Weekly Share November 12th – 18th

Hickory King Cornmeal
Spinach or Cauliflower
Escarole or Frisee
Broccoli
Mixed Roots
Mesclun Salad Mix
Aleppo Style Chile Flake

This is it, the last share of the season. Although we attend markets up until Christmas, this marks the waning of our main season. We will miss feeding you all every week and keeping with a seasonal rhythm. We will also look forward to the freedom of our slow season, with less of a rigid set schedule and less urgency with every task from dawn to dusk. Coming into Winter signifies projects, creative brainstorming and planning for the future of the farm; while also cleaning house. Our pastures, buildings, equipment, and infrastructure needs yearly maintenance and this is the only time we can attend to these much needed chores.
This fall has been a bit stressful. We have had to do more scrounging to get the volume of food out of the fields that we need to fill shares and fill tables at market; not to mention having consistent offerings for wholesale too. In our first few years, we were often struggling to get the volume out of crops we needed in order to keep our shares paired the way we wanted while not over saturating you all with too much of any one crop. Over the years we became more consistent growers and had a better sense of how the crops would ebb and flow. This fall has really brought us back. We are really lucky that we had such a strong stand of fall crops in late August and early September; as otherwise it seems like the storms might have wiped us out more significantly. Instead it has just been a strong reminder that we control very little and must always be willing to shift coarse and be creative about what we have even if it means scrounging a little. We hope you all have enjoyed this whirlwind of a season and that we will see you at market sometime this Winter.
This week’s share is really exciting with lots of delicious bits. Of course a very harsh freeze is coming over the weekend, hopefully sweetening some of the roots and greens, especially the spinach, a favorite cold season crop. It’s time once again for our cornmeal. We are really happy with this year’s stand of Hickory King, a native white dent corn, even though we did not yield as much as in some years past. This year’s crop: the actual plants, ears, and kernels are much healthier and more robust than we have had in the past. It has made for a cleaner grind as well as a delicious flavor. The cornmeal is stone-ground medium-fine and will be excellent for making cornmeal, cornpone, for use in frying, corn cookies, and a very fine porridge. If you want to store it away for later we encourage you to put it in the freezer, in an airtight bag or container. This is the first time we are giving the CSA our signature Aleppo style chile flake. Over the past two years, we have dialed in a recipe and process that seems consistent and is delicious. Brian built a larger dehydrator this past Summer; which allowed for drying more peppers under more even conditions. This chile flake is a blend of three distinct peppers. It is spicy with complex dried fruit and bright full earth flavors. It can be a great finisher to sautéed greens, egg dishes, salads, or used in marinades, beans, or whatever you like. We hope you enjoy this share. Have a wonderful Winter…..Autumn and Brian

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