HATCHET COVE FARM

What a bounty this week!  Last year, members requested more eggplant, and so this year we dedicated almost all of one of our small greenhouses to the plants with their beautiful purple flowers and fruit.  The delicious harvest is now underway!  Also, the largest variety of onion that we grow, Ailsa Craig, was finally ready for harvest this week.  They always amaze us with their grandiosity and make us feel that the long onion haul that started back at the end of February was worth it.

Purslane is the unusual green in a little bag this week.  Purslane is often thought of as a weed, but this is a culinary variety and it is one of my favorite things on the farm.  It has a lemony crunch and all parts of it are edible:  the leaves, the stem and the flower.  Also, it has an extraordinary amount of omega-3 fatty acids, as well as being full of antioxidants.  Every time I snack on it I feel like I’m being virtuous, though I’m really just eating it because I love it!

If you get a cucumber in your share this week, consider it your lucky day. We usually are awash in cucumbers at this time of the season, and I feel bad that we haven’t been able to provide them at the usual rate.  What happened is that we tried a new variety this year, the Diva, and they were true to their name.  They were extremely finicky in the cold spring and transplanted very poorly.  Almost all of our first and second plantings died.  We had a small section of our old standby variety that did well, but it will still be a few weeks before our third planting will be fully on.   It’s disappointing that the Divas didn’t do well, though, because even if they don’t look lovely (they are long and skinny and a bit misshapen) they taste divine.  So enjoy yours if you get one and rest assured if you don’t that everyone will get cucumbers eventually!

Good luck getting through your veggies this week, and we hope you have some memorable meals!

Remember to please continue to let me know if you want a bulk order of kale, chard or collards (10 bunches for $15).

Have a great week,

Reba and the HCF crew

Scenes from a harvest day. Above: the wash shed in full swing. L to R: Minna cleaning garlic, Les checking the “pick-list” that hangs from the ceiling. Neil sorting and washing meslun mix, and Sara in the background searching for the right-sized wax box for kale bunches. The kiddie pool in the center is where all the different mesclun components get mixed together. After everything is mixed and bagged up, the pool gets hoisted to the ceiling to stay clean and out of the way.

Sorting purple potatoes into quarts for wholesale. The potatoes are first dug then washed, dried, and boxed up.

Week 8 (of 18) veggies:  Green Beans, Eggplant, Garlic, Ailsa Craig Onion, Beets, Carrots, Potatoes, Zucchini and/or Zephyr Squash, Cucumber (hopefully), Purslane, Dill

This week’s recipes:  Eggplant Salad with Dill and Garlic, Green Beans with Caramelized Onions, Red Potatoes with Purslane, Chilled Zucchini Soup with Purslane

The garlic is in!  Wednesday was a huge garlic harvest day.  We pulled up and laid out thousands of bulbs of garlic.  The upstairs of our small barn (in fact, the whole building) is permeated with the aroma of garlic (in a good way).  We all love the fresh, uncured garlic.  You can use it just as you would garlic from the store, but expect the cloves to be downright crunchy and have a fresh, strong flavor.

We have enough plantings of kale and chard now that if you are interested in putting some by for winter, we can start filling orders.  This offer will be available for some time to come, but we’d be happy to start  picking for those who have a chance to tackle it during the summer.  The price is $15 for ten bunches (filling a bag the size of a garbage bag, basically).  You can specify kale, chard, or collards.  Send us an email if you’re interested.

Also, blueberries will be delivered Thursday (8/4), Sunday (8/7) and Monday (8/8).  There are still a number of boxes available.  The details, again:  $35 for a 10-lb box of cleaned organic wild blueberries, from Red House Farm in Waldoboro.

All but one of the fifteen ducklings that staggered out of the woods with their mama a couple weeks ago are thriving.  Cookie the cow got a little greedy and stepped in their pen, trying to get to their grain.  Hence we have one fewer duckling.  And we now have a fourth cow on the farm — a little Jersey bull.  He’ll stay with us for a few months and hopefully Cookie will get pregnant during his tenure at HCF.

Have a great week and enjoy the veggies. With the green beans and potatoes it finally feels like peak summer is really here!

Reba and the HCF crew

John and Sara swimming in a sea of garlic. With drying racks stacked two high and additional racks suspended from the ceiling, we were able to fit at least four thousand bulbs in the upstairs of our small barn. Heavy duty fans will run day and night for the next month to make sure the drying process goes well.

