Calliope’s Table CSA Distribution #8-July 22, 2009

Hello Subscribers,

The warm weather the plants have been needing is here, and then some. Keeping all the gardens watered becomes a good deal of the activity every day in weather like this. I’ve seen signs of a tomato or two starting to ripen, and the squash are really starting to come on, so I’m very happy to bike to the gardens and spend time with the plants while watering.

This week I’ll have broccoli, chard, summer squash & zucchini, a few more peas, basil, and more greens.

The weather this week dictates cold foods like salads. You might try a salad with broccoli, a few peas, basil, and even some thinly sliced summer squash. Use a combination of salad greens and/or some of the summer greens I had last week like orach and chicory. Toss with your favorite salad dressing, and serve very cold with some crusty bread. Perfect for our dinner time weather this week.

For desert you might try something I haven’t even tried yet, sliced summer squash with honey. Sounds great to me. Thanks to Ethan for that one. Is anyone else coming up with interesting things to do with your CSA bounty? I’d love to hear what you’re cooking up, and if you’d like I would love to post your recipes here too.

I’ve also been reminded to remind you that our produce distribution is on Wednesdays at the Ginger-Olive garden on SE Woodward. The time is set for 4-7pm, however if you come right at 4 you might still find me doing some harvesting. If you can’t make it by 7 or at all, give me a call and we’ll arrange something that works for you.

Have a fabulous week, and stay cool!

Peace and blessings,

Calliope

Calliope’s Table CSA Distribution #7 – July 15, 2009

Hello Subscribers,

A variety of things, new and continuing, await you this week at the distribution such as peas, chard, broccoli, BASIL!, and maybe even a first showing of the root crops. Even with the cold weather we’ve been having lately – it’s summer! That means we’re finally shifting from spring into the heat of summer, whatever that means this odd weather year. So, salad greens are on their way out for a bit, and squash, tomatoes and basil are in. Well almost.

The nearly 100 summer squash plants around town have started producing as you saw last week, and are just waiting for a couple of decently hot days to take us into that time of year when folks start hiding them at friends’ and neighbors’ to get rid of them. I will stop by those gardens today and see what we can find there that is ready.

On the tomato front, about 50 plants of different varieties are planted and have fruit set on them. An indicator of our cold season is that the early season varieties are only slightly ahead, if any, of their mid-season cousins. There is green fruit set on most every plant in the first wave, and again, we just need some warm weather to remind them it’s time to ripen some of that fruit.

Today I will be harvesting the first of the Basil. Woohoo! I love basil so this is always a special turning point for me in the summer. I can eat a handful of it every day, so it has been so hard for me to just pamper them and not pick them up to this point. Another wave of basil transplants are now in and growing down the street from this first batch so we will have plenty this season. They are in fact growing right next to (yes, tomatoes do love basil as you’ve heard) those heirloom tomatoes I posted about seeding back in April. Hopefully it will all come in at once and be a big part of some canning and preserving we’ve talked about. If you are still interested in doing/learning some canning this season, please mention it to me as I’m starting to think about rounding up all the right people and equipment to be ready when the plants are.

The chard is making a fine comeback after the recent leaf miner raid that left them less than eatable last week, but already has some nice new growth that will be harvested today. Thanks to Carmen for her Zen-like approach in culling out the damaged leaves and singing to the plants while she did. That kind of attention really does wonderful things for the plants.

On the greens front it looks like we’ll be making a transition from salad greens back to cooking greens, or maybe somewhere in between. There may be one more picking from the lettuce mix you (and especially me!) have been enjoying these past weeks, but time is really up for them now and with the New Moon coming up next week it’s time to replant those beds. This will likely take us right through the fall with salad greens when they make their appearance in a couple of weeks.

There are lots of the Tatsoi mustard greens left, even as they try to bolt, and also Orach and Chicory are now at a harvestable size. I’ll have a mix of these available today for you to try as either a cooking green or give them a try as a summer salad mix. Think of Orach as a summer spinach, and chicory as well but with a bit more bitter taste.

