First Harvest

Welcome to the first harvest, it's been half a year in the making, so we are glad to have a lot of great food for you!   The  farm is bustling with excitement as we begin harvesting--lots of delicious and nutritious food to harvest this week, probably lettuce, cilantro, dill, bok choi, napa cabbage, kale, chard, green garlic scapes, and pick your own snow peas, our best guess.  

Weekly Pickup:  whichever day suits you best from week to week.  
Thurs: 3-7pm
Fri:     11-7pm
Sat:    9-1pm    


How does it work?

If this is new to you, come on up to the barn, you will see a sign-in sheet to initial, a friendly farmer or two to greet you, and fresh veggies of course, farm market style.  We encourage the use of cloth shopping bags, but we also have plastic shopping bags here for you to use as well as produce bags.   Signs will tell you how much of each item is for Half shares and Full shares each week.  You do not need to take the full amount if you don't care for something very much, or know you won't be able to use all of it.  
As berries flowers and herbs mature, we will add them to the Pick Your Own board.  We will also do our best to answer cooking and nutritional questions that you may have.  Enjoy! 


A few Guidelines: 
We want everyone to have a great time here at the farm, there is a lot to enjoy. For everyone to have an excellent experience please observe the following: 

--to allow flowers, herbs, ornamentals, berries or fruits to reach proper size please wait to harvest until they are listed on the Pick Your Own Board.

--please keep dogs in your vehicle while at the farm.  

-- accompany any children under your care, and please avoid machinery,  and equipment areas.

           Red and Green Lettuce

 


 Serving Suggestions for the Harvest:

Lettuce heads: great for salad, sandwiches, enough said :-) 
Garlic Scapes:  these green garlic necks are tender and can be used in lieu of bulb garlic in any meal,
see pesto recipe below
 Chard: this green is a cousin of the beet and is good for salad and as a spinach substitute in lasnagna or elsewhere. Spanakopita anyone?
 Kale and Collards--a little butter or bacon fat or oil and sautee these well--very tasty side dish. My wife serves with eggs and sauteed onions and mushrooms--fabulous.
Bok Choy:  think of this as a crispy cabbage of Asian origin.  Also think of peanut butter, soy sauce, garlic, ginger and onions as great companions with this vegetable. See recipe below.
Napa cabbage: not familiar with this one?  It's like lettucey cabbage. It is used in kimchee, the fiery hot pickled cabbage of Korea, and can be used in recipes calling for cabbage.  Great to stir fry and use with garlic scapes, onions, ginger, soy sauce and sesame.  

Garlic Scape Pesto:--this is awesome!! 
 1 c. grated Parmesan cheese
 3 T. fresh lemon or lime juice
 1/4lb fresh garlic scapes
 1/2 c. olive oil
 Salt to taste

 Puree scapes and olive oil in blender until smooth.  Stir in Parmesan and lemon or lime juice and season to taste.  Serve on bread or crackers.  --courtesy of Mary Jane's Farm and made often by Elizabeth Swope of Goodwill at Homefields Farm fame. 

Bully for Bok Choy 

Isa Chandra Moskowitz has this to say about  bok choy:  " It looks like a cute little vase made of green leaves, and the flavor and texture is that of  a very sweet, juicy white cabbage.  We try to find reasons to eat as much of it as possible, not just a piece or two tossed in a stir-fry.  So with that in mind, this is our favorite way to quickly prepare bok choy on a weeknight…"

Baby Bok Choy with Crispy Shallots and Sesame Seeds

1 lb bok choy

2 small shallots, peeled and sliced into very thin rings

1/2 inch cube fresh ginger, peeled and grated

2 Tbsp peanut oil, or other cooking oil

1 Tbsp mirin or apple juice

1 Tbsp soy sauce

1 Tbsp roasted sesame seeds

Slice off the stubby base of the bok choy from the white, thick bottoms.  Slice the white stems away from the leafy tops.  Wash stems and chop  into 2 to 3 inch chunks, and set aside.  Wash the leafy part of the bok choy in a large bowl or salad spinner.  Shake off excess water and set aside.

Heat oil in a skillet over medium heat.  Add the sliced shallots and sauté  for 5-6 minutes until golden brown.  Remove from the pan with a slotted spoon and set aside.  If there is no oil left in the pan, drizzle in extra oil.  Add grated ginger and stir fry for about 15 seconds.  Add the bok chow stems and  sauté them for 2-3 minutes.  Add the leafy greens and stir fry for about 2 minutes until the green leaves start to wilt.  Add the mirin and soy sauce, stir briefly, and cover the pan.  Steam for 2 more minutes, then remove lid.  Stir for about 30 more seconds and remove from heat.  Top with fried shallots and roasted sesame seeds and serve.

