HATCHET COVE FARM

Remember Late Blight?  The wretched tomato and potato disease that caused the Irish Potato Famine a hundred and fifty years ago, also decimated crops in the Northeast last summer.  We were one of the few farms in the area to save our tomatoes last year, and hoped that it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.  We don’t have it yet this year, but this week  late blight returned to Maine, probably due to someone’s old, infected potato seed sprouting anew.  Out of all places, it was first re-discovered in Waldoboro.  We’re doing everything we can under organic  rules to protect our tomatoes and potatoes, but it is likely that eventually they will get it.  Late blight spores can travel up to thirty miles through the air from infected plants.  Since we grow all of our tomatoes in hoophouses, the plants are offered some protection against the spores.  We are optimistic about making it through the season blight-free, and promise to get as many tomatoes and potatoes to you as possible in the meantime!

Hanni transplanting chard for the fall harvests

We’ve had a great crew on the farm recently, with Katie from NYC and Lauren from Texas working with us last week.  And we can’t wait for the big garlic harvest, which will happen on Tuesday (2000+ bulbs!).  The fresh garlic in this week’s share is a wonderful treat — it’s not cured (dried) yet, so has an wonderful zingy, fresh flavor.  Peel the outside of each clove like regular garlic, even though it will be hard to see the distinction between the bulb and the paper.

Have a great week, and we’ll keep you updated with the blight situation as it progresses (or, hopefully, ceases to progress!)

Be well,

Reba and the HCF crew

Week 7 veggies:  Cucumbers, Zucchini and/or Zephyr Squash, Tomatoes (Slicing and/or Cherry), Basil,  Red Potatoes, Redbor Kale, Fresh Garlic, Bok Choy

This week’s recipes:  Viennese Cucumber Salad, Greek Salad with Orzo and Black-Eyed Peas, Sesame Soy Braised Bok Choy

Bill, Emma & Eli erecting the new hoophouse

A new ‘small’ hoophouse is underway at the farm.  Some of you may remember the “port-a-hoopies” that we built last summer.  They were a bit of an experiment, and an experiment that was challenged by windstorms and early November snow.  This new, equally ‘portable’ hoophouse ought to withstand the weather much better.  It is created out of bent chain link fence pipes, instead of rebar like the last ones.  We hope it will result in bountiful harvests well into the fall, as some of our late summer crops will be planted under the hoops.

Something new for our members:  farmers Marc and Abby Strobbe of Heathy Heritage Farm in Bremen are making their pasture-raised pork, poultry and eggs available to our members through a ‘Hatchet Cove FarmShare’ program.  They will be delivering to our members every other Sunday in Rockland and to Hatchet Cove Farm every other Monday evening.  Let us know if you’re interested, and we’ll email you all the details.  We’re really excited to be connecting our members with such well-grown meat and eggs.

If any of you have fennel left over from last week….a warning.  I finally made the couscous salad that I put into last week’s recipe, and it wasn’t very good.  Instead, a CSA member reminded me of another fennel recipe that she says is a summer staple in their home:  Penne with Fennel, Tomato Sauce, and Blue Cheese.  You can find it on our website (after clicking the recipe tab, click on the word ‘fennel’ —both recipes listed there are hits).

Have a great week!  We hope to have some exciting dairy cow news for you next week…stay posted, especially if you love raw milk!

Reba and the HCF crew

Week 6 veggies:  Cucumbers, Carrots, Zucchini and/or Zephyr Squash, Salad Mix, Savoy Cabbage,  Radishes, Beets, Basil, Potatoes

This week’s recipes:  Eli’s favorite Zucchini and Apple Muffins, Radish, Cucumber and Romaine Salad with Tahini Dressing, Zucchini and Summer Squash Salad with Basil-Parmesan Dressing

It has been a toasty week for all of us, but full of exciting new things on the farm:  new potatoes, new beets, new baby birds in the nest in our barn, and new words from Cecilia (‘boobeer’—or so we now call blueberries).  A new volunteer, Corinne, will be with us during the next week.

