What we’re getting in our vegetable boxes

We can expect to find some tomatoes and a cauliflower among the contents of this week’s veg boxes.

These vegetables come from Richard Hore, our new supplier at Rest Harrow, Trebetherick (between Daymer Bay and Rock).  They’re not grown to organic principles, but are freshly picked and have clocked up few food miles – barely five in fact.

The potatoes and onions are our own contribution to the harvest.  They’ve been grown by our volunteers on Camel Community Supported Agriculture’s two-acre plot at St Kew Highway. 

Our expert growers are providing the rest of the box contents.  Salad bags – Jane Mellowship, cucumber and curly parsley – Jeremy Brown, celery – Mark Norman. 

See this week’s Recipe No 8 – Braised celery

This week’s boxes

We are enjoying some more of our recently-harvested onions in Camel Community Supported Agriculture’s veg boxes this week. 

The Swiss chard, beetroot and potatoes also come from our own plot at St Kew Highway. 

Our expert growers have provided most of the rest of the vegetables.  Jeremy Brown cultivated some of the cucumbers and the flat-leaved parsley.  Jane Mellowship supplied the salad packs.  Mark Norman grew the courgettes and the remaining cucumbers, which feature in our Recipe No 7 – Cucumber raita.

We have a new local supplier – Polmorla Market Garden, Wadebridge – which provided the freshly-picked runner beans.  Unlike the rest of the box contents, these are not grown organically.

Oops!

The boxes also contain bunches of celeriac leaves, picked in ignorance as they were mistaken for mature flat-leaved parsley. 

These could be used as a garnish on salads or soup.  However they are rather coarse and have a distinctive, strong flavour.

It emerges that I may have caused irrevocable damage to our celeriac crop as a result of this inadvertent act of horticultural vandalism.  This is one of the downsides of relying on enthusiastic amateurs like me. 
S-o-o-o embarrassing!

Seasonal recipe No 6 – Tabbouleh (bulgar wheat salad)

Bulgar wheat salad has an earthy taste and uses an abundance of parsley, which features in Camel Community Supported Agriculture’s veg boxes this week.  This well-tried version of tabbouleh comes from Claudia Roden’s classic A Book of Middle Eastern Food.

Soaking time: 30 minutes
Preparation time: about 15 minutes

Serves 6

Ingredients
250g fine bulgar wheat
3 tablespoons finely chopped spring onions
Salt and black pepper
About one and a half teacups finely chopped flat-leaved parsley
3 tablespoons finely chopped fresh mint
4 tablespoons olive oil
4 tablespoons lemon juice
Cooked vine leaves, raw lettuce or tender cabbage leaves (to serve)

Method
Soak the bulgar wheat in water for about half an hour before preparing the salad.  It will expand enormously.  Drain and squeeze out as much moisture as possible with your hands.  Spread out to dry further on a cloth.

Mix the bulgar wheat with the chopped onions, squeezing with your hands to crush the onions so that their juices penetrate the wheat.  Season to taste with salt and pepper.  Add the parsley, mint, olive oil and lemon juice, and mix well.  Taste to see if more salt, pepper or lemon are required.  The salad should be distinctly lemony.

Tabbouleh is traditionally served in individual plates lined with boiled vine leaves, or raw lettuce or cabbage leaves.  People scoop the salad up with more leaves, served in a separate bowl beside it.

Notes
Claudia Roden adds: “As with most dishes, the preparation is highly individual.  Quantities of ingredients vary with every family, but parsley is always used abundantly.  This is a great Lebanese favourite.”  More about Claudia Roden.

Compare her relaxed approach to Yotam Ottolenghi, chef/patron at Ottolenghi in London.  He insists there’s a right way and a wrong way to make this refreshing summer salad.  Click here to find out what he claims is the right way to do it.

Click here to see all the recipes that Camel CSA members have recommended so far.

Seasonal recipe No 5 – Courgette frittata

A quick and easy recipe from Patience Gray’s Honey from a Weed. Tasty too!

