Eaters' Guild

May 12, 2009
Good Day to You!

Welcome to the opening week of our CSA season.  Saturday in South Haven went relatively smoothly, given an untimely, yet characteristic spring day…The earth is greening slowly, even some trees seem reluctant to unfurl their leaves just yet.  We are finding field growth very slow as the soil just isn’t warming any too quickly.  The compost spread late March needs some 50+ degree avg. temps in order to activate.  The microbes we depend upon to liven the soil, and release the nutrition held in the compost, remain dormant otherwise.  April, on average was a little cool—and May hasn’t exactly been warm.  The radishes and salad mix seem suspended in a miniature holding pattern, making harvest rather timid and un-plentiful.  Really, our experience is different every year.  On the other hand, we have seen a dandy asparagus season so far.  The last two nights of chilly temps has left some damaged stalks behind, but this doesn’t seem to have a huge impact on our distribution of the crop.  Organic asparagus is hard to come by, and very special, particularly when you are eating it within 24 hours of harvest.  Every season we become greater asparagus snobs, eating all we can from our crop to the point of almost loathing it, knowing we will abstain from the sub-standard representation that can be found throughout the year, flown in from California or Mexico, or further….there’s my proof—complete snobbery.  
     The straight-from-the-pickers-mouth update on salad mix is that we will need to wait another week harvest it for distribution.  There is a good deal of spinach—so this will need to stand in as the leafy green this week.  The spinach is an over-wintered field crop.  This is planted late fall, not for harvest, but solely intended for spring harvest.  You will have tender spring radishes, asparagus, and green onions to round things out.  Looking ahead, these items, except for onions as they are finishing this week, will be the make up of the boxes for a few weeks out.  We like to begin our season this early in order to give you the asparagus part of the season, but things can be, and we are finding, are quiet in coming on, and your share may seem repetitive. As the season revs up, the variety will as well.  This isn’t unusual for each season, and we like to put this out there as a reminder.
    FYI:  We are not accepting more members for the season.  We haven’t quite met our designated capacity, but we feel it will be advantageous for all that we cap shares at the number we have now.  If you passed our CSA info along to friends or colleagues, thank you.  If you know people still interested, you can feel free to let them know we are filled for the season.
    
Thanks for joining us this season—I’m leaving off without recipes, if you need prep ideas for these spring delights, let me know!
Be well
Laurie, Lee and IRis
   
 

Here we go!                            May 1, 2009

The ground is soaked, but all in all, it has been a nice start to the season.  We ask for and expect rain of spring.  The biggest obstacle placed on our operation is getting into the field with tractor and transplanter to place seedlings in the ground.  There is also the issue of rinsing fertility away with such heavy rains in a short time.  We have no way of knowing how great the impact will be on present field crops, only time will tell, and we will do our best to adjust and make amendments where we can.  

The main purpose of this email is to thoroughly cover pick up protocol.  There is a good amount of detail to be covered here, so please keep this note for further reference.  We give you the contact information for your pick up location and this can be valuable to you when you need to personalize your pick up.  We are often hard to reach in a pinch, and contacting your host directly is most efficient,  

We are doing things a little different this year, for those of you who have been with us in the past.  We have changed over to a B.Y.O.B.—Bring Your Own Bag.   This helps us keep costs down, and allowed us to keep share prices where they have always been for another season.  At your location your bag is filled on site, either by us, or by you.  If your site is un-personed (Kalamazoo, Portage, Benton Harbor, Saugatuck huh?? I will explain) there will be sign clearly stating what you are to take according to your share type.  Please observe this…..we know you will; we will leave produce to accommodate the number of shares.  The produce is rinsed, and will be either bunched, bagged (salad mix—these bags are bio-degradable), or otherwise, easily measurable.

On pick up time windows:  The set times for pick up are fairly ample and it is best to meet this time frame.  As mentioned earlier, there can be that day when something comes up and you just can’t get there.  This is when you call your host and arrange for another time, or just as a courtesy, let them know you will be late.  The point at which your produce becomes your hosts produce is 24 hours after your pick up time begins—with two exceptions, in Portage and Saugatuck, noted below**.  You may get your veggies after this time, but you need to call your host and make arrangements.  Here are the days and times:

TUESDAY—Begins May 12th
     KALAMAZOO—127 N. Berkeley—Hether and Matt Frayer  381-0847
                   4:30-9:00 pm.
    PORTAGE—4250 S. Westnedge,--Kalamazoo Community Chiropractic Center
388-3003     5:00pm-night-fall  (located just north of Kilgore, you can/should park in the Blockbuster parking lot in order to reserve space for the clinics clients)**please come by noon the next day.
WEDNESDAY--Begins May 13th
    HOLLAND—Farmers Market  8am-noon  (Look for the RED tent)
    SAUGUTUCK—SummerTime Market—BlueStar Hwy at the bridge in Douglas
                 10am-5pm **come within this 7 hour window, no next day pick up
    BENTON HARBOR—190 5th ST.  The Livery 925-8760, liverybrew.com
                                          5pm-midnight
    EATERS’ GUILD FARM—26041 CR 681  269-427-0423, 989-965-1528
                             After 3 pm
SATURDAY--BEGINS MAY 9th
    SOUTH HAVEN—Farmers’ Market—8am-noon
    EATERS’ GUILD FARM—after 3pm

Hello!  A note to farm members for the 2009 season--If you have not received a confirmation email from us, please send us an email, or call us.  Ideally we have contacted all members--but as I learned again today, somehow we miss something, somewhere.  If you have a yahoo account, we often find that our messages don't get through to you; it may take a few tries.  The blog could become the regular contact method...so stay tuned.  Thanks for joining us this season.  These sunny days make for a great start!

