What’s In The Box with Recipe Suggestions
Purple, Yellow or White Cauliflower: Store your cauliflower in your fridge crisper drawer inside a perforated bag. Alternatively, if you are not planning to use your cauliflower within the next week or two, you could cut the cauliflower into individual florets, blanch them for several minutes, ice bath them for another few minutes, and then dry them and put them on a tray in your freezer. Once they are frozen, you can take them off the tray and put them in a plastic bag back in the freezer. Below is a simple roasted cauliflower recipe that would be a great way to prepare frozen cauliflower florets.
Oven Roasted Cauliflower Florets
Broccoli or Romanesco: I just ate a great homemade sheet pan dish of broccoli and carrots from The Farm last week. I would highly recommend using the recipe below to make your own sheet pan dish with the broccoli and carrots from your box. We did not have it at the time, but you could also add cauliflower to the dish.
Porcelain Garlic: Porcelain Garlic forms a large white bulb that generally contains fewer cloves than most other garlic varieties, including our Italian Garlic variety, but its cloves are bigger than most other Garlic cloves. Porcelain Garlic is not considered to have much of a flavor difference than Italian Garlic, but their larger bulbs and looser skin makes for more efficient peeling.
Green Jalapeño Pepper: Though Red Jalapeños have a sweeter taste, Green Jalapeños provide a firmer crunch that can be a great feature if you are planning to bake them in a dish but wish for them to still provide a bit of crunch.
Stuffed Jalapeno Poppers Recipe
Red Serrano Pepper: An easy way to dry and preserve both Serrano and Jalapeño peppers is to air dry them on a string. I remember growing up how my father would spear our homegrown hot peppers with a needle and thread and then hang them in our pantry to dry. Over the next few months, he would remove them from the thread as he needed for cooking soups throughout the winter. If you are interested in doing this, it would be best to slice an opening in the Jalapeño and Serrano peppers so that their thicker flesh can fully dry.
Pretty & practical: Stringing hot peppers
Red and Yellow Onions: If you intend to make the broccoli and carrot sheet pan dish mentioned under the Broccoli section above, you could also enhance the flavor profile of the dish by adding slices of one of your onions. Another option for using this week’s onions could be to make these caramelized onion stuffed onions!
Green or Red Poblano Peppers: This week, make the traditional Mexican pasta dish Espagueti Verde (Green Spaghetti) using your Poblano Peppers. Due to the very mild spice of Poblano Peppers, this pasta dish will have a little heat to it.
Spaghetti Verde (Pasta with Poblano Sauce)
Salad Mix: This week embrace football season and use your Salad Mix to make some Quarterback Crunches. A Quarterback Crunch is essentially a taco with tortilla chips as the base instead of a tortilla, and then lettuce and other leafy greens and veggies layered on next. Lastly, add ranch, more chips and shredded cheese on top. Crush the top chips so that they are smaller bits and not full-sized tortilla chips. Then broil it in the oven and watch carefully to not burn the top layer of cheese and chips. This is a family recipe that my grandmother made in her restaurant so I don’t have a link or anything to a more detailed recipe.
Orange Carrots: Among the top vegetable-based desserts is of course Carrot cake, and there is good reason for that. Drawing from its natural sugars, its stored moisture and its deep orange color, Carrot Cake is a great stand-alone dessert, but it can also pair well with vanilla ice cream.
Bayou Belle Sweet Potatoes: This week we are sending Bayou Belle Sweet Potatoes in your box. Bayou Belle has light orange flesh and pinkish-red skin, and it is sweeter than the Purple Splendor that we sent out last week. To learn more about Bayou Belle and the other Sweet Potato Varieties grown at Harmony Valley Farm, check out last week’s newsletter on our website: HVF October 22, 2026 Newsletter
Magenta Lettuce and Green Romaine: In addition to the other leafy greens in this week’s box, there is the not-so-green Magenta Lettuce. Check out these recipes for ideas of how to prepare and eat lettuce that does not involve making a salad.
Lettuce Is So Much More than Salad. Here Are 10 More Ways to Eat It
Lacinato (Dinosaur Kale): Lacinato, or Dinosaur Kale, is a bluish-green kale that’s leaves are cupped and bumpy. You can store your kale in a plastic bag in the refrigerator, or you can make kale chips with salt and parmesan sprinkled on-top and then keep them in a Tupperware container in your refrigerator.
Baby Bok Choy: Baby Bok Choy can be eaten raw in salads and slaws, as well as eaten in stews. In Korea, Baby Bok Choy is put in Kimchi, which you could make along with the Artesian Radish from this week’s box. You can store your Baby Bok Choy for up to 5 days wrapped in a damp cloth in your crisper drawer.
Artesia Daikon Radish: You will have several Artesia Daikon Radishes in this week’s box. Check out the Feature Vegetable Section below to learn more about Artesia!
