Shared Harvest CSA

Picadilly Farmer Jenny Wooster writes:  ”April irrigation – that would be a “first”, coming on the heels of our first March plowing ever!…In our efforts to reduce field tillage overall, we have moved away from using a traditional moldboard plow. With our light, sandy loam soils, a disk-chisel-type plow serves us well. Seven shanks run as deep as 14”, or as shallow as 6”. These chisels, in combination with two gangs of rolling disks, loosen the topsoil and break up the roots of our winter cover crops, without flipping or churning the soil excessively. The ground we plowed yesterday will fill up throughout the next month with lots of good food – the first greens and roots, then 2½ acres of potatoes, followed by an acre of onions and leeks. We’ll seed down a handful of acres to oats, to be cut in June for straw. Then we’ll use the straw to mulch pathways between beds of tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, as well as to top off strawberries and garlic in the fall…Our propagating greenhouse is 90% full of seedlings already..Onions are “damping off” a bit in the flats: the tiny seedlings rot right below soil level, when the “wrong” soil fungi gain a foothold over the “right” ones. So, onions are on the TLC train, getting extra boosts of fish fertilizer and beneficial bacteria and fungi. Our planting buffer will come in handy for this crop this season. In spite of the new challenges and lessons learned every year (and perhaps because of them), I always circle back to the understanding that this whole activity of growing food is a miracle, only peripherally controllable by me. These thousands of small, hard seeds that roll through our fingertips into the soil: the life that bursts forth is an astonishing gift.”

Mark Your Calendar for the Picadilly Annual Strawberry Festival

Saturday, June 23.

Strawberry picking, walks around the farm, visits with the chickens and the pigs.  Bring a picnic and a blanket or some lawn chairs.  Join in the singing with the Family Folk Chorale in concert www.familyfolkchorale.org.  And of course, save some space for strawberry shortcake!  This is a fabulous time to visit and get to know Picadilly, one of the primary growers for Shared Harvest.

Third Annual Green Homes Fair on April 21st from 12-4 pm.

Cunningham Hall, 75 Edgehill Road, Milton

Chef Didi Emmons will be back again this year with a presentation at 3:15.  The day’s event will feature info on rebates, tax credit and energy saving, tips for a healthy home, garden, and you, and kids activities including live animal presentation & eco-crafts.  The idea is that folks can get valuable information, products for purchase, and presentations from a wide variety of local vendors.  Sponsored by Sustainable Milton.

Shared Harvest will be hosting a table of info about (guess!?) eating locally through the winter, including storage tips and recipes.  We’ll be right next to Brookwood Community Farm.  Thanks so much to Tara Manno Richer, Shared Harvest shareholder and VP of Sustainable Milton, for inviting Shared Harvest to be part of the Fair!

Whether or not you can make it to the Fair, check out Sustainable Milton’s Educated Eaters document, found on their home page, which has some great, very up to date information on eating responsibly, healthfully, and enjoyably.

If you live in the Milton area, please come and enjoy the event, stop by our table and introduce yourself!

http://www.sustainablemilton.org/Milton-Green-Homes-Fair.html

10am to 2pm, Arlington Town Hall (and garden) 730 Mass. Ave. Arlington

The theme is “Locavoracious–for Food!”  There will be tables from dozens of organizations educating about and working for sustainable living and of course, local food!   Bring the kids–there will be children’s activities and the Lexington Community Farm Commission will have their 1 year old dwarf Nigerian goats there in the outside garden.  There will be free compost for your garden.  And Shared Harvest will be running a table about–you guessed it–eating locally through the winter.  I’ll be sharing storage tips, info about sourcing local food all winter, and also explaining the methods and health and taste benefits of preserving with lacto-fermentation.  So come on down and enjoy the myriad of interesting tables and the featured speaker, Arlington’s backyard grower Charlie Radoslovich, at 11am in the upstairs hearing room.  And please, stop by our table and introduce yourself!

This Thursday, March 8, 5:30 PM – 8 PM http://getoutma.org/farmsharefair/ Argenziano School, Union Square, 290 Washington St., Somerville                                  “We’re bringing farms to the city! Meet the folks who grow your food,
and sign up for a local farm share to get weekly fresh veggies!
Free entry, Exciting Kids Activities, Stone Hearth Pizza for sale, Inspired Feasts raffle for restaurant gift certificates”

Looks to be a fun event!  It’s a great way to connect with growers, whet your appetite for the upcoming harvest season, and sign up for a summer share (and a winter share!) that’s a good fit for you.  I’ll be at the Fair doing a table for Shared Harvest, and Picadilly Farmers Jenny and Bruce Wooster  will be there taking signups for their summer box shares–so be sure to stop by and introduce yourself!

The fair is organized and hosted by our friends at theMOVE In case you don’t already know the fabulous way they’re connecting people with how/where their food is grown:  “theMOVE (the Massachusetts Outdoor Volunteer Experience) brings the transformational experience of farming + gardening to diverse groups throughout the Boston area, by organizing single-day reflective outdoor volunteer experiences.”

