February 21st-Whole Farm CSA
Full & Half Share Share: Chard, Arugula, Spicy Mix Microgreens, Delicata Squash, Montana Morado Corn
This Week: Eggs, Monthly meat for February, Chicken if you have not picked up for the month.
The Greens are really beautiful out of the greenhouse this week but I’m really excited to share some new things with you. As many of you know, Matt and I always have a few side projects in the works. This past season we rented land from our neighbor to the north of us. We mostly use it for grazing the sheep and the egg layer mobilecoop but we wanted to try a few crops there too. There is not a good source of water for watering crops out there, and we wanted to experiment with some Dryland options. We planted Delicata Squash, Montana Morado Corn, and Indian Woman Dry Bean. These were all planted with a Water Wheel Transplanter so they had a little pocket of water around their seed or transplant and planted right before a good rain. Otherwise they received no supplemental water. Last year was a really great year to do this with all the rain we got!
We have gotten all of the Montana Morado shucked off the Cob and have saved aside what we wanted to re-seed this year. We now have some to share with you! You can save some of this to seed in your own gardens if you want! It is a great soft corn to make cornmeal. I quickly ran it in my Vitamix and got a nice cornmeal. So far I have made polenta with it from the attached Love and Lemons recipe and am hoping to start trying all cornmeal things- starting with tortillas and cornbread. The polenta was creamy and bright and purple!
We selected a big bin of the Best Delicata Squash and have been slowly cooking with them and saving the seeds as we go. We have a good amount of seeds saved up and want to share some of them with you. If you take one of the bigger Delicata Squash today, consider saving the seeds. We left a print out of the directions to squash seed saving in the market stand and included a link below. Save the seeds and plant them yourself or bring them back to us to be a part of the Dryland Montana Delicata Squash program. This is a great community project; They were harvested during a ‘Farm to Crag’ event that happened on the farm last fall.
We’ll have news of the Indian Woman Yellow Dry Beans coming soon!
Happy cooking, Jacy