Bill digging Red Norlands — the first new potatoes of the season (and he’s clearly delighted to have his picture taken).

Bill and I admitted to each other this week that it feels strange to have a farming season with no crises in it so far.  We  always tell apprentices, half-jokingly, to ignore us when we get simultaneously, momentarily, deeply anxious over something bad on the farm (i.e. late blight kills all the potatoes, cutworms eat all the broccoli seedlings, etc.).  We tell them that those kind of lows are bound to  happen, that that’s life on the farm, and then we’ll move on.  But so far this year there haven’t been any major problems.  I hope that I’m not wishing some disaster upon us by writing this.  But it sure feels nice for now.

The irony is that, for blueberry farmers in the state, this has been  a rough year (and last year, our tough year,  was a great one for them).  Remember how we had that early, warm stretch around Easter, and then a  late cold snap?  Our friends at Red House Farm, the Waldoboro organic blueberry farm that sold truly gorgeous berries to our members last year, lost nearly half their crop this year to that late frost.  They sent us an email yesterday to say that they’re sorry, but there will not be blueberries for sale to our members this year.  We feel terrible for them, and what a disappointment for all of us.  May next year be both a good berry and a good vegetable year.

Our MOFGA organic certification inspection took place this week.  It’s a two to three hour annual meeting where we walk our fields with the inspector,

Hanni in the wash shed, cleaning up a mountain of beautiful rainbow swiss chard.

talk about our organic management strategy, provide records of everything we’ve planted or sprayed or input on our farm.    It takes a lot of effort and resources, both financially and in terms of our time, to remain certified organic, but we believe it’s worth it.  It’s one of the most important ways we can show the level of our commitment to the environment, the soil, and to the folks who eat our vegetables.

We’ve been eating a lot of amazing salads from  Mark Bittman’s ‘How to Cook Everything Vegetarian’ cookbook this week.  I really can’t recommend that cookbook enough to CSA members.  Hearty salads have been the perfect foil for this hot, but still hungry, time of year!

Have a great week!

Reba & the HCF crew

Week 5 veggies:  New Potatoes, Fennel, Basil, Baby Beets with Beet Greens, Zucchini &/or Zephyr Summer Squash, Cucumber, Swiss Chard

This week’s recipes:  Couscous Salad with Fennel and Raisins, Crumbled Zucchini or Zephyr Summer Squash

This year reminds us that when conditions are ideal for bountiful vegetables, they are also ideal for bountiful weeds!  But weeding future crops is just as important as any current harvest.  Some days it feels like we’re doing triage in the fields, deciding which crops will get the sunlight and soil resources first.  As one apprentice said of the baby lettuce in a bed of mesclun she had spent the morning weeding, “it can breathe again!”

We’re very lucky because our neighbors the Storers and Doyle/Ewarts have lent us the use of their fields.  We aim to sow these new fields with ‘cover crops’ of vetch, buckwheat, rye, oats or peas.  These  cover crops (or ’green manure’) are not grown for harvest, but for their ability to add fertility when we incorporate them into the soil.  They will also

Laurie in a weeding spinach before-and-after shot: on the right, before. On the left, after.

help reduce the weed ’seed bank’ in the soil over time.  We hope that the use of these fields means that some day we may be one of those rare and amazing organic farms without a weed in sight.  Until then, we’ll keep on weeding, and when we miss a weed and see it flower, we’ll tell ourselves that we left it for the bees!

Coming soon in your shares:  basil, cucumbers, and more summer squash and zucchini.  And new potatoes aren’t too far off!

For those who pick up at the farm or have home or workplace delivery, keep switching out those reusable bags!  We think it’s working well, but let us know how it’s going for you.  And if you get a cheese or mushroom share, let us know how you like it so far (did everyone grill their Haloumi last week?  We thought it was just about the best thing ever…).

