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Woodbrige Pork Coming this Fall

Woodbridge Farm has let us know that their pork shares will soon be available again, a little earlier than the past two years.

Woodbridge Farm also raises heritage pigs. These animals are fed certified organic grain, supplemented by vegetables from our garden and whey from our cheese making process. They enjoy 2 acres of woods as their home and root and sleep as they are naturally meant to.

Their “Mini Pork Share” for $150 will be made up approximately of the following cuts and weights:

  • Pork Chops – 3 lbs
  • Country Style Ribs – 2 lbs
  • Sausage (hot, mild or breakfast) – 2 lbs
  • Shoulder Roast – 3.5 lb
  • Ham Steaks – 3 lbs
  • Bacon – 3 lbs

Please let Dave and Julia know directly if you want a share by emailing them at woodbridgefarm@sbcglobal.net. Payment can be made at the time the pork is delivered.

Distribution dates should be Oct. 5 and Oct. 26.

And remember, there are also Woodbridge Farm beef shares available. Sign up here.

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Small Farmers and the Farm Bill

Here is a great article about the struggles of small, organic farmers and some farm bill insights. Finding out that even the “successful” farms are just getting by makes me thankful that there is anyone out there growing veg without the big machines and chemicals AND hauling it into the city.

The First Family’s Fallow Gardens
by Heather Rogers, from The American Prospect

Morse Pitts has been cultivating the same land in New York’s Hudson Valley for 30 years. His operation, Windfall Farms, is the very picture of sustainable agriculture. From early spring to late fall, the farm’s 15 acres are luxuriant with snap peas, squash, mint, kale, and Swiss chard. Its greenhouses burst with sun gold tomatoes and baby greens. Pitts, who is in his 50s, doesn’t use chemical fertilizers or pesticides or any genetically modified seeds. He cultivates biodiversity, not just vegetables.

Twice a week, he hauls his produce 65 miles south to Manhattan in a biodiesel school bus to sell at the lucrative Union Square farmers market. Pitts does a brisk trade; demand for his produce is high. Since the mid-1990s the number of farmers markets has shot up 300 percent, and the organic sector has seen annual double-digit expansion.

But despite having no mortgage debt (he inherited the place), a ready market, and loyal customers, Pitts wants to leave his farm. His town recently rezoned, and the area is now industrial; if he wants to cultivate soil that isn’t surrounded by industry and its attendant potential for pollution, he has to move. The problem is, he can’t afford to.

Read more at utne.com

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One Small Farmer to Another


As many of you know, we helped organize a second CSA in the neighborhood this spring when our own wait list overflowed and the movement for a LES Food Coop turned on more people to the idea of locally grown, organic produce. Many of you probably know people who get their veggies Thursdays from the LES CSA. And some of you have mentioned to us recently that their yield has been much better than ours, even though lack of rain has affected the whole region.
I posed this question to the LES core group, and they confirmed that they’ve been overall very pleased with both the quantity and variety of their produce in this, their first season.
But my question also got a response from their farmer, Melinda Rowley of Monkshood Nursery in upstate NY, which I thought would be interesting to share:
Hi Jeremy,
At first I felt proud to hear your members feel our CSA is more bountiful than theirs this year, but then I started feeling sorry for your farmers. I just feel the need to “defend” your farmers, because I know some day we will have an “off” year. Each farm is so individual, there is no way to truly compare and say “All these other farms have plenty of produce and they didn’t get any rain either, so what’s wrong with our farm?” For instance one farm may have a 5 acre pond to pump water out of, another has a deep well that only gets 4 gallons per minute. Plus microclimates are all over, another example, our farm is next to the Hudson River and therefore our temperatures run warmer about 2 weeks earlier and later than other farms 10 minutes down the road. As small farmers we are all individuals also, maybe there was illness to deal with, equipment breakdowns happen all the time, etc. My husband David works 16 hour days M-S and on Sundays drives to NYC for farmers market making it a 19-20 hour day. He never complains, he loves his job, you have to or no one would work that hard. So instead of trying to find fault with your farmers, give them some thanks for all their hard work and appreciate what they HAVE been able to produce this year. Next year will be completely different!
Melinda
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Update from the Farm

David and Julia just sent us this update:

Dear CSA Members,

Thank you so much for your support and patience and your words of encouragement throughout the past weeks of slim harvests. It is time to give you an update on how things developed since our last e-mail in which we had shared with you our trouble with the irrigation.

