HATCHET COVE FARM

I nearly forgot to write the newsletter this week, what with all preparation  underway for Sunday’s fundraiser at the farm!  Hopefully by the time many of you get this we will have had a successful, delicious afternoon together.

The first frost touched us this week, and while we’ll miss the cucumbers and the tomatoes, it is a little bit of a relief at the same time.  No matter how hard we work, mother nature eventually forces us to slow down.  The wet weather that continued this week has continued to affect the crops, but our fall salad greens are  coming up nicely in the hoophouses, just in time for the fall CSA.  There are still about ten spots left in the fall season, so sign up soon if you want a share.

Bulk items available this week:  carrots (15lb/$20), turnip or rutabaga (15lb/$15) and shallots (10lb/$45).

The survey is yet to go out, but as soon as the fundraiser is over I will create it and send it out.  We really look forward to hearing your feedback.

If you are not able to attend on Sunday but you want to send a check to support the fundraiser, please send it to me at the farm and note that it is for the fund, not for a CSA share!

Have a wonderful week, and we hope to see you either on the 9th or at the garlic planting party on the 22nd!

Reba and the HCF crew

We’re grateful for all the generous support we’re received from our members and from the community for Sunday’s fundraiser. The following fabulous businesses donated without a second thought.  Let them know how much we all appreciate them!

Uproot Pie,  music by Dusty & Joanna & Ray Montana, Good Tern Co-op, Rising Tide Co-op, Terra Optima Farm, Appleton Creamery, Village Café and Bakery, Atlantic Baking Company, Treats of Wiscasset, Pen Bay Medical Center Café, Oyster Creek Mushroom Company, I Love Pie, Capt’n Eli’s Soda, Maine Root Soda, Treats of Wiscasset, Hannafords, Shaws, CD’s by Josephine Cameron, t-shirts by Amelia Chambers and Carolyn Niehaus, Native Maine Distributers.

And thank you to our wonderful baking and cooking and helping friends:   Emily Arons (cook, baker, organizer extraordinaire), Patsy Dunton (ice cream!), Ashby and Jesse Bartke (ice cream cookies!), Amy & Joe Libby (flowers!), Dee Obuchon, Ingrid Bathe, Sara Hotchkiss, Eve & Fred Richardson, Melissa Holt,  Bob McLaughlain, Jean Matlack, Jeannie Klainer, Susan St. John, Liga & Chip Jahnke, Tom & Claire Pluecker, our wonderful apprentices Sara Hodges and Les Macare and John Wright, Ryan Parker, Anne Mynttinen, Jaxsun Darlin, Kevin & Josie Johnson, Noah deLaski, Audrey Richardson, Louise & Dick Cadwagan and no doubt others before all is said and done.

Week 17 (of 18) veggies:  Spinach, Carrots, Winter Squash (Acorn or Carnival), Beets, Shallot, Potatoes, Savoy Cabbage, Turnip

This week’s recipes:  Cabbage Salad with Apples and Walnuts, Roasted Root Vegetables with Rosemary

We have a lot to look forward to on the farm in the coming weeks, but in the meantime this extended warm and wet weather is really doing a number on some of the fall crops.  We expected to have broccoli in your share for another week or two, but mold sprung up all throughout the broccoli field, and so Cookie and Boston are reaping the benefit of thousands of pounds of unusable broccoli (see picture below).  Winter squash, too, was first thwarted by the wet and cold weather in the spring, and now is not curing well due to the wet and warm weather.  We’ll put all the winter squash we can into the shares, but for the first time in years we won’t have lots of it.

We’ve got a pretty exciting few weeks ahead for the farm.  The salad and pizza event at the farm on October 9th is shaping up to be lots of fun (see details on reverse side) and now we have something else to put on your calendar:  Saturday, October 22nd (rain date Sunday, October 23rd) we will host our annual cider-pressing, garlic-planting, potluck starting at noon.  It’s usually a relaxed afternoon in the fall sun, popping open garlic bulbs and enjoying amazing food contributed by all.  Unlike the event on the 9th, this is a get-together just for CSA members and is free, so head on over first on the 9th and then on the 22nd with  your lawn chair, ready to eat!