 

Hello~
It's a snowshoe winter.
We're planning to be on schedule today (tuesday), no changes here. Post-holiday, we're finding the reprieve willed upon us by the season nice--outright quiet at times.  This last week we added another sprout to offer some variety, radish.  These are snappy little plants--great on sandwiches, in maki, in soups and salads.  If you've been with us past winters, you've become quiet familiar with them, and if you remember, our tendency to not start them on time to give them to you greened.  Logistically speaking, we lack the space in a brightly lit window to accommodate the amount of sprouts we grow, so perhaps it is just appropriate for us to give them to you started, with a few days of care and light for optimal flavor and nourishment.  Here's our advice:

To keep the radish sprouts, place the sprouts in a quart jar--you will rinse them by filling the jar with fresh water, use a screened lid (especially manufactured for sprouting) to drain, or if you do not have one of these, cover the jar opening with a towel or with cheesecloth, tightly secure the cloth with a rubberband and drain.  Once drained, you may set the jar (covered with the screen/cloth) in a windowsill.  Sprouts will continue to grow and will become green.  Once greened to your liking, you may keep them in your fridge--use in a few days for best taste.  Rinsing everyday is important.  Sprouts are living, and produce their own heat.  So without regular cooling and mixing, radish sprouts especially, can get funky fast.  On the other hand, the pea sprouts are relatively easy.  THey are ready to eat with a sprout of the root, and you can let them grow for a few days, rinsing as you do so (these are easy to drain in a colander--as can be the radish).  Once you wish to slow growth, again place them in your fridge--if used in a few days, further rinsing for the peas doesn't seem to be necessary.

We are entering the world of blogging.  OF course this necessitates having something to say, and taking the time to say it.  THese qualities have a contradictory nature in our lives as in the winter we have the time with little to tell--in the working season, there's plenty to share but few free sequential moments to send it brain to keyboard....so if we can ask, please be patient with us, it is experimental at best.  I will copy this message to the blog, and you can see what is already there.  To find the blog you can go to LocalHarvest.com, search/find eaters' guild farm (our zip is 49013) and then read our blog, or you may try the link below.

http://www.localharvest.org/blog/9939/

Check it out.  At some time we hope our website can host our blog, and be a resource for farm members and others too.  

Recipes?  Turnips and rutabagas stumping you?  I have my books ready, and try to wow you with incredible white root ideas...Be well and stay warm--LLi

DIlly turnip and carrot gratin--
2C graterd Turnips
Salt
1/3 C butter
3/4 C bread crumbs
2C grated Carrot
1/2 tsp sugar
2tsp fresh dill
Freshly ground pepper
3/4C heavy cream

Preheat oven 350F.  Sprinkle turnip with salt and set aside 30 minutes. Melt half of the butter, saute bread crumbs, set aside.  Squeeze water from turnips, combine with grated carrot.  Melt remaining butter in saute pan and add carrot, turnip and sweetner.  Cook med-low heat stirring often.  Stir in dill pepper and salt to taste.  Put all in a buttered baking dish, pour cream over and top with bread crumbs.  Bake in oven until brown and bubbly.

Scalloped Turnips
4Tb butter
1/2 c onions sliced thin
4C peeled sliced turnips
2 Tb flour
1 tsp salt
Fresh ground pepper
1C milk
1/2C light cream
preheat oven 350F
Saute onions in 1 Tb butter until wilted. Layer in thirds turnips and onions into buttered baking dish, sprinkling  with one-third of the flour and salt , and pat with 1 TB butter between each layer.   
Mix milk and cream together and pour over turnips.  Cover and bake for 30 min., then remove cover and bake 30-40 min , or til tender and bubbly.

We've found that sometimes it's best to begin something when you can no longer escape its traction..or lure.  Like intentions to go up and nail down that loose piece of roof steel, ending its clatter and ringing threats to quit us entirely. Or fixing an old gate to save that 2 seconds extra work each time to open it.  Or this, staring at the blogosphere, starting our blog farm---as if the world were not oversupplied with such things, inedible and vacant of substance as they are.  

If these musings are enough to get you here, at least you won't be disappointed to find yourself in this blog barn.  It's an emanation of Local Harvest which will help you find a lot of the other foods and farms you should be looking for.  So clearly not a wasted click.  Before long and before your eyes glaze you'll want to search by your zip code to find good food nearby.

In this blog, your gonna want to really use your keyword seach option to find relevance.  We will have plenty of people coming here to find important weekly info on CSA pick-up issues, new crops and recipies and scheduling of events.  We'll figure out how to post photos when they are actually better than words.  Periodic newletters will be posted here for all to read as well as general rumblings from the farm scene around here.

It may be mistaken but our intent, too, is to use this as our general farm activity log which is a  requirement of organic certification.  This will be a banal list of deeds and measures about which most will find no thrills.  It may however be an interesting experiement in transparency for us and an extortive way to make us commit to keeping it current.  Any taskmasters among the CSA membership may find comfort in the metrics of our toil.  This component may also archive useful information for other growers furthering a sharing a best practices and shedding of worst.

So we hope this is a warm welcome.  It has been willing you should know.  Soon to come will be recipes and notes for this weeks winter share.  We need the bounce this new endeavor provides to get us into the expansive side of the season, out of the leisure of the cold and dark weeks and minimal chores of winter's deepest.  Thanks for helping confirm our suspicions that blogging is theraputic mainly for the blogger at the expense of the blogged...can you forgive us?