Annual Membership Drive

Well, we're getting ready for another season and we're putting out the call for members!

This little blog entry is like my own form of an annoying public radio membership drive: "We can't do this without you, the members..." And this is absolutely true. Seriously. We can't. We will be starting hundreds and hundreds of transplants soon, a big risk when you consider the tending, planting, weeding, and harvesting that comes between us and a finished vegetable crop. If we didn't have our CSA membership who already paid up to receive a share of the season's harvest, we'd be a bit more hesitant about putting all those plants in the ground hoping somebody's going to purchase all that produce when harvested.

We are changing up our CSA program a bit this year. We continue to have a "regular" CSA share ($400) where you receive a delivery of a mix of produce every week, but we've also added a couple other options:

• The "every-other-week share" ($225). The name kind of says it. You get a delivery every other week and we're starting this especially for couples who get overwhelmed by a regular share. Chet and Paulette Nettestad of Pelican Rapids were our every-other-week trial run last year, and, from talking with them, it seemed to be a good amount for two people and worked out well.
• The "a la carte share" (increments of $100). This is a customized delivery every other week, and, like an a la carte menu, you choose what you want from our online order system (www.localdirt.com) earlier in the week and we deliver on Fridays. Think about it as having a tab with us. You put in $100, $200, $300 at the beginning of the season and we keep track of what you order and let you know your balance monthly. On our site we also carry Organic Valley dairy products, meats, and eggs you can order too. This is a "use it or loose it" option. You will have from now until December to use your tab and whatever is leftover will be donated to Lutheran World Relief, because it's a little harder for people around the world to feed themselves than for us here...I like their approach to sustainable rural development and I'm a Lutheran.
• The "chicken share" ($60). You receive 6 chickens (5-6 lbs) in three deliveries from late summer to early fall. The chickens will be whole, frozen, and plastic wrapped just like a whole chicken in the store.
  

So, if you are interested in becoming a member of Lida Farm, please get in contact with us. Our e-mail is lidafarmer@gmail.com and our phone is 218-342-2619. Call with questions...you won't be bugging us. Our brochure about our CSA program and the order form are linked below. But please make sure we are not filled up for the season and you're in our delivery area before sending in the order form.

Click here for a brochure about our CSA

Click here for our order form

Lida Farm in Winter

What happens on the Farm all winter? Although you'd think that we would try to do nothing, I keep finding projects to do. So far has been a laundry list of repairs and maintenance which I've been trying to get to for a long time: fixing the sheep feeders that have been broken the last 6 months, cleaning the chicken coop, putting in a glass pane in the barn that I shattered 2 years ago...it goes on. One of the biggest projects was putting woven wire fence around the back pasture so those sheep have something to eat in the middle of the summer next year.

But probably the project I'm most proud of so far is our skating rink. Neither of the kids have skated before, but they did both get skates for Christmas this year. I figured there's no better place to learn than on the pond across the sheep pasture. It took a few hours of shoveling, scraping with an ice scraper, and taking water out of a fish hole with

a gallon jug, we were in business!

Me putting on the finishing touches, sweeping the snow off with the broom.

Willem's first skate

Neufchatal and Cream Cheese Special

We will be delivering again this Wednesday, November 11 throughout the area. I'm thinking we're the only organic dairy route in the nation, so join up to say you're on the cutting edge.

We have organic cream cheese and Neufchatal on special at $2.25 each and still have a good number of whole chickens for sale as well as some winter squash. Please order through our local dirt site to let us know what you'd like:

https://www.localdirt.com/user_product_list-a241.html?id=1535&type=delivery

We will also be doing one other delivery before Thanksgiving and will have our own lamb available at the end of the month. You can also arrange to pick up if that works better.

Orders for Sunday

Here at the end of the produce season, this is your last chance to stock up on some things before we go on vacation. We're sitting on a mountain of winter squash we're selling for a real deal at $5 for 1/2 bushel as well as the last of the onions and peppers.

