2013 CSA: Week 31

Greens, greens, and more greens! Let your mind drift back in time to this past summer, when the only greens in sight were Malabar spinach and Sweet potato greens. Now fast forward to this week and feast your eyes on the verdant variety of veggies we have listed below. We have a few roots in store this week, and at least one more surprise in store before week 34. But the upsetting news is that the early fall beets and carrots did not work out. We may see some of the carrots next week, but nary a beet will be had before the Winter CSA starts. Which reminds me, please keep telling your friends and neighbors about the CSA this winter. We are still accepting applications.

On the farm-front:  the crew is enjoying the shifting pace of harvesting back to the winter schedule (8am start! versus 6am in the heat of summer). We are also tackling all sorts of new jobs. Lori is starting to construct new bee-hives and strategize new ways to grow mushrooms around the farm. We’ve begun building a series of connected small ponds to collect and utilize rainwater from rooftops.  And we’re planting new fruit trees like persimmons and mulberries and satsumas, as well as more berries and brambles. Gotta love the fall, such exciting work to be done.

*Finally, a note for Meat CSA members: There are times when we assemble your boxes the very same day that the meat is cut fresh. Other times, we are able to stock-pile in advance of that week in order to give everyone the same contents in their box. Please look for a “freeze-by” or “sell by” date on your items. If an item arrives for you at <40 degrees but not frozen, chances are it has not thawed but instead, was actually cut fresh from the animal just recently.  Depending on the meat, you could choose to cook and enjoy immediately, start aging in your fridge (for steaks) or to just freeze it for later.

 

Ground Beef

Cuban Oregano

Watermelon Radishes

Examining hives

NY Strip

TatSoi OR BokChoi

Meat CSA: (call us on Monday by noon for any additional a la carte orders: 229-641-2081 – web orders click here)

NY Strip – x2 The most popular grilling steak that is derived from the loin of the beef carcass. This steak lends itself well to those who cherish a great steak in any type of situation.

Ground Beef – x2 A 90% lean ground beef that is great on the outdoor grill, stove top, or George Foreman grill.

 

Pasture Raised Eggs: 

Beautiful brown eggs from our own lovely ladies that range freely on certified organic pasture. The eggs are washed, candled and graded fresh for you each week. (Wanna add eggs to your order this week?  Please email me or call our office today: 229-641-2081)

 

Certified Organic Vegetables:

Red Russian or Dino Kale – It’s back! Bring on the Greens. Tis’ the season

Mizuna or Arugula – One bag of spicy green goodness in a bag.

Bok Choi OR TatSoi – The last of the bok Choi for a little while, OR the first of the tat soi!

Okra OR Watermelon Radish-  A pound of your favorite cousin of cotton (that’s right – okra), or a big bunch of spicy

Hakurei turnips – aka Salad turnips. Super good raw! or in anything else this time of year.

Assorted Eggplant – Eggplants love Fall! And we love eggplants, y’all!

Peppers – Jupiter and Orion Bell peppers, Cowhorn and Carmens. What beauties!

Mixed Hot peppers – Mostly jalapenos and Cayenne types.  mixed hot peppers are bagged separately for your convenience.

Surprise herb – Cuban oregano OR Mountain mint.

Basil – Either genovese, purple ruffles, lemon or Thai. Can’t go wrong.

2013 CSA: Week 30

Good news! We have a replacement box truck and we are back on normal delivery schedule. Thank you all so much for your patience and understanding the past few weeks. With only a month left, we’re all hoping for smooth sailing for the home stretch. We’re also hoping that more of you will join us for the winter. Eggs and vegetable shares are still available, which would enable you to get 5% off of any meat orders to your location.

You’ll notice that the new egg cartons came in! Big thanks to Frankie for facilitating the design process on those cartons. Please keep them clean and send them back each week. We’d love to keep using these for a long time. I’ve also heard some feedback asking to be alerted in advance when new sausage varieties are introduced. Jenni writes a regular newsletter that features several of our artisinal products including the hand-crafted sausages. To get on the email list, Please go to our web-page and add your email address to the box at the bottom of the page. Then click “weekly specials” when you’re signing up. If ever you tire of hearing about sausage and pickles and broth, etc (and I can’t imagine that ever happening), then you can unsubscribe via a link within the emails you receive. CLICK HERE for the website.

Finally, with only a month left, I want to remind everyone that as members of the CSA, you also receive a free tour of the farm as well as a lunch for two on any visit to our on-farm restaurant. Thanks to everyone who’ve taken the time to visit with us already.  The door’s open for everyone else, just give us a call first so we’ll be ready for you. 