Did anyone try a pasta salad with the Broccoli? I did and came up with two versions. The broccoli is the sweetest I’ve tasted in some time, and I’m enjoying eating every bit of it, stalks and all. One salad had Rotini (corkscrew) pasta, broccoli, sliced red onions, matchstick carrots, minced ginger, scallions, snow peas, cilantro and dressed with a honey-dijon salad dressing. The other had less of an Asian influence and left out the carrots, ginger and cilantro.

Another simple pasta creation that will work for this week is taking the hot pasta and mixing it into sautéed greens. For pasta shape, try a medium spaghetti or linguine. In a skillet in which you’ve sautéed sliced onions in olive oil over medium-high heat until mostly translucent, stir in the chopped cooking greens and continue cooking keeping everything moving until the greens are wilted. Toss in a good amount of minced garlic, turn the heat down to low, toss well to mix, then add the hot drained pasta and keep mixing. Add a bit more olive oil if needed to coat the pasta, and serve when everything is well mingled. Black olives with a bit of its juice works well in this too. Serve in a bowl with grated parmesan on top and crusty bread.

You might also try the greens mix this week as a salad too. Use your favorite salad dressing or you might like to try this one I ran across that sounds great too: Whirl in a blender or whisk in a bowl: 1 clove roughly chopped garlic, pinch salt 1 teaspoon (scant) dijon mustard, 2 teaspoons plum jam or any other jam available, 4 Tablespoons rice wine vinegar, 1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil. Thanks to Marquita Farm CSA for that recipe. Check the link for more recipes from them.

In other farm news, there will be regular gatherings at the Ladd’s Addition garden on Saturdays at 9:00am. If you’d like to help us turn this lovely space back into a community garden, please join us on any Saturday starting this week, July 18 at 9:00 am. We would love your help to make this space a food production garden that will help supply the new Food Not Bombs-style serving that is being developed in SE Portland. Help us grow high-quality, nutritious fresh food to supply these servings, and help us vision the direction this community garden will take in future seasons. Across from the East Rose Garden in Ladd’s, straight down the Harrison hill into Ladd’s if you’re on bike. Get in touch if you need better directions.

Also, for the next 3 weeks, I will be the farmer-in-residence at the SE Urban Farmer Collective produce booth at the new Hawthorne Urban Farmers Market. It’s 1-6pm on Sundays at SE 43rd and Hawthorne next to the Hawthorne Auto Clinic. There’s lots more than produce there, natural soaps, Reiki treatments, furniture, cut flowers, and live music, all truly local, with a down-home feel you’ve not seen the likes of at a farmer’s market for some time. Come see the new market, enjoy the music, sit a spell, and meet some of the urban farmers and artisans in your neighborhood. The new market will be featured in a piece on National Public Radio this week. http://minnesota.publicradio.org/radio/programs/marketplace_money/ It’s on Friday night here, from 8-9pm (91.5fm). Tell everyone!

A most wonderful and blessed week ahead to you!

Peace, Calliope

Calliope’s Table-CSA Distribution #6 July 8, 2009

Hello Subscribers,

It’s finally time to share some of the Broccoli we’ve been watching grow all this time, and some of you had a sampling of last week. In fact, it’s a bit past the time of the first heads being ready. One of the challenges I find in distributing produce with the CSA model is that it only happens once a week. And the plants are working hard 24/7 to reach their ultimate goal of producing flowers and then seeds. As you remember from the many flowering mustard plants this spring, that can happen quickly, and our goal as cultivators and eaters is to swoop in just before that happens which is usually the time they are at their peak eating.

With the several days of 90+ degree weather we had last week, several of those big broccoli heads decided it was time to show some flowers just two days after last week’s distribution. There are more plants ready for this week, and others just starting to head, so no worries, but I wanted to use this example to show you how this food thing is really an everyday affair. I think often about how to accommodate the plants’ schedule and get produce to you at it’s peak. I know at least one of you think we could really help this situation with tweets on Twitter. And I’m thinking they might just have something there based on my limited knowledge of Twitter. “Broccoli’s ripe! Meet at the garden this afternoon!” It gives me much food for thought how to evolve the CSA. Your thoughts?