We also got in a set of small roaster chickens (4 - 4.5 lbs) and still have the range of Organic Valley cheeses and butters available. Order up at our Local Dirt site http://www.localdirt.com/products-a213.html by Saturday evening and we'll deliver on Sunday afternoon. If you'd rather pick up on the farm on another date, that works too.

It's really cold in Minnesota (CSA Week 16)

Wow, didn't it get cold last night? It's a bad sign when there's already frost on everything before you go to bed and the sky is clear as a bell. We're guessing it was about 25 degrees, which really puts a final end to the season. Few things go through a freeze like that, even the beet greens where pasted to the ground. We have the white stuff forecasted for tomorrow, so selling at a farmers market in snow will be a first! Maree wishes our camera worked, because we'd like to have record of it.

End of season logistics: If you're in the neighborhood, please just drop off the last wax box...if not, don't worry about it. Also expect an end of season survey in the mail. We really do want to know how the CSA season worked for you. It's also an opportunity to let us know if you're interested in being a member next year....as a current member, we give you first chance to re-join before opening up to others.

Thank you for being a member this season. Our door is always open. If you haven't gotten a jack-o-lantern pumpkin, please come on out and we'll set you up.

In the box:

Tongue of Fire Beans: this is an heirloom dried bean. Simply shell them and use as any dried bean. There are not many, so I'm thinking of them as something to add to a soup.

Potatoes

Hubbard Squash: this is the big blue-colored one.

Buttercup Squash

Spaghetti Squash: yellow and long in color

Haralson Apples: a good baking and cooking apple

A couple sweet onions

A couple white onions

Popcorn: this needs to be dried quite a bit before popping. Pull back the corn wrapper and hang like you would indian corn for at least a couple of weeks in a dry sunny place.

Yearly Veggie Report (CSA week 15)

Wow, today and yesterday have been the worst harvesting ever. I was going to pull in potatoes, but that's way too difficult in this stuff. It's cold, wet, and miserable out there...stay inside and drink some tea or something (which sounds pretty good). All told, I do like bringing in fall crops...I just naturally feel like bringing in the end of the season harvest. Kind of like gophers or bears getting ready for winter, I think people get a natural instinct this time of year to pull in what they can.

Every year I do an end of season re-cap: th winners and losers of the produce season. I figure today is a good day to do that as I reflect on how the season went as I'm out in the machine shed cleaning up indian corn and winter squash.

In the winner category are all the cool season crops, which just loved this cool summer with a fair amount of rain. This includes kohlrabi, cabbage, broccoli, fall peas, leeks, spring greens like lettuce and salad mix and I'd have to throw in onions and beets as well. The grand champion of the year in my mind is celery...now I know this may seem like an odd one to you, but this is the third year trying to grow the stuff and typically it turned into a stalk 6 inches tall with the consistency of dental floss...so I was really excited about how it turned out this year! These crops grew well mainly because of the cool season, but there are some which did well just because I "got my act together", which is evident in the long corn season this year--I think we got it in the box for 6 weeks, which is the most weeks in a season. This is because I got three plantings done in the spring, each 2 weeks apart, which allowed them to be spaced out. Another thing we did was cultivate onions well with the help of our new tine weeder, so we got good-sized onions because of little weed pressure.

In the loser category we have a list longer than I care to mention, some due to the weird season, but some due to me doing stupid things out in the field. The causualties of bad weather include some hot season crops. First and foremost is the eggplant...it didn't even get into the box! It needed heat in a big way, but it also was under serious attack by the potato bugs this year...by far, the worst season ever with these guys. Our organic pyrethrin spray didn't seem to do anything to these bugs...I don't know if it's a tolerance issue or I simply had my timing off. Anyway, they also devastated bad crop number 2: potatoes. I even put in these fingerlings for this season, but they didn't get into the box either because they ended up being the size of small peanuts since the plants died back by the end of july, which is terrible. Still, the crop which just killed me this year was garlic. It was a comedy of errors on my part which destroyed this crop. I didn't get it planted in time last fall, so I had to treat as a spring transplant; then I pretty much killed it by running it over with our tine weeder cultivator when I never should have...I'm still kicking myself for it. Others I wasn't crazy about: strawberries, raspberries, spring peas, greens (swiss chard anyone?), edamame, and beans (although I loved the new variety we grew, Grenoble).

