In your box:

• Bok Choy
• Cucumber or extra turnips
• Garlic Scapes
• Green Onions
• Head lettuce
• Salad mix
• Summer squash
• Turnips

Farm News

Just a reminder that we’ll be hosting an open house on Saturday, July 16th from 10am-4pm. This is part of the “Eat Local Co-op Farm Tour,” which includes regional tours of local farms. There will be many people here with no prior connection to the farm, but we hope you’ll join us and introduce yourselves. I’ll be leading tours every hour and there will also be yard games, space for picnics, and time to explore our farm. We are located at 17250 County Road 122 / New Germany MN 55367. Hope to see you at the farm! And if you can’t make it, we’ll have events in August and September as well.

Thanks to everyone for returning your boxes! If you ever forget, there’s no need to make a special trip to return it–just bring back two the following week. Also, please leave the labels on the boxes so that we can reuse them. Thanks!

This week’s box

Summer squash, any one? This week brings us the largest haul of summer squash I’ve ever had in fourteen years of farming. The combination of healthy plants, heat and humidity have supplied us an early bumper crop. Unpicked squash get unusable and tax the plant, so all we can do is keep picking and hope the plants start to moderate their production. If you’re getting overwhelmed with squash, we’ve included a recipe for zucchini cake, below. You can use any type of squash or a mixture in this recipe.

We’re starting to see a few cucumbers ripening, but we’re still a week away from a solid harvest. This week you’ll either receive a cucumber or an extra turnip. Our plants are sprawling and full of flowers and baby fruit, so we should have a great cucumber crop coming your way shortly. The skin on some of these is a little rough, which I think is a result of the heat we’ve had so far. It does not seem to affect the quality of the fruits, thankfully.

This week brings the end of the season for garlic scapes. The plants will continue growing for just three more weeks, with all of their energy focused on growing larger bulbs. By the end of the month they’ll be picked and drying out, and we’ll have regular garlic coming your way next month.

This week’s bok choy is the last of the spring season. I know bok choy isn’t a common veggie in most American’s diets, but it’s a great short-season crop that we’ve really come to love. We won’t have bok choy again until the fall, but our summer cabbage are starting to form heads and they should be in the boxes soon.

We also welcome Turnips to this week’s box. These are a sweet turnip variety called “Hakurei,” with a very mild flavor. We’ll have the traditional turnips in the fall, but these sweet turnips are great chopped into a salad or eaten raw. The greens were shredded by pests that got through protective netting, but thankfully the roots themselves are still in good shape.

Chocolate Zucchini Cake

From Asparagus to Zucchini, 3rd ed.

• ¾ c. oil
• 1 ¼ c. sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp. Vanilla
• 2 c. grated summer squash
• ½ c. sour milk or buttermilk
• 3 TB cocoa or carob powder
• ½ tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp baking soda
• ½ tsp each cinnamon and cloves
• 2 ½ c. flour
• small bag of chocolate or carob chips

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 9×13 inch pan.

2. Mix all ingredients, pour into pan and bake 30-35 minutes.

Coming up

Next week, we are expecting head lettuce, kohlrabi, green onions, summer squash, cucumbers, turnips, salad mix, and peas or currants.