Week 7 (of 18) veggies:  Fresh Garlic, Carrots, Green Beans, New Potatoes,  Basil, Zucchini and/or Zephyr Squash, Lettuce Mix

This week’s recipes:  Pesto Potato Salad with Green Beans, Quick Zucchini Sauté, Green Bean Salad with Walnuts and Parmesan

So many things to look forward to in the next few weeks!  That is, assuming this heat breaks and we get some rain.  It was a sweaty week for everyone on the farm (and everywhere else).  We knew things were too hot when Mica the farm dog stopped hopping up and down for every new car coming down the driveway.  But we have a lot of exciting things coming our way, such as…

GARLIC!  This week will include our annual garlic harvest.  We look forward to a long, hot, dusty day when we get to see the results of ten (!) months of waiting.  We’ll keep our fingers crossed and hope that each clove we planted last October became a beautiful bulb.  Each bulb will get pulled from the ground, dusted off, and lifted to the upstairs of our small barn in the tractor bucket.  There, it will get laid out to dry and cure with thousands of other bulbs on our fourteen drying racks.  But while some garlic is curing, if all goes well you can look forward to incredible fresh garlic in next week’s share!

For those of you who pick up at the UU church on Sundays, Cheryl Denz from Terra Optima farm plans to have pork and beef for sale when she makes her chicken and egg csa deliveries.  This is open to everyone, so stop and talk to her about what will be available!

Finally, I’ve decided to go lower-tech on the blueberry orders.  The online sign-up program proved to be a little too complicated for me to figure out at this time of year.  So, please simply send me an email if you would like a box of blueberries.  Pick up can be at the farm on Thurs August 4th or Monday August 8th, or in Rockland on Sunday August 7th.  We are not able to do home or workplace delivery for the berries, but you are welcome to sign up for pick up at the farm on any day.  You can mail the check for $35 to us at the farm, or bring it to the pick-up.

We have so enjoyed the many notes and emails we’ve received about the shares.  Keep the comments coming!

Eat well,

Reba and the HCF crew

Blueberry Details:  Certified Organic Wild Blueberries from Red House Farm in Waldoboro.  10 lb box for $35. Pick-up at UU Rockland on Sunday, August 7th (10:30-11:30am), or at the farm on Thursday August 4th or Monday August 8th  (5-7pm).  Email info@hatchetcovefarm.com to reserve a box and a pick-up location.

Week 6 (of 18) veggies:  New Potatoes, Savoy Cabbage, Lettuce Head, Zucchini and/or Zephyr Squash, Basil, Rainbow Chard, Spinach

This week’s recipes:  Penne with Goat Cheese and Chard, Grilled Zucchini and Summer Squash Salad with Basil-Parmesan Dressing

Contrasting scenes of life on the farm at 98 degrees. Top picture: the apprentices weeding CSA onions (they got the rest of the day off, I promise).

Bottom picture: Eli and his friend Miguel, running up their slip-and-slide made of greenhouse plastic. Looking at these pictures, we’re not sure why Eli thinks life on the farm is so onerous!

Today was an exciting harvest day on the farm.  First-of-the-season harvests of carrots,  beets, basil, green cabbage and  new potatoes!  Boil the potatoes  and toss them with a little salt, pepper and butter… there’s nothing more sublime than just-dug baby potatoes.

Blueberry season is on its way!  Two years ago we connected our members to the berry farmers at Red House Farm in Waldoboro.  Known for their incredible organic low-bush berries, it was a great disappointment last year when their harvest was limited by a late frost.  But this year, berries are back!  There is high demand for their berries, and I suspect that more of our members will want to purchase berries than there are available.  So for this first round, members will be limited to one 10-lb box per family, and even with that every family who wants to purchase a box may not be able to do so.  We hope that it will be a great berry season, though, and that at the end of August they may be able to open their schedule up again for more orders.  I’m still figuring out how to take these orders online, and will email a special link for members to purchase berries as soon as I figure out the details.  The price of a 10-lb box is $35.

A couple of other things to put out there:  our apprentice Les and his boyfriend Jaqxun are looking for an inexpensive rental starting this fall.  They would love to exchange yard or garden work, or childcare, for part of their rent.  If you know of such a place, please pass the details along!

We were lucky to have a returning WWOOFer on the farm this week (WWOOF= WorldWide Opportunities on Organic Farms.  Many of our short-term volunteers come to the farm through WWOOF).  Corinne Beaugard first came to the farm to volunteer last summer, and is now running the greenhouse at the Children’s Museum in Portland for the summer.  It was great to have her back for a few days.

Have a great week, enjoy your veggies, and please let us know what is or is not working for you.  We love feedback, both about the veggie share and about the add-ons, if you get a chance.

Reba & the HCF crew

Once a week we have “farm dinner” when the full crew eats together. This meal included barbeque chicken, sesame kale salad, Hen-of-the-woods mushroom salad, spinach and goat cheese-stuffed mushrooms, baked zucchini, rice and garlic scape salad, and strawberry pie from the dessert share! L to R: Les, Emily, Corinne, John, Sara, Bill & Eli. Missing from the picture: JP, Cecilia, Reba, Megan and Neil. Cecilia insists on lighting her favorite pink candles at every farm dinner. Ambience is everything.