Unlike the above-soil crops, the root crops love this weather!  Available for bulk purchase are carrots (15lb/$25), red or golden beets (15lb/$25), turnips (15lb/$15) and shallots (10lb/$45).  All of these are great keepers.  In our kitchen fridge you can find bags of carrots, beets and turnips stuffed into every possible crevice, and they stay crisp and delicious all through the winter and spring.  Other bulk items for sale (these require blanching and freezing) are spinach (5lb/$40) and kale/chard/collards (10bu/$15).

It’s hard to imagine that this is the last week on the farm for our apprentice Les.  After the fundraiser on the 9th he will take off for a couple of weeks of travel.  After that he will be living in Rockland, so we’re happy he and his boyfriend Jaqxun won’t be far away.  We’ll miss him very much on the farm, though!  And it will be strange not to have Bucket, Les’s dog, enjoying himself on harvest days by chomping away on cauliflower or zucchini.

The fall CSA is a little over half full, so make sure to sign up soon if you’re interested.  The link is available from our website, or you can call the farm directly.  In the next week I will send out a CSA survey. We count on your feedback, and every year we try adjust things based on what we hear from members, so chime in with your thoughts!

We hope to see you all on Sunday the 9th.  Farm tours will be at 1pm and 3pm, and the salads, pizza and dessert are going to be amazing, so don’t miss it!  We still need volunteers for everything from parking to selling items, so let me know if you want to help out!

Have a great week with wonderful meals,

Reba and the HCF crew

Cookie, enjoying a mountain of broccoli. She’s due to calve in late spring, so this has got to be healthy for her baby!

Week 16 (of 18) veggies:  Spinach, Carrots, Cherry Tomatoes, Yellow Onion, Brussels Sprouts, Garlic, Salad (Hakurei) Turnips, Winter Squash (either Delicata or Carnival)

This week’s recipes:  Pan-Browned Brussels Sprouts, Minestrone

So many plans are underway at the farm!  Fall seems like it should be a time to start slowing down, but it seems like the opposite is happening! Plans for the fundraiser on October 9th are coming together (see the updated Save The Date) and we’re excited about the fabulous food that will be there.  This is a fundraiser and is open to the public (though primarily promoted through the CSA and the UUR).  But for all those who have wondered, we still will have our annual (and free!) garlic-planting, cider-pressing, potluck party at the farm (most likely on October 22 or 23).  We’d love to see you at both events!

It may be a bit startling to find what appears like an entire bush in your CSA share this week!  Fear not, edamame one of our favorite treats, but we leave it up to you to pull the soybeans off the plant!  Edamame is actually the name of the prepared dish made by cooking the soybeans in the pod in salted water.  The instructions are in this week’s recipes, but if you plan to wait a few days to cook them, you should pick the pods off the stalks and put them in a bag in the fridge.  They’ll keep best that way (not to mention they won’t take up a whole shelf of space!).

Next week we expect to start sign-ups for the fall CSA.  The fall share will run for four weeks, starting the week of October 23rd.  The vegetable share will cost $65, and will include salad greens out of the greenhouses as well as root crops, bunched green, onions, shallots, garlic, winter squash, Brussels sprouts, potatoes and more.  We’ll also be offering fall CSA extensions of the bread, cheese, mushroom, chicken, egg, and dessert shares.  Sign up will be online (as it was for the summer).  Stay posted for details!

While tomatoes are winding down for the season, we ought to have some seconds available for bulk canning orders.  Twenty pounds of tomatoes cost $30, for as long as they are available.  Green beans will still be available for a week or two more (5 lbs/$10) and Kale/Chard/Collards remain available.  Basil is still free pick-your-own or $8.50/lb pre-ordered.