I’m Jane Hammer, and I’ll be managing Shared Harvest Winter CSA this year. I’m taking the reins from Gretta Anderson who organized and managed Shared Harvest since 2007. Gretta and I have worked together in various capacities to support small local farms since the days we were both on the board of directors of Waltham Fields Community Farm.  It’s great to be joining with her again, and I hope to gracefully continue the valuable service and connections she has created with Shared Harvest.

I’ve been involved in CSA farms and local food now for 17 years.  Both of my brothers and several of my friends are growers involved in organically-managed CSA farms in this region.  I feel very fortunate to have so much access to healthy, delicious, thoughtfully produced food and am excited to share this with more people through Shared Harvest.

As mom of a busy family with 3 sons, I’ve made time to bring my family to participate in and actively support local farms.  Continue reading →

Great weather predicted for the Canton Shared Harvest distribution tomorrow! The boxes are packed, loaded onto the truck, ready to go. I imagine our farmers are sound asleep already, resting up for an early morning delivery.

We’ll have a lot of extra goodies to distribute to those of you who ordered them, including maple syrup from Warren Farm, mozzarella and burrata from Fiore Di Nonno, goat cheeses from Crystal Brook Farm, honey from Warm Colors Apiary, bulk black and kidney beans from Baer’s Best Beans, and bulk produce (garlic, sweet potatoes, cabbage and carrots) from Picadilly and Riverland Farms.

Here’s what you will find in your CSA shares tomorrow.

From Lover’s Brook Farm, Farmer Charley Baer
Light red kidney beans, 1 pound
Heirloom beans (Soldier, Money or Vermont Cranberry), 1 pound

From Riverland Farm, Farmers Rob Lynch and Meghan Arquin
Beets, 3 pounds
Cabbage, 1 head
Yellow Onions, 2 pounds
Garlic, 1/2# packed with onions
Parsnips, 2 pounds
Popcorn, 1 bunch
Sweet Potatoes, 4 pounds
Butternut Squash, 5 pounds

From Picadilly Farm, Farmers Jenny and Bruce Wooster
Carrots, 6 pounds
Turnips, 2 pounds
Winter radishes, 1.75 pounds (half misato, half black Spanish)
White potatoes, 5 pounds
Celeriac, 1 piece
Leeks
Shallots, one pound

Enjoy!

Running out of ideas on what to do with all of those winter veggies? Then look no further. Join Personal Chef Sharon Shiner as she provides practical tips on how you can get the most out of your winter CSA.

The class will discuss the basics of roasting and stewing some of the more regular features of winter CSAs, as well as how best to use them in the winter classic, soups. Get ideas on herb pairings and other ingredients that will enhance the taste and flavor of your vegetables. Each participant is asked to bring one or two vegetables to work with during the class.

Sunday February 5th, 1:30- 3:30pm
$30, $27 Friends of the Farm
Location: Newton Community Farm

To register for this class please visit
www.newtoncommunityfarm.org/education/classes.

Newton Community Farm is a 501(c) nonprofit organization. Our mission is to nurture a community that teaches and models sustainable agriculture and environmental practices on the historic Angino Farm.

Jenny and Bruce Wooster, Picadilly farmers, sent this farm update. Picadilly Farm is one of the farms that makes up Shared Harvest multi-farm winter CSA.

Many of you have emailed and called, so I’ll give you a brief update from the farm, post-hurricane. Here, a few puddles and some soggy fields are the only remnants of the big storm. The rain gauge over the weekend read five inches precisely, certainly less rainfall than in places to the west of us, and a relatively manageable amount. We sustained no damage from winds or flooding. Our fields sit on high ground, well above the Connecticut River flood plain and about twenty feet above the streambed that surrounds the farm, so we’ve experienced none of the destructive flooding of surrounding farms and towns. Our canoe did come into play, though, as the Manning Hill dairy farmers used it to rescue some round bales of hay, before they floated away from their riverside field and down the Connecticut. Our animals weathered the storm just fine. All the moisture may bring lingering challenges, in regards to diseases in our summer crops, and loss of fertility in the fall “green” crops. In both cases, we’ll watch and see what happens, and act if possible/needed.
Of course, many farms in our region, especially to our west and south, have a different story to tell. Like the damage to roads and homes, the agricultural destruction appears to be widespread and heartbreaking – whole fields under water or even washed away.  We’ll all know more about the extent of the damage as time goes by, and what we or others can do about it.

My family walked through our farm during the early hours of the storm, in part to check out our new drainage system around the farmstead. You may recall, this June we spent weeks working with Natural Resources Conservation Service of USDA to construct a long-planned series of grassed waterways around the farm structures and parking area. The goal is to funnel rain water during big rain events off these areas and through the fields, down to our stream, without carrying our precious topsoil away with the flow. This weekend undoubtedly qualified as a big rain event… and it worked! We observed water flowing quickly just where it was supposed to go, leaving the farmstead area easily passable by Monday morning. I humbly swallow every bit of grumbling I muttered about that project in June.

Overall, a very positive storm report from the farm. We hope you all weathered the storm well, with no lasting damage.

Jenny & Bruce
Picadilly Farm