In Your Share This Week

• Beets
• Carrot
• Celeriac
• Kale
• Onions
• Parsnips
• Potatoes
• Radicchio
• Winter Squash, Butternut, Delicata & Acorn

What a bounty this week. We love to celebrate the abundance of the season for our final share and help get you ready for Thanksgiving feasting! We choose a lot of storage crops for the last share as a send-off that can last you beyond this week.

It has been a pleasure to grow for you all and we take a lot of pride in bringing healthy, nourishing, good food to our community. We want to thank you for your support this season, its been a tremendously successful and exciting season for us. As always, we’ve learned a lot, made new discoveries, brought back some oldies, and are always striving to better our farm into the future.

Here on the farm we are wrapping up the CSA Main Season just in time for Thanksgiving, and we are looking forward to a little holiday vacation to slow down and enjoy the fruits of all our hard work this season with friends, family, and each other. We hope you have enjoyed participating in our CSA this season, and hope many of you will join us for our super-awesome Winter CSA!

We are thankful for the sun, rain, water, air, soil, wildlife, birds, bees, and all the people and critters that are a part of the SIO community, and of course- for all of you.

Thanks again and Happy Thanksgiving

In Your Share This Week

• Cabbage
• Carrot
• Chard
• Chicory
• Onions
• Potatoes
• Winter Squash, Butternut

While we didn’t totally plan it, this week’s share is very red- red onins, red cabbage, red radicchio, red chard. I like late-season chard because the red pigment is so rich- adding it to soups or braising it draws out the color into the liquid and turns it all a lovely shade of pink. Also, the red cabbage makes really fantastic kraut, so if you’re unsure what you want to do with you cabbage I would highly recommend giving red cabbage kraut a shot- its amazing to look at and to eat. Here is a link to a great basic kraut recipe. If you are new to fermentation, Sandor Katz is an amazing resource to help you delve into the fun and awesome world of all things fermented.

This week we are also featuring a new potato variety that we grew for the very first time this season. Its a nice yellow potato, and is billed as being resistant to just about every blight, disease, and malady that afflicts potatoes…and it seems to have lived up to its name. We really put it to the test and grew it in some tough fields that have been historically very challenging to grow in, and they did pretty well. In hindsight it would have been interesting to put some more standard varieties alongside of it in the same field as a control in this experiment, but oh well. We hope you like them.

We just want to say we are also very proud of our carrots- these are some of the largest and most beautiful carrots we’ve seen in quite some time. We were a little worried that the carrot field was not going to produce glorious results this fall due to some pests and a later-than-ideal seeding…but so far the yields have been aMaZiNg!!! We had to re-do the math several times because we couldn’t believe how many pounds were coming out of each bed- but its all true, we are crushing yield records with these sweet, crunchy, amazing beauties!

Thanksgiving Preview

• Beets
• Carrots
• Celeriac
• Kale
• Onions
• Parsnips
• Potatoes
• Radicchio
• Winter Squash: Butternut, Delicata, & Heirloom Acorn Squash

In Your Share This Week

• Beets
• Carrots
• Kale
• Kohlrabi
• Leeks
• Radicchio
• Shallots
• Winter Squash, Acorn

Crop Notes

Leeks: If you ever wondered what déjà vu is like for a farmer, here you go: I was sitting here trying to think of something to say about leeks, so I looked at last year’s blog post from this week and found the following: I’m going to admit that I couldn’t think of anything particularly interesting to say about leeks that hasn’t already been mentioned, so I thought I’d take a ramble through internet-land to get some inspiration. In addition to some growing and cooking information, it turns out that leeks were a part of humanity’s diet in Egypt and Mesopotamia since the second millennium BCE. Also, leeks have made some interesting cultural appearances over time- as a national emblem of Wales, on military helmets as identifiers, on certain vintages of British pound coins, on the coronation gown of Elizabeth II, mentioned in Shakespeare plays, featured in internet memes based on Japanese anime, and even in pokémon. Well played, leek. 

Shallots: I think we have struck gold with our shallot crop! We have found an amazing variety that consistently produces enormous bulbs that store well into Spring of the following year. They have a pretty pinkish-coppery colored skin and white flesh with pale purple colored rings, with great shallot flavor. 