We have good news in that we have been able to supply an abundance of water to our fall crops including: lettuce, pac choy, chinese cabbage, kale and swiss chard, tatsoi and broccoli, turnips, salad greens, radishes, carrots and beets.

We did have to abandon a good third of one of our fields on which we were growing all the cucurbits (squash, cucumbers, winter squash and pumpkins) in order to be able to supply enough water to the fall crops and the remaining summer crops with the small well we are now using – this decision was relatively easy since the plants had been heavily impacted by the lack of water over the summer. As a consequence of this drought, the winter squash yield this year is not very good. Equally impacted is the potato yield – which is probably going to come to an end soon.

The recent cold nights took a toll on the field tomatoes which have slowed down production to almost nothing. We have a beautiful second succession of beans that is yielding abundantly at the moment and should continue to do so for the next three weeks if the weather holds up and we don’t get any early night frosts.

So you should expect to see more cooking and salad greens as well as root crops going into fall – but keep in mind that the usual basics of potatoes and winter squash might be missing this fall.

Thank you again for your continued support!

“Know Your Food!”

Julia and David Smagorinsky
Woodbridge Farm LLC
30 Woodbridge Road
Salem, CT 06420
phone: (860) 531-8090
e-mail: woodbridgefarm@sbcglobal.net
www.woodbridgefarmonline.com

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Green Superheroes this Tuesday

This month’s Second Tuesday event features The Anthropologists, “company of artists dedicated to the creation of investigative, socially relevant, and engaging theatrical work.” They’ll be presenting their work, “Green Superheroes,” from 5:00 to 7:00 at distribution, and they need your help:

If the most awful evil confronting humanity today is the threat of climate change, who will do something about it? Where is Superman when we need him?

Join The Anthropologists on Tuesday, September 14 from 5-7PM and create your own superhero alter-ego! Actors will work with Grand Street CSA members to create eco-superheroes and design costumes from recycled materials and “clean trash” (e.g. paper towel rolls, packaging materials). Participants can invent a superhero character with special powers to help accomplish “green” goals, can complete a “Superhero Identification Card” and can even create a video podcast in character!

Community members are invited to contribute their own clean trash to this project!

Here they are in June at Go Green Day in the Bronx:


Go Green Day! from the anthropologists on Vimeo.

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About the low yield at our CSA

Email to members 9/4/10:

The last few weeks have seen a decreasing yield in our CSA shares, culminating last week in what was probably our smallest take-home in three years. Farmer Julia provided us with a detailed explanation of their challenges this year with irrigation and water supply, problems highlighted by the general lack of rain this summer. You can read her full letter on our web site, but the gist of it is not good news — the pond that Woodbridge Farm has relied on for irrigation has practically dried up, and they expect sparse pick-ups for at least another few weeks.

Julia is hoping for better results for their fall crops, as they’ve been given permission to tap into a neighbor’s well. We’ve asked for an update on their progress, and will post that to the web site also as soon as we receive it.

It’s worth noting that CSAs were invented precisely to help growers withstand the natural unpredictability of a small farm, as well as to provide amazingly fresh produce with no chemicals to consumers. That is, we ask that you patiently take the bad with the good. Our CSA provides Julia and Dave with the kind of economic security family farmers have never had; CSAs in NYC and around the region have helped re-energize family farms across New England; in particular, the movement has encouraged more small farmers to grow organically, which leaves their crops more susceptible to the vagaries of weather and disease. In other words, we hope there’s more to your CSA membership than the desire for tasty tomatoes.

We try not to get too mission-preachy here at the Grand Street CSA, but when all you get to take home is a pile of purslane, maybe a big-picture pep-talk is in order.

(Speaking of purslane … we posted some information about what you can do with the stuff to our web site, and thought it was a good time to remind you of all the veggie tip sheets from Just Food. There’s even one for purslane.)

Please feel free, as always, to email us your comments and complaints, or to talk to the core member at distribution on Tuesday. And if you have time in your busy day for a quick rain dance, Julia and Dave and the salad greens will appreciate it.

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All That Purslane – What to do?

Here is some info from a CSA in Illinois on the succulent green veg we’ve seen a lot of the past few weeks:

Think of it as a weed, and you’ll be missing out on one of the most nutritious greens on the planet. Purslane has more beta-carotene than spinach, as well as high levels of magnesium and potassium. Historically it has been used as a remedy for arthritis and inflammation by European cultures. Chinese herbalists found similar benefits, using it in respiratory and circulatory function. Recently, it’s been found that purslane has alpha linolenic acid, a type of omega-3 fatty acid. Researchers see evidence that these substances lower blood pressure and cholesterol levels as well as make the blood less likely to form clots. And, purslane has only 15 calories per 100 g portion.

