Red Wagon Farm

What’s in My Share? – Week 4

Posted on June 8, 2020 by kaimetcalfe

Hello CSA Folks!

We’re hoping to help you identify your veggies early in the week this week.

You can expect to see:

Kale! Kale comes in a variety of leaf shapes and colors. You might receive Red Curly (not pictured), Green Curly, or Tuscan Kale this week.

Green Curly Kale

Tuscan Kale

Sugar Snap Peas have begun. These sweet treats are great raw or stir fried (if you don’t eat them all on your way home!) Pull the stem off, but eat the entire pod with the peas inside.

Sugar Snap Peas

A handful of garlic scapes were included in a few of last week’s shares but this week a lot more of you will be seeing these delightfully curly crops. We love garlic scapes! They will be on a choice with herbs. We harvest any herbs that look good that morning which may include chives, garlic chives, oregano, mint, thyme, sage, lovage, edible flowers, tarragon, and eventually basil.

Garlic Scapes

The last new crop for the week is head lettuce! Hopefully it’s a familiar crop to you, but maybe you haven’t seen it in a “head” or outside of plastic. This week we are cutting them out of the ground, rinsing them and delivering to you fresh as can be!

Head Lettuce

You should be familiar with arugula and turnips from last week or previous weeks.

As the week goes let us know if there’s still something you don’t recognize!

Posted in 2020, Farm | Comments Off

What’s in My Share? – Week 3

Posted on June 5, 2020 by kaimetcalfe

Here are some of the items you might have seen in your CSA share this week! I know our veteran CSA members are familiar with our veggies but some of the new folks might be scratching their heads when they get home. Here’s a short breakdown:

Turnips! The white ones are called Hakurei Turnips and the purple ones (not pictured) are Purple Top Turnips. Both can be eaten raw but the purple ones are better cooked

Some of you may have received garlic scapes while most received green garlic. This photo shows the scapes. They have similar tastes and you can find recipes on our website for both

Bok Choi, there are a few varieties that were harvested this week but they can all be eaten in similar ways. You may have received spinach instead.

Pea Shoots! These curly greens have a similar flavor to snap peas. They can be used as a salad green or in a number of recipes

Arugula. This plant has a wide range of leaf shapes and vein colors. It has a peppery taste. We work very hard to remove all the weeds during harvest, washing and packaging but sometimes they sneak by.

Braising Mix AKA Spicy Salad Mix

Instead of arugula you may have received a bag of mixed greens that we call Braising Mix or Spicy Salad Mix. This included a mix of tatsoi and mizuna all week with the addition of tender broccoli raab leaves early in the week and mustard greens later in the week.

Lastly, we had radishes! Two different types went out this week. French Breakfast and Easter Egg radishes. The French Breakfast radishes are red or purple and long and straight (mostly) while the Easter Egg radishes come in a variety of colors from white to dark purple and tend to be more round. They taste similar and can be used in similar ways.
Some of you may have received rhubarb, herbs or spinach as well.

Did you recognize all your veggies this week or did we introduce you to something new!? :D

Posted in 2020 | 1 Comment

Pea Shoot and Green Garlic Pesto

Posted on June 1, 2020 by mo

I love Pesto!! I love Pesto made from almost anything green. Arugula, Collards, Sorrel, and of course Basil.

This week I wanted some pesto and it is too early for basil and I ate my arugula so I found myself eyeing a bag of pea shoots in the vegetable bin and I also saw some green garlic lurking next to the pea shoots…that is about all I needed to make pesto; something green, garlic, and oil. If I have some nuts or seeds and hard cheese like Parmesan I use it, but it isn’t necessary.

This is what I had. Let’s make some pesto!

Pea Shoot and Green Garlic Pesto

1/3 of a cup of nuts or seeds. I had toasted walnuts
About 3 cups of pea shoots
Green garlic, I used about 1/3 cup
1/3 olive oil. You might want a little more
1/3 to 1/2 cup of hard cheese like Parmesan-optional
salt and pepper

DIRECTIONS

In a food processor or blender, combine nuts, pea shoots, Parmesan and garlic. Pulse until roughly chopped. Add salt. With motor running, slowly drizzle in olive oil. Blend until well-combined and it is the thickness you like.

Scrape the pesto into a bowl and use immediately, or store in a jar with a thick covering of olive oil and use within three days. You can also freeze in ice cube trays or zip-lock bags. This makes a little more than a cup.

This pea shoot pesto was very different than any pesto I have made, or had before. Usually I think of pesto as a sort of a ‘punch in the face’ from strong flavored herbs like basil, arugula and sorrel and the garlic in most pesto is usually very hot.

This pea shoot pesto is pleasantly mild and grassy in a good way and the green garlic is very mild, both were really nice with the olive oil I used. I could taste all the ingredients, I really liked that.

I made a grilled cheese and pesto sandwich and also some pesto deviled eggs. I like to use pesto as a condiment like mayonnaise or ketchup.

Have a great week. I hope you are enjoying your CSA. Leave a comment or question if you have any.

It’s so great to see you all at pick-up, even if I can’t see your smile I can see your eyes and they speak volumes. We feel your support and gratitude and that means the world to us.

Be well.

Posted in 2020, Garlic, Peas, Recipes | 2 Comments

Ways To Make The Most Of Your CSA

Posted on May 25, 2020 by mo

Last week I suggested having a look around the recipe section on our website for ideas on managing your CSA. I hope you had a minute to do that.

Here are a couple more ideas I hope you will find useful in keeping organized and not overwhelmed.

Have a salad spinner (Wyatt’s says you need two!), a good cutting board, a couple really good knifes, a large stock pot and a big mixing bowl. I love my mandolin, it is very inexpensive and you can whip up a salad or a fancy sandwich in no time. I highly suggest getting one.

