Welcome to Week 2 of the Fall/Winter CSA!
We are still soggy from the atmospheric river and it looks like a wet week ahead, but still lots still happening on the farm! We got the rest of the garlic in the ground, along with overwintered onions. Yes, the onions we will be harvesting next May were started in August! It's nine long months for a sweet spring onion.
This week we have lots of cauliflower (white and purple) coming in from the field, along with Brussels Sprouts! We don't harvest our Brussels until after a couple frosts as they really sweeten up and are much tastier. We started these plants May 1, so we are happy to finally be eating these 6 months later.
Another shout out to the under appreciated, but extra flavorful celery! These are also a looong season crop (seeded end of March) and are very nutrient and water intensive. Definitely eat the leaves! This Potato and Celery salad from Alison Roman is a refreshing change from celery in soup.
Its definitely chicory season! In addition to escarole, we have lots of radicchio available this winter. Lately, there is a lot of buzz around chicory, and for good reason! We are lucky to live in a climate where these crops can be overwintered outside in the field with minimal effort and graciously provides us with delicious salad all winter. Not only are these delicious and beautiful, this is a small way to help with climate change! Our reliance on CA and AZ grown lettuce and salad mix through the winter months are not sustainable in the long term. We are eating exported Californian WATER that has been piped into a desert harvested with exploitative labor practices to satisfy our craving for caesar salad in January. We farmers would love to see more people switch to locally grown, wildly biodiverse chicories for the winter and decentralize the extractive corporate salad industry!