Have a great week,

Reba and the HCF crew

Week 4 veggies:  Mesclun Mix, Broccoli florets, Zucchini &/or Zephyr Summer Squash, Green Baby Cabbage, Redbor Kale, Garlic Scapes

This week’s recipes:  Sauteed Greens with Cannellini Beans, Toasted Sesame Slaw

Garlic scapes, the flower spike of the garlic plant, are an eagerly awaited annual treat on the farm.  We cut the flower off so that the garlic plant will put more energy into the bulb, resulting in a larger head of garlic.  Each garlic plant will produce only one spike, so it is a one-time harvest.  But what a beautiful and delicious harvest.  We chop scapes up and use them in place of garlic in any dish.  But our favorite method is simply sautéed, as described in the recipe section.  Cecilia, our toddler, will eat them by the fistful!

You may notice that the broccoli is a bit less lovely this week than before.  We planted three  varieties for this first broccoli harvest, and while the one that matured first looked gorgeous, the second two varieties appear quite a bit less perfect.  But they still taste great, and are a reminder that on the farm, flavor, not looks, is everything!

Margo, Hanni & Emma (with Laurie in the background) harvesting garlic scapes amidst a tangle of garlic planted last October by many of you!

Other news on the farm:  our short-tern volunteer Margo went home to New York today, after giving us three weeks of hard work and a wonderful attitude.  We’ll miss her!  This week we will have our organic certification inspection, an important day of the year for us (we’ll tell you about it in next week’s letter). And we hope that we will finally all just be healthy for a week — we’ve never known a June so full of one illness after another!  But luckily, with great weather, a great crew, and six years of experience now behind us, we seem to have made it through in great shape.  And for this we feel lucky and grateful.

We hope you’re enjoying all your veggies.  Have a wonderful week, and have fun cooking!

Reba and the HCF crew

Week 3 Veggies:  Garlic Scapes, Winterbor Kale, Radishes, Lettuce Head, Arugula, Cabbage, Broccoli

This week’s recipes:  Garlic Scapes, Pasta with Broccoli, Kale Chips

The beautiful range of weather continued this week, with a direct impact on the veggies in your share.  It thrills us to be able to give things other than greens (though, of course, we love the greens) this early in the season, and we hope you enjoy it all.  This is our first full season with a ‘caterpillar tunnel’ (or port-a-hoopie) — essentially a low, relatively easily constructed and lower priced hoophouse.  The summer squash we planted in the caterpillar has started to produce fruit a full two weeks earlier last year’s field squash plants, and we hope they will be producing enough give them to you in the next few weeks.  Summer is really here, in my mind, when the zucchini arrives!

Hanni and Erin seedling fall vegetables under the big maple, with Margo pulling a wagon up the driveway full of more seeding supplies.

Our crew continues to do an awesome job, making even the harvest days just zoom by, even though we are harvesting, washing and packing more than ever before.  Erin had to return home to CT this week since farmwork was not helping a back injury heal.  We thank her for her enthusiasm and the effort she gave to the farm while she was here.

As for this week’s veggies, a couple of things to keep in mind:  we learned to love collards only after we realized that they need to cook far longer than the other bunching greens such as kale and chard.  In our favorite cooking method, (the simple recipe below), we simmer them for a good 45 minutes.  Another item that may be unfamiliar to you, the little bag of pea shoots, are delicious chopped up in a salad, sautéed as a side, or thrown into a stir-fry.

Have a great week, and enjoy your meals!

- Reba and the HCF crew

Pick-Your-Own Herbs
Our members are always welcome to come to the farm for pick-your-own perennial herbs.  Thyme, Tarragon, Sage, Rosemary, Chives, Oregano, Mint and Lavender are available, when in season.  Just let us know the first time you plan to come and we’ll show you where everything is and how to harvest it.  Then you’re welcome to come back and pick the herbs as you need them.