As for the Bill back update, most days are better than the day before (he even picked green beans this week, looking, as a friend said, like a silverback gorilla on his knees with his back straight).  Enjoy your purple potatoes this week, let us know if you’d like to contribute to the planning of the fundraiser in any way (bake a pie!  Paint kids faces!  Donate beverages!  Just come and eat and donate!).

Reba and the HCF crew

John and Rob pressing the first apple cider of the season.

CJ patiently waiting for the first cider with her small drinking vessel (she really did drink about a whole mixing bowl full of cider before we realized what was going on).

Week 13 (of 18) veggies:  Cauliflower, Carrots, Edamame, Onion, Cucumber and/or Summer Squash, Cherry or Big Tomatoes, Mesclun Mix, Purple Viking Potatoes

This week’s recipes:  Edamame, Curried Cauliflower Flatbread

Save The Date
Share The Abundance!
A Pizza, Salad and Ice Cream Social Fundraiser at Hatchet Cove Farm
Sunday, October 9th, noon to 4:00

A delicious afternoon to raise money for both the HCF CSA “scholarship fund” (providing grants to make the HCF CSAs accessible to all) and for the UU church in Rockland, which so generously hosts and supports the CSAs.

Uproot Pie Co.  will be making pizzas in their portable pizza oven with ingredients from HCF and the add-on CSA farms.  Tours of the farm, live music, a chance to try your hand at milking the cow, and more!  If you’re interested in helping out, please contact Reba at info@hatchetcovefarm.com.

Contributors thus far include:  Uproot Pie Co, Good Tern Co-op, Rising Tide Co-op, Terra Optima Farm, Appleton Creamery, Oyster Creek Mushroom Co, The Village Bakery and Café, Oyster River Winegrowers, I Love Pie, Hope Hoffman/Free Grange Productions, and more to come!

Thank you to so many of you for your words of concern and offers of help during this past week.  It has certainly  been an overwhelming week, but the storm caused no damage and Bill  is  on the mend (though he’ll be on light duty for weeks to come.  If you come to the farm and see him lifting or hauling something, feel free to give him a piece of your mind!).  Our crew has really stepped up and with additional volunteers and helping hands, we’ve made it through the week without too much going awry!

The one casualty of the week, in fact, may have been the meal you made with last week’s “turnip greens.”  Bill is in charge of all things seeded, and hence he had to give me directions from bed to where the turnips are in a remote field.  Now, turnips and rutabaga are very closely related, and their leaves look nearly identical and, lo and behold, it wasn’t until the Thursday harvest that I realized that we had in fact harvested the rutabaga greens instead of turnip greens for you.  Wikipedia says that they can be eaten as a cooked green, but I  admit that Rutabaga Greens and Pork doesn’t have quite the same ring as the traditional Turnip Greens and Pork.  So, to the Sun/Mon/Tues members, I’m sorry, and I hope you enjoyed your new specialty green!

Corn is (obviously) the exciting newcomer this week.  We harvest it within a couple hours of delivery to give the sugars in the corn as little time as possible to turn to starch.  But that means that, depending on when the varieties ripen, some of you may have received corn last week, some may receive it this week, and some may receive it next week, .  And I know, for all you beet haters out there, three weeks of beets in a row is unconscionable.  But I promise that there are an equivalent number of beet lovers out there, and I hope to be able to give both beets and arugula this week so I could include the below recipe.  It is just so good!

As for bulk and pick-your-own orders, basil is now available for free pick-your-own if you want to come by the farm and fill a bag to take home for winter pesto.  Also, green beans ($10/5 lbs), harvested-for-you basil ($8.50/lb), and kale/chard/collards ($15/10 bunches) are still available for special order.  Just shoot us an email and we’ll set you up.

Have a wonderful week, and check out the Save The Date below!

Reba and the HCF crew

Emily Arons picking tomatoes in the greenhouse (she is our newest volunteer who will be with us for the next month or two. Reba is also lucky enough to claim her as a cousin).