Here’s some pictures from the week and then we’ll talk over the menu…

Herbs

Radishes or Turnips

Kale

Sugarcane

new transplants

Packing the farm store

 

 

Meat CSA: (call us on Monday by noon for any additional a la carte orders: 229-641-2081 – web orders click here)

Shoulder Roast – TIme to break out the slow-cooker! 3 lbs of grass-fed protein for a great value. Here’s an easy straight forward recipe from the queen of all things domestic: http://www.marthastewart.com/313619/slow-cooker-pot-roast

Party Wings – 2- 2.5 lbs of the best pasture-raised comfort food around. High heat and frying will toughen these wings while cooking, so feel free to try any of these recipes for a tender and moist change of pace: http://www.yummly.com/recipes/tender-chicken-wings

Ground Chicken – 1 lb of quick, easy, deliciousness. Try some taco seasoning for added flavor!

 

Pasture Raised Eggs: 

Beautiful brown eggs from our own lovely ladies that range freely on certified organic pasture. The eggs are washed, candled and graded fresh for you each week. (Wanna add eggs to your order this week?  Please email me or call our office today: 229-641-2081)

 

Certified Organic Vegetables:

Red Russian Kale – It’s back! Bring on the Greens. Tis the season

Sugarcane!– For the first time ever, we’re offering chewing cane. A nice Halloween candy alternative. Directions: cut/peel, chew, spit, repeat.

Braising Mix – Tender greens including: arugula, mizuna, tat soi, baby kale, and more! 

Okra –  Two pounds of burgundy and green okra. Some big, some small and some just right in size.

Hakurei turnips OR Valentine’s Radishes – Don’t forget to use your baby turnips too!  They make a great accent to a salad or casserole.

Assorted Eggplant – Eggplants love Fall!

Peppers – Jupiter and Orion Bell peppers, Cowhorn and Carmens. What beauties!

Mixed Hot peppers – Mostly jalapenos and Cayenne types.  mixed hot peppers are bagged separately for your convenience.

Bok Choi – Wonderful addition to stir-fry, quiche, quinoa dishes, or hearty fall salads.

Surprise herb – Purple ruffles basil, Dill, Summer Savory, Sage, or Mint.

Lettuce – 2 heads of lettuce, picked young for maximum taste.

2013 CSA: Week 29

This is gonna be a short posting. We’re busy in the field and working hard to making these deliveries happen. Thanks again for your understanding while we get the bus rolling again. Big thanks to Lori and Frankie for leading the charge the last two weeks. And keep sending prayers to Jamal, our driver, as he heals up. During the past 13 days, I was away at an intensive Permaculture Design Course at Spiral Ridge in Tennessee.  We look forward to hosting some workshops in the future as we implement ecologically regenerative techniques all around the farm. Stay tuned for more info…

So here’s what’s in store for this week!

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Meat CSA: (call us on Monday by noon for any additional a la carte orders: 229-641-2081 – web orders click here)

London Broil – The leanest muscle that is derived from the beef carcass that lends itself well to all types of preparation.

Grass-fed Spare Ribs – A long cut from the lower portion of the carcass, spare ribs are great for barbecuing, smoking, or cooking over an open flame.

 

Pasture Raised Eggs: 

Beautiful brown eggs from our own lovely ladies that range freely on certified organic pasture. The eggs are washed, candled and graded fresh for you each week. (Wanna add eggs to your order this week?  Please email me or call our office today: 229-641-2081)

 

Certified Organic Vegetables:

Braising Mix – Tender young greens including: arugula, mizuna, tat soi, baby kale, and more! 

Jerusalem Artichokes (aka Sunchokes) – Both delicious and both can be prepared in a number of ways.  Please share your favorite recipes!

Okra –  One pound of burgundy and green okra. Some big, some small and some just right in size.

Hakurei turnips and turnip greens – Don’t forget to use your baby turnips too!  They make a great accent to a salad or casserole.

Rattlesnake Pole Beans / Eggplant – Can’t go wrong here!

Peppers – Jupiter and Orion Bell peppers, Cowhorn and Carmens. What beauties!

Mixed Hot peppers – Mostly jalapenos and Cayenne types.  mixed hot peppers are bagged separately for your convenience.

Hon Tsai Tai OR Bok Choi – Wonderful addition to stir-fry, quiche, quinoa dishes, or hearty fall salads.

Basil – Genovese, Purple ruffles,

Lettuce – 2 heads of lettuce, picked young for maximum taste.

