weeks 16 and 17

welcome to fall like weather! summer crops are winding down and fall food is starting up it is a transitional time at the farm. we are grateful for the night falling earlier and the cool evenings that make it perfect to pull up a good book and do some reading after a long summer.

husk cherries! if you haven't yet tried them, don't miss the experience- sweet and nutty!


what are those colorful hermit crab shells doing in the farm newsletter? the farmers were on vacation and enjoyed some time on the board walk by the shore where there are hermit crabs galore!

this is the time of year that people start asking, "when does this thing end, anyway?" The answer is the last week of october, there are 22 weeks total to the csa, (elmira will have only 21 weeks of pickup this year, but will recieve extra items in october to make up for the last week which falls on november first- as the market ends the week before on october 25th)




lovely, local ginger! see recipe below


also, coming on up, put it on the calendar, saturday october 9th the ever popular perogie making day will be coming up again! bring a filling of your choice, creativity is encouraged! in the past we have had both sweet and savory fillings with many different colored potato, sweet potatoes, ricotta with fruit, grape pie type, cabbage or saurkraut.
make and bring a filling to share. then we will make perogies and bag them all mixed for fun surprises when you cut into them and enjoy at home! this event will begin at 10 am.


what's up on the farm, we have been seeding the last few items that may or may not make it in time, even for our january/february markets, we have one more planting of lettuce to put in (tiny heads that will size up some before winter hits) and then there will be the garlic in the middle of october. you will have a chance to help plant garlic on saturday october 16th starting at 2pm, that will be the last CSA event of the season.


Carrot-Ginger-Cashew Soup
This is a tangy cool-season comfort food that‘s loaded with distinctive flavors and antioxidant-rich ingredients. The blended cashews add a creamy dimension to this soup, along with muscle-fueling protein and heart-healthy oils. (Adapted from Morris Press Cookbooks; cookbooks4sale.com)

1 1/2 pounds carrots, raw (peeled and washed)
2 tablespoons olive oil or butter
1 medium yellow onion, chopped
1/4 cup gingerroot, finely chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
7 cups vegetable or chicken broth
1 cup dry white wine (optional)
1 1/2 cups cashew nuts, unsalted and either raw or dry-roasted
2 tablespoons lemon juice
(orange juice may be substituted)
Curry and/or coriander powder,
one pinch or to taste
Salt and pepper, to taste
Fresh chives or parsley for garnish

Peel and cut carrots into half-inch pieces. Place oil or butter in large stock pot over medium heat. Add onion, ginger, and garlic; sauté for about 15 minutes. Add broth, carrots, and (if using) wine. Heat to boiling. Reduce heat and simmer uncovered over medium heat until carrots are tender (about 45 minutes). Purée in blender with cashews. Season with juice, curry, coriander, salt, and pepper, as desired. Serve hot or cold with garnish. Serves 6.

have a super week! roast some veggies make some soup and eat well!
liz and matthew

Still planting

Summer's bounty

We have not done much planting here for the past few months - just a few beds here and there. This includes salad greens - as I'm sure many of you have noticed their absence the past few weeks. However it has generally been too hot and dry for greens to grow well this summer and the ones we have planted have mostly just bolted.

But we are trusting that soon it will not be so hot and, yes, it will even eventually get cold. So now is that very short window in time where we can get greens, turnips, radishes, etc. planted so that they may reach maturity before we lose the sun too much and they stop growing (toward the end of October). If we time it right we will have many greens for the last weeks of the CSA and also through the winter! How is this possible? Well many crops, while they don't grow through the winter's short, cloudy days, will certainly stay fresh and vital right in the ground as long as they are provided with a little protection. These include crops like spinach, lettuce, kale, turnips, carrots. The protection comes from our hoophouses (with two layers of plastic) and the white, floating row covers directly over the plants.

And I don't know about you, but here at Muddy Fingers we are definitely looking forward to some cooler temps!

Additions to the selection to look forward to next week:

leeks

ginger

maybe apples

hopefully some lettuce mix

Probably next week will be the last week for melons - hope you've loved 'em as much as we have the last few weeks.

weeks 11+12

the garlic is all pulled from here and a cover crop of appin turnips has been planted, they will grow this fall and open lovely channels in the soil, leaving lots of room for microorganisms and earthworms in the soil. They will die over the winter and act as a "biofumigant" naturally killing disease organisms in the soil.
this is the kind of photo we like to use as a background on our computer in the winter to remind us of how lovely the summer is!

its seems we have slipped to a bi-weekly update, sorry don't know where the time has been going lately. we've spent the week picking for you all to eat, pruning raspberries for next summers yummy berries, harvesting onions, cutting tops off of garlic, doing some planting of greens for later in the CSA season, and even some things that will overwinter until next june and hopefully be in the CSA during that lean month next year.

