shallot harvest.
The sweet pepper plants are loaded with fruit. Much of the fruit is still green, which is edible. With enough heat, the peppers turn their final color. We have red, orange and yellow sweet peppers. With the sunny forecast this week, we are optimistic that many will ripen further.
Each tomato has at least one primary purpose when we select it for the season. Some are chosen for earliness (Moreton), yield (Sunrise Sauce), disease resistance (Juliet), juicy heft (Big Beef), crack resistance and color (Orange Jubilee) and dependability (Jet Star). We had a taste test last week with this year’s crop, and the favorites were Jet Star and Moreton.
Tips for Success
- Be thorough when picking the beans. It’s a single row in the bed, harvest ALL the mature beans from each plant before moving to the next plant.
- The Fall Egg Share started this week. All eggs are labelled for specific shareholders, they are not available for purchase at this time.
Meet the Dragon’s Tongue Bean, with it’s bold purple stripes. It can be prepared the same way as green and yellow beans. The color fades once boiled but the texture remains juicy.
For our homestead needs, a favorite staple is freezing edamame. This year we cued up the local documentary Pottytown and watched it outside on the projector screen while shelling the beans for winter meals. Entertaining!
A rich batch of refried beans was the base for this meal. Farm ingredients to enrich the beans included garlic, onions, sweet peppers, hot peppers, cilantro and coriander seed.
Crops Available
This list and availability are subject to change, check the share whiteboard at the start of every visit. If you are unsure about how to harvest: ask us! In person, via text or email.
Cell phone numbers, Flip: 315-854-5399 and Bob 315-854-5395.
*Asterisk marks crops added this week
- Arugula
- Beets
- Cutting celery (harvest individual stalks, not entire plant)
- Edamame/green soy
- Flowers
- Groundcherries
- Hot peppers: sugar rush peach, jalapeno, cherry bomb, shishito, habanero
- Kale
- Lettuce greens
- Onions
- Potatoes
- Rainbow chard, also called Swiss chard
- Spicy mixed greens*
- Sweet peppers*
- Tomatoes
Culinary and Medicinal Herbs
- Basil
- Bronze leaf fennel
- Cilantro
- Coriander seed
- Hops
- Lemon balm
- Lemon verbena
- Mint
- Oregano
- Parsley
- Rosemary
- Sage
- Sorrel
- Thyme
- Winter Savory