 

2013 CSA: Week 28

It’s me again!  Lori, that is.  We’ve been keeping busy on the farm and were lucky to get some good rain this weekend.  The mornings are getting cooler and our fall greens are getting bigger and more robust every day.  Our brassicas are stretching their legs (and leaves) and getting ready for a good season.  The cows are calving, bees are buzzing, and our 5,000 baby birds just had their first day out on pasture!

As many of you know, our box truck is down and until we can replace it we will be making deliveries with our refrigerated trailer.  Due to the space limitations of the trailer we have had to make some day and time adjustments to our normal weekly deliveries and have contacted each of the CSA recipients to highlight these changes.  As a reminder, our normal Wednesday delivery is being split between Tuesday and Wednesday and our Tallahassee delivery will be made on Friday instead of Saturday.  If you have any questions or need to confirm your pick-up time please call our office at (229) 641-2081.

Now, on to the boxes.  New this week to our veggie share are baby bok choi, young turnip greens, and sunchokes.  As you may remember from the spring, bok choi is a tender Asian green that has a crisp, not-too-fibrous stem and goes great in stir-fries.  If you’ve never had it before don’t be afraid to experiment.  Bok choi is a very versatile green and can pair well with many different flavors.

Our turnip beds are looking fantastic right now and they have been loving the cloudy weather of late.  We are glad to have this opportunity to give you these healthy greens and give our Hakurei turnip rows some much-needed thinning at the same time.  So enjoy your greens this week and know that in eating them you are making room for bigger, badder turnips to come!

Now, some of you veteran CSA members may remember sunchokes from last year.  Also called Jerusalem artichokes (and by at least one CSA member, “fartichokes”), these underground tubers are quite versatile and can be eaten in almost any way imaginable.  Add them raw to a salad, braise them, roast them, sautee them, toss them in a soup–the possibilities or endless.  Or, grow your own!  Sunchokes are easy to cultivate and very persistent once they’re established.  Plant the tubers underground as you would a potato and you’ll be able to harvest your own next year (as a bonus, you’ll get some pretty yellow flowers and good forage for wild pollinators).

A note on the sunchokes for this week:  due to the weekend rain our sunchoke fields were too wet to harvest on Monday.  As a result, the Tuesday/Wednesday delivery folks will receive sweet potatoes in lieu of sunchokes this week and you’ll get your sunchokes next week.  Friday/Saturday folks will get your sunchokes this weekend.

 

Now that that business is taken care of, let’s look at some pictures from around the farm and get on to what’s in your boxes:

Baby kales on the way

Curious turkeys

Sunchokes growing tall and mighty

Tenderloin filet

Baby turnips and turnip greens

5-week-old chicks marching out to pasture

Meat CSA: (call us on Monday by noon for any additional a la carte orders: 229-641-2081 – web orders click here)

3x Tenderloin Steak- Derived from the most tender muscle of the beef carcass, these steaks are the master of all steaks. Savor them for the evenings that really count. They lend themselves well to grilling, broiling and pan frying.  

Pasture Raised Eggs: 

Beautiful brown eggs from our own lovely ladies that range freely on certified organic pasture. The eggs are washed, candled and graded fresh for you each week. (Wanna add eggs to your order this week?  Please email me or call our office today: 229-641-2081)

Certified Organic Vegetables:

Braising Mix – Tender young greens including: arugula, mizuna, tat soi, baby kale, and more! 

Sweet Potatoes OR Sunchokes – Both delicious and both can be prepared in a number of ways.  Please share your favorite recipes!

Okra –  One pound of burgundy and green okra. Some big, some small and some just right in size.

Young turnips and turnip greens – Don’t forget to use your baby turnips too!  They make a great accent to a salad or casserole.

Eggplant – Enough to go around for everyone this week.  Scrumptious!

Peppers – Jupiter and Orion Bell peppers, Cowhorn and Carmens. Fall weather should help us see more colors in the peppers too. What beauties!

Garlic – At least one head of Inchelium Red softneck garlic, an heirloom variety we know you’ll enjoy.

Mixed Hot peppers – Mostly jalapenos and Cayenne types.  mixed hot peppers are bagged separately for your convenience.

Bok choi – Sometimes called Chinese cabbage, this Asian green can be cooked almost as many ways as it can be spelled.  Try this recipe for a simple and healthy dish.

Basil – Basil’s back!  Want more ways to use it?  Try infusing basil into vinegar for a tasty salad dressing base, chop it finely and make your own basil salt, or mince it and mix into a tasty herb butter!  Get more ideas here.

 

Finally, it’s been my pleasure writing to you all for the past couple of weeks.  As the resident farm entomologist I love any and all talk of insects and also slimy, slithery things in general.  If you ever have any questions or comments about bugs, plants, weeds, mushrooms, or anything else, please feel free to email me at lorimoshman@whiteoakpastures.com.  Have a great day!