Preparation time: 5 minutes
Cooking time: about 20 minutes

Serves 2

Ingredients
3 or 4 courgettes
1 small onion
olive oil
4 eggs
parsley
1 dessertspoon pane grattugiato (crushed crumbs from oven-dried bread)
1 dessertspoon grated parmesan
salt, pepper

Method
Wash, dry and dice the courgettes and chop the onion. Pour a little olive oil into an omelette pan, and fry the courgettes and onion on a quick fire until they brown, tossing them often, adding a minimum of salt.

Beat the eggs in a bowl with a little salt, pepper, some finely chopped parsley, and add the pane grattugiato and the grated parmesan. Pour the egg mixture over the browned contents of the pan and reduce the heat.

When the frittata is almost set, take a large plate, lid or board, cover the pan with it and reverse the frittata on to it. Then slide it back into the pan. Both sides should be brown. Serve at once, or let it cool and eat it on a picnic.

Notes
You can make a quantity of pane grattugiato (a good way of using up odd bits of bread) and it will keep well in a jam jar.

Have a look at these recipe suggestions on the eat the seasons website.

If you’ve got a favourite courgette recipe you’d like to share with the rest of us, please insert it as a comment on this post.

Click here to see all the recipes that Camel CSA members have recommended so far.

This week’s share of the harvest

Our veg boxes are tops!

We’ve had an enthusiastic response from our members to Camel Community Supported Agriculture’s first vegetable boxes.  This is despite some teething problems with distribution.

Tony says:

Our first standard veg box

“The box looks fantastic! We’re looking forward to next week’s already.”

John and Cathy are delighted with the quality:

“The cucumber which was sweet and fresh and the lettuce and onion we used in a salad.”

They like the wide and interesting variety of vegetables and have found new ways of using them:

 ”The beet greens we cooked almost like a spinach or spring greens and had with fish - better than spinach – along with broad beans and potatoes.

 

The beets will be roasted and eaten with a lamb casserole with the rest of the onion, turnips and courgettes and we will try your broad bean soup.  Nothing wasted.”

In the end, both small and standard boxes contained potatoes, broad beans, beetroot, turnip, cucumber and onions.  Standard boxes had a salad pack and small boxes a lollo rosso lettuce.  In addition, standard boxes contained Swiss chard and courgettes.  There wasn’t enough time to pick parsley.

We have a glut of broad beans, so each box was given an extra £4-worth at shop prices!  We don’t yet have our own poly tunnel, so our three expert growers – Jane, Jeremy and Mark – supplied the salad bags, lettuce, courgettes and cucumber.

New team

Grateful thanks to our volunteer picking and packing team of expert grower Mark Norman, Mike H, Penny, Robert and Trish.  Mark says:

” It’s great to see some new faces.  I hope the boxes going out means that we’ll see even more volunteers next week.

 

As first boxes they are excellent.  I hope we can keep the variety going.”

If you would like to volunteer, either picking and packing or planting and cultivating, just turn up on a Friday or Sunday between 10 a.m. and 12 noon.

Compost bin

This Sunday we constructed a compost bin from wooden pallets lashed together with binder twine.  At long last we have somewhere to dump the annual weeds, unwanted plant tops and thinnings.

A great deal of effort was devoted to the backbreaking job of cutting down the remaining dock leaves to stop them going to seed and spreading all over the site.  We were grateful there were so many of us to share this potentially soul-destroying task!

We weeded the Swiss chard, carrots and brussels sprouts.  We planted more radishes to replace the ones which had gone to seed in the hot weather.

A big thank you to expert growers Jane and Mark N and Charlotte, Danny, Ian, Mark M, Mike H, Mike S.

Our first veg boxes

We’ve done it - we’re starting to eat our own food! 

More than 15 Camel Community Supported Agriculture members receive their first vegetable boxes on Friday 3 July. 

A great deal of human effort has gone into providing these first fruits of our labour.  It’s hard to believe that we only started preparing our site at the beginning of March and sowed the first seeds just a few weeks later.

Our first share of the harvest will contain: - 

• broad beans
• potatoes
• onions
• beetroot
• Swiss chard
• a bunch of curly or flat-leaved parsley
• turnips and radishes – possibly
• green salad

We’ve grown the first eight items ourselves at St Kew Highway.  The salad leaves are being provided by Jane Mellowship, one of our expert growers, who has her own vegetable plot at New Polzeath.