Hearing no replies, we skipped the meteor sleepout this year, and were a little sad to do it, we'll have to get a date set for a september event soon so that it can go out and onto your calendars before too long.

The cultivating event last week was informative and helpful, and we are looking forward to going to see the setup at a local farm this week as well, so we should be well on our way to buying some new weed control tools for our selves.

food you may see this week:
melons! tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, garlic, onions, lettuce, spicy greens mix, chard, a few beets, zucchini/summer squash, potatoes, beans, parsley, basil, cilantro

things you won't see: (or at least not many of you will) cucumbers, our newest planting has gotten downy mildew and is dying even before it comes into full production- darn!

a few updates:
we are a sponsor for a symposium entitled "awakening the dreamer, Changing the Dream" which will take place on saturday august 21st from 9:30-4:00 PM at wisdom's goldenrod in hector. register on line at www.awakeningthedreamer.org

also, NOFA-NY (Northeast Organic Farming Association of new york) is hosting a locavore challenge as a way to promote local farms and raise funds to help keep small, organic type farms like ours strong. Want to pledge to eat local for a day, a week, or the whole month of september? Pay a small fee to get resources to help you learn where to get food from organic and sustainable farms as well food ideas to get through the month eating the local/100 mile/250 mile/seasonal diet (if you have read any of the spurt of recent books about this topic, you may be interested in trying it yourself!) You have a good headstart on it by being in a CSA!

this recipe sounds so tasty that i have to post it despite the fact that i just said our cukes are doomed, i'm sure it would work stuffed into peppers instead!

feta-walnut stuffed cucumbers: from prevention magazine
1/2 cup walnut halves
1/4 cup fresh parsley
1/2 cup crumbled feta cheese
1/4 cup fat free milk
1 small clove of minced garlic
1/2 t paprika
1/8 t ground red pepper
4 medium cucumbers, peeled, halved lengthwise and seeded.

combine walnuts and parsley in food proccesor, and pulse until powdery, add rest of ingredients (except cukes), and puree until smooth. fill cucumbers wiht mix and pat in place, slice into wedges and sprinkle with paprika before serving.



this is a good way to try tomatillos if you are a pork eater, thanks wendy for sending this recipe!
3/4 lb cubed pork--or, works well with cheaper bone-in cuts like pork steaks or western style ribs
1 lb coarsely chopped tomatillos
1-2 cans Great Northern beans, rinsed
1 can chicken broth
1 large (or more) onion halved and sliced thin
1 4 oz. can mild green chilies
6 cloves garlic, sliced or chopped
1 t. cumin
S&P to taste
1/2 c lightly packed fresh cilantro, chopped
sour cream (optional)

Brown meat on all sides. Place in slow cooker and add remaining ingredients to cumin. Cover and cook on high for 3-4 hours or low for 6-7. Add S&P and taste. Stir in cilantro and cook ten minutes more on low. With wooden spoon, shred meat against side of cooker. Serve with optional sour cream.

hope your week is lovely and if you are about to send a beloved child (or the unlikable ones, too) off to school, may you all enjoy good food together before its cafeteria fare for them and lonelier dinners for you! take time to cook together this week!
liz and matthew

week ten

this week the tomatoes and cherry tomatoes seem to really be starting, finally! i was chatting with another farmer at the market this week and he commented that his tomatoes were taking a long time to ripen, too!
lets see, this week has been another dry one and pretty hot, too. We have been irrigating, but the pond is getting low enough we are starting to worry a little.

this year our focus has been on how to make our business more efficient and profitable. to this point, we have made a modest living at the farm, but not necessarily the kind that will sustain us long term. We have been keeping lots of records, which we will use this winter to determine which things we grow are profitable and which are not. With a CSA we may not be able to drop all of the crops that are unprofitable, but armed with the knowledge we will be able to look into how to grow things more efficiently and which items would be acceptable to stop growing. we'll keep you posted once we do all the math.

one area that we know needs to be improved upon is weed control and we have spent some time since we bought a cultivating tractor last fall (you may remember the photo- it looks like a little orange dunebuggy!) reading about weed control with it. There are lots of options for tools to hang below it to use to kill weeds and we are still not positive which one(s) are right for us. We visited a nearby farm a few weeks ago and they were kind enough to give us the basics and show us their tools and even let us weed some of their vegetables! (wait, they let us do their work for them, we've been swindled!) all joking aside, they were very generous with their time and we learned a lot, but still don't feel confident in this new technology on our farm. We are looking forward to sending an representative to a workshop tomorrow about tractor cultivation and there is one more local farm we'd love to visit as they have a system like ours- with permanent beds and paths, which is a little different than how lots of other people do things and needs to have tools set up differently. We'd like to get one or two cultivating setups set up by the fall so we are all set up for next year. The weeds really slow down by the fall, but it doesn't hurt to get some practice in first on a less weedy patch, where the crops maybe will be easier to see between the little weeds.

love these large mild onions

its funny, we farm on small scale, and a slightly awkward one. We can certainly use well made tools that are geared towards home gardeners, and we do. But we can also benefit from technologies that larger scale farmers use. Sometimes it is hard to find the balance between when a technology will be cost effective for us and when it will just be nice to have but not make a difference in whether the crop profits or not.

