CSA #29

Dear CSA-ers,

This week’s preassembled bag will contain Collards, Garnet Mustards, Green Tomatoes, Lovelock Head Lettuce, Carrots, Sweet Potatoes (Amish Grown) and Cilantro. Custom Orders may be placed between now and Tuesday evening on the website at: https://magneyfarm.locallygrown.net/market
There’s just one more weekend for Farmers’ Market this year, but CSA is just getting started for the Fall season! Our cool season crops are starting to look healthy and tunnel turn-over and planting are our goals for the coming week. This Friday we pulled the eggplant tunnel, so last week’s bag was the last time you will see eggplant until next summer. Other summer marginal vegetables like arugula, winter spinach, carrots, and radishes are just now starting to perform.
The ebb and flow of varieties is the very nature of seasonal eating. Many people have lost this connection with the land and local agriculture. Grocery stores import freely from the Southern Hemisphere to create produce departments that reflect very little seasonality at all. For some people, the changes in vegetable selection from month to month with the CSA is strange at first. Yet eating seasonally means eating only the freshest vegetables, and over time you may start to feel a little bit of that connection with the land come back. That’s our hope, anyway.
Our featured vegetable this week is Garnet Mustard. Garnet Mustard is a spicy leaf vegetable that should be cooked for best enjoyment. It is a beautiful deep purple color due to rich concentrations of anthocyanins, a group of antioxidant compounds the plant uses to protect itself from cold. This first round will have some cosmetic bug-holing due to the peskersome flea beetles, but with the onset of colder weather we expect leaf quality to keep going up. This is the only one of our three mustard greens we brought back this year, which is testament to how much we love it. Enjoy it sautéed, steamed, or cooked down by itself or with any of our other greens. A very knowledgeable customer once told us that collards are best prepared with mustards as the flavors balance each other. Regardless of how you prepare them, we sincerely hope you enjoy these and all the other vegetables in your bag this week. And, as always, we thank you for your continued support of our farm.
Sincerely,
The Magney Legacy Ridge Farm Team