Tag Archives: csa

Autumn Lentil Potato Soup

November 2, 2015

November can’t be official until a hearty soup is simmering in a crock pot all day long on a Sunday. Inspired by quirky fingerling potatoes from Delvin Farms & a multi-lentil “autumn” blend from Whole Foods, I quickly threw together the ingredients and have been enjoying the rest of my day not in the kitchen.

Fingerling potatoes are a great source of vitamins, minerals, and dietary fiber. I left the skin on for taste, texture, and Vitamin-C (a much needed vitamin in gloomy-autumn). Delvin Farms grows organically, so when tossing all of these raw ingredients into my crock pot, I can rest assured I’m not simmering anything but true goodness!

INGREDIENTS:
+ 1/2 small yellow onion, diced
+ 2 garlic cloves, minced
+ 2 1/2 cups fingerling potatoes, sliced into coins
+ 1 turnip, cubed
+ 1 fresh rosemary sprig, finely chopped
+ 3-5 fresh thyme sprigs, finely chopped
+ 1-2 celery stalks, diced
+ 1 cup autumn blend lentils (or a variety of lentils: French Green, Petite Crimson, Golden, Black Beluga, Spaish Pardina, and Ivory White).
+ 6 cups vegetable stock
+ Salt, pepper and/or all purpose spice
+ 1 tbs olive oil

METHOD:
Salute the diced onion and minced garlic in a small skillet with olive oil. Place in a crock pot, turned on “High” and add ALL additional ingredients, diced/chopped/cubed! Go enjoy your day and come back to eat in 5-6 hours!

— Amanda Barnhart is an art director, food enthusiast, and cat lover. She curates & photographs new recipes weekly on her vegetarian food blog, PlatedColor.com. You can see more photos and read about this recipe there.

Fall is for Organic Green Beans

September 18, 2015

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Fall is for organic green beans! As the nights cool down, the days shorten and humidity starts to leave us, the green beans on the farm seem to explode. September and October bring some of the best beans of the season, flavorful, crisp, plump and dark green. “SNAP, SNAP” is the sound of the fresh green beans. With little insect pressure and moisture in the ground, the beans will take off in size and double every 5-7 days. Normally, we harvest the beans three times a week and are included in our CSA shares as well as farmers market’s produce assortment. If your looking for purchasing organic green beans, check out our farmers markets page and pay us a visit in September and October.

Delvin Farms CSA Delivers to Nashville

July 22, 2015

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CSA (Community Supported Agriculture)– Supporting Farm and Community. Delvin Farms Organic CSA is Nashville’s largest and one of the longest running CSA programs. Our CSA delivers freshly harvested produce to over fourteen pickup locations in Nashville area from Mid May through the end of October. Why CSA? It it for me? Read on.

July CSA box. Blackberries, tomatoes, garlic, cherry tomatoes, kale, cabbage and potatoes

Summer is in the air and as it was once said “A young man’s fancy turns to love”. But lately, with more and more community awareness of the importance of buying local, spring not only brings images of young love, it brings images of sweet, sweet strawberries. It brings images of freshly harvested vegetables plucked at the peak of maturity in the early morning dew from a local farm right in your own community. Those tantalizing thoughts then turn to investing your food dollar into a local farm through a CSA program.

CSA is so much more than just “supporting” a local farm, it supports the community. Think of it as your food dollar at work to keep communities alive. Much of your CSA dollar is reinvested locally on employee wages as well as countless community businesses supported by local farms. Land purchases, farm equipment, fuel, utilities, seed companies, local Farmers CO-OP, tire companies (have you ever priced just one huge tractor tire?) truck purchases, truck rentals, organic fertilizers such as fish emulsion, worm castings, seeds for cover crops like wheat, rye, vetch and yes, even sunflowers are purchased by farmers. When you purchase your CSA, farmers in turn use their dollar in the community, supporting local businesses and employees of that said business.

Running a farm is a delicate balancing act which requires careful scheduling, knowledge of the weather, botanical expertise, labor management and a sundry of other skills. CSA provides a living connection between farms and the communities they serve.

At Delvin Farms our commitment is growing the best quality, certified organic fruits and vegetables and delivering them to our members at the peak of freshness, packed with nutrition supplied through our rich, nutrient dense soil. There is a lot that goes into a CSA box, but the most important thing is the care that goes into land and the commitment to grow your food in the most healthy, environmentally sound soil without pesticides, herbicides or harmful chemicals. These are two things that we have cared deeply about since the first day that our first CSA share went out, and it will be the two things that will be our top priority for years to come.

Ready to Join? SIGN UP HERE NOW.

Juliet Tomato is Summertime Favorite

July 6, 2015

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We grow a lot of organic tomatoes on Delvin Farms but by far one of the favorites among our family and customers alike is the Juliet Tomato. With a rich tomato flavor but sweet and small seeded, the part plum, part roma, part cherry tomato is so versatile in recipes.

Juliets are a meaty, firm textured tomato with just the right amount of sweetness to add them to salads, salsas, and spaghetti sauces. Eaten simply, we enjoy them sliced in half with a little salt or even with fresh mozzarella and basil. Like a mini roma, they are perfect on sandwiches or a toasted panini.