For example, with our cultivating tractor, we do have one basic set of "Beet knives" for it. These are shaped like half of an elongated "V" and weed next to beets and other crops. we have used them several times, but they are not quite the right tool for what we were using them for. To cultivate a bed with them takes about 3-5 minutes to actually do the cultivating, but it also takes several minutes to check the gas, oil, coolant, and what not on the tractor, start it up and drive it to the field. To use a hand held "scuffle hoe" (a capital D shaped blade that scrapes tiny weeds with two sharpened edges on the curved side of the D, works on the pull and the push stroke) it can take as little as 12 or 15 minutes per bed (or much longer if the weeds are large!) So when there are lots of beds to be done, the cultivating tractor makes sense, but if there are only one or two to be done, (or there are lots of different kinds of beds that require the tool to be adjusted to different positions) the scuffle hoe can be just as fast.

these are the kinds of questions that our record keeping will help us to better understand, we are really looking forward to sitting down and looking through each crop at the end of the season.

produce:
new this week: shallots. nice large mild onions. lovely mild salad turnips

also chard, kale, beets, potatoes, tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, cucumbers, summer squash, zucchini, tomatillos, lettuce mix

coming soon, melons!

we saw this cool humming bird moth at the farm, we had only seen them in the insect books before! (sorry these photos seem less clear than they used to, though this wasn't that clear to start with)

still looking for feedback on the august and october events. any ideas, let us know. we are thinking of doing the meteor shower sleep out on friday the 13th, let us know if there is any interest, if not, we will plan something else later in the month. We are interested in having co-operative extension do a nutrition event, give us feedback if you have it.

ok, happy eating, see you around!
liz and matthew

week eight is great!

winter squash leaves.

shallots are a new crop for us this year, they grow in a clump, they are nice looking!

HELLO ALL! lets see, first off the picnic was great fun, thanks to all who came! a few items were left here, if you are missing a water bottle, a serving spatula, or scented bubbles, let us know! (i do know who the bubble belong to, its just fun to write the words scented bubbles, we'll try to get them back to you all.)

this time of year the story is harvest, harvest, harvest, and hope for some rain. things here have been dry, but fine. we were transplanting cabbage plants for the fall this week and will be doing some seeding for the fall and even into the winter months pretty soon. and of course there is always weeding

the last several days we have spent some time working on preparing a new field, which was pictured a few weeks ago on this page. It will be planted fairly soon, we have just spent some time between those photos and now letting weeds germinate and then killing them to make sure there are less weed seeds in the soil's "weed bank".

we are looking for feedback on our next CSA event. For the past several years in august we have had a sleep-out event corresponding with the annual Perseid meteor shower, the first year it was kind enough to fall on a weekend, the next time and, alas this year, the shower peaks midweek (aug 11+12)and we are trying to decide- should we hold the event midweek, or should we just have it on the closest weekend and enjoy the sensation of sleeping under the stars whether there is a promise of meteors or not? send us feedback by hitting comment, by email or in person. If enough people were interested in sleeping out midweek, we would hold the event then, otherwise, we will plan on the weekend.

start thinking ahead to october as well. 10-10-10 is the international day of climate action, we'd like to host an event of some kind, have ideas? let us know!


things you'll see in the share:
leeks
cucumbers, pickling and slicing
tomatoes!
cherry tomatoes
kale and chard
basil!
new potatoes, this week purple, and really bright purple, at that!
green and speckled beans!
fresh onions
fresh garlic
zucchini and summer squash/patty pans
cabbage
tomatillos!
beet greens
rainbow carrots

we had beans cooked like this the other night and ate a whole quart in about two minutes, they were so good!
Saute a quart of beans (the speckled ones are nice like this, and keep their color better) in butter or olive oil. When just about tender, mince a clove of garlic and a tsp of soy sauce and toss on top of the beans, cook another few minutes, serve and enjoy. Simple and so tasty!

have a treemendous week,
liz and matthew

week 7 of CSA

these radicchios were at the end of a bed that finished, they couldn't take the heat with out irrigation and boy are they a mess now! "hello, i'm kale, get used to me, i'm versatile and you'll see me or my curly leaved sibling a lot this season. I am high in calcium, iron, and vitamin K, your doctor will be proud if you learn to like me. I am a little bitter, but great cooked with a bouillon cube until bright green and tender (but not so long that i get overcooked and soggy) or cooked with a dash of water and caramelized onions, toss a handful of raisins in and the contrast of sweet and bitter is lovely!"