Coming up this Month: 
 Blueberries
 Green Beans
 Scallions

 Thanks for joining us for the thirteenth season of the farm program, we are looking forward to a great season of fruits and vegetables. 

Scott Breneman
 Farm Manager 

Spring Planting, Opening Harvest, Shares Available

this is also on the Blog at: http://goodwillathomefieldsfarm.blogspot.com/

Hello from the farm, 

Well, the beautiful heads of lettuce were transplanted by the thousands yesterday as were the scallions, which were on the heels of 10,000 onion plants.  It's a lively time at the farm, and we're all pleased to see these crops going into the ground and getting a great start.  The drying wind has given way to some showers and we are grateful for the moisture.  

 

Opening Weekend is the First full week of June:  June 7, 8 and 9

Hours are:  Thurs: 3-7  Friday 11-7 and Sat 9-1

Shares available: yes, we have shares available for this season.  Go to www.yourgoodwill.org/farm to sign up online.  Spread the word.   

If you would like to pick up a fruit share from North Star Orchard, go to www.northstarorchard.com to sign up and for more info. 

Other happenings around the farm: it's never dull here, we had the first run of the organic fertilizer hopper, which ran like a charm, have been working on a potato digger rig for the July potato crop, a harvest rack for holding bins of produce, mending broken and misaligned tools and equipment to name a few, in addition to the weeding and mulching which are mainstays of our farming :-) 

Your farmers

Hello Friends of the Farm!

We have come to look at these wonderful sunny days as another "bad weather" day. The sun, warm temps and windy conditions have been drying out our fields and we are grateful to finally see an April shower. The upside is that the dry weather has made great conditions for transplanting and preparing our soil for seeds. Carrots, cilantro, beets, lettuce and more should be sprouting up any day now.

Renaissance Farmer Scott has been fixing up leaky hydrants and has completed his first solo welding project. Way to go Scott! These days he can be spotted out in the fields driving Big Orange and pulling the transplanter behind him.

There has been a makeover in our blackberry and raspberry patch thanks to Del, Pat, Brian, Matt, John, Eric and Law Reh, who have been stripping back pesky weeds and dressing the beds up with fresh wood chips.

Ready, Set, Fertilize!

Bob McClure has been putting in lots of extra hours building a custom designed fertilizer dispenser that works with our mulch layer. Yesterday we had our first test run and it passed with flying colors. This allows us to add organic fertilizer to our fields at the same time as we lay down drip irrigation and plastic mulch. Thank you Bob for sharing your skill, your time and your ingenuity!!! We will soon be putting this to good use as we prepare to plant thousands of onion plants.

Bob displays the new Fertilizer Box



Getting a Farm Education

Shareholder and Millersville Professor Kendra Saunders brought the members of her "Food for Thought" class out for a tour of the farm this week. They are studying the impact of the American diet and got their hands dirty planting broccoli and cabbage plants into the field. We appreciated their fresh perspective on farm work and their fun energy. Thank you Kendra and team.

Thanks to Brandon and Abbby of Susquehanna Farm School for kicking off the season with a great workshop on Tuesday night. From worm composting to perennial greens to mushrooms, these farmers have great techniques that can work in your home garden or on a larger scale. Thank you for sharing your time and knowledge with us.

Could Goodwill help your small business?

If you are interested in learning more about how Goodwill works with local businesses to provide services like shredding, collating, labeling and hand packaging, please contact Phil Metzler at pmetzler@yourgoodwill.org or 717-232-1831.

Opening Harvest Coming Soon

Looking forward to seeing everyone back at the farm for our first harvest on June 7, 8 and 9! It will be here before we know it.


Your Farmers,
Scott, Kim, Law Reh and Elizabeth      

Hello Friends of the Farm!

