Week 20

Well csa crew, it's almost over for the season. The weeks have flown by and it seems like yesterday when you were helping us put up the packing shed. We thought we'd go over some of the highs and lows. It's a good time to reflect on the summer of 2008 and discuss our hopes for 2009.

Crop Report Card:

The Spring Semester was full of beautiful greens; we still remember the crunch of big heads of lettuce. We had tons of cucumbers and summer squash from mid june through august. Spring time gave us the best radishes and bok choi and oodles of garlic scapes. The only spring crop that didn't meet our expectations was the snow peas which we never trellised and sort of lost. In early summer the PYO flower and herb garden really shaped up, we had Kat our herbalist wwoofer around to keep things under control and help folks find their way around. July brought beautiful broccoli and cauliflower and many people's favorite, purple cauliflower. We had excellent early summer carrots, though that seems like a distant memory as we lost most of our later carrot plantings.

Once the tomatoes and peppers started coming in July they were unstoppable. It wasn't quite as good a year for tomatoes and eggplant when compared to last year (too much rain in mid-summer) but the tomatoes were abundant and we learned a lot about which varieties people like (good old red) and don't like (white, yellow & weird). In August, the melons were drowned by rain, and while they were plentiful, most, with a few exceptions (yellow doll watermelon & sweetie honeydew) just weren't as tasty as last year. When the plants absorb too much rainwater, the sugars in the fruit get diluted, we had a lot of melons that looked lovely but tasted like cucumbers. The potatoes on the other hand were an amazing bumper crop, and we've heard form lots of folks who especially enjoyed the purple spuds. The garlic crop was great, and we saved most of it for replanting in order to grow even more next year. We had a bit of a mold scare with all the rain in August, but everything worked out and we ended up with enough for the CSA and about 5000 bigger cloves that we planted just a couple weeks ago.

The winter squash harvest was good, though yields were down from last year (due to the pesky summer rain and accompanying fungal issues). Again we learned more about our shareholder's varietal preferences, next year we'll plant more acorn and butternut and less of the big clunkers that seem to scare people. In the later weeks we had lots of husk cherries, apples, cabbage, beets (although small) and Brussels sprouts. The Brussels were particularly fulfilling as they had been a failure in 2007. We are proud to have had salad mix on the table every week for the entire season and I must say it is currently at its very best. This cool damp weather provides ideal conditions and there are thankfully few pests munching on the leaves.

The eggs have also been a great success, for the first few weeks in June we had a bit of a shortage, but once the girls started rolling, we consistently collected about 100 eggs a day with hardly any grain. It is incredible to think about the resources that are wasted in our society. By simply collecting foodwaste from a handful of restaurants in our little town, we were able to create approximately 10,000 eggs and make tons of compost which goes on to create tons of produce when applied to our fields. This is a beautiful synergistic example of a creative local food solution.

We thought we'd give everyone an opportunity to come by for an end of season vegetarian pot luck on Sunday November 9^th from 3-6 PM. We'll be sharing a slide show from the season along with some Teleion Holon treats. We'll also give everyone eggs and salad greens to take home, a small token of our appreciation for all your support.

We still have lots of greens in the field and in our high tunnel so we are planning on selling eggs and salad greens self serve from the fridge in our house every Friday through December. Salad will be $4 for a half pound (we'll try to keep separate spicy and mild mixes) and we'll also have eggs for sale at $3/dozen. Come by Fridays at your convenience.

In other exciting news we are currently attempting to purchase some beautiful farmland near Manchester. With this land base we will be able to grow much more food, expand our CSA, and supply more markets. We have much more to learn, but we our hearts are deeply committed to feeding our neighbors. It is an incredible time to be doing this work and we need to invest now to meet the growing demand for safe local organic food. If you feel the spirit, you could help us by sharing your feedback on what being a part of our farm has meant to you (perhaps your words could soften up the loan officer tomorrow). Likewise we'd appreciate any feedback to help us improve for next year.

Finally, for anyone that hasn't noticed, Bonnie and I are expecting a new (very small) worker to join our farm sometime in early March. We look forward to introducing you all next season and promise to keep in touch.

With gratitude,

week 16

Hi CSA friends,

It's fall. Time to eat hearty soups, kale, cabbage, and winter squash. Time to split firewood, plant garlic and mulch the berries. Its Rosh Hashanah, the Hebrew new year, an opportunity for reflection, a new season, a new beginning, an attempt to not repeat last year's mistakes. It is celebrated with lots of sweet foods to ring in a sweet new year, and so this week we will be sharing honey from our hard-working bees with you! After a long summer, our bees present you with bear-shaped bottles of anti-microbial goodness.