Week 2 veggies:  Mesclun Mix, Collard Greens, Broccoli, Cauliflower, Radishes, Pea Shoots, Lettuce Head

This week’s recipes:  Roasted Broccoli with Garlic and Red Pepper, Cauliflower with Olives and Bread Crumbs, Shannon’s Simple & Delicious Collard Greens

The 2010 CSA season is underway!  Compared to the rains of last spring, this year’s mix of sun and rain has been simply wonderful.  The veggies are growing great, and the salad and cooking greens that we always start the season with are as satisfying and delicious a first harvest as ever.

Our awesome June crew around the salad-mixing pool (yes, that is your salad in there!). We harvest separately each component of the mix then sort, wash, and spin it dry, then mix it all together in this pool, then bag it up for you! L to R is Margo, Laurie, Bill, Emma, Bob, Hanni, and Erin with the salad mix on the first CSA harvest day of the year.

We’ve had a busy crew here at the farm this spring.  We hope you’ll get a chance to meet Laurie and Hanni, our full-season apprentices, as well as Emma and Erin, who will be here through August, and Margo, the volunteer who squeezed in at the last minute!  They’ve been ceaselessly transplanting, weeding, harvesting, and being the human meals for black flies.  This CSA would not be possible without them, so make sure to thank them if you see them around!

If you receive your share via a home or workplace delivery, remember to bring your cloth bag back every week.  And remember that you won’t be getting your own bag back, most likely.  Think of it as canvas bag roulette…very exciting.

We love to hear feedback on how the CSA is working for you, and what you think of the cheese and mushrooms this year.  I am super easy to reach, especially by email, so please contact me with any questions, scheduling concerns, or anything else.

And finally… what is that crazy looking veggie in your first week’s share?!  We know that as many of you have become fans of kohlrabi over the years as have come to dread it.  It will only make an appearance in your share a couple of times this year (it’s a quick growing veggie, so is a good way to diversify the early, greens-heavy weeks).  It won’t be around much, though, so peel it and munch away — part broccoli, part apple, all crunch!

Enjoy wonderful meals and have a great week!

Reba and the HCF crew

Week 1 veggies:  Lacinato Kale, Mesclun Mix, Kohlrabi, Broccoli, Swiss Chard

This week’s recipes:  Our Favorite Balsamic Vinaigrette, Swiss Chard Pie, Everyone’s Favorite Kale

Storage tips for Kale, Chard, and all other leafy greens:

All leafy greens will quickly wilt if exposed to the air.  The best way to store them is to place them in a plastic bag, and store them in the crisper drawer of your fridge (even better if you wrap them in a damp paper towel first, but not a necessary step).
The Evert-Fresh green produce storage bags, for sale at the co-ops, also do a great job at keeping veggies fresh.

Need Extra Inspiration in the Kitchen?
These cookbooks are consulted weekly, if not daily, in our kitchen.

How to Cook Everything Vegetarian
By Mark Bittman
An incredible cookbook that we turn to daily.

Vegetarian Planet and
Entertaining for a Veggie Planet
by Didi Emmons
her cookbooks are like magic  — every single recipe is delicious!

Farmer John’s Cookbook:the real dirt on vegetables
By Farmer John Peterson and
Angelic Organics
Organized by veggie especially for CSA members

From Asparagus to Zucchini: a guide to cooking farm-fresh seasonal produce
By the Madison Area CSA coalition

Greens, Glorious Greens!
By Johnna Albi and Catherine Walthers
The name says it all…

Also, at www.epicurious.com, like all the above cookbooks, you can look up any
specific vegetable and create your meal around the recipe that pops up!

