Contact Team Leaders for Work Hours at the CSA

We are nearing the halfway point in the CSA season, and we wanted to remind members that if you need to catch up on CSA work hours, you can contact the team leaders listed below to plan some time to work. If you haven’t signed up for any teams yet, contact any of the team leaders to sign up now. You can also ask them any questions you have about the work the various teams do at the Enright Ridge CSA.

TEAM LEADERS
Communications Team: Beth Andriacco, eandriacco@gmail.com
Compost & Soil Management Team, Bill Cahalan, earthawaken2@yahoo.com
Crop Care & Pest Management Team: Deborah Jordan, djordan@fuse.net
Finance & Funding Team: Jim Schenk, jschenk@imagoearth.org
Greenhouse Care Team: Karen Graves, karengraves99@gmail.com
Harvest Team: Christine Boatwright, thou_art_loosed@yahoo.com
Membership Team: Leeann Garrett, leeann.garrett@gmail.com
Outreach Education Team: Dave Hill, davidghill2003@yahoo.com
Packout Team: Angie Utley, packoutteam@gmail.com
Seeding & Transplant Team: Michelle Savoti, michelle.savoti@cincinnatilibrary.org
Social Team: Beth Brubacher, bbrubacher@zoomtown.com

In addition to these member-led teams, the Propagation Team, Soil Bed Preparation Team, and Irrigation Team are currently headed by the farm staff members:

Charles Griffin, cgriffinrising@gmail.com
Rudy Rudemiller, drudemil@hotmail.com
Dave Hill, davidghill2003@yahoo.com

The Enright Ridge CSA takes more than 5,000 hours of work each year to plan, promote, sow, harvest, care for, and distribute the produce we get each Saturday morning. Please contact a team leader and starting contributing your share of the work soon.

Food Preserving Classes at the Civic Garden Center

I thought CSA folks might be interested in some of the upcoming classes offered at the Civic Garden Center (on Reading Road in Mt. Auburn). The classes in preserving the harvest, by canning, freezing, drying, pickling, and preserving, might come in particularly handy as the shares continue to grow. Unless otherwise listed, classes are $10/person (free if you are a Civic Garden Center volunteer). To learn more or register, visit the CGC website.

Plant Your Own Salad Garden
Saturday, July 23, 10:30-Noon, 1-2:30 $5/participant, kid-focused

Preserving the Harvest: Water Bath Canning
Wednesday, July 20, 6 - 8 pm

Simple Solutions to Stormwater Management Tour
Tuesday, July 26, 6 - 7 pm (FREE)

Munch Your Way Through the Garden
Saturday, July 30, 10:30 -11:30 am
$5/child, geared for kids aged 18 months to 6 years

Fall Vegetable Gardening
Wednesday, August 3, 6 - 8 pm

Backyard Composting
Saturday, August 6, 10 to Noon

Preserving the Harvest: Pressure Canning
Wednesday, August 10, 6 - 8 pm

Food Preservation Methods: Freezing, Drying, Pickling and Fermenting
Wednesday, August 17, 6 - 8 pm

Potluck in Paris (Sort of) on Thursday, July 14

I just knew that we might get unexpected results if we piled compost around that old air-conditioning unit at the greenhouse . . . but at least this is a good reminder of our next potluck, coming up on Thursday, July 14, Bastille Day. We’ll celebrate all things French for the occasion, with French food (we hope) at dinner, scheduled for 6:00 pm. Then we’ll have a meeting, conducted entirely en francais (just kidding) at 7:00 pm.
Please join us—we’d like to hear from team leaders how things are going in the gardens, and we’d really like to get anyone who’s not signed up for a team set up with one at the meeting. We'd also like to get just a few more CSA members as we approach mid-season, so if you have a friend or relative who has shown some interest in the farm, please bring them along.

The weather forecast indicates that it won’t be as hot as it’s been the past few days, so we can enjoy the food on the picnic tables outside as we practice our French declensions. (Kidding again.) And it's not really in Paris; it's at Imago, as usual, which is at 700 Enright Avenue in the Ecovillage, if you haven’t been to a potluck before. And if you haven’t, why not? Please join us on Thursday!

Snapping Beans

I was sitting on the back porch this evening snapping green beans, prepartory to blanching them and freezing them. They were certainly nice-looking beans, and we got so many of them that I wanted to freeze the ones we wouldn't eat this week while they were still fresh. Even though they were picked on Friday, they still looked very fresh on Tuesday. I imagine some green beans you get at the store take a lot longer than four days just to travel from field to store, so I was happy to get these beans frozen while they were still so fresh.
Anyway, I got to thinking about the many, many green beans I snapped sitting on my great-grandmother's back porch. She didn't live in some old Victorian with a big back porch; she lived in a modern brick two-family with a glass-enclosed porch, but that's still where I sat when I snapped beans, right on the back stoop between the dining room and the porch. When I was done, she'd cook the living daylights out of them. (I like them a little more al dente these days.)
When I went down with a few bags of beans to put in the basement freezer, I found I still had a bag of corn and one of chopped green peppers from last season. I believe that's all that is left, except for half a jar of green tomato chutney in the refrigerator. I believe I'll make some succotash from that corn and the green peppers. Which reminds me of my Grandma Alice . . . but that's another story.

