CSA WEEK #26: NOV 17-19 (Last Share of the 2015 season!!!)

Beets: Our harvest manager Jen admittedly went crazy and indulged her creative tendency to beautify your CSA share once again.  The three or more different shades of beets of this mix, washed and co-mingling in our large harvest bins are just gorgeous.

Celeriac: Still with that odd alien beauty that is unlike any other vegetable we grow. Slicing into the celery root releases a bit of summertime as a well appreciated mid-winter dose of aromatherapy. I enjoy it grated raw and mixed with raw grated carrots as a winter salad. Nutritionally celeriac is especially a bargain and by keeping our soils supplied each spring with macro and micronutrients, those minerals get passed on to you to help keep you healthy this winter.

Kale: The kale patch is showing some signs of slowing down and wanting to hibernate.  The cold weather with out much day length makes it difficult for even the toughest varieties to put on much new growth quickly. Most of what you will find bunched together this week is a hardy mix of ‘rainbow lacinato’ and ‘wild garden kale.’

Onions: This summer of record heat helped produce a massive and record size yield of all of our onions. This variety of yellow onion has been selected to last, cured in storage for up to and beyond 9 months depending on how they are kept. Right now, as long as there isn’t a threat of a deep freeze they will stay where they have been waiting comfortably in the dark loft of the barn. The crew has fond memories of an entire morning hoisting and carrying 6 tons of fifty pound onion bags up to their storage space.

Parsnips: These beauties were seeded back around the fourth of July, and with a lot of work watering, tractor cultivating, weeding, harvesting, and washing they are ready for you some five months later.  This variety has proven to be a real keeper, huge and delicious.  So far we have harvested half of our patch, just under 1/8th of an acre.  More will remain in the field until needed for supplying the 2015-2016 Sauvie Island Organics Winter CSA.

Potatoes: These Yukon Gem’s are an improved selection from the well known variety Yukon Gold. They seem to produce super well from very vigorous disease free vines.  These potatoes have been in cold storage for a little over one month now, around 32 degrees, so most of their starches have converted to sugar making them very sweet to the taste. The only downside to this high sugar content is that if you attempt to deep fry them, those sugars tend to cook super fast, brown, get smokey, and potentially burn. So, if you intend to make fries, just set the potatoes in a dark place at room temperature for a few days first.  Otherwise, straight from cold storage or your fridge, roasted or mashed they are really tasty this way.

Pie Pumpkins: A little smaller than the ones distributed prior to Halloween, but maybe sweeter?  Anyhow, they make a fantastic simple pumpkin soup.

Radicchio: Every year improvements are made in production systems. The simple, but time consuming job of keeping weeds out of the chicory patch reward us tremendously with a greater quantity of larger radicchio heads. And this year with a combination of tractor cultivation and hoeing, we were able to keep weeding by hand to a real minimum. Another triumph in their production, is that no extra nitrogen fertilizer was applied to the field, these beautiful chicories grew with nitrogen provided them naturally from a cereal rye and common vetch cover crop that was worked into the soil about a month prior to transplanting.

Winter Squash, Delicata: We classified the size that you will be receiving this week as medium to large, but in reality they are huge compared to some previous seasons. Thank you record hot summer! We used to frantically race any forecasted frost or freeze event, normally in October to get all of our squash out of the fields. No such stress this year. We just leisurely waited for the morning dew to dry and then on those beautiful fall afternoons picked them up with the assistance of our tractor operators into large wooden bins.

Don’t Want the Deliciousness to End… 
Join our Winter CSA!