Winter Shares still available. Don’t want the bounty to end in 2 weeks, join our Winter CSA. Eat locally & deliciously all winter long.

The Winter Bounty: beets, braising greens, cabbage, carrots, celeriac, chicories, herbs, kale, kohlrabi, leeks, onions, parsnips, potatoes, pie pumpkins, radish, rutabaga, turnips, shallots & numerous varieties of winter squash (butternut, delicata, acorn & kabocha varieties)

In Your Share This Week

• Cabbage
• Carrots
• Celeriac
• Onions
• Parsnips
• Peppers
• Potatoes
• Pumpkins 

Crop Notes

Parsnips: We are really proud of our parsnip crop so far this season. We experimented with pelletized seed this summer, which helps to ensure a much more uniform and well-spaced seeding rate as opposed to plain seed (especially for things like parsnips that have a peculiar seed shape). We loved it! We had much better germination, and the spacing was correct so we didn’t have to thin or worry about overcrowding, resulting in parsnips that had just the right amount of space to size up into beautiful snowy white roots. I think my very favorite way to enjoy parsnips is to cut them into chunks and roast them until soft and then smash them up a bit, pour some heavy cream over the top, and grate a little fresh nutmeg onto it. 

Peppers: This may be the last time we see peppers in the share this season. We will watch the plants into next week, but at the moment it would seem that they’ve given all that they can for the year. Thanks peppers!

Pumpkins: We like these little pie pumpkins in time for Halloween because they’re festive to look at, but also make great pies! These are ‘pie pumpkins’ rather than jack-o-lantern pumpkins. The main difference is that jack-o-lantern pumpkins are intentionally bred to be large with thin walls, a large internal cavity, and have pretty stringy and watery flesh, whereas a pie pumpkin is much smaller with a creamier flesh and thick walls. A typical pumpkin pie recipe calls for 2 cups of pumpkin puree, which is approximately the amount you can expect to get out of one of these little pie pumpkins. They’re also great for making curry, soup, roasting, or any other baking application that calls for pumpkin. 

Around the Farm

We are now in full Fall harvest mode and are pulling our various root crops out of the fields to put up into long-term cold storage. We have several kinds of beets and carrots, parsnips, celeriac, watermelon, black, and daikon radishes, rutabagas, and turnips. 

Besides lots of root harvests, we are excited to be planting out our high tunnels very soon with a wide array of items that do well in the dead of Winter and on into the Spring. We intend to utilize our high tunnels as very valuable real estate for Winter salad mix production. After the cold, wet, and winds of Winter have rendered most crops unsellable, greens inside the high tunnels are still amazingly vibrant, lush, and delicious! Growing salad mix in the Winter is a real treat despite some of the difficulties because what could be better than fresh greens to liven up a cold, grey drizzly day? 

The Canadian Geese have also returned to Sauvie Island in full force, so we get to experience massive flocks of hundreds of geese flying overhead throughout the day. Sometimes they like to land in our fields and snack on the cover crops that are just freshly sprouted, so we install flags throughout the fields in order to deter the geese from landing. Although majestic and beautiful, those big flocks can lay waste to a field of cover crops in no time! 

In Your Share This Week

• Beets
• Carrots
• Chard
• Fennel 
• Onions
• Peppers
• Radicchio
• Winter Squash, Delicata

Carrots: We have been trialing several carrot varieties that are known as a ‘Chantenay’ type of carrot- a group of carrots that have a stout, triangular shape and are well suited to soils that have a chunkier texture or higher clay content. We have been growing these because a large portion of our farm has more clay and isn’t typically great for carrot production, so these are a great choice for those fields. More tinkering still needs to be done with our seeding rates, as the overall roots seemed rather small (which we think was due to overcrowding). Most of what you see in the store are an ‘Imperator’ type, which are known for their long, thin roots- which requires extremely powdery, chunk-free soils to grow. Great for the Salinas Valley, less so for us here in the Willamette Valley. 

Chard: As we dip into colder night temperatures and wetter weather, the chard is always the first of the greens to die off. We have had some very pleasant surprises at the regrowth of chard fields from our spring planting, but this is likely the last time you will see chard in the CSA for 2016. I like the red chard late in the season- the stems are a rich ruby red and the leaves take on a deep brownish-red color as well. 