2013 CSA: Week 27

Hi everybody!  This is Lori here.  I’ll be your blogger for the next two weeks, and seeing as I don’t do this blog thing very often, I’d like to take the opportunity to share a little bit about what I do on the farm.

As some of y’all may know, I am part of the organic vegetable crew, but I’m also taking on some projects of my own.  I am in charge of starting and caring for all the delicate little seedlings that begin their life in the greenhouse before we move them out to the harsh, unforgiving field.  It’s a big world out there.  I am also beginning to cultivate culinary mushrooms and am foraying into the wonderful (and sometimes painful) world of beekeeping.  I could write an essay on each of these endeavors, easily.  But that’s not what I came to tell you about.

I came to talk about the black soldier fly larvae.  BSFL.  Let’s get one thing out of the way here.  I love bugs.  I love bugs, creepy-crawlies, little tiny things that writhe around on six legs (or sometimes no legs), minuscule robots with wings and antennae.  I think they’re great, and the grosser the better.  So it’s no wonder I jumped in feet first to the black soldier fly rearing project here at White Oak Pastures.  Let me give you some background…

Black soldier flies (Hermetia illucens) are flies native to the southeast U.S. (and elsewhere).  They will eat pretty much anything that can decompose.  Vegetables, meat, eggs, manure–you name it, they will probably devour it.  That sounds great, right?  Well, here’s the even better part.  These little guys are eating machines as larvae, but as adults they only live four days and don’t need to eat during that time–they just live off of their fat reserves until they die.  Why is this so cool?  Because it means that BSF are much more tolerable to be around than ordinary house flies (they don’t bite), and as a result they are much less likely to vector disease.  And, call me a proud mother, but they are way cuter than house flies.

So here’s where I come in.  Not only are BSF great composters, but a great protein and fat source for poultry as well.  I am working with the wild population of BSF here on the farm, collecting freshly oviposited eggs and raising the larvae to feed to the myriad chickens, turkeys, geese, and guinea that may one day be on your plate.  What do I feed them, you ask?  Great question.  All of my BSFL babies receive daily rations of ground eviscerate material (guts) that come fresh out of the beef abattoir.  I haven’t tasted it myself (not on purpose, anyway) but I can tell you that the larvae just love it (and the chickens just love them)!  And that is just one more way to complete the nutrient cycle and fulfill our goal of being a zero-waste facility.

I could go on and on, but you guys must be getting hungry.  So here is what’s going in your boxes this week:

Mama and her newborn calf

Black widow

Delicious soldier fly larvae

Sweet potatoes curing in the greenhouse

Radish and Hon Tsai Tai greens

Soybeans

Pesto

Meat CSA: (call us on Monday by noon for any additional a la carte orders: 229-641-2081 – web orders click here)

Tenderloin Roast- Cook it slow and low for the best results!  Marinate overnight for an even juicier and more flavorful experience.

1lb Bacon–  Who doesn’t love bacon and eggs?  Get ’em while they’re hot!

Pasture Raised Eggs: 

Beautiful brown eggs from our own lovely ladies that range freely on certified organic pasture. The eggs are washed, candled and graded fresh for you each week. (Wanna add eggs to your order this week?  Please email me or call our office today: 229-641-2081)

Certified Organic Vegetables:

Braising Mix – Tender young greens including: arugula, mizuna, tat soi, baby kale, and more! 

Sweet Potatoes – 3- 4 lbs of sweet potatoes. Enjoy!

Okra –  2 full lbs of purple and green okra. Some big, some small and some just right in size.

Beans OR Radish Greens – A full pound of tender green beans or a mixed bunch of radish and Hon Tsai Tai greens.  More fall greens to come!

Eggplant – Enough to go around for everyone this week.  Scrumptious!

Peppers – Jupiter and Orion Bell peppers, Cowhorn and Carmens. Fall weather should help us see more colors in the peppers too. What beauties!

Soybeans – We’ve got ’em and now so do you!  For a quick and easy snack or appetizer try steaming the whole pods and tossing with coarse salt. Simple and delicious!

Mixed Hot peppers – Mostly jalapenos and Cayenne types.  mixed hot peppers are bagged separately for your convenience.

Lemon Balm – This is our gourmet herb for the week.  Try making it into a refreshing herbal tea or toss it in with your braising mix for a citrusy zing.

Pesto! – We took your weekly basil bunches and turned them into a delicious pesto!  This one contains green Genovese basil, garlic, olive oil, and Parmesan cheese.