A Note From Your Site Coordinator

Hello and welcome all CSA 2009 Members! I am thrilled you all found your way here and wish you a healthy and happy season. I hope you will feel free to use this blog as a place to express your vegetable passions and strengthen your sense of community. Your energy and creativity is welcome and encouraged! The possibilites are endless: Vegetable parties and events! Vegetable art! Vegetable comic strips! The story of the tomato and onion love affair... ?

Cheers and bon appetite.

~Amanda Miller

Our Farmers

Monkshood Nursery and Garden wishes to make a deeper connection to the people we grow our food for. Hence, we are now offering a farm share or CSA. Our hope is to build a community of support for local agriculture, fantastic food, a clean environment, and a vibrant local economy. Our concern for safe, healthy great tasting food grown right here where we live is what motivates us.

About our Farm
David and Melinda Rowley along with their daughter Sorrel are the farmers at Monkshood Nursery & Garden. David attended Hadlow College in England studying Commercial Horticulture, while Melinda went to Cornell University and also studied Horticulture. Together we started a potted herb nursery in 2001. Two years later while looking for a place to expand the nursery we leased an 82-acre piece of land in the heart of Stuyvesant, NY. This is where we began growing vegetables for farmers market. We have since put up 3 greenhouses expanding our growing season. Now we are adding a CSA. And our garden keeps growing…

http://www.monkshoodnursery.blogspot.com/

Jews, Food, and Contemporary Life

De-bugging one’s vegetables is a challenge in any kosher kitchen, and a number of home cooks are reasonably concerned that using organic produce might expose us to more insects and a more difficult examination process. In fact, the opposite is true. I have now heard from a mashgiakh (supervising rabbi) that according to mashgikhim with extensive bug-checking experience, non-organic greens are not in fact less infested than organic greens; they are merely infested with smaller, more tenacious predators that have become resistant to the toxins. The good news for those who keep kosher, or are vegetarian, or simply want to limit their consumption of insects because of the gross-out factor, is that organic vegetables, along with all their other virtues, provide the safest and easiest way to eat bug-free.
Wash your vegetables, examine them, and enjoy in good health. - Eve Jochnowitz

Recipe from the CSA Kitchen

SALAD with JAPANESE TURNIP
(adapted from http://kitchen-parade-veggieventure.blogspot.com)
(15 minutes )
Salad
Salad greens
Japanese turnip, skins on, ends trimmed,
cut into batons or diced
Apple, quartered, cored and diced
Candied nuts

Assemble ingredients in bowl.

Dressing
1 pressed or mashed garlic clove
A pinch of salt
a dollop of a favorite mustard
a double splash of vinegar
a splash of good olive oil
freshly ground pepper to taste

Rub first 3 ingredients together with a fork. Whisk in vinegar then oil. Add pepper. Taste the dressing, then adjust to your own taste profile.

(we will usually have 2 or 3 recipes- I promise!)

CSA Responsibilities
Each CSA member is required to sign up for either two 2 hour or one 4 hour distribution shift. This is the way that we are all able to get our shares. If you haven’t already, please sign up for your volunteer shift.
We are still looking for more CSA members to join our core team. The core team is a group of volunteers who take an active role in managing the CSA, making decisions on behalf of the group, and developing events for the community. Do you have a talent for organization? We have an opening for a volunteer coordinator who will manage the schedule for our volunteer shifts. Interested members can contact Amanda Miller, 212-780-0800 x233. CSA@14streety.org

Core Team: Gina Bonati and Sayra Player ,(Volunteer and Distribution Coordinators) , Kristin Marting and Terry Gumula (Newsletter), Frances Anderson, Elise Hurley, Helen Greenberg

How on Earth Do I Wash all these Greens?

The rich, loamy soil of Columbia County nourishes some of the best produce in the eastern United States, and a great many of us are becoming personally acquainted with this miraculous dirt. We appreciate it, of course, but at some point we need to wash it off.
Washing greens is not as difficult as it seems. Fill your sink or a large pot with cool water, submerge greens and swoosh them around with your hands. Lift the vegetables out of the water. Do not pour them through a strainer, or you will merely deposit the sand and bugs you just washed off back on the greens. Repeat once or twice as needed.When I bring home a big CSA pickup full of sandy greens, I set up a whole assembly line of a few pots, then a colander, and finally the spinner. Briefly: first bunch of greens into first vessel, swish swish; first bunch of greens into second vessel, second bunch of greens into first vessel, and so on. Dry your greens in a spinner, pat them with clean towels, and refrigerate. You can place a square of paper towel in the bags with the greens to absorb excess moisture and keep them fresh longer.
- Eve Jochnowitz

This Week’s Harvest

This Week’s Harvest
1 Bunch French Breakfast Radishes
1 Bunch Brocolli Raab
1 Bunch Japanese Turnips
1/3 Lbs lettuce mix
1/3 Lbs spicy mix
1/3 Lbs mizuna mix
1 Bunch Thyme

Getting to Know Our Farmers

Q: Are you growing vegetables for our CSA that you have never grown before?
A: We usually try to grow something new each year, even if it is just a different variety of winter squash. We like to try new things to see what grows the best in our soil, sometimes we get a gem and start growing it every year and it becomes a staple variety, and sometimes we get radishes full of wire worms. We are always trying to learn to work with our farms ecology and continually improve it.

Q: What do you enjoy the most and the least about farming as a way of life?A: I enjoy the satisfaction of knowing that we can produce all the food we need to survive, that it is clean and fresh, and that we eat real food that hasn't been processed, or changed in some way, or shipped across the country. I feel blessed to be able to eat this well and hope that others will discover the same revulsion I now have for grocery stores and most restaurants. What I like least is the long hours, if you’re awake and it’s the growing season you’re working, because there is so much to do and not enough hours in the day to accomplish it all and it all has to be done now or - for instance- there are no carrots because they weren't flame weeded at exactly the right stage and the weeds grew faster than the carrots and crowded them out. Even though we work on the farm together, we are usually doing different jobs, (you only need one person to drive the tractor to cultivate the field, etc.) And quality family time is very hard to come by. This year we realized that we COULD take a short vacation, separately. Someone always has to be here to take care of the greenhouses, the chickens, and now the cow, not to mention keeping the employees busy

This Week’s Happenings . . . June 4th

Welcome returning members and newbies! This is our second year of our CSA and we are thrilled to be back. Each week this summer and fall, we will have a terrific range of healthy organic fruits and vegetables.

This newsletter is a space for us to communicate as a community. In the past, it has included general CSA updates, short articles about our farmers, Jewish culture and food in general as well as recipes for some of the food in this week’s share. We’d love to hear from you about other things you’d like included. There are two of us alternately editing the newsletter each week. If you are interested in writing occasionally or regularly for the newsletter, we’d welcome your help.