So for this week, besides Broccoli we’ll have scallions, peas, the last of the salad greens for a while, cilantro, parsley, mint, and lemon balm.

I’ve been re-inspired by Jeff Kingman, who writes the Kitchen Dances blog and has been helping get some press for the new Hawthorne Urban Farmers Market, to get you some recipe ideas every week for the produce available. He is a credentialed chef who can throw together a menu in a heartbeat, as you’ll see in his blog he did for Week 2 of the Hawthorne market. So here are some ideas around this week’s produce.

BTW, a huge thanks to Marie of Sellwood Garden Club for the many hours she’s putting in to help shape and promote the new market. This besides the very long days she puts in as an urban farmer. If you haven’t been to the new market yet, go check it out, and support a farmer’s market that is more like the one’s of older days than you will see anywhere. Everything from the best local produce around to local flowers, soap, furniture, a Reiki healer, and live music. Sundays 1-6 PM at SE 43rd & Hawthorne next to Common Grounds Coffeehouse.

Here are some recipe ideas for the week’s produce, rather than step by step instructions. If you need a little more detail you can do a Google search on any dish name or combination of ingredients and find many detailed recipes. I want to give you some of the basic building blocks of a dish and some options to go with them. If you’d like to peruse some good recipe sites I suggest Allrecipes, Food Network and CDKitchen.

Broccoli Pasta Salad
1 lb pasta cooked al dente (slightly underdone). Any pasta will work but best with a bigger shape that will stay on a spoon like Farfarelle (bowtie), Rotini (corkscrew), Shells, or Penne.
1 large head of Broccoli cut up into bite-size florets (uncooked)
2 or 3 scallions sliced at an angle for eye appeal
Cheese 1/2 to 1 lb, shredded or cut into small cubes. Cheddar is good, crumbled Feta for Greek style, or try your fave.
Nuts 1/2 cup. Try slivered almonds, pine nuts, walnuts, hazelnuts.
Fruit or Herbs for a little zing. Fruit can be grapes, raisins, cranberries, currants, something that won’t break down in the salad too easily. For herbs, anything will work but fresh herbs are really good here. From the garden this week you can try cilantro, parsley, mint, or even lemon balm.
Salad Dressing 1 bottle or jar of your fave. You can try Cole Slaw dressing, Blue cheese (maybe omit the cheese above or crumble in more blue cheese), Ranch, etc. Or you can make something yummy yourself from plain yogurt, mayo, veganaise, sour cream, and some herbs, etc. You’ll need about 2 cups.

Toss everything together reserving just a bit of the salad dressing, and chill in the refrigerator for an hour or two. You can toss the salad before serving with the rest of the dressing.

There you go, Pasta salad 101. Ask me if you need help (or need a bigger challenge). And when you’re creating, try doing as chefs do. Think of the flavor of an ingredient in your head (sometimes I like to munch the ingredient as I’m creating), think of another ingredient and see how it would taste with the first, and find combos that seem appealing. Most good chefs can create a recipe this way without ever touching the food.

Something else chefs do is just vary a few of the ingredients of things like a pasta salad to get a different ethnic themed dish. For a Greek pasta salad add Feta cheese, olives, and a little fresh oregano or parsley. For an Asian Pasta salad try a Sesame-Ginger salad dressing, snow peas, shredded carrot, scallions, cilantro and maybe some sesame seeds. The snow peas you’ll receive this week are a perfect mix to add some of the younger ones whole, and the bigger ones that have swollen up you can add the shelled peas and thinly slice the pods to add.

Happy eating!

Peace and Broccoli,
Calliope

Calliope’s Table-CSA Distribution #5 July 1, 2009

Hello Subscribers!

This is hopefully the start of a new trend where I get you info about the weekly distribution before it happens, and even some recipe ideas.

This week look for more peas, chard, onions, assorted herbs such as cilantro, parsley, and lemon balm, and probably the last of the salad greens as I fear they will not survive the heat wave we’re expecting later this week. There’s also more raspberries to pick so you might want to get there a bit early. I’ll try and remember to pick a few ahead of time so there will be a few available, but I can’t promise I won’t eat most of them. They’re good!