It’s Not Easy Eating Greens

No, I’m not talking about how roughage might affect one’s digestive tract. I merely mean that it’s not easy finding enough different ways to serve greens in one week when greens are really in season at the CSA. We have a new motto at our house, “A meal without greens is . . . breakfast. Maybe.”

I like greens; I have always enjoyed salads, and cooked greens used to be a special treat when we’d go to a good barbecue restaurant. But now I know that I had barely touched the surface of what you can do with greens.

In the last week or so, we have had . . .

-5-Lettuce Salad with Basil Vinaigrette
-Polenta with Greens, Baked Eggs, and Cheese
-Thunder Bay Salad, made with Chinese Cabbage
-Potato Fry-Up with Summer Greens
-Greens Soup with Cream Cheese Croutons
-Kale Sauteed with Tomatoes, Peppers, and Onions
-Mixed Greens with Basalmic Vinegar
-Pineapple Chicken Stir Fry with Chard

So far, I have not come up with a dessert recipe that uses greens, but give me time and more greens, and it may happen!

If anyone has some good ideas—and especially recipes—to use greens, we’d like to share them on the blog. Send them to the Committee Team Leader to post or bring them to the next potluck or to packout on a Saturday. As the summer moves on, we’ll be getting other vegetables instead of greens, but they’ll be back when the weather cools off in fall and we need to be prepared!

Packout Scones

A few people have requested the recipe for the scones that were at the greenhouse during packout last Saturday. They weren't made with any of the produce from the farm this time, although they are also tasty with a dollop of pear butter made from the pears from the Schenk's yard. Here's the recipe.

SCONES

2 cups flour
1/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 stick (1/2 cup) cold butter (or margarine)
2/3 cup buttermilk (or put a tablespoon of lemon juice in measuring cup and then add milk to 2/3 cup)
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 egg
1 tablespoon milk
dried fruit, nuts, or jam (optional)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. It's quicker to mix the dough in a food processor, but you can cut in the butter with the dry ingredients by hand with two knives--that's the first step, mix together the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and butter (cut into smaller pieces) until mixture resembles coarse meal. Add the vanilla to the buttermilk and then add all the liquid slowly to flour mixture until it forms a stiff dough (you might not need all of the liquid). At this point, mix in dried fruit or nuts if you want, then turn out dough on floured surface and form a round about 8" in diameter and an inch or more thick. (For more smaller scones, make two rounds, smaller in diameter but still about an inch thick, and cut each one ito six wedges.) Cut into eight wedges, and arrange them on a double cookie sheet lined with wax paper (that is, put one cookie sheet inside another and put wax paper on the top cookie sheet; this keeps the bottoms from burning while the tops brown). Mix the egg and milk together and brush the tops of the scones with the egg mixture. If you haven't put dried fruit or nuts in the dough, at this point you can make an indentation with the back of a spoon in the wide part of each wedge and then put a teaspoon of preserves, jam, or apple butter in the indentation. Then bake for 20 minutes, cool, and eat.

On Farming & Revolution

On Fourth of July, I always think about the men in the Continental Congress who signed the Declaration of Independence. I knew them all well. And no, I’m not nuts or channeling past lives—the theatre group I was in put on the first amateur production of the musical 1776, and after two months of rehearsals, fittings for about 27 frock coats, and numerous performances, I still feel like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Joseph Hewes, John Hancock, Robert Livingston, John Dickinson, and the rest of them were my friends. Probably because they were, at least in their musical theatre incarnations . . .

Historically, I know a lot of them were farmers and plantation owners, but they were all what you might call “gentlemen farmers.” Whilst they were in Philadelphia, other people were tending their fields and farms back home. In Braintree, Massachusetts, Abigail Adams kept the small family farm going while John was away (I know because she told me so herself when I was hemming her dress); Thomas Jefferson, with Ben Franklin’s help, tried mightily though unsuccessfully to have slavery outlawed in the Declaration, but Jefferson’s own slaves kept his plantation at Monticello running while he was gone, including tending his gardens, where he experimented with heirloom seeds and organic growing methods more than 200 years before we thought about it.

Now, I’m finally getting to my point in this Independence Day post: we have a few gentlemen farmers in the CSA. They pay for a nonwork share, and we’re happy to have them, because they definitely help pay the bills. However, the majority of our shares are work shares, and a few of those work share owners haven’t picked up a hoe yet. So, this is a gentle reminder that our Urban Farm Revolution needs the help of every share member. If you are reading this blog, you’re probably already an involved member of the Enright CSA, but if you know any members who haven’t signed up for a work team or two yet, please encourage them to take a little time this week to do so.

Our CSA is part of a local food revolution, and we each have dedicated ourselves to the proposition that we must help water, weed, write, count, clean, packout, plan, plant, hoe, and harvest. Tell any friends who haven’t started putting work hours in yet not to wait too long or they’ll have a lot of time to log and not too many weeks to do so. They need to put their John Hancocks on a team signup list today. Email farm@pricehill.org if you specifically need a list of team leaders and their email addresses.

Happy Fourth of July, and remember what Mother Jones said: “We need to raise less corn and more hell.” We can raise hell with the status quo in America’s food production methods by raising our own corn, beans, greens, tomatoes, and more—each and every one of us. I think I hear the Liberty Bell tolling for us now . . .