love these onions!

how did this happen?! sorry regular checkers, we flubbed this week!

i guess by the fact that we didn't post this week you can infer that we have been busy. our working shares start up in july and it has been a hot first two times out for them, with temperatures into the 90s and humidity high as well. thanks cindy, brendan, devin, danielle, pat, mark, terri, lydia, and reeder for being so tough in such hot weather! not a single wimp or whiner in the group! and an extra huge thanks to pat and mark who loaned us their truck this week when ours had to go into the shop at 5:15 the night before market and we didn't know how we were going to get things to market in corning the next morning! (a minor problem fixed in a few hours, but not in time for us to get to market in our truck.)

we are looking forward to the picnic tomorrow and are tidying the fields up so things look their best for the crowd. If you are coming and play an instrument, bring it, we will be having a campfire at dark!

things you have seen in the share:
baby leeks
cucumbers, pickling and slicing
first tomatoes! (a few)
some cherry tomatoes (not too many saw these yet)
kale and chard
basil!
new potatoes
green beans, new this week!
fresh onions
fresh garlic
zucchini and summer squash/patty pans
cabbage
a little lettuce, but the hot dry weather has been hard on it, it makes it bitter and then it bolts (goes to flower)


things you'll see soon:
tomatillos! (some times called mexican green tomatoes, and make a great salsa)
beet greens
rainbow carrots

this weather has been great for coleslaw, hope you have a favorite recipe, here's a suggestion if not:
shred cabbage and toss with shredded carrots, mayonnaise, dill seed or weed, a splash of vinegar, salt and pepper to taste.

have a great rest of the week!
liz and matthew

week six of csa

well lets not beat around the bush, last week we began by talking about the change of the weather and how cool it was going to be, slowing the growth of our warm season plants. this week, that has not been an issue! All along the east coast its been hot and dry and we aren't done yet, at least tomorrow will continue to cause us to swelter! it wouldn't be so bad to be so hot if it weren't so dry. Things would be growing like crazy if we had had a big rain before things heated up. But instead, we have been watering by irrigation mostly, but a few newly planted things by hand and hoping to get a good soaking rain sometimes soon.

we've decided that we should just have a fun event on july 17th, we'll be hosting an evening of fun on the farm! We'll have a picnic dinner (bring a dish to pass) and we'll have games like badminton, bocce ball, Frisbee, a bean bag tossing game (good for little kids) and a collection of games and challenges that take a minute to play. this will be a great event for those who want to see the farm and meet other members, but don't feel that they can do a farm work type event. Know someone who would like to see the farm? Invite them along! We'll have dinner at six, arrive as early as five on saturday, july 17th.

In pick-up news, we've decided to try giving one pound of dry beans or small bags of flour as items that you can choose in the shares, at first it felt odd to give something that we had not grown, but we thought we'd give it a try. (sorry ithaca pickups, we do not bring these items to the market there as the rules do not allow it.) We have been bringing whole wheat bread flour and all purpose flour both locally grown and ground and certified organic from Farmer Ground Flour in trumansburg as well as black beans all from cayuga pure organics in brooktondale (which is one of the two farms that grows the wheat for farmer ground flour). We have begun bringing these items to the markets because we really feel that to have a strong, vibrant local food system, we need farmers to grow staple food items like these, and we need them to be successful doing it, and bringing these items to markets that they otherwise wouldn't get to is one way that we can help make the local food system stronger. don't know how to use dry beans? see recipe below, it includes both the flour and beans!

things you may see this week:
chard and kale
lettuce and lettuce mix
new potatoes
patty pans and zucchini
cucumbers are new!
raspberries
fresh onions
fresh garlic, last few scapes
cherry tomatoes first few


coming soon:
green beans!

recipes for the week:
hummus with garlic scapes
one can of chick peas
olive oil start with 1/4 cup
1-3 garlic scapes
splash of lemon juice
T of soy sauce
pepper

mix all in food processor until smooth, adjust seasoning to taste.


here's a favorite of ours, Burritos with homemade tortillas:
1 lb flour, about 3 cups, can use some whole wheat (i often use one cup)
2 pinches of salt
1/4 cup oil
1 T baking powder
about a cup of water, add a little at a time

mix flour, salt, and oil then add water in increment. knead dough and add flour if needed to get a doughy consistency. cook on a hot, dry skillet until brown bubbles form, flip and cook other side.


we make burritos with any number of fillings- but especially greens, rice, beans, cheese, and salsa (tomato, tomatillo, or peach).

to cook beans, soak several hours or overnight, drain and simmer until tender. flavor as desired, we use onions, garlic, and hot peppers. wrap in tortilla and enjoy!

have a good week, hope to see you at the picnic!
liz and matthew