CSA Farm Share 2009: Week 16 and then some

[surrealestate]

Last week, Parker Farm said that due to this year's horrid conditions, shares would have to be canceled for the rest of the season. I was, of course, quite sad over the news, but given the situation all over the state, it wasn't entirely surprising. A few days later, Steve changed his mind and announced that, with some small changes and understanding that hauls would likely be smaller, things would, in fact continue. Yay! Too bad he didn't just start out by saying there'd be no drop-off that week, which would have saved an assortment of annoyance on various sides.

Ironically, despite that, last week was the biggest total haul of the year, because my share partner and I went out to Red Fire on Monday to harvest and came home with a metric buttload, then I helped Steve a bit at the farmer's market Saturday which yielded as much as I could carry on my bike. A lot of CSA members had stopped by to say hi and offer support. It was good to see. And because Steve is awesome, he sent us all home with extras.

The official drop-off:

• [no Parker drop-off]
  --
• 1 lb sweet peppers
• 4 small hot peppers
• 2 eggplant
• 1 bunch kale
• 1 head lettuce
• 1 bunch dill
• 1 small winter squash
• 1 small head cabbage
• 11 oz broccoli
• 1 lb summer squash
  --
• 1 lb peaches
• 1/2 peck apples

Harvest at the farm included four qts of cherry tomatoes, 4+ qts yellow and green beans, 2 qts raspberries, dozens of hot peppers, and over 30 pounds of tomatillos.

Farmers market yield included 2 bunches arugula, 2 of Asian turnips, a gaggle of purple-top turnips and parsnips, 1 bunch cilantro, 1 head lettuce, and an embarrassing quantity of hen of the woods mushrooms.

And on the food preservation front:
Canned: tomatillo salsa verde, more tomatillo salsa verde, roasted red pepper spread
Dried: tomatoes, apples, apple powder, oregano, parsley, rosemary, green & yellow beans, mushrooms
Froze: blackberries

I hope everyone who went for it had an easy fast (mine wasn't too bad).

Comments

[kissoflife.livejournal.com]

I was slightly startled that people I watched do some canning recently were also doing this via the net. But having found a pressure canning vat thing, so the lids would pop down sealed on. It was amusing.
Too cool, so now I must find one of these-- I love having a new project as to kitchen gadgetry! I'm sure it will take into winter for me to find one.(It is like a steamer-doubleboiler, but with inner colander thing reaching all the way down to the bottom. No doubt there's an actual name. A mystery for me to solve, whee!)

[dani-namaste.livejournal.com]

I can ask Nick where he got the pressure canner that we use - I am pretty sure he got it from Amazon. If you want an old-school waterbath canner, try Benjamin Franklin in Cushing Square (Belmont, near me). They have tons of canning supplies.

[kissoflife.livejournal.com]

Cool, asking would be nice and yay, a new place to explore.

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

Tags in Porter also has everything you need for canning. But I still anti-recommend buying a boiling water "canner". A pressure canner is a nice thing, but more expensive and not necessary for the most common kinds of canning (tomatoes, fruit, pickles).

If you get a pressure canner, though, you can also use it for BWB stuff.

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

Ironically, the people learning it now, assuming they are using proper sources, are likely being safer than those who learned from their grandmothers. I've seen people post about canning and provide enough details for me to know that the USDA would consider their methods unsafe. Not that the USDA is the be-all-end-all, but it's like safer sex, in that odds are relatively low that you'd get into trouble if you didn't follow the guidelines, but why take the chance?

I don't have a pressure canner and so only do boiling water bath canning. I don't recommend buying anything called a "canner" for that, though. Any large vessel will do, and most "canners" are not sized properly for canning, oddly enough.

[kissoflife.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I caught that commentary about non-FDA-approved old canning styles. Scratching my head over it. (did the right things to prevent botulism, etc. so what's so dangerous?)
What's the sizing difficulty? Depth so the jars are immersed enough?
The 'canner' _did_ seem almost redundant, and that its main charm was the aluminum insert preventing glass breaking(eh). I'd imagine one could accomplish this with a pie plate too. *g*

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

I think the thing about non-approved methods is that they don't actually kill all the bad bits reliably. They will most of the time, but not all.

But yeah, the "canners" are almost always not deep enough to safely can quart jars, and the wire racks they come with suck. Putting Food By has several pages of rant on the topic. :)