Summer 2022 CSA - Week of July 4th
Full share: Lettuce mix, lacinato kale, carrots, 2 cucumbers, broccolini, strawberries, rhubarb, garlic scapes, mint
Half share: Lettuce mix, carrots, cucumber, broccolini, strawberries, scapes
Happy 5th of July!
We hope everyone had a fun and relaxing holiday. Here on the farm we celebrated by harvesting strawberries and the rest of the produce for your CSA boxes followed by a nice dip in Rocky Creek! Very refreshing.
Notes:
We butchered chickens last week so Whole Farm members, be sure to grab your monthly chicken from the cooler in the market stand this week! We also have whole chickens for sale in the market stand. If you haven’t tried our birds before I highly recommend that you do.
U-Pick opens TODAY for strawberries! We are only open for u-pick during market stand hours (Tuesday 12-6pm, Thursday and Saturday 8am-12pm). Berries are $7.50/lb and you can bring your own container to pick into or use one of ours. If you bring your own make sure to stop into the market stand so we can weigh its before you head out!
Gorgeous views from the strawberry field!
Everything really is coming on like crazy now that we’re into summer, and with the rain finally petering off it’s been irrigation central over here. We use a hand-line sprinkler system in the fields, which means we move our lines by hand every time we irrigate a different part of the field. Collectively across the farm we move up to 24 lines a day. While in the past we’ve had a dedicated irrigation person moving most of the lines themselves, this year we’re all working together to make sure the fields are irrigated.
Produce:
Lacinato kale: goes by many names (tuscan, dinosaur, black palm). Lacinato is my personal favorite type of kale -- it’s a bit smoother/less fibrous in texture than curly kale so tends to be a little more versatile and widely liked. All parts (including ribs) are edible raw and cooked -- try it in a salad or saute in oil with salt, pepper and a squeeze of lemon for a side! Massaging the leaves for a few minutes really helps bring out the flavor. I make a curry/soup similar to this one and usually add some chopped kale around five minutes before everything else is done. Broccolini would be really good in here too.
Over the next several weeks we’ll be introducing a few new voices from around the farm into the newsletter. This week Jordan is our contributor. Check out his brief bio from last year’s newsletter here and keep reading to hear some juicy details about our animal program (which Jordan has been leading for the past 3 years) and some perhaps even juicier (literally) details about his favorite uses for the garlic scapes in your boxes this week!
Hey everybody! My name is Jordan Atwood and I’ve been a part of the GVB crew since the spring of 2020, which feels like a decade ago for obvious reasons. I started as an intern while studying Sustainable Food and Bioenergy Systems at MSU and currently run the animal operations on the farm. I recently traveled to Uruguay to volunteer on a small scale subsistence permaculture farm where I planted an array of trees and shrubs, distilled herbs into essential oils, cooked for the family I was living with and pulled many weeds out of the ground. It was an incredible experience and although I miss the Uruguayan lifestyle, I am happy to be back in Bozeman working at GVB.
We are very busy at the farm this time of year with our hot weather crops ripening, incredible diversity of flowers blooming, chicken butchering, rotational sheep grazing, and the daily cultivation necessary for our array of produce. This week, we will be moving our sheep herd from a cover crop patch in our vegetable field to a fenced-in pasture where we will sort the rams from the herd and finally move them back over to a pasture on the Rocky Creek side of the farm. Cover cropping and animal grazing are vital to the soil organic matter and overall health of the soil on the farm and because of this, our sheep, chickens and pigs are a pivotal part of GVB.
I am very happy to see garlic scapes on the produce list this week! My favorite way to prepare garlic scapes is to first toss them in oil or clarified butter and then blister/char them on a very hot grill. This releases more of the sugars and the rich garlic flavors from the scapes. After this step, the world is your oyster. You could chop up the scapes, fold them into some room temperature butter and then slather that on a ribeye. Or, a healthier option is to use charred scapes as a topping on your hummus or an addition to some chimichurri. Lastly, garlic scapes would be a great addition to Uruguayan steak sauce (Mojo). For this recipe, chop up scapes, capers, oregano and parsley, stir in olive oil, lime juice, orange zest, salt, chili flake and let sit at room temp for about 5 days to ferment.
Feel free to say hello if you see me around the farm this summer!
-Jordan
Thanks for reading!
Sasha