All told, it kind of evens out, although this isn't any consolation to those who love eggplant or garlic and just didn't get enough.

In the box:

Celeriac: some call celery root. You use whenever a recipe calls for celery...it keeps forever, just leave in crisper in fridge.

Rutebega: another standard root crop, some love it, others hate it. Try mixing in with potatoes and mash, about half and half proportions.

Cippolini onions: I had these for breakfast yesterday, sauteed with peppers and some tomato and put on eggs with some toast.

A sweet onion

Butternut squash: again, keep in a dry, sunny spot. The taste of winter squash actually improves with age...it'll taste better in a couple weeks.

Buttercup squash: the dark green ugly one with a button on the bottom.

A couple pie pumpkins: can use for decoration or bake for use in pumpkin recipes like pie or anywhere you'd use that canned pumpkin stuff.

A small canteloupe: end of the line, I just throught I'd put in the last of them.

Parsley

Sprig of Rosemary

A mix of peppers

A few heirlooms

The frost that never came (CSA week 14)

When I start harvesting winter squash I know for sure it's fall, whether I like it or not. Typically I harvest winter squash right after the first light frost, usually in mid-september. It has happened here every year for the last 6 years, so I figured this year would be the same, but I guess not. This is both a blessing and curse.

It's a blessing because we didn't really have a summer and this ended summer actually gets some of those crops across the finish line--I would have been really upset if half the tomatoes never turned red.

It's a curse because the frost forces me to let go of the summer crops. There's only so much you can cover a few thousand plants and so the frost typically brings all tomatoes, peppers, beans, corn, and eggplant to an abrupt end. I get really worked up about this, dashing around the night before trying to pull in everything I can. But the day after the frost, I experience a huge sense of relief...I can relax because all those tomatoes coming in at one time really causes some stress. It's all about picking and hopefully selling them in a really short window.

So, the summer continues and so do we. Peppers are actually turning color and that last set of corn actually ripened. By the way, I must apologize if you did hit some corn which tasted a lot more like field corn than sweet corn--an issue brought to my attention by some people I sold to at the market. The problem is that I planted sweet corn too close to the indian corn and they cross pollinated, making your silver queen take on the flavor of its neighbor...again, my apologies (I still have some more good corn at the farm if you'd like me to set you up to redeem myself).

As mentioned before, our harvest party will be saturday, October 3, starting at 5:30 with dinner at 6 pm. Please let us know if you are coming. We supply the main dish, drinks, and you supply yourself and a side. We look forward to hosting everybody....and we think the saturday evening will work better than sunday afternoon as we've done the last couple years.

Order extras at our Local Dirt site here

In the box:

Acorn Squash: dark, acorn shape. This has not been cured, so it will improve it's taste if you leave in a dry sunny spot in your house (we typically leave in the greenhouse to cure).

Delicata Squash: some call a sweet potato squash...very stringless and tastes sweet potatoy. Again, cure as you would acorn.

Russet potatoes: Small, I know.

Leeks

Cherry Tomato mix

A couple regular red tomatoes

A few Green Zebra tomatoes: yes, they are ripe at this stage. They are naturally zippy in taste.

Roma tomatoes: a good amount for saucing

Edamame: You don't eat the stalk...just pull the pods off and boil a bit in salted water. Rinse in cold water and eat.

Sage

Colored pepper mix

Cherry Bomb hot peppers: These are supposed to be hotter than jalapenos, but I don't buy it. They have a sweet flavor for a hot pepper I really like.

Red cabbage