Hard work

We’ve made enormous strides since March – entirely as a result of the dedicated volunteer labour provided by members and expert growers.  Some people said we would never manage it, but we have proved that we can.

Many hours of hard work have gone into preparing the 40-metre long growing beds, spreading compost, digging up dock leaves, sowing seeds, planting out seedlings, hoeing and an enormous amount of hand weeding.  We’re grateful to our expert growing team and all the volunteers who have turned up on Sunday mornings – rain or shine.

Last Sunday we thinned out and hand weeded the parsnips, weeded the Swiss chard, spread compost and dug up yet more dock leaves that were threatening to go to seed. 

A big thanks to expert grower Mark Norman, to members Charlotte, Diana, Mike H and Mike S, and to visitors Donna and Marianne.

Another team of volunteers will be picking and packing the boxes every Friday morning.  If you’d like to be included on the rota, please contact Mark Norman or phone Antonina at St Kew Harvest. 

Box collection

 

“Your name will be on your box, please take your own box and anyone else’s that you are delivering.  Remember to give us feedback as soon as possible.

 

A special thank you to to Penny and Robert Manders and to Mike Haywood for volunteering to help Mark with the first harvest and packing.

 

Happy eating!”

Feedback on box content and any queries about veg box administration should be sent to Cathy at thefarm@bodminmoor.co.uk

Jobs for Sunday 14 June

There’s a great deal to do at Camel Community Supported Agriculture this Sunday as the growing season continues apace.

As expert grower Jeremy Brown explains: -

There are runner beans to plant out and French beans to sow.  We also need to sow some more rows of carrots.

Everything needs weeding – the carrots (yet again!), the parsley and celeriac…  But the onions are okay. 

The early potatoes also need weeding and ridging up.  The peas need supporting and tying up.

Just turn up to join the team on our site at St Kew Highway between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. 

If you can’t manage Sunday, why not come to our new mid-week volunteer session every Thursday morning at the same time?  Or ring Jeremy Brown on 07971762227 if you’d like to help out another day.

Mid-summer celebration for members

Don’t forget it’s our mid-summer barbeque next Saturday 20 June in St Mabyn from 6 p.m. onwards.  Please contact Charlotte Barry if you can come at charlotte.barry@btinternet.com so we have an idea of how many people to expect. 

Everyone is asked to bring some food for the barbeque, a drink and a seasonal side dish or pudding.  Don’t forget to bring your own plate and cutlery as well!

They deserve a medal!

We’re having an extra mid-week volunteer session on Thursday as there’s so much work to do at Camel Community Supported Agriculture.  Charlotte, Kitty and Mike S have already put their names forward.

We need to plant out brassicas, celeriac, parsley and spring onion plants and, if we have time, sow sweetcorn and squash seeds.

If you’re able to give a hand, we’ll be on the site this Thursday 28 May between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m.  Click here for directions. 

If you can’t make it on Thursday morning, why not give expert grower Jeremy Brown a ring on 07971762227 to find out when else it might be convenient to help out.

Medals all round

Last Sunday’s team deserves special praise.  Everyone got down on their knees and hand weeded. 

The onion, shallot and Swiss chard beds were comparatively easy to tackle, but weeding the carrots by hand was an exacting and extremely fiddly job. The air was blue at times.  We’ll savour every single one of those carrots when they appear in our weekly vegetable boxes!

Grateful thanks to volunteer expert growers Jane, Jeremy and Mark and to their willing helpers – Beverley, Cath, Carolyn, Charlotte, John, Kitty, Mike H and Mike S.

There’s so much effort going into preparing the first vegetable shares, which should start to be available in mid-June.  A lot of thought is being given to when and how they will be picked, packed and distributed.  

We’ll be working on the site as usual next Sunday from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.   Do come along and enjoy the fresh air and exercise.  It’s not all hard work.  It’s good company – and fun too.

Sunday jobs – Whitsun weekend

We need all the help we can get on Sunday.  The growing season has hit us with a vengeance at Camel Community Supported Agriculture .  Weeds are shooting up – they love this showery weather! 

Expert grower Jane Mellowship says: -

“On Sunday we have lots to get done. Brassica, celeriac, parsley and spring onion plugs need to be planted out, there’s sweetcorn and squash to sow and plenty of weeding too.

Hope to see you all then!”