Share 19 - week of Oct 7th
In the share this week:
1.2 lb red tomatoes
1 bunch salad turnips
1 bag green beans
1 bunch lacinato kale
Sweet pepper mix
1 head red romaine
1 little gem lettuce
1 bag spicy salad mix
Thoughts from Farmer Anna:
Seems as though I've been having a hard time finding time to get newsletters out here lately! Luckily we have a rainy day today, so I'm inside making sure I get this done. It is always a little surprising to me, how busy things are around here in September and October. It's really not the veggies - we are slowing down with the work that needs to be done there - it's a lot of school related things and extracurriculars, plus the usual farm stuff, plus the washing of eggs (see child labor helping out with this one above), plus the need to cull a number of roosters over the next little bit. I thought I would take a little space to talk about how this is going, because it is hard, but also feels very important. This is always a hard thing to talk about because people have a lot of feelings about keeping and eating animals.
Our family does eat meat, although we don't eat a lot by American standards. We do eat more chicken than other meat and love to use whole chickens so we can utilize as much of the animal as possible. I have long felt that it is important for me, at some point, to know what it is to be the person fully responsible for raising an animal and for taking its life. These are special, unique birds that we have all come to have some love and affection for. But, we absolutely cannot keep 12 roosters with our 11 hens. Already, over the past few weeks we noticed the hens getting bullied and roosters fighting more aggressively with each other. This fact makes the work of culling a little bit easier. We have culled just three birds over the past week, and I will say that it is emotionally hard, but also rewarding to be in such close contact with our eventual food. It was amazing to see the quality of the dark meat on these birds as compared to a grocery store chicken. Basically all meat chickens in this country are a single breed - Cornish cross - bred for absurdly large breast muscle and their ability to put on weight super fast (most are culled at 8-10 weeks, vs the 20 weeks our birds have reached). They are also about half the size of a Cornish cross bird - just 2.5 lbs compared to 4-5 lbs. The flavor of the meat is quite good - just really chicken-y and we made some excellent broth with the bones as well. The farm cats got some of the organ meat and we buried the less edible stuff in our family orchard where it will fertilize those growing trees. We've saved some feathers and my girls are thinking about fun ways to use those in crafting projects. We are all doing our best to honor these beautiful creatures! Wish me luck on the remaining seven. We plan to keep two roosters to help protect the flock and possibly for breeding as well.
Alrighty, on to the veggies this week! We are nearing the end of most of the summer crops but still have some wonderful tomatoes and sweet peppers for you. The peppers have done surprisingly well this year, especially given the amount of rain we had in the summer. This is one of the huge benefits of planting them in a hoop house, as it helps control some of that. The fall roots are coming in nicely, with some beautiful salad turnips going into shares this week and hopefully some fall carrots and more radishes coming next week. I'm thinking you should make a big salad this week with your lettuces, spicy salad mix, tomatoes, sweet peppers and salad turnips. You could also mix in the kale as well. Add some nuts, cheese and avocado and you've got yourself a hearty meal!
The green beans are the only veggie left out of the salad party, but I'm sure you can find something good to do with those. I've been super happy with the quality of these late season beans. I think the week of heat last week, really helped them along. We made the classic green beans, potatoes and ham last week - which is such a comfort food and family favorite. For something different, you could also try making pickled beans, something like this:
These are a fun pop of flavor in the winter and are great to add to pasta salads and such!
That's all for now - have a good week everyone!