Storage: Best if used fresh. But, if you must store it, wrap purslane in a moist paper towel and store in a plastic bag in the vegetable bin of your refrigerator.

Preparation: Wash. Remove larger stems. Some recipes use leaves only. Purslane can be substituted for spinach or wild greens in lasagnas, filled pastas, and Greek-style tarts.

For links to recipes, including several potato salads and a purslane, lamb and lentil stew, see the complete post here: Prairieland Community Supported Agriculture.

The New York Times Dining section featured purslane in 2006 with two more delicious sounding salads.

[Also, remember that we have veggie tip sheets from Just Food available online. Including one for purslane.]

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CSA Yields

Important news from the farm:

We hope all of you are enjoying the vegetables we have been providing so far this year. For those of you who have been members from the beginning or if this is your second season with us you may have noticed a decline in yield of some of our crops like salad greens, lettuce heads and cooking greens as well as the size of our peppers and cucumbers. We have been been facing some different challenges this year especially with irrigation and water supply. We wanted to update you as to what we have been encountering and share our concern for potentially lower yields in the weeks to come.

This year we had implemented a new system on a new field we call,”Gadbois Field”. The system is drip irrigation which utilizes drip tape the runs the length of each bed that we grow in and as the word implies water drips out of the tape to irrigate our plants. The drip tape and bed is covered with plastic mulch to stop weed growth and the paths in between each bed is mowed to keep everything accessible for harvest and a healthy environment for growth. The water source is a pond adjacent the field that is pumped to the drip tape that runs up and down 60 beds (about 4 acres). We noticed about 2 months ago that our veggies were not growing as expected and started a comprehensive fertility program using fish emulsion and calcium, and irrigated more often. Still something was not right and as we were planting our fall crops last week we discovered the answer when the pond went dry during an irrigation attempt. It became apparent that we had been irrigating less water then needed by clogging up the pumps filtration lines with sludge from the “near” bottom of the pond. This is not good news as what has not received enough water during this period are a good amount of the vegetables we had planned for the next 4 weeks. So expect some sparse pick ups in the near future.
For the fall crops we have hope that a well the neighboring farmer agreed to let us use will pull us through the remainder of the season. It has only been 3 days since our discovery and that we have been using the well. It is not a deep enough well to irrigate all 60 beds at once so we have started with 3 at a time and will be adding a bed at a time until we find the wells “breaking point” and irrigate as often as we must to save as many crops as we can.

Rain…Rain…Rain!!! We need rain. We have had only a few rain falls since May which plays into our struggle greatly. Both the pond and the well is dependent on rain fall.

As all of you are part of our CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) program we do greatly appreciate your understanding and continued commitment through all the good and challenging times the farm has had in the past and the struggle we are encountering currently. Thank You!

“Know Your Food!”

Julia and David Smagorinsky
Woodbridge Farm LLC
30 Woodbridge Road
Salem, CT 06420
phone: (860) 531-8090
e-mail: woodbridgefarm@sbcglobal.net
www.woodbridgefarmonline.com

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Grill-a-Chef Recipes

Josh Stokes had a hand-out at distribution on Tuesday with a few very nice recipes, including the kale kimchi and zucchini relish that he had samples of. If you didn’t grab a piece of paper, here’s the PDF:

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Grill-a-Chef at Distribution this Tuesday

I’m really excited that the core members who organize our Second Tuesday events have pulled Josh Stokes down to Grand Street this week. Josh is a chef and a friend to farmers market addicts (and CSA members) who die a little at the end of the week when they have to throw away some veggies that just didn’t make it to the plate in time.

He’s put together this project called Grill-a-Chef, which is, unbelievably, a free kitchen advice service for you and me. He’s got a great blog, with recipes and other advice. He hangs out at the Union Square Greenmarket every Wednesday morning, 9am – 12pm, just to answer questions you may have about all the good stuff for sale. He does the same thing at Chelsea Market every other Friday, 12pm – 4pm.

But he’ll also just answer any question you email to him or post on his Facebook page. And he does this all for free (at least until someone in NYC puts him on TV or something).

Anyway, as noted previously, he’ll be at our distribution on Tuesday until 7:30, and he’s ready for any question you have related to the CSA or anything else going on or blowing up in your kitchen. So come prepared!