Also, a sneak preview of the broccoli you’ve been watching get bigger these last few weeks. There are a couple of heads big enough to harvest, and while it’s not enough to provide you all a share’s worth, I’ll have some broccoli and dip for you to sample the first harvest. More center heads are coming on quickly, and these varieties (Thompson and Umpqua) were chosen specifically for their ability to keep producing side shoots the rest of the season after their center head has been harvested. If you have an interesting dip or sauce you’d like to bring, please do.

I’ve been doing some interesting things with the pea harvest from last week including more stir-frys, an ingredient in salad rolls, and also part of an Asian breakfast scramble with eggs. Yum! This week could be the last of our peas so if you’d like to save some for later, here’s a link to info on how to blanch and freeze them. http://www.farmersalmanac.com/blog/2006/06/05/freezing-snow-peas-and-sugar-snap-peas/

Here’s an idea for some of the chard coming this week which looks like it will be a weekly offering for some time. Last nite I sauteed onions in olive oil until they were just about translucent, added chopped chard (and any other cooking green you have such as kale or collards) and let it cook down until just about wilted, turned down the heat to low and added minced garlic. Mix it around a bit to warm the garlic and get everything coated in the oil, and then add cooked and drained pasta (best right from the pasta pot on the next burner where it’s been cooking all this time). Toss it around a bit, add some more olive oil to make sure everything is well coated, and salt to taste. Serve in a nice big bowl with grated parmesan on top. I didn’t use any other seasoning as I wanted to get all that greens goodness. It was yum and made me feel like I was in Tuscany for a minute.

I hope you’re enjoying the salad greens too. I really love growing greens and am calculating how soon I can get some more growing without being affected by the summer heat. I’ve been eating them as a garnish on everything from peanut butter sandwiches, bagels with hummus, eggs, rice and beans, and even as salads.

It could be pretty hot by pick-up time tomorrow. If you’ve got some ice or an ice pack, or a small cooler it could help your produce make it back home while still looking perky. I’ll have the distribution table set-up under the grape arbor again to keep things cool, but all the produce will likely be inside the coolers and we’ll all need to work fast when taking things out so the coolers are open as little as possible.

See you Wednesday, 4-7pm!

Peace and (blanched and frozen) peas,
Calliope

April showers bring…more showers?

The rain just keeps coming, but one of the things I can do in a rainy period like we’re having is to take a few minutes to catch up with the blog.

The ground is still wet with the recent round of rains we’ve been having. The last two dry cycles offered some drying out for new plots waiting to be prepared, even if just for a day or two before the rain is back again. It’s all about being ready to work the windows of good weather when they arrive. This new garden was within hours of being ready to plant when the day ran out before the two farmers present could finish it all. By later that evening the rain was back and it will be another week before this one can be worked on again.

It’s often just this kind of close timing that makes the difference in farming. Had we been able to start earlier that day, had we had just one other helper, well, you get the idea. The difference might have allowed us to get this one planted out with the salad greens we plan there. And that’s a huge difference. Everything that is planted at this point is doing fantastic! While it seems unusually rainy to me, a check with the National Weather Service confirms that so far it’s a fairly normal year precipitation wise here in Cascadia, and by August we’ll actually be a bit short on rain. If you like geeky weather stuff their Climate Prediction website shows you just such things.

By the way, these pictures are from a stylish new cell phone given to me by a farm supporter when he learned about the “farmers without phones” dilemma posted about recently by Farmer K. Thank you! I have been waiting to take some pics of what’s going on in the gardens and now I can.

Rainy weather usually means more work in the greenhouse, and last Sunday the moon cycle, the right day, the materials, and my quest to have my favorite hot peppers to cook with for years to come, finally came together. I spent that beautiful spring day starting seeds for several of my faves, and also got to eat lunch with the bees there. I enjoyed starting Peacework Sweet Peppers beside two heirloom tomatoes, Burbank slicing and San Marzano paste, with seeds from Seeds of Change. That would be pre-Mars, Inc.-Seeds of Change as these seeds were bought last year but never got planted. These are two of my favorite heirloom tomatoes, and when I bought the seeds last year expressly for growing out and saving the seed from them I didn’t realize it would be that much more important as another “organic” company sells out to agribusiness interests.

