Hellgate CSA

Raise your hand if you spent an hour soaking greens and herbs last night, all the while worrying a little about eating salad every day, three meals a day all week. Fret no more!

First of all, I just want to give a nod to Meg's post of a Clotilde recipe and say there are so many vegetables that make tasty and interesting pestos. Radish greens, while excellent simply sauteed with salt and oil, are certainly an excellent choice for pesto.

We received copious amounts of glorious carrots for December and January and they last so long. Those of you who are sick of carrot sticks and aren't juicing these, may be running out of ideas.

Meat and Dairy

Just a reminder to everyone that the deadline for this month's Meat and Dairy order is January 15th and that pick-up for orders will be on January 20th.

In The News

Many interesting op-eds and feature articles seem to have popped up this year in major newspapers all over the country concerning food, sustainable agriculture and CSAs. I wanted to share one of the op eds in the New York Times that was recently published.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/06/garden/06root.html?em

The New York Times ran an article this week on food storage, specifically root vegetables. This inspiring article explores some ways people are adapting small, urban spaces to store food in a manner that achieves maximum preservation without canning or freezing.

Additionally, the article does mention CSAs.

As tomato season and tomato shares have been arriving, I'm sure the one thing we've all been thinking about is how to make a good tomato sauce.

From Just Food:

Permaculture is a contraction of "permanent agriculture" or of "permanent culture". The term was coined in 1978 by Australian ecologist Bill Mollison and his student David Holmgren.

From Just Food:

Did you know that dirt and soil are not the same thing?

Soil is a complicated system of air, water, minerals, organic matter and living organisms (an acre of healthy topsoil can contain 900 pounds of worms!). Healthy soils which have a balance of all of these elements provide the nutrients that plants need to grow well and to resist weather, pest and disease stress.

A good friend of mine sent me this article, so I thought I'd share with you here:

The worm turns ... a profit
by Dianne Rinehart
August 7, 2007 at 5:19 PM EDT

On the website of Cathy's Crawly Composters is a cartoon titled "Getting Into Heaven in the 21st Century.

In it, St. Peter is querying a would-be entrant on his recycling habits. Did he recycle: "absolutely." How about composting? Well he lived in an apartment. Well what about using composting worms? Well he didn't have a balcony. What about your living room, asks St. Pete. "Worms in my living room?

From the Organic Consumers Association:

Over the last forty years nitrogen fertilizer use has increased seven-fold and nearly every acre of intensively farmed, conventional cropland is treated with pesticides. A team of scientists explored the impact of pesticides and other environmental toxicants on symbiotic nitrogen fixation (SNF) brought about by Rhizobium bacteria (Fox et al., 2007).

Time Out NY has a nice writeup this week about urban farms- they highlight one farm per borough. I think it's important to know that farming is taking place within the confines of New York City, such an urban place for most of us.  The farm they talk about in Queens is the Queens County Farm Museum. From the article:

Occupying the city’s largest swath of undisturbed farmland, the 47-acre farm museum has been operational for more than 200 years.