Week 5 (out of 18) veggies:  New Potatoes, Beets, Carrots, Winterbor Kale, Lettuce Head, Green Cabbage, Basil

This week’s recipes:  Chocolate Beet Cake, Toasted Sesame Slaw, Easy Peanut Kale

Our Saturday harvest day began in the rain and fog and ended with one of the more glorious days of the season.  And to top it off, between the veggies and the cheese, mushroom, and bread shares, we ate  ridiculously well this week.  We hope you had a chance to enjoy the weather and your meals, too.

The farm feels wonderfully alive with animal life this year.  Our new barn cat, “Ten Cat” (yet another interesting  name provided by Eli — she arrived with the name Miss Kitty) is adjusting well and trails us in and out of the fields.  We adopted her from a CSA family, and Tux (the King of the barn cats) is barely tolerating her, so we think she’ll stick around.  The honeybees that our apprentice John brought to the farm this June love the flowering mustard plants.  It’s also fun to see Eli trail after John on his beekeeping rounds, always watching from a cautious distance.

Apprentice Megan (below in the photo with the huge mass of chard) has assumed caretaking for all things fowl and coddled the baby turkeys and meat bird chicks when they were in their infancy.  Now that the meat birds are older and far less attractive they’ve lost a bit of their allure, but she soldiers forward and we’ve lost fewer than usual.

Tink and Cookie continue to charm us with their bovine-y enthusiasm.  As I write this, I hear Cookie making her incredibly odd, elephant-like trumpets.  And Tink really seems to think she is a dog.  If you visit the farm, ask us for some wilted lettuce or kale to feed to them, or bring some stale soft bread from home.  If you arrive empty-handed, though, she’ll happily just lick your arm instead.

If you save disposable Hannafords plastic bags, we’d love to have them to make available to members who forget their reusable bag.  Please remember to return your empty cloth bag this week, though — we’re not running short quite yet, but if we keep up the current rate of return, we’ll likely run short soon!

Have a great week, and eat well!

Reba and the HCF crew

Week 4 (of 18) veggies:  Mesclun Mix, Scallions, Spinach, Swiss Chard, Depending on delivery day: Napa or Green Cabbage, Sugar Snap Peas, Pac Choi

This week’s recipes:  Swiss Chard Pie, Mango Slaw with Cashews and Mint, Napa Wasabi Slaw

Apprentice Megan Racely, weighed down by an armful of Swiss Chard.

I think that every year a few more CSA members learn to love garlic scapes.  I don’t know how you could resist them for long.  Scapes are gorgeous, they’re incredibly scrumptious, and they’re a once-a-year event.  They certainly earn their reputation as a rare and treasured treat.  Scapes are the flower spike of the garlic plant, and we cut them off so the plant will put more energy into the garlic bulb (resulting in a larger head of garlic at harvest time).  We use scapes like we use garlic: chopped up fine and sautéed along with whatever we’re cooking.  But they’re at their most exquisite when solo, and my favorite garlic scape dish is included in this week’s recipes (if you can call something so simple a recipe) .

The other crazy-looking thing in your share this week is purple kohlrabi.  Peel it and shred it into salads or slaws, cube and sauteé it with garlic scapes and butter, or slice it thin and put it in a sandwich.  Think of it as a crispy cross between a broccoli stem and a cucumber.

While many of our early season crops are still struggling to shrug off the effects of this cold and wet extended spring, the spinach is in heaven.  We’ve never had enough spinach to give it to the CSA two weeks in a row, and we’re excited to be able to do so now.

Things to look forward to:  the summer squash and zucchini are starting to show up on the plants.  They may be tiny and slow to arrive, but they’ll be here soon!  We’re also hoping to have new potatoes within a few more weeks.  We just built a new “shed” (it looks more like a blue-tarp covered wagon) to house our big equipment investment of the year: a root washer.  Last year’s apprentices said that a root washer was the thing they most wished to have on the farm, and since we want to keep our apprentices happy (see picture below), that’s what we went for.  We can’t wait to set it to work!

Have a great week!

Reba and the HCF crew

Week 3 veggies:  Lettuce Head, Garlic Scapes, Spinach, Broccoli, Redbor Kale, Kohlrabi

This week’s recipes:  Kale Chips, Garlic Scapes, Quinoa and Wilted Spinach Salad

Instead of brass knuckles, the thugs at Hatchet Cove Farm prefer to intimidate with garlic scape knuckles. L to R John “Angry Thug” Wright, Neil “Happy Thug” Attfield, and Les “Fierce Thug” Macare.

Although the last few days have felt like a return to our cold, wet spring, we know that summer is out there somewhere, hiding underneath the clouds.  Many of the summer crops are coming along great:  eggplant and peppers in the hoophouse, basil in the fields, and the last of the pumpkins finally transplanted.  And the garlic that so many members helped plant last fall is looking gorgeous (garlic scapes next week – we can’t wait!).