The day before I pickup my CSA I like to clean out my refrigerator, especially all the vegetables and fruits. I chop up anything that will go bad in the very near future and make a salad or soup. That is what I was doing in the above picture. My CSA pickup is tomorrow so I snapped that picture and this one below after I tidied up my refrigerator.

The two green containers in the middle have a salad I made with last weeks bits and some greens I quickly steamed that I can add to eggs or make a yummy grilled cheese and greens sandwich.

I’m steaming the greens here. It takes up a lot less room when you cook them down.

CSA’s are all about using what you have. I am sure we have all learned in the past couple of months what pantry staples each of us rely heavily on. Here are some of mine, probably yours too.

Citrus and vinegar brightens any dish up. Grains and legumes have been the backbone of so many meals pre, but more so post-covid. Canned tomatoes I can’t live without. Eggs make any vegetable or grain or pasta dish a meal and more satisfying.

And herbs; using herbs in the past couple months became something that anchored me. I can’t really explain it but a little parsley or chives on some eggs or a boring pasta dish brightened my day. I never want to be without some basic herb in my life.

Now that you are ready for this weeks pickup have a look at this post to see how I wash, trim and store my share.

Let me know in the comment section below if you have any questions or tips you might have using your CSA share.

Have a great week. I’ll see you at pickup.

Posted in 2020, Farm, Recipes, Storage and Preparation | Comments Off

Starting the Season in a COVID World

Posted on May 21, 2020 by Amy

What a crazy start to the season it’s been! In early March when the pandemic started to heat up Wyatt and I didn’t even know if we’d have a farm this year. Would we be required to close down? It was time to do our first big spring planting, so we decided to put a lot of seeds in the ground and hope for the best!

On March 23rd, our governor declared that farms were essential businesses so we knew we had the choice to stay open. But what about the health risks? I did a lot of online research and decided that our workplace risk was relatively low since we are working outside and can reasonably maintain safe distances from each other. But restaurants had already been ordered to close and we sell a lot of produce to restaurants. Would we have enough income to operate with the loss of restaurant sales?

In a normal year we have about 400 CSA members. As of March 30th, we only had 320 members and we didn’t think this would be enough to keep us operating. So I put out the call to existing CSA members to help us spread the word. You sure came through! By April 23rd we had 600 members and Wyatt said he didn’t have enough crops planted to feed any more people, so we closed the CSA to new memberships and went to a waiting list. (We have 175 people on the waiting list! This says so many things about people and food these days!)

In the middle of all this, the temperature got down to 14 degrees on April 14th. Remember the night the buds on all of your trees died? So did a bunch of our sugar snap pea plants. All the things we plant in March (spinach, arugula, radishes, turnips, peas) can handle cold and snow. (Otherwise we wouldn’t plant them in March.) But 14 degrees is a bit much and a lot of our crops suffered some damage. And then it was cold and muddy for a handful of days so we couldn’t get out to plant anything else until it dried out a bit.

Me & Roxy on April 16th. No wonder the season is off to a slow start!

Your CSA shares are lighter this week than we usually try for. But I feel like we have accomplished a lot by having any food at all given the past two months. Wyatt, Javier, and the rest of the crew have been working so hard to plant and grow and harvest…and plant and grow and harvest…and… There are so many seedlings in the ground here right now. We can’t wait to start harvesting them for you in a few weeks.

Thank you all so much for joining us for whatever unknowns this season brings. We’re grateful that we are able to look forward to feeding you in these uncertain times!

Amy

After I published this blog post I decided to go back and add this bit. I hate attention and prefer to remain incognito. But with so many new members I realized that I really do need to introduce myself (sigh). My husband, Wyatt, and I are the owners of Red Wagon Farm and we’ve been growing organic vegetables for our Boulder County community since 2004. Thanks for joining us!

Posted in 2020, Farm, Newsletter | Comments Off

Welcome 2020 CSA Members

Posted on May 20, 2020 by mo

Welcome to Red Wagon CSA Blog. We have so many new CSA members I think I’m going to start at the beginning and introduce myself, and the recipe portion/blog I write here.

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll try to point you to some posts that (hopefully) will be helpful to the new members (and remind returning members) how to successfully navigate our CSA. I’ll also make a few suggestions on stocking your pantry and talk a little about some kitchen gear that I find helpful in prepping and storing my CSA weekly share.

Let’s start.

Hi, I’m Mo. I’m a foodaholic.

This is what I look like this year.

I think about food 24-7. I love to feed people. I have worked at Red Wagon over a decade. I’ve done almost every type of farm work over the years. I have aged out of field work and now just do CSA prep and distribution, and this blog.

I have written several dozen posts to (hopefully) give our members ideas and inspiration how to use the food we get each week. I try to use only our weekly share, with little else, other that a few pantry staples. When you have some time I hope you can take a minute and look around our recipe section and get excited about the year to come.

For example this week we got garlic scapes and sorrel. Some of you might not be familiar with those crops. Here is a post with some ideas, and here is another, oh hey look…another!

I have also written quite a few posts on how to store and prep our vegetables. Have a look around there too.

I am anticipating this year will bring some unique challenges we haven’t faced in previous years because of some shortages in stores and the fact that we, or most of us, are limiting our trips to the store and will be more dependent than in previous years to make every last bit of our CSA share count like our meals depend on it. Because it does. I get that and I hope I can help navigate this venture in a creative and useful way.

Until next week.

Mo.

PS if you have any suggestion or question please leave them in the comment section below.

Posted in 2020, Farm, Newsletter | Comments Off

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