For October we will have an array of cold hardy produce including:

Potatoes, winter squash, cabbage, beets, Brussels sprouts, garlic, onions, and newly sprouted greens like kale, arugula, and mustard.

We still have some summer veggies left, but they are winding down: we still have some tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant. Special for the next 2 weeks we will have GREEN tomatoes for frying…yes, like the movie. As we take down the tomato vines in the greenhouse to prepare for a crop of winter greens (we hope they'll feed us through the winter, a new experiment this year!), we'll share all of the last un-ripened fruits we uncover so that you too can enjoy this southern treat. Tonight we're trying out a recipe for green tomato cake – we'll let you know if it's good!

In other news, we've been doing lots of haying, carting loads and loads of fresh hay to the chicken coop and to the hillside, where we are mulching the garlic for the winter. It's been quite the project – all the woofers, and Guv, have been sufficiently showered in grass, making for a lot of laughs and itchy skin!


Thanks for being part of this adventure with us, we look forward to seeing you this week!

L'Shanah Tova - we wish you a sweet and happy new year, filled with ear-to-ear smiles and veggies to fill them.

The Teleion Holon party crew

week 14

Hello CSA friends,

Welcome to fall! We hope you all are enjoying the first days of crisp breezes, cold mornings, and sweet hints of changing leaves as much as we are. With a brand new pack of woofers, we are energized and ready for what in many ways feels like a new season here on the farm: new things to harvest, new tasks to complete, and even some new things to get in the ground! This week we've been busy picking apples, cleaning up the gardens, planting late season crops like spinach and arugula, and harvesting a truckload of winter squash. We also pulled up all of the squash and melon plants and are preparing the beds for the garlic to be planted. Last week, we harvested honey from the beehives and ended up with quite the supply of sweetness, which we will be bottling up and sharing with you all soon.

We are all done with summer crops like musk melons, cukes, and zukes, but we still have enough late watermelons to last a few more pick-ups. We will also be rolling out the winter squash gradually over the next few weeks, and sharing wonderful recipes for them. More cabbage, carrots, and beets are on the way as well, which along with some kale and potatoes will make for some great soups.

In other news, we'd like to remind you all that this week is the Localvore Challenge week, in which communities across the nation are challenging themselves to eat completely local for one week, meaning that none of their food comes from more than 100 miles away from their homes. So stock up on Teleion Holon veggies and be encouraged to attempt the challenge. For more information you can check out www.vermontlocalvore.org.

Peace,

The Teleion Holon veggievores



Here's a few simple recipes for the edamame and winter squash that are coming your way this week:




"Cook Them Soybeans (Edamame)"

Bring 2 quarts of water and 2 Tbs. of water to a boil


Boil soybeans for 10 minutes or so. Drain.

Pop the cooked soybeans right into your mouth or into a serving dish. You can also serve them cold as snacks or in pasta salad, potato salad, or green salad. Or, you can eat them in the pod, covered in some salt for a Japanese-style treat.



Baked Winter Squash

Cut the squash in half, remove seeds and stings with spoon. Place upside down in a pan covered with aluminum foil and filled with 1/2" water. Bake at 350® until almost tender. (about ½ hour). Turn over so cavity is facing up and add to each cavity 1 tbsp. butter, 1 tbsp. brown sugar and/or maple syrup and or/apples, cinnamon, walnuts. Back again uncovered until sugar is bubbling.

week 12

Hello CSA

Its been hot and dry. Sunny days and cool nights. We've been putting in hay and pulling out summer squash and cucumber vines… getting ready to plant garlic. The dry sunny weather has been good for ripening the winter squash. We're starting the squash harvest today, but we'll let them cure in the sun for another week before we put them away, this will toughen the skin so they store better. Most of our wwoofers have gone back to college, so we're feeling a little short handed, (and struggling to be ready for pick ups and markets on time) but at least we are enjoying the sunshine.

We'll bring back bok choi this week, although this planting looks a little spotty from beetle damage, it tastes great. It can sometimes becomes challenging to grow nice greens when it gets hot, they are really more in season in the spring and fall. We transplanted a bunch of fall spinach and it should start producing in a couple weeks so that's a little something to look forward to. Next week we'll also be pulling beets, and more watermelons, and we should have edamame (fresh soybeans) soon.