Save The Date for a
Share The Abundance Fundraiser!
A Pizza, Salad, and Ice Cream Social at Hatchet Cove Farm
Sunday, October 9th, noon to 5:00

A delicious afternoon to raise money for both the HCF CSA “scholarship fund” (providing grants to make the HCF CSAs accessible to all) and to raise funds for the UU church in Rockland, which so generously hosts and supports the CSAs.

Uproot Pie Co.  will be at the farm making pizzas in their portable pizza oven with ingredients from HCF and the add-on CSA farms.  Tours of the farm, live music, a chance to try your hand at milking the cow, and more!  If you’re interested in helping out or making a donation, please contact Reba at info@hatchetcovefarm.com or 273-3044.

Week 12 (of 18) veggies:  Green Beans, Cherry Tomatoes, Big Tomatoes, Garlic, Collard Greens, Potatoes, Beets, Sweet Corn, Ground Cherries, Zucchini and/or Zephyr Squash, Cucumbers, Arugula (this week or next)

This week’s recipes:  Beet, Barley and Arugula Salad, Fresh Corn Griddlecakes

Sorry, no full newsletter this week!  Bill injured his back while preparing for Irene, and two of our apprentices left for the season on Friday night (after putting their full effort into a final day in crisis mode).  So the apprentices and I have been scrambling with the help of family and friends to get things tightened up for the storm.  We’re not sure yet how the vegetables for this week’s share (that are still in the fields) will be affected by Irene.  At best, the crops will probably look a little more beat up than usual.  At worst, well… hopefully there won’t be a worst.  As for now, I’m hoping that delivery dates and times will be unaffected.  Stay posted!
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In other news, we had an amazing onion and shallot harvest on Wednesday.  Thousands of onions are curing in the greenhouse (hopefully they’ll still be nice and dry come Monday!) and shallots fill the racks that previously held garlic.  Below is a picture of Cecilia, proudly harvesting an onion the size of her head!
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Stay safe and dry, and keep your fingers crossed for the greenhouses!
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Reba
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Week 11 (of 18) veggies:  Shallots, Onion, Turnip Greens, Big Tomatoes, Cherry Tomatoes, Beets, Yellow Peppers, Zucchini and/or Zephyr Squash, Basil

A proud onion harvester!

It’s getting to be that time of year when we’re determined to enjoy every last minute of summer crops.  The most significant indicator of summer’s end is that Megan and Neil, two of our full-season apprentices, will be leaving the farm at the end of this week.  Having apprentices is one of the best things about running a small-scale farm.  We may not get off of the farm often during the summer, but sometimes it feels like the world comes to us.  It’s always great to see how much apprentices learn and grow and gain confidence throughout the season.  Neil is one of the first apprentices of whom Bill ever said “He can keep up with me!” and Megan has a great eye for detail and an admirable willingness to challenge herself.  We appreciate all they have contributed this season, and no doubt you do too, since their hard work has been crucial to the production of every single vegetable in the shares.

Next Saturday evening, August 27th from 4:30 to 7 pm, our friends and neighbors at Two Sisters Farm in Warren are hosting a farm dinner:  burgers from their own beef cows, corn, salad, drinks and dessert ($8 per plate, $5 for kids 12 and under).  Their farm is gorgeous and has animals and beautiful views, so bring your out-of-town guests and a cooler to take beef home to stock up for winter!  With questions or to RSVP, contact Willy Ulbrich (whulbrich@yahoo.com or 273-3044).  Two Sisters Farm is located at 723 Finntown Rd in Warren (a mile before you reach Hatchet Cove Farm, on the left).

The tiny lantern-like treats in this (or next) weeks’ share are Ground (or Husk) Cherries.  Pop the little fruit out of their husk and enjoy the little explosion of pineapple-tomato-mango flavor (everyone has a different opinion on how it tastes!).  Depending on how rapidly they ripen, you will get them either in this week or next week’s share.