Last year Seeds of Change was quietly sold to Mars Inc. of candy bar fame. This is the same Mars candy company who will now be using GMO sugar beets for the sugar needed in their products. Mars is claiming innocence about their part in non-GMO sugar beets becoming essentially unavailable, but I will no longer patronize them, nor will I trust them to preserve the heirloom varieties that are important to me.

This mission statement can be found on the Seeds of Change homepage: “In 1989, Seeds of Change began with a simple mission: to preserve biodiversity and promote sustainable, organic agriculture. By cultivating and disseminating an extensive range of organically grown vegetable, flower, herb and cover crop seeds, we have honored that mission for 20 years.” Maybe so, but I have strong doubts about that intention going forward. So these two tomato seed packets will be my last seeds from Seeds of Change, now that Seeds of Change has changed. Another company that started out trying to do the right thing suddenly becomes part of what they fought against. If this were a rare thing you could just say it’s an anomaly. But do you know how many small organic producers end up being owned by an agribusiness company? Lots. Check out this chart on Organic Industry Structure.

How does this happen? I don’t think they all sell out for the money. But when companies like Dagoba Chocolate and MaraNatha Peanut Butter end up being owned by Hershey and Heinz it makes you wonder how this happens. Perhaps it’s an issue of scale. Do these companies just get too big for the comfort of the big food companies? Does the popularity of the products grow the companies too large to hang on to their ideals? Maybe it’s when a regional company goes national that is the dividing line. In the case of Ben & Jerry’s, now owned by Unilever, it apparently started when Ben & Jerry’s collective ownership of the company fell to less than a majority share and they could no longer insist that their vision be embraced. I think it will be important in the future that we hang on to our regional producers lest we lose the ability to make that product on a local basis in enough quantity to matter.

In other news I’m happy to tell you a newly built bike trailer for me is just days away from being completed. I borrowed a similar trailer from the trailer builder last week and did the first compost pick-ups from the coffee shops last week on the bike. It was so great to just zip up and park next to the front door on the bike and change out the buckets. Sweet!

I’ve been picking up coffee grounds from 3-4 coffee shops on Mondays and Thursdays for a couple of months now and have been using the grounds to amend beds and start new compost piles. It does take time away from other farming activities but it’s something I’m committed to. Coffee grounds are concentrated tropical nutrients, high in nitrogen, available for free. If you’ve got a garden, go talk to your nearest coffee shop and ask for their grounds. The key is coming back regularly to pick them up. Most coffee places have experience with people picking up the grounds for a while and then fizzling out. If you’re someone who would enjoy an hour or so zipping around to a few places on a bike twice a week to pick up compost, let me know. I can hook you up with a trailer and there’s often a free cup ‘o Joe in it for you.

I’ve also started picking up the veggie scraps from the awesome people at Soup Cycle. I ran into one of their soup delivery people delivering soup to the residents of one of the gardens, and we got to talking. It seems we’re all kindred spirits in cooking great food, using good organic ingredients, and bike delivery! Hopefully some of the compost from them will help grow veggies that will make their way back into a future batch of soup. I’ll keep you posted!

If you want to contact me about helping out, my new phone number is: (203) 962-2741. Just give a call on a day you want to come out to one of the gardens and find out what we’re doing that day. There is much to do and plant in the next 6-8 weeks, including a huge new plot in Ladd’s Addition that was once a community garden! It’s in a fantastic, very visible spot across from one of the rose gardens, and I would like to infuse some community growing there again. Besides planting corn which has been a tradition there in the past, I think it would be awesome to grow some things like Giant Kohlrabi which people don’t see growing very often in a city. Much thanks to J & J who made the land-lender aware of Calliope’s Table and what’s going on with urban farming!

Come out and join us as we turn these spaces into food production sites. With so much to be done, we can accommodate all ages and skill levels and help you find something to do that lets you find your happy space while in a garden. See you soon!

Peace and peas,
Calliope