Just a small sample of what we grow!
What we grow
We're working on this page still, so it doesn't have everything we grow yet, but it will in time :). We grow lots more than this!
BRUSSELS SPROUTS:
Being a CSA member revolutionized this vegetable for me. Instead of bland and bitter, they were tasty sweet and came on a club I could take out the burglars with!
For storage in your fridge, cut the sprouts off the stalk and store in a plastic bag. You can remove the outer leaves if the sprouts have any damage. Take care not to overcook them (boil or steam 5-10 minutes max); mushy is not what you want. Roasting them in the oven with a little olive oil really brings out their sweetness.
• Roasted Brussels Sprouts
• Roasted Brussels Sprouts in Creamy Dijon Sauce
SHALLOTS:
You shall use shallots like onions, as they are quite similar. The flavor of shallots is subtly distinctive and prized for specialty dishes. They also store really well.
• Warm Dressing with Shallot
• Mashed Potatoes with Shallots
PARSNIPS
If you've never had these, get excited. They are sweet and so yummy. They are sweeter and nuttier than carrots and can add a refreshing swap to recipes that call for them. Try mashed parsnips with a little honey. They store much like carrots, in cool and dry places.
In medieval times, parsnips were as much of a staple as potatoes. Sugary varieties were also often fermented to make wine. High in potassium and vitamin C.
• Raw Parsnip Winter Salad
• Easy Parsnip "Fries"
• Parsnip Coconut Rice
CELERIAC
Celeriac might be the most scruffy-lookin vegetable in your share, but rest assured it will make its mark. Your soups will be 10 times better, stir-fries richer, and your salads crunchier. You'll be even more grateful when, in March, your celeriac is still ready for eating.
It's in the family with celery, and is amazing chopped and baked with olive oil like fries in the oven, delicious in soups, and very tasty stir-fried with greens. It takes about the time of a carrot to cook.
DAIKON RADISH
The bright white of this mild radish is beautiful in many dishes.
In Japan, the daikon radish comprises 15% of all vegetable production.
You can eat them fresh, cooked or fermented. Very high in vitamin C.
It's beautiful grated like snow over the
top of a salad.
I like perfect circles on my sandwiches.
Nice
sliced and added to miso soup right near the end of cooking time. We
have a really amazing lacto-fermented diakon pickle in our fridge
currently.
• Hearty Autumn Stew
• Daikon Radish Salad
• Daikon Radish and Apple Salad
RUTABAGA and TURNIPS
We grow a number of different turnips.
Now you may have an image in your mind of a poor peasant eating nothing
but turnips for months (which certainly makes sense because they store
very well...), however, as a food item in a varied diet turnips have
many charms.
They have a touch of sweet and thin slices sauteed in
olive oil with onions are a real treat (add greens to that if you
like!).
Boil them until soft and make a mash with butter and garlic
(also traditionally mixed with mashed potatoes).
Fabulous cut into
chunks and baked, perhaps with a medley of other roots!
The rutabaga is a root vegetable that looks very much like a turnip, with a creamy skin and its own flavor.
Rutabagas and the various turnips all store very well and can last up to a month or more in a plastic bag in the refrigerator. Both rutabagas and turnips can be eaten raw, roasted, boiled, steamed, stir-fried, mashed, or stewed.
High in vitamins A and C, and some minerals, especially calcium.
• Coconut Rutabaga Carrot Mash
• Hearty Autumn Stew
• Turnip and Carrot Gratin
• Braised Kale and Turnips
SWEET POTATOES
Sweet potatoes are tasting good! They come in all sizes from almost a loaf of bread to skinny little potato fingers. The skinny ones bake quickly or chop up into pretty little circles for stirfrys or homefries.
We grow a majority of the Beauregard variety of sweet potatoes with their delicious orange flesh, and a little of a white type called O'Henry, and a purple-skinned variety called Japanese White.
In Korea, they sell baked sweet potatoes as a snack on the street. They really are excellent straight up after baking. The smaller ones make perfect little snacks, packed with vitamin A, vitamin C and manganese. Sweet potatoes are also a good source of B6 and potassium, among other nutrients.
Bake sweet potatoes at 375-400 degrees F for 30 min to an hour.
When they give in easily to the tines of a fork, they're ready. You can also slice them thin and sautee for a quicker cooking time. Nice with onions and soy sauce.
KOHLRABI
Peel and slice up the bulb thin and raw for salads. The leaves can be cooked like kale. You can cook the bulb too in a stirfry, soup, or any style you like. Make sure to remove the woody skin before preparing.
You can make a nice slaw with grated kohlrabi and carrots, olive oil, lemon or lime juice and salt to taste.
• Kohlrabi Mashed Potatoes
• Kohlrabi and Potato with Sour Cream and Dill
• Kohlrabi and Potato Gratin
• Braised Kohlrabi
PEA TENDRILS
I like to just eat these in the field. Excellent in salad. Also simply delicious steamed or sauteed with a little olive oil and garlic. Add to anything.They cook quickly.
BOK CHOY/ Pak Choi/ Bok Choi
You may never know quite how to spell it, but I bet you'll find it's great for the eating. Crunchy stems and delicate leaves are delicious raw in salad. They stirfry quickly and commune happily with garlic and peanut oil. You can work them in with any vegetables you have on hand. Put them in last for just a few minutes to keep some crunch in the stems.
We like to grow baby bok choys like Mei Qing and Red Choi as well as larger varieties that make a plant larger than a lettuce head. They all have similar cooking properties, though the larger varieties will take slightly more cooking time.