Enjoy your bounty of tomatoes this week.  If your tomato is not yet a deep red (or deep pink if it is a Brandywine), it is not yet completely ripe.  Just give it one or two more days, and it will be perfect!  We pick them before they reach that deep red stage so that you can enjoy them before they are over-ripe.  Another thing we do to produce peak tomato flavor is to water the greenhouses very infrequently after the plants set fruit (the last time we watered was over two weeks ago).  This way, the flavor of the tomatoes is the most intense and not watered-down.  Finally, if you see a blue dot or two on your fruit, just wipe it off before you eat it.  That is residue from the copper we use to (hopefully) protect and save the tomatoes from Late Blight.  It is certified organic but if I missed a spot in my tomato polishing, it’s best to just wipe it off before eating.

Kale/Chard/Collards and Basil are still available in bulk (Green Beans should be available again soon).

Have a wonderful week full of delicious meals!

Reba and the HCF crew

Apprentices Neil Attfield and Megan Racely during their final Saturday potato harvest/wash/dry/sort!

Week 10 (of 18) veggies:  Big Tomatoes, Cherry Tomatoes, Zucchini/Zephyr Squash, Basil, Potatoes, Winterbor Kale, Mesclun Mix, Onion, Ground (Husk) Cherries (either this week or next) 

This week’s recipes:  Summer Bread Salad with Tomatoes and Feta Cheese, Eli’s Favorite Zucchini and Apple Muffins,  Kale Chips

This week marks the half-way point of the summer CSA, and we’re very excited to finally have tomatoes for your share!  My absolute favorite are the Sun Gold orange cherry tomatoes, but there are about ten other different varieties growing in our greenhouses and hopefully you’ll get to sample many them over the coming weeks.  Remember not to store tomatoes in the fridge (it affects texture and flavor).  My fingers are crossed as I write about having tomatoes for the coming weeks, because Warren is the epicenter of this year’s outbreak of Late Blight.  Late Blight is the disease that caused the Irish potato famine, and to this day kills tomato and potato plants in a flash.  In the wet and cold summer of 2009 we were one of the few farms in the area that fended off the disease, since all our tomatoes are semi-protected in greenhouses.  Hopefully we’ll be able to do the same this year, and in the meantime, we’ll enjoy every possible bite of tomato!

If you would like to put pesto by for the winter, we now have bulk bags of basil available.  Later on in the season we will open the basil up for free pick-your-own, but it will be much more bug- and weather-battered at that point.  As for now, you’re welcome to order bulk basil at our wholesale rate (1 lb for $8.50).  Also, kale/chard/collards are still available for bulk purchase (10 bunches for $15).  Green Beans are also available in bulk (5 lbs for $10).  Just send me an email to order.

If you come by the farm this week, don’t be shocked by the huge excavator and bulldozer parked alongside the driveway.  We’re not tearing up the farm simply to give Eli the joy of seeing large earthmovers at work.  We received a grant from the USDA to build a manure/compost pad next to the barn and to reduce erosion by putting culverts and ditches in key spots around the farm.  It’s a bit of a shocking sight, but in the long run it will allow us to do a better job of protecting water and soil quality.

On one final note, one of our wonderful full-season apprentices, Neil Attfield, will be returning to interior painting this fall (his business is called Craft Fine Interiors).  He’s looking for new jobs throughout the mid-coast and points south, so feel free to contact him with any painting projects you’d like to have him look at!  His number is 650-8291 or   www.craft fineinteriors.wordpress.com.

Have a great week full of wonderful meals!

Reba and the HCF crew

Minna Latortue (HCF crew ‘09, ‘10, ‘11) with a handful of golden beets. Minna is our fabulous third-year WOOFing veteran (volunteering via World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms). We’re lucky enough to have her with us for a full month this season.

Week 9 (of 18) veggies:  Green Peppers, Green Beans, Onion, Lacinato Kale, Cherry Tomatoes and/or  Slicing Tomatoes, Potatoes (Purple or Red), Basil, Golden and/or Red Beets, Zucchini and/or Zephyr Squash

This week’s recipes:  Farfalle with Golden Beets, Beet Greens and Pine Nuts, Roasted New Potato Salad, Tuscan Kale Caesar Slaw