 Another week goes quickly by at the farm, but your farmers are stepping quickly, planting over 6,000 feet of potatoes, 4,000 pepper plants, chipping brush, mulching the berries, putting up stakes and trellis for snow peas and much more.Never a dull moment, as we also had some plumbing repairs, worked on a possible potato digger conversion,  making an organic fertilizer precision dropper, a harvest rack for the tractor, concrete work, sawmill and wood splitting operation, field tillage, major landscaping work, and chased an escaped herd of zebras runing though the farm (ok, one of those is inaccurate and pertains to the day of April. ) 

Shares available for the 2012 season  If you know anyone who is interested in our food from the fields, here is a link where they can sign up for a share:http://goodwillathomefieldsfarm.csasignup.com/members

Fruit Shares from North Star Orchard:

If you haven't heard, we will be a pick up site for a fruit share from North Star Orchard. Ike and Lisa are long-time fruit growers and know their stuff, and often appear in regional and national publications. If you'd like to receive their tree fruit starting in mid-summer, go to http://www.northstarorchard.com/csa.php to sign up or learn more about their outstanding peaches, apples, Asian pears, plums and other tree fruit.  

Looking forward to our first harvest, only a few short months away. Thank you for supporting our farm!Your Farmers

Notes from the Farm: Spring planting

You can also view this newsletter at our blog
 http://goodwillathomefieldsfarm.blogspot.com/
 

Hello Friends of the Farm!
 
Happy Spring!  We are taking advantage of this glorious spring weather and have been able to get a head start on the season, as everyone else in Lancaster county has been, too.    We are so excited to be growing vegetables for you and your family! 

Scott planted the peas on Tuedsay and today's team project for the trainees is putting in the potatoes.  What a change from the cold, wet spring we had last year.  We are loving the warm weather and being able to get into the fields so early.  Even though it feels like May, we are keeping in mind that we are still in March and there could be another freeze in our future.  
Farmer Scott uses Big Orange to prepare the fields for spring planting with the chisel plow

 

While most of the farm team was off site for the winter, Scott was busy planning for the new season.  He worked with our Development Team, Butch Bixler and Bob McClure, engineering ways to make our work  more effective and efficient.  We have a new hydrant serving the fields, new spouting near the distribution area to redirect rain fall, a fertilization system to work with our mulch layer and a harvest platform in the works.  Thank you Scott, Bob and Butch.  Everything is working great!!!    

The greenhouse is coming back to life with seedlings and in the field the garlic is bursting out of the ground with vigor.   We are pleased to have 10 Farmer Trainees returning for another season, and look forward to having some new folks out at the farm this year, too.  Mike, Cameron and Del have been working hard getting wood chips ready and Brad and Scott C are busy planting potatoes.  


Workshop at the Farm   Thanks to Kim Stoltzfus for coordinating this!

 Introduction to Beyond Organic: Methods of Susquehanna Farm School. Brandon and Abby, of Susquehanna Farm School, will share their experience homesteading along the banks of the Little Conestoga while specifically focusing in on their small scale and sustainable agricultural practices.    Presented by Brandon and Abby of Susquehanna Farm School Tuesday, April 17th, 6 - 8pm  Goodwill at Homefields Farm, Millersville  Class is free, donations accepted    www.SusquehannaFarmSchool.org
 
Shares available for the 2012 season  If you know anyone who might me interested, here is a link where they can sign up for a share:http://goodwillathomefieldsfarm.csasignup.com/members

Looking forward to our first harvest, only a few short months away. Thank you for supporting our farm!

Your Farmers, 
Scott, Kim, Law Reh and Elizabeth  

Hello from the farm, 

We're excited to have a fruit share available to pick up at the farm from North Star Orchard this season, and want to give you more information and links for learning more and signing up. 

 

North Star Orchard has been growing heirloom and unique varieties of tree fruits for twenty years, and has offered a very popular CSA Fruit Share for 9 years. The Fruit Share consists of an 8.5 pound bag of unique and high-quality varieties of fruit each week for 12 or 15 weeks, whichever you choose when you become a member. Fruit selections include peaches, nectarines, plums, pears, Asian pears, and apples, starting the first week of August.

You can learn about the Fruit Share and sign up for membership directly on the North Star Orchard website: http://www.northstarorchard.com/csa_fruit.php
Members of the Fruit Share will receive their bag of fruit each week (starting in August) when you come to the Goodwill at Homefields farm to get your vegetables, and will receive an email from North Star Orchard each week detailing the varieties which are in the share.  A slide show of their fruit is at:http://www.flickr.com/photos/northstarorchard/sets/72157628765638177/

A bit about North Star Orchard: 

North Star Orchard, owned by Ike and Lisa Kerschner, is a small diversified farm in Chester County specializing in unique varieties of high-quality fruit. Ike and Lisa sell the farm's produce directly to consumers at area producer-only farmers' markets and through their CSA; they do not sell through wholesale channels. Their farm is best known for its abundance of apple varieties (now numbering in the hundreds!), unique Asian pears, and the high standard of quality in all of its fruits and vegetables.
Ike and Lisa have always been interested in both growing unusual varieties of fruit and vegetables and in using the newest ideas in production, training and trellising. They are highly concerned about the environment, and work hard to farm in a manner as sustainable and safe as possible.