LEEKS
A good tip for getting the dirt out of a leek is to slice the leek in half long-ways from the tops down to mid-leek where grit definitely isn't. Then keep the root up and run water through the separated leaves, rinsing the layers of leaf where dirt catches, until clean.
Leeks are a member of the lily family and close relatives of the allium family which includes onions, shallots, and garlic. The leek has a wonderful onion flavor, but is much milder. The white stem is used as well as much of the green section. You can use leeks anywhere you would use onions.
• Caramelized Leeks and Apples
• Sesame Saute with Pea Tendrils, Leeks and Bok Choy
• Belgian Leek Tart
RADISHES
Fresh radishes are a tasty treat to add some zip to salads and sandwiches. You can also throw them into sautees, roasts, and soups. Many people also enjoy the greens! You can roast your radishes and then toss them in a pan with butter and the greens and sautee until the greens are wilted.
KALE and COLLARDS
Kale is delicious and abundant during the fall season. It gets and extra kick of taste and sweetness when the weather gets cooler. It's also very nutritious and easy to cook.
• Kale Chips!
A couple other Kale ideas:
Saute kale with garlic, onions, olive oil, and soy sauce. Toss with bread crumbs and feta or tofu. Yum! Or, add butter, sausage, roasted winter squash, sage, and mushrooms to make a winter hash.
• Ginger Kale
• Kale Sauteed with Apples RecipeCOLLARDS
WINTER SQUASH
We grow a wide array of winter squash at the farm. You'll find Delicata, Butternut, Acorn, Sweet Dumpling, Kabocha, Buttercup, Spaghetti, Sunshine, and Carnival squashes at our stands and markets over the fall season, as well as pie pumpkins and carving pumpkins. Each has different flavors, textures and storing abilities.
All are easy to bake and top with butter or olive oil and salt for a simple recipe.
Just cut them in half, remove the seeds, and put them on a baking tray in an oven at 375 until the flesh is easy to poke into with a fork.
The seeds of all the squashes can be baked and eaten separately if you'd like.
• Butternut Apple Bisque
• Golden Autumn Soup
• Delicata Squash with Rosemary, Sage, and Cider Glaze
• Stuffed Delicata (or other baked winter squash)
• Spaghetti Squash with Fresh Tomato Sauce
BEETS
Tasty and colorful, beets make excellent cold salads like the ones below. They are also fabulous roasted in the oven with a little olive oil.
• Easy Beets
• Panama's Pink Potato Salad
• Beets, Carrots, and Hakurei Turnips in Lime Vinaigrette
CARROTS
We have traditional orange carrots, as well as the wild and crazy rainbow carrots and purple carrots in season.
Purple carrots rock the house like a joint concert of Jimi Hendrix and the artist formerly known as Prince.
I say that because we grow two varieties of purple carrots, Purple Haze (dark purple with a bright orange core), and Purple Rain (dark purple with a yellow core). I'm imagining a theme meal.....
The rainbow mix contains all the colors of carrots we grow, with a baseline of a rainbow seed mix of whites, yellows, oranges and reds.
Here's a photo Ryan took of his lunch the other day, which included a salad titled "Researching the Inner Colors of Purple Carrots."
• Curried Carrot Dip
• Yellow Springs Carrot Cake
• Easy and Refreshing Carrot Salad
CABBAGE
Chop your cabbage up raw for some great slaws, or cook it any way you like. Our Chef Ona makes a tasty cabbage pie.
• Blue Cheese Cole Slaw Recipe on Food Network website - Recommended as delicious by Stephanie, one of our CSA members.
• Greggie Pie's Cabbage Pie
• German Sweet and Sour Red Cabbage
• Stuffed Cabbage
• Irish Cabbage and Bacon
• Dilly Slaw
CILANTRO
FRESH HERBS
A great way to use your fresh herbs is in a quiche! The recipe below allows you to add whatever herbs you have or enjoy.
GARLIC
Dried garlic from our July harvest is ready now. We grow a few hard neck varieties that are different from the soft-neck kinds you usually get in the store. Hard-neck garlic is usually much easier to peel, and it's also easier to grow here.
SWEET ONIONS
We grow two varieties of sweet onions, Walla Walla and Ailsa Craig. Last year, our Walla Walla's had a problem with their tops dying back really early, so we're growing more Ailsa Craig this year. (Luckily so, because the Walla Walla's are doing it again!) Both varieties are quite similar in the characteristics of a sweet, Spanish-type onion.
Ailsa Craig onions take their name from an island off the coast of Scotland. (They do well in cool weather!) They're big and sweet. Delicious raw on tomato sandwiches, and added to salads. And cooked up any way you like your onions.
PARSLEY
Did you know tabbouleh is the national dish of Lebanon? Ona has put together a recipe for the classic Middle Eastern dish for you to try.
Parsley is wonderfully full of vitamin C, vitamin K, and significant amounts of many other nutrients. Chopped fresh parsley is great in salads, with grains, on top of potatoes, and in soups and sandwiches. It's got an aromatic fresh flavor with a little saltiness.
Also excellent in green smoothies.
POTATOES
We grow a smorgasbord of varieties, Chieftain, Adirondack Blue, Carola, Nicola, Reba, Austrian Crescent Fingerling, and more.
Dilly Potatoes:
For a scrumptious and simple dish, boil the potatoes until a fork goes through easily, and serve hot with butter or olive oil, lots of chopped dill, and a bit of salt and pepper.
• Homefry Pie
• Panama's Pink Potato Salad
• Potato Tacos
• New Potato Salad