For those of you who coveted your fellow members’ add-on shares when you saw their loaves  pies and cheeses, know that you can still sign up for any of them.  We pro-rate the price so that you just pay for the remaining weeks, and you can usually start up right away.  Contact me if you’re interested.

This week’s share is full of great greens.  When we’re out in the fields bunching greens, we’re always oohing and aahing over the beautiful colors.  As for the broccoli, the plants were stressed by the spring weather and so many heads are smaller and less pretty than usual.  But we made a broccoli slaw last night and it was still delicious.  With the collards, we didn’t learn to love them until our southern friend Shannon taught us to cook the heck out of them.  They need to be cooked for much longer than kale and chard, but when you do, they are simply delicious.  Pac Choi, while being the perfect stir-fry vegetable, is also great shredded into a slaw.  And we don’t think anyone needs directions on how to deal with the sugar snap peas (if they make it all the way home at all!).

Have a great  week and let us know how the CSA is going for you.  For those of you in the chicken and egg CSAs, remember that the first delivery will be this week.

Eat well,

Reba and the HCF crew

Sara, Megan and John harvesting spinach on a misty Saturday morning

 Week 2 veggies:  Spinach, Collard Greens, Sugar Snap Peas, Broccoli, Pac Choi, Beet Greens, Lettuce Mix

This week’s recipes:  Broccoli Slaw, Shannon’s Delicious and Simple Collard Greens, Double Sesame Pac Choi, Spinach with Walnuts, Anchovies and Raisins

We have been looking forward to today’s CSA harvest for a long time. We simply love knowing the folks who eat what we grow.  It has been a challenging, wet spring, but the sun in these last few weeks has lightened our spirits and helped the plants make a good recovery.  And knowing you were out there, awaiting your fresh meals, kept us all going!

Our full-season crew this year is made up of a fabulous crowd:  Megan Racely, Les Macare, John Wright, Sara Hodges, and Neil Attfield.  We’ve never had so many apprentices at one time, but so far it has meant that even though the CSA is larger than ever before (and still with a wait list!), we’re all able to work, learn and play in reasonable balance.

If you are receiving a bi-weekly egg or chicken share, remember that  Cheryl from Terra Optima Farm will begin her deliveries next week.  And for those of you who are not bread members and have therefore not heard, we have a new bakery for the  bread and dessert CSA.  We’re excited to be supporting The Village Café and Bakery in Waldoboro, a wonderful bake shop on Friendship St. that is run by three very hardworking women:  Jess, Liz and Susan.  They are busy baking and experimenting with organic and Maine-grown ingredients for our members this week, and we can’t wait to enjoy the result!

In this week’s share are a few treats:  our favorite heirloom kale (Lacinato, also called Dinosaur Kale due to its bumpy leaves), Pea Shoots (a tender  garnish for salads and stir frys), Broccoli (small but tasty early heads), the famous Hatchet Cove Farm Mesclun Mix, and Beet Greens.  I once read (though I’m skeptical) that Beet Greens are native Mainers’ favorite vegetable.  These beet greens are so young and tender you can either eat them raw as a salad or sauté them with garlic, oil and a little vinegar.  Either way, they’re a treat.  Let us know if they’re your new favorite, too!

Have a wonderful week full of delicious meals, and remember to get in touch with any questions.  Enjoy!

Reba and the HCF crew

Week 1 veggies:  Lacinato Kale, Mesclun Mix, Pea Shoots, Broccoli, Baby Beet Greens

This week’s recipes:  Everyone’s Favorite Kale, Amazing Balsamic Vinaigrette

2011 apprentice John Wright feeding leftover pea shoots to Tink (black) and Cookie (redish brown).

It was time to make the call and we decided that we have to postpone the start of the CSA for one week, as much as we hate to do it.  The vegetables are growing beautifully and we’re doing everything we can to help them catch up, but this cold, wet spring really threw the soil and the plants for a loop.  Your share will still run all eighteen weeks, and we’re shifting the start by a week in order to maximize the quantity and diversity of vegetables that you will receive over the course of the season.  But we’re sorry to have gotten your hopes up for an early start, and appreciate your understanding after this soggy spring.

Thank goodness for the sun!  It’s been an odd spring on the farm, as I know that you are all able to attest to with your own rain-soaked lawns and gardens.  We have had a house full of apprentices (five full-season apprentices this year!) and very little for them to do, what with the fields being sodden and the greenhouses packed full of seedling that couldn’t be transplanted.  But with just a few days of sun on our backs we’re feeling optimistic, and hope that today’s glorious weather bodes well for the coming season.

The 2011 crew! L to R: Les, Sara, John, Neil, farmer Bill, Megan

Eli sprinting down the rows on potato planting day