Here is a recipe idea from our son Guv:

Mashed potato ice cream

Boil potatoes until tender (if strawberry ice cream is desired cook with 1 beet)


Mix in milk, butter and salt and mash until creamy-lumpy

If chocolate chip ice cream is desired, mix in cooked black beans


Scoop with ice cream scooper into sugar cones

Top with ketchup (strawberry sauce)

And of course a cherry (tomato) on top



PS during the next couple of pick up times, we could use some help splitting garlic bulbs for planting. So if you've got time and don't mind getting your hands stinky come join us.

peace

week 10

Oy vey CSA!

With rock concerts, car accidents, new wwoofers, hurt feet, and a seemingly endless bout of rain and hail storms all hopefully behind us, we start the 10th week of the CSA. we'd love to know more of your thoughts on how it has been going and any suggestion you might have for us as we cross this half way point.


An update from the fields:

The storms had the biggest impact on the peppers, broccoli, and cauliflower. The peppers got slammed by hail a little over one week ago. the hail left pockmarks all over their tender skin. We harvested a lot of them, but the ones we missed turned to mush. As another illustration of the benefits of the high tunnel green houses, the tomatoes, safe inside the green house, were unaffected by the storms. The fall brassica crops (broccoli etc.) enjoyed the rain, but the plants that were closer to harvest, couldn't stand being so wet and were all pretty much wrecked by mold. So we probably won't have much broccoli for a couple weeks.

The garlic, over 200 pounds of which was harvested 3 weeks ago, never dried right because of all the humidity and so little sun. It was an incredible garlic harvest this year and we figured we were all set, but now we are starting to find mold on some of the cloves. This is particularly important because the garlic we harvest is also our planting stock for next year. Normally we plant it in early November, but because of the mold situation this year, we'll be planting it really early… like next week we'll send out an email announcing a worksession soon,


And hey, the Brussels sprouts are over 3 ft tall and are starting to fill out really nicely. Brussels sprouts was a crop that we bungled last year, so it's nice to see things working out. The melons have been coming in strong, and we hope you've been enjoying them as much as we have. We have had an enormous harvest of delicious potatoes, purple, red, gold & russet. We've been talking about getting a little fry-o-lator and selling bags of purple potato chips at the farmers markets…yum. The watermelons are almost ready and the winter squash is sizing up, it's crazy to think the CSA is only half way through the season, there is so much still to come!

Here is this week's joke:

Where do cantaloupes go for summer vacation?

Answer: John Cougar's Melon Camp

And for those who missed last week's newsletter which was written 100% by the wwoofers,

here is their joke:

So one time a family of potatoes is sitting around, daddy potato surfing the net and momma potato cooking dinner, when all of a sudden their oldest daughter burst in. She announces to her stunned parents that she is getting married. They quickly ask who is the lucky guy. When she tells them he is a russet potato they start dancing and open up the Don Perignon. But then a minute later the next daughter opens the door and tells them that she too is getting married. Again they ask to whom? She tells them proudly that he is a Yukon gold. Now they are howling with joy and start drinking Blue Label. But before they can take a sip the youngest daughter stumbles in. She too, oddly enough, is getting married. They ask stunned who she is marrying? She replies Tom Brokaw.

With tears in their eyes they say but he is just a common-tater.

Bonnie was craving a potato knish last week, and lamenting the impossibility of finding one around here, so we googled a recipe online and we made them successfully here at home. There are a few steps in the knish making process, but it wasn't hard and there is even a you tube video to follow along, check out http://video.about.com/kosherfood/Potato-Knish-Recipe.htm

Ingredients for Potato Knishes

6 potatoes
1/4 cup of oil
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
3 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1/4 cup butter
1 onion and/or garlic
1/2 cup cold water
1 egg
Cook the Potatoes

First, boil the potatoes. Use a vegetable peeler to take off all of the skin. cut the potatoes into large chunks, which will help them cook faster. Place the potatoes into a pot of boiling water. Cook for around 15-20 minutes, until they are soft. Now, drain the pot into a colander.

Mash the Potatoes

Put the potatoes back into the pot and mash them well. Measure out 1 cup of the mashed potatoes. This will be for the dough.
Put the measured potatoes into a bowl. Add the oil and salt, then mix it together. You'll see it gets nice and creamy.