Feature Vegetable: Artesia Daikon Radish
We grow a number of radish varieties, and among those we grow several Daikon Radish varieties, and amidst our Daikon varieties we grow the Artesia Daikon Radish. The Artesia Daikon look quite a bit different from the White Daikon Radish that we grow. Artesia Daikon have bright red skin and their inner flesh is also a bright red, but also often contains blended pink and white streaks. Their inner flesh is similar to Beauty Heart Radish’s inner flesh, but Artesia’s flesh is a little darker. Artesia Daikon are half to even one third the length of White Daikon and are roughly the same width of about 2 – 2 ½ inches. Artesia Daikon are a similar size to Beauty Heart Radishes, though Artesia can be bit longer and Beauty Heart can be a bit wider. These Artesia Daikon are generally a bit sweeter than White Daikon and often lack the spice that Red Table Radishes and many other radish varieties possess, such as our Black Spanish Radishes.
The Artesia Daikon was developed by Asia Seed Co. predominantly for its fast development and visual appeal. It is also believed that the company developed it in response to the general market’s trend toward “healthier” food, as the Artesia Radish is high in anthocyanins. According to the federal research agency: National Institutes of Health, anthocyanins have been shown to lower blood pressure, improve blood vessel dilation, enhance memory performance and language fluency, and many other health benefits. It is unknown when Asia Seed Co. developed Artesia Daikon, but it is certainly a young radish variety since the company was only founded in January of 1992 in South Korea.
The predominant market for Artesian Daikon is still in South Korea, where it is commonly used in making Dongchimi, or Winter Kimchi. Kimchi is a traditional dish in Korea that is comprised of salted and fermented vegetables, mainly cabbage and radishes. Making Kimchi involves combining salt-rubbed cabbage and or radishes with, garlic, Onions, and ginger into a salt brine, and allowing it to ferment for several days. See Feature Recipe #1: Radish Water Kimchi below for the full ingredient list and instructions on how to make Dongchimi. Artesia Daikon are also often used in cooking the same way as White Daikon are, with stir-frying and roasting being some of the predominant cooking methods used.
If you are looking to store your Artesia Radishes for later use, leave them unwashed and remove their leaves. Make sure when you remove the leaves that you make the cutting point at the leaf stems just before the root bulb begins, and not at the start of the root bulb itself. Put the Artesia Radish bulbs into an air-sealed container or plastic bag and then place them in your refrigerator. They can last several weeks if stored in this manner.
Farm Update
Dear CSA Members and Friends,
This has been a challenging year on the farm in many ways. Even so, many of you told us how delicious and beautiful the produce has been, and how much variety you’ve found in your boxes-with more than ten different vegetables in each one. Your kind words are a boost to all of us, and we’re grateful that you took the time to share them.
One of the reasons that this has been a difficult year is because of my health. In May, I was diagnosed with lung cancer, and I have just recently completed my chemo and radiation treatments. Rafael, Kelly, and team did an amazing job of running the farm while I was dealing with the side effects of the treatments. The doctors are optimistic that the cancer was caught early and that the treatments provided a cure. I am optimistic, as well, and am looking forward to being back and more involved with the farm the rest of this season and beyond.
Other challenges have been due to personnel changes. Andrea Yoder left the farm in May of 2025, but she has been a huge support for me recently. She was a powerhouse who took responsibility for many aspects of farm management. While we miss her, we wish her well in her new ventures. Our bookkeeper, Kelly left us as of October 1st after 16 years of support of HVF. Many of you had contact with her over the years and she stepped up to carry on with some of the responsibilities that Andrea had in addition to maintaining the bookkeeping work. While we have hired a new bookkeeper and other staff, it takes time for new people to learn the many details involved in running a diversified farm and a CSA. We hope you will be patient and understanding with us all through this process.
And, as everyone is aware, costs have risen in nearly every aspect of our lives, including farming. Seed prices were up 15-20% last spring, fuel costs now double, everything we buy is up!
This has led to belt tightening beyond what we are typically prepared for. All of these rising costs will likely require us to raise our CSA price for next year. We know that price matters, and we’ll continue working to provide good value to our members.
I am so pleased and proud of how Rafael, his two oldest children, Adrian age 19 and Jimena 21 have grown into being a major part of our team and the rest of our farm team have stepped up to meet the challenges that this year has brought. I wanted you, our valued CSA members, to be aware of what we have been experiencing this year and to know that you are always upper most in our minds when we have difficult choices to make and challenges to meet.
We started CSA in 1993, 34 years of growing, packing and delivering boxes. We have weathered multiple floods, droughts and a pandemic without ever missing a box! Our CSA members were our best supporters and got us through some difficult times. That is why you are our top priority and will continue to be in the future.
I’ve only ever wanted to ’change the world’ in a positive way. This farm is my life’s work and I am both grateful and proud that it continues to provide healthy food for so many people in our neighboring communities.