Chicories: Everyone will get a head of radicchio this week (round and reddish-purple in color), and full share members will also get a head of Pan di Zucchero chicory (pale green and elongated in shape). The chicory family also includes escarole, frisee, endive, many specialty types of heading chicories that are similar to radicchio, and loose bunching chicories that resemble dandelions. Pan di Zucchero means ‘Suagarloaf’ in Italian (appropriate for what is probably the sweetest of the chicories) and will store for a long time in your fridge. How long? In past storage trials we still had beautiful, delicious heads 3-4 months later. What you do is store it in a plastic bag and cut off however much you need at a time and stick the rest back in the bag, back in the fridge. I think the white parts closer to the base are the most delectable so I tend to cut it lengthwise so I can get some of that stuff too. It doesn’t last as long when cut this way, but it sure is good! I like to serve Pan di Zucchero as a light side in tandem with an otherwise heavy or rich meal with lots of cream/fat/oils/sauce. Cut the chicory into thin ribbons and dress lightly with olive oil, lemon juice, salt, pepper, rosemary, and garlic. Its a delicious little salad that brightens up a meal and aids in digesting heavy foods. The addition of acid helps cut down on the bitterness factor as well- but remember…bitters are good for you.  

Winter Shares Available!

 In Your Share This Week

• Cabbage, red
• Carrots
• Escarole 
• Leeks
• Parsley
• Peppers
• Potatoes
• Winter Squash, Butternut

School is out on Friday, October 14th and October is National Farm to School Month.   What a great time to join our Educational Partners at the Sauvie Island Center for a morning of fun and learning on the farm. 

Family Fun on the Farm, gives kids and parents the chance to explore Sauvie Island Organics and the grounds of Howell Territorial Park while learning about farming and where food comes from. 

You’ll will visit five different stations around the farm, where Sauvie Island Center staffers will lead games and activities based on our curriculum.  Lessons are geared toward elementary-school aged children, but everyone is welcome.

• Soil Exploration. Dig in and learn about healthy soil.
• Seed to Harvest. Learn about the cycle of farming when you plant, tend and harvest in the Grow Lunch Garden.
• Plant Parts Investigation. Explore the farm and plants we can eat.
• Wildlife & Food web. Who else has been foraging on the farm?
• Pollination Station. Meet these hard-working farm friends.

The event is free, but pre-registration is requested

WHEN:        Friday, 10/14 from 10 AM – 1 PM

WHERE:       Sauvie Island Center
13901 NW Howell Park Road
Portland, OR 97231

In Your Share This Week

• Carrots
• Fennel
• Kale
• Kohlrabi
• Onions
• Peppers
• Winter Squash, Acorn

Crop Notes

Kale: We are really excited to be harvesting such a variety of kales for our Main Season CSA- every kale has its own personality and applications. What we have in the share this week is referred to as a ‘Winterbor’ type. These curly kales tend to be the all-stars of overwintering production, and we have about half a dozen individual varieties of Winterbors to see which ones do the best. I think this type of kale is the absolute best for massaged kale salads. I really enjoy tahini-based dressings or anything with lots of lemon and garlic!

Kohlrabi: This week we gave Full Share Members a large green storage variety of Kohlrabi and Half Shares the smaller, purple type that we’ve been featuring in the share so far this season. For folks with the large type, this is a variety that has been bred for size and storage capability- so it can last for months in the refrigerator! It tastes great even after a long time in storage, the interior flesh is still juicy, crisp, and sweet…a real treat later on in the dead of winter. The main difference is that unlike the smaller purple type where peeling is more of a matter of personal preference, I would absolutely recommend peeling the skins off these large types as it tends to be pretty woody and tough. 

Winter Squash, Acorn: As with all winter squash, Acorns have a strong, tough skin that protects the fruit long into the winter. Thats a great feature for storage, but it also means that these might take a little extra elbow grease to cut open. I get a sturdy chef’s knife and use it to poke a hole in the side of the squash, then use that as the starting point to push the knife in further and then use that as leverage to push down and work your way around the hemisphere of the fruit. Acorn Squash always reminds me of being a kid and eating them cut in half and baked with butter and brown sugar. I’ve had some good savory-stuffed Acorn Squash, but this is a rare instance where sweet always wins in my book.