Prepare the Flour Mixture

In a separate bowl, add the baking powder to the flour. Whisk them together. Add about one-third of the flour mixture to the mashed potatoes and mix. In sections, add in all the flour as best you can.

Knead the Dough

Next, make a small well in the center of the bowl. Pour the cold water right into that spot. Knead the dough with your hands for a few minutes. Place a wet cloth or towel on top of the dough, and let it sit for 30 minutes.

Combine the Ingredients

Meanwhile, cut and peel the onion. Dice it into small pieces. Then melt the butter in a pan to medium high heat. Add the onions and/or garlic and sauté until they are soft, but not yet brown.

Pour the onions into a mixing bowl. This will be for our knish filling. Add 1 1/2 cups of mashed potatoes, 1/2 teaspoon of salt, and 1/4 teaspoon of pepper. Combine everything together. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.

Roll the Dough

Flour a flat surface and a rolling pin. Place down the dough, and divide it into six parts. Take one part and prepare it for rolling. Roll out the dough, flipping it over occasionally, so it is one-quarter of an inch thick.

Make a Square Knish

For a square knish, with a pizza cutter or knife, trim the edges of all sides of the dough so it forms a rectangle. Place the potato filling into the center of the square. Fold over the short sides and push down on the edge.

Next, fold over the longer sides. You'll see how the dough forms a pocket around the filling. Dip your fingers into some water, then wet the dough to help seal the edges.

Place the knish on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Crack an egg, and beat it with a fork. Paint the egg on the knish with a brush for the final touch.

Make a Round Knish

To a make a round knish, use a bowl to help make an even circle with the rolled dough. Place the filling in the center, pull up the sides, and pinch the dough at the top. Place it on the baking sheet, and brush with the egg. You could also make a long knish log or cut the log into small bite-sized knishes.

Bake the Potato Knishes

Place the pan into the oven, and cook for about 20-25 minutes. You can see how the egg brings a nice golden color to the finished knishes. Enjoy the knishes as a side dish or a snack.

Did you know you can find all the weekly newsletters and recipes in a printer friendly format right on our website www.teleionholon.com

Here's to ten more weeks of veggie fun

With much Love, the teleion holon team

week 8

Hello csa friends,

Its another rainy Sunday night and we are all tired. Weeds keep growing, markets keep coming. We keep harvesting, we try to keep planting. There's no time for weeding. Zucchinis getting huge, we'll try to make bread. Too many cukes, time to make pickles. Hard rain washes away the potato hills, time to dig spuds. Children are screaming, children are charming, tomatoes are everywhere… and then we see melons…

melons…melons...

big ripe melons, they are rolling toward us coming down the hill picking up speed.

What are we going to do? Put them in the cooler and give 'em to you!

Ps. anybody available this Wednesday afternoon for a CSA worksession?

We'll be digging potatoes and could use lots of help so reply to let us know if you can come.

Rain or shine

Peace

week 7

Hola CSA,

We write from the big apple, having just picked up Oliver's brother Max who's been in Israel for the past year. We welcome Max back and invite all to stop by and get to know him. It's the first time we've left Vermont since firing up the greenhouse this Spring. We've also procured 24 gallons of extra virgin Kalamata olive oil from the Greek mafia in Astoria, Queens. Most of our prepared foods products are made with lots of olive oil and we have found that using really good oil makes a big difference. So now its back to VT and all the projects back home. We have been using the walk in cooler and its working great but we still need to build a roof over it (to keep it working great).

In our absence the woofers have (hopefully) harvested carrots for this week's pickup. Our carrots are truly baby carrots unlike the machine milled water logged mini fingers at Shaw's. They do not need to be peeled, only washed right before crunching (they'll keep longer with their greens cut off, unwashed, stored in a plastic bag). We're not including a recipe for them because we hope you'll savor them raw- they are truly good as gold. Some folks have been enjoying the pick your own green beans, scallions and kale. There is plenty more to pick. Just a reminder, the pyo herbs and flowers do not count as a point, but the veggies do.

Just a few storage and handling suggestions/reminders:

-Don't refrigerate tomatoes

-Don't tie your bags of salad greens closed- they need to breathe too

-Keep herbs at peak freshness in a loosely closed Tupperware with a damp paper towel inside.

This weeks veggie joke:

What did one snowman say to the other snowman?

Something smells like carrots!