One of the first tomatoes we harvest in early June, Juliets are with us all summer and will be included in our organic CSA shares and all of our markets till early fall. From a growers perspective, we love the juliet because of the volume of tomatoes it produces on vigorous , indeterminate vines. Plants can grow in our high tunnels to lengths of 10,12,15 feet long and produce hundreds of blooms that turn into clusters of small grape size tomatoes. The fruits are crack resistant and generally all sized uniformly. The plants are the longest producing plants for us and will often keep putting on flowers and fruits well into the fall.

Juliet Tomatoes Grown in our Tunnels can grow to 15′ in length and produce tomatoes for months.

First Spring Organic CSA Share 2015

April 23, 2015

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In your first organic CSA share for 2015 we are offering a freshly harvested selection of spring favorites.

Spring share, strawberries, onions, lettuce, sweet potatoes, juice, kale, spinach

Lettuce

Green Onions

Siberian Kale

Spinach

Strawberries

Asparagus

Sweet Potatoes (from our fall crop)

Quart of Tomato Juice- From last summer’s crop. All ingredients from our farm, except the sea salt!

Spinach Soufflé

1 to 1 1/4 cup spinach, chopped
1/2 cup onion, chopped
2 eggs
1/2 cup shredded cheese
1/2 cup sour cream
1 tablespoon flour
2 TBL butter, softened
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 tsp. black pepper
Mix spinach and onion together in bowl and set aside.
In separate bowl, mix eggs, cheese, sour cream, flour, butter, salt , pepper.
Add spinach and onion and mix well. Place in a 11/2 quart greased casserole dish. Bake at 350 for about 25 minutes, or until lightly browned on top.

Sesame Kale

2 cloves garlic, minced
1bunch kale
2 teaspoons sesame seed oil
2 tablespoons water
1 teaspoon soy sauce
2 teaspoons toasted sesame seeds
Salt and pepper, if desired

Mince the garlic cloves. Wash kale. Remove and discard the stems from the kale and tear it into bite-size pieces. Save the stems for another use, such as vegetable stock.

Heat the sesame seed oil in the skillet over medium-low heat. Add the minced garlic to the hot oil and sauté for about 20 seconds. Add the kale and water to the garlic and oil, and cover the skillet.

After 1 minute, stir the kale, then re-cover. After 1-2 more minutes, when the kale is wilted, stir in the soy sauce and sesame seeds. If desired, add salt and/or pepper to taste.

Ice Quakes to Strawberries

April 23, 2015

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We finally made it through one of the coldest winters we have seen in quite a while. All of the beautiful snowfalls that we greatly anticipated, just brought tenths of inches or even worse, ice.

Ice Drips from the dormant organic blackberry vines. The cold weather and ice of February encapsulated the entire farm

One evening some of the most beautiful and largest snowflakes I have ever seen filled the darkness. The child in us all makes us stop and marvel at the quiet beauty that comes with snow. The stillness and peace falls over land along with the snow. That peaceful silence was suddenly interrupted with a bang. It sounded as if a door had been slammed, which alarmed us. We felt sure that we had an intruder. Once again, a loud bang. If this was an intruder, he needed another line of work, for he was a noisy one for sure. We checked all the doors, and listened to several more sounds which seemed to explode in all areas and continued through the night. The mystery was solved on the morning news. Ice Quakes? We had never heard them or heard of them until this winter. Water in the ground freezes and expands, the ice and ground around it crumble and create loud booms. Who Knew?

Strawberries grown in our Haygrove tunnels are earliest to season and make their way into the CSA this week.

Today winter still wants to claim part of spring. The rain has the fields laden with water, so much so that no work can be done without doing more harm than good. Despite the cold, despite ice quakes, the signs of spring are all around us. The flowers are blooming, the smell of freshly cut grass is in the air, the trees are budding and the sound of tree frogs is filling the night air. However, the most important sign of spring is that the STRAWBERRIES are in! The sweet smell and flavor of the strawberry melts the ice quake memory, warms the soul with the promise of spring and delights our senses with the promise of more to come. Goodbye ice quakes, welcome strawberry spring!

Cindy

Strawberries Mark the Beginning of the Season!

April 21, 2015

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Strawberries always mark the beginning of the growing season for us on Delvin Farms. Our organic strawberries are extra large, plump, deep red and delicious. Voted best berries by taste at many of the six farmers markets we attend, they are by far our customer’s favorite fruit we grow on the farm. During the peak of the season we harvest between 2500-3000 quarts of berries each week from mid May to early June. We have become well known for having some of the

How do we grow our Berries?

Strawberry growing begins in the fall with the purchase of 35,000 organic plug plants. We grow two types of berries, Chandler and CamaRosa, both of which are June bearing varieties meaning they fruit and harvest over an eight week period in the spring and early summer. Raised beds covered with a plastic mulch and centerline driptape provide the perfect conditions for growing big plants with lots of berries. The berries are

What makes our Berries taste so good?

That is a hard question to answer but I’m convinced it is from growing in a living, organic soil full of microbes, organic matter, micro and macro nutrients alike. We water the berries heavily during the fruiting season using the water conserving drip irrigation system. Most importantly, the berries are allowed to fully ripen on the plant before we harvest them. The mid May heat, sunshine, organic soil and water are the perfect combination to create a sweet, juicy strawberry’ie taste.

Come get your Delvin Farms strawberries at any of our farmers markets starting end of April til early June or secure your order by signing up for our CSA program. The 2015 season is shaping up to be a great year for the berries with big plants, lots of blooms and mild temperatures. Come early to the markets as they sell out fast !!