Around the Farm

We are really excited about the shift towards Fall here on the farm. Gone are the hot summer days of speeding to pull in fresh greens in the cool of the morning and the non-stop output of summer crops like zucchini, tomatoes and eggplants. Now are the days of thick morning fog, geese returning to the island for the winter, digging lots of root crops, and cleaning up the fields and cover cropping in preparation for winter. Its really hard to believe we are about to begin October, but we’re busy taking lots of notes, mapping, and collecting data on the last of the summer crops and summer production before we move on and get ready to start thinking about next year.

Our Field Manager Brian is busy on the tractors, mowing and tilling in old crop debris to prepare the fields for cover crops. A large amount of the farm has already been cover-cropped, and it feels good to see large emerald carpets sprouting up. The onions are all out of the fields, the head lettuce has all been cut, the winter squash brought in, potatoes are safely in storage, most of the corn has been picked, cabbages harvested…and now our lovely green carpets of cover crops will add fertility and organic matter to the fields for next season. 

In Your Share This Week

• Carrots
• Escarole
• Kale
• Onions
• Peppers
• Potatoes
• Winter Squash, Delicata

Crop Notes 

Carrots: Sometimes, carrots have a sense of humor too. Not every carrot is a uniform, straight root…we see all sorts of configurations when we pull up our carrots. By the time carrots hit the grocery store, everything but the ‘Grade-A’ has been culled out, but there’s a whole secret world that I would imagine most folks never see. Carrots (and other root vegetables) can appear hairy if too much Nitrogen is present in the soil, and forking generally happens when the taproot encounters an obstacle on its way down- like a clod of soil, or chunks of organic matter that aren’t fully decomposed. Here’s an assortment of treasure that I found from the cull bin just the other day (by the way this is what we either eat ourselves, or send excess to non-profits around town like Urban Gleaners, The Oregon Food Bank, or Apples to Applesauce). The carrots spiraled together are always our favorite…they’re best friends forever, awwwww.  

Chicories: Its time to eat your bitters! Everyone will receive a head of Escarole this week, and Full Share members will also receive a head of Radicchio. Both can be eaten wither raw (more bitter) or cooked (less bitter and more savory). My new favorite thing is the white ribs near the base of the Escarole…they’re so sweet and delicious with just the right amount of that feel-good bitter flavor! Yum!

Peppers, Sweet: Tuesday pick up site folks will see the mix of red and gold Italian sweet peppers that we have been featuring in the share recently, with mostly gold since they seem to be yielding much higher at this point in time. For Thursday pick ups this week we are also excited to share the amazingness that is the Jimmy Nardello frying pepper. It looks more like a cayenne with a very long, slender shape but don’t fret- although it looks like a hot pepper, its about as sweet as they come. Just slice it into rounds and fry it up. The seeds are concentrated near the stem, so you can just halve it and scoop them out when you get there. We will make sure that Tuesday folks get some Jimmy Nardellos in the next week or two. Click here for a fun bit of the cultural history of Jimmy Nardellos.

Potatoes, RedGolds: We were excited to find that we had more usable RedGold potatoes come out of the field than we originally thought were going to wind up with. Some of the skins have scab, which looks like dark soil that is encrusted on the skins. It can be easily removed with a quick scrub using a bristled brush. I love the flavor of RedGolds and my favorite is to boil, smash, and toss with salt, parsley, and either butter or olive oil. 

Winter Squash, Delicata: This tends to be the reigning favorite of CSA members. Delicata is a very versatile squash that’s great either savory or sweet. Since the skins are thin enough, you can even pan sear it in thin half-circle slices for a real treat. Although Delicatas are grown, eaten, and stored like a winter squash, they actually belong to the same cucurbita ‘pepo’ species as summer squash (think zucchini, pattypan, crooknecks, etc.) acorn, carnival squash, as well as the jack-o-lantern pumpkins that you see for Halloween. Squashes are native to the Americas, and also include two other species- cucurbita ‘maxima’ which includes hubbards, kabocha, and many of the large storage heirloom varieties that we will feature in our Winter CSA Share, and ‘moschata’ which features butternuts and other crookneck squash like ‘Trombocino’.  

Pitch in for PACSAC

Enjoy a delicious pop up dinner and support the programs of of the Portland Area CSA Coalition. Proceeds from the night make CSA shares affordable for families while supporting an education network for CSA farmers. The Portland Area CSA Coalition is a 501c3 non-profit representing 54 CSA farms providing over 7,000 CSA households in the Portland tri-county area with locally-grown produce.