Fruit Share members have said:

"On behalf of our family, I just wanted to say thank you. My 5-year-old has never eaten as many plums as he has this year. The quality of the fruit from your farm is outstanding." -2010 Member Stephanie

"Your fruits are wicked good!" -2005 Member Shelly R.

"Our family would like to thank NSO for the phenomenal Fruit Share this summer. It gets better every year. My son asked me what was 'wrong' with the apples we got from the store....priceless!" - 2010 Member Anna C.

"I wanted to thank you for such a wonderful season of delicious fruit! Our whole family is in the habit of eating fresh fruit now, it's so wonderful! My four young kids inhaled your pears, peaches, apples and plums like you wouldn't believe (well, maybe you would believe). So many thanks to YOU and your wonderful crew who made all of this possible. We'll definitely be back next year!!" -2006 Member Carrie E.

Looking forward to a great harvest season.  Fresh salads, berries and veggies will be here before we know it.

Scott 

February Farm update: what's happening, King Corn, and what you Love about the farm

Hello from the farm,

The planting season is quickly approaching and we've got a bunch of new ideas and inspiration for it in part thanks to the farm conference this week at Hershey.  The sessions on organic growing used to be few and sparsely attended, but now all are pretty much packed.  Look for us to be experimenting with fabric for weed suppression in the pick your own field and possibly unrolling round bales for weed suppressing mulch between the vegetable beds.

Free Farming Movie:  King Corn

Can a farming movie be fascinating?  Yes.  As of last check, when my wife and I watched it two weeks ago,  King Corn is available to watch for free at hulu.com.  It follows the adventures of two city boys who head to Iowa to grow an acre of corn and find out what modern corn farming is like.  Funny, sobering and educational all in one, it makes you appreciate local and sustainable all the more.

What you Love about the farm:

(as we prepare for the new season, these are the things that shareholder wrote about last season--it's a great encouragement to us)

• Exposed me to veggies I don't normally eat. Discovered how much better fresh veggies are than frozen.
   
• Having my children experience a farm, knowing that their food does not come from Giant, and that someone is working hard to produce this food.
   
• Being connected with the land and the people who grow our food feels natural and reassuring, more like how I grew up. Providing meaningful work for people, growing more food and PRESERVING Lancaster County farmland makes me a shareholder for life. Think about selling lifeshares...
   
• Great people, fantastic food that is free of chemicals & pesticides, pleasant surroundings
   
• Friendly staff
   
• Truly enjoyed the experience of coming out to Millersville once a week, especially enjoyed picking the flowers and other pick your own.
   
• bringing the kids out to see, harvest, eat, and enjoy  picking stuff ourselves
   
• My kids experience visiting a farm each week
   
• Having a sense of community with the farm staff and families participating in the CSA. The hands-on family friendly atmosphere is admirable and refreshing!
   
• Well, you all just rock.
   
• The fact that I don't have to go shopping as often and don't have to decide what to buy. :-)
   
• Forces variety in our diet and teaches us to be satisfied and creative with what we get. I grew up with a garden, and now that I live in the city, it gives me the benefit of having a garden without having to have the land for it. I also like that it keeps me in touch with the seasons, the weather, and what's going on. In a strange way I like it when we get too much eggplant or too few potatoes, because then I get to ask why, and find out what's going on at the farm and in the county.
   
• Recipes and serving suggestions for unfamiliar things like Napa cabbage, bok choy, and garlic scapes (I really LOVED the pesto).
   
• Knowing my food is grown locally and sustainably, and by the world's most comprehensively amazing Farmer!
   
• We love the "iron chef" challenge to find tasty ways to clean out the crisper bins!
   
• The physical beauty of the farm, especially berry-picking on cool summer mornings.
• Showing my daughter how important it is to eat well and know where our food comes from. The FLOWERS! Oh, how I LOVED picking my own flowers!
   
• great variety!
   
• Friendly farmers and workers ready to answer questions.
   
• I like going out into the PYO fields. 

Soon the little sprouts will be popping up by the thousands, as we anticipate sun-warmed strawberries and tomatoes, green beans and edamame and farm fresh salads once again.

See you soon,

Your farmers