The start of the CSA season is in sight!  It has been such a strange, beautiful, dry spring, and we are welcoming this much-needed day of rain.  Hopefully we’ll get a few more days before it dries out again.  But this spring has us thinking, as MOFGA’s executive director Russell Libby recently wrote, “In one way, it’s amazingly nice to be able to plant early… and in another it means that all the old patterns may no longer be working.”  So we continue to learn as we go, adjusting our farming and keeping our expectations flexible, and hope that in building this new community around agriculture and food we will be part of the solution for our climate.

The first deliveries will be in the week starting Sunday, June 13th.  I will send out a separate email to each of you confirming the details of your location.  If you pick up at the farm or receive home or workplace delivery, we ask you to bring two reusable shopping bags (of the sort you can buy at Hannafords or the co-op for a couple dollars) to your first pickup.  We have always struggled with how best to package the CSA deliveries, and we hope that the flat bottom of these kind of bags will reduce damage to the veggies.  But don’t give us bags you have emotional attachments to, please!  These bags will be used interchangeably between all members.  When you receive your share one week, you can leave the prior week’s empty bag in its place.

Hanni and Laurie hard at work planting the 2010 potatoes

We can’t wait to share with you the new salad greens, kale, chard, pea shoots, bok choy… all the first veggies of the season.  We had sesame kale salad last night for dinner and I can’t wait for kale chips tonight!

If you are not already paid in full, remember that the second installment is now due.  Please contact us with any questions, and we look forward to seeing all of you soon!

Be well,

Reba and the HCF crew

Hello CSA members,

What a beautiful spring!  The sight of yesterday’s hail against a backdrop of cherry blossoms was amazing.  The past few weeks have been packed full of transplanting thousands of seedlings, harvesting hoophouse greens for sale to co-ops, and direct seeding salad greens, radishes, peas and more in the fields for your first deliveries.  We can’t wait for the CSA to get underway!  Remember that you’re always welcome out to the farm at any time to visit your rapidly growing meals.

We are lucky to have had the great company and hard work of an early crew of apprentices and volunteers.  Laurie Hacklander and Hanni Witzig will be with us for the full growing season and we hope you’ll get a chance to meet them and appreciate their work in person.  Tauhid Bin Kashem and Ben Weinberger are short-term volunteers who have helped ease the hard work of the start of the season.  We thank them for all they’ve done to keep the farm on track this spring.

Tauhid, Ben, Hanni, Laurie, Eli and Bill transplanting thousands of onions. Each of what appears to be an individual blade of grass is actually an onion or shallot that will be harvested next fall.

Remember that whether you are paying in full ($325) or installments ($65/month), you payment is due!  The CSA now has a wait list, so please let us know if your plans have changed.  And if you are joining the cheese ($225) or mushroom ($190) CSAs, those payments are now overdue.  Our hope is to soon reduce the amount of time I have to spend in front of the computer doing CSA record keeping so that the other work of the farm can take top priority.

The CSA deliveries will start the week of June 13th, so start perfecting your salad dressings!  We can’t wait!

Reba and the HCF crew

We’ve certainly been enjoying the warm start to the farming season.  The torrential rain last week left the fields sodden, but we hope that by next week they will have dried out enough that we can start transplanting broccoli, kale, and other early season veggies.  Fresh greens aren’t far away!

We still have a handful of CSA spots available, so if you know of anyone who is thinking of joining, let them know to contact me soon.  If you are paying in full, your payment ($325) is due this month.  If you are paying in installments, the first payment of $65 is due on May 1st.  (The installment plan is not through the UUR after all, so the payments are a little less but will start next month: $65/month, May-September).  As always, if you are having a hard time with the payment or will be late with it, just let me know and we’ll work it out.  And there is also still time to sign up for the cheese and mushroom add-ons (the links will provide you with more details).  We’re aiming for the week of June 13th as the first week of CSA deliveries.

We hope to be sending you details about egg, chicken, and pork options some time soon.  We’re so excited about the coming season (and the accompanying meals)!

Hope you are all well, and we’ll be in touch again soon!

Reba