Chef Megan Denton, who has two decades of culinary experience in small farm-focused restaurants, will host an intimate pop-up dinner in the heart of Portland on N Mississippi Ave. You will enjoy a four course meal with wine pairings from Amalia Roberts of Petite Monde Wines.

Where: 4025 N Mississippi Ave (Bryant Park at Lot 13, next to Fresh Pot)
When: Saturday, September 24 at 5 PM
Cost: Sliding Scale $50 and up. Ticket and raffle proceeds benefit the Portland Area CSA Coalition

Click here to purchase tickets.

In Your Share This Week

• Beets, red
• Cabbage, red
• Chard
• Corn
• Joi Choi
• Onions
• Peppers, sweet
• Tomatoes

Beets: Do you ever have that thing happen where you find something like a pair of boots that fit just right, or that perfect shade of lipstick…only to find that its being discontinued, or the places you shop are no longer going to carry it? Well, that same annoyance happens to farmers with vegetable varieties. Our red beet variety that has been our main workhorse for years is essentially being discontinued. We’ve learned in the past (with sweet peppers) that although this can be a big disappointment, it can also spur new discoveries and innovations. We were sad to learn that a sweet pepper we grew was going away, so we did a massive variety trial to pick our next pepper varieties- and wouldn’t you know it, the shining all-stars of the trial came from breeders right here in the Willamette Valley! We love the Gatherer’s Gold and Jolene sweet peppers even more then what we were originally growing- and that’s what you’ll find in the share all this season. We are doing the same thing with our red beets this Fall- we have a handful of promising varieties that we are testing out. We will be looking at germination rates, uniformity of growth and maturation, days to maturity, disease resistance, vigor, leaf quality and bunching ability, storage ability, root size, color, texture, and of course…taste! This is the very first contestant from our trials and we really like the nice shape, low cull rate, and smooth skin.    

Corn: Just another reminder that we are firmly into the unavoidable Organic late summer corn appearance of corn borers (the green caterpillar looking pals that are likely lurking in the tips of your corn ears). If the proposition of peeling back the silks to reveal a caterpillar and mealy kernels that have been snacked on sounds unappealing, you can always take a firm, swift swing at the tip of the corn ear with a sturdy chef’s knife or a cleaver and just cut 1-2 inches off of the tip before you shuck the ear. Be safe, and have fun!

Onions, Cippolini: We grow a fun little assortment of red, gold, and white Cippolinis that we’re happy to get to share with you this week. Cippolini means ‘little onion’ in Italian, although we have to say that no matter what we try, we keep growing very large ones. The ones in your share this week are a little larger that the dainty boutique-sized treats that you may have seen in specialty markets before. We think its just more Cippolini to love! These are renowned for their sweetness and ability to caramelize incredibly well- so that’s what we would recommend trying. The skins are papery thin, and on some onions may have sloughed off. We hope you like these!

Peppers, sweet: Just a side note…these thick-walled, smooth, and meaty peppers are GREAT for roasting and freezing. Char the skins until they are all blistered and blackened (either over a fire, on the BBQ, or under a broiler) and then toss them into a paper bag and roll the top closed. This will slightly steam the skins and they will slide right off once they are cool enough to handle. Trim the tops off and pull the seeds out, and you’ve got amazing roasted red peppers all winter long!  

Around the Farm

This field was fallow for 2016. That means we did not plant any cash crops in this acre, only cover crops. This was part of an effort to help rejuvenate this field by incorporating the accumulated biomass that the cover crops provided and increasing the amount of organic matter in the soil. We had also been having weed problems in this field, which the cover crops help to smother and reduce going into the future. 

The corn in the background is where we picked your corn this week. In front of it we have red beets (also in the share this week), gold beets, and carrots. This field is looking really promising as we head in to Fall and we are expecting pretty good yields that will provide for the Winter CSA as well as Winter Farmers Market and Restaurant sales. You might even find some of our red beets in New Seasons this coming Fall and Winter. 

From left to right we have Lacinato kale, collards, leeks, and carrots underneath the row cover. The row cover helps to keep rust fly out of the carrots, and the the leeks will be large enough to start digging soon!