Produce: This is week 18 out of an 18 week season. Didn’t this last summer seem to just fly by? By the end of August, Jerry was exhausted. I told him to hang in there because before he knew it, it would be the end of the season. Now here we are! New crops this week are pie pumpkins and gourds. You will also receive spaghetti squash, potatoes, onions, carrots, turnips, green & red bell pepper, our main season tomatoes and Brandywine tomatoes.

Eggs & Bags: It is very important to bring your checkbooks to Distribution this week as well as any purple, red or white bags hanging out in your kitchen or garage. You will be asked by your Distributors to pay for the eggs you have received. They are sending me a report outlining how many shares were given to charities around your community as well as what you owe me for eggs. Distribution Centers keep track whether or not you have been returning your bags. Don’t be surprised if they know exactly how many you have not returned!

Fruit: First Fruit wanted to share with you their products they process and distribute to surrounding grocery stores. They felt bad that you did not receive as much high dollar items such as cherries and peaches. Even though they had one of their worst years ever, they sent us the best tasting fruit! I thought the quality and taste was amazing! Being a CSA member, I was astounded they were sending us pear & apple cider, peach jam and Honeycrisp applesauce! They have never done this before, god willing they don’t get a repeat of this last summer!

Survey: Last week I sent a hard copy of the survey to those members who get hard copies of the newsletter. For those of you who go to the blog to get the survey, here is the address of an online version. Please take a few moments to fill this out and let us know how we are doing! Thanks.

Click here to take survey

Winter Share: The Winter Share will begin the first Wednesday of November, the 2nd. The New Distribution Center for West Denver is located at 24th & Raleigh off of 26th and Sheridan. The New Distribution Center for Westminster, Broomfield and Louisville will be located at 115th and Sheridan off of Hwy 36 and 104th. Distribution Centers will get their list of Members picking up from their homes next week. You can expect a call from them with their home address, phone number, hours and what to do when you forget to pick up; by Sunday night the 30th of October. Call me ASAP if you want to switch Distribution Centers! For those of you who signed up for a Winter Share last spring, we will be continuing your egg order as it was filled this summer. If you do not want eggs, please call and let me know!

2012 Membership: 325 Members have confirmed they will be continuing with the farm in 2012. Thank you for your commitments! You will be seeing a statement of your charges by the middle of December. If you are only getting a summer share, a deposit of $175 will be due by January 31st. If you are ordering fruit, please add an addition $80 to that. If you are no longer interested in a Fruit Share or any other product listed on your statement, please let us know of your cancellation and we will take care of it right away! Beef, lamb or pork will not be included in the statement. You will need to fill out a new order form for these products.

Those of you who are undecided, you will get a renewal form in December. You will be asked to return that by mid January. If you cannot send a full deposit of $175, please send a minimum of $40 and plan on making monthly payments to pay for your share by the end of October or December if getting a Winter Share. Please write your intentions in the margins of the Sign-up Sheet.

2012 Animals: Anyone who has ordered a 2012 beef or lamb; your order has been cancelled. Jerry has decided to raise the rates for both. New Sign-up Forms will be mailed out to each person who has placed an order. If you were holding off ordering until you knew the new price, please give me a call and I will promptly mail you an order form! The new price for a quarter of beef is $500; up from $450. The new price for a whole lamb is $400; up from $350. Pork will remain the same at $500 for a whole hog. The reason for the increase is the cost of feed. We cannot raise enough feed for all the animals all year long. We have to supplement and that price has skyrocketed.

A Reflection: This has been a roller coaster ride for the farm this summer. Spring was wet, cold and full of hail. Then it got extremely warm come August and September (August being one of the hottest on record!). And then we had one of the prettiest falls I’ve seen. If it wasn’t for this beautiful long fall, several of our crops would not have matured and you wouldn’t have gotten them! What a nice benefit to offset our cold spring.

Several of you have never grown anything in Colorado before. I also know some of you are avid gardeners. CSA is a very hard thing to get used to. It is one of the hardest things you will do! You have to learn to cook with what you have instead of what you want. Learning the Colorado seasons and when produce is actually harvested and using them is new to half of you this year. You have to clean the produce yourself; which you should be doing anyway with your grocery store produce. (So many people are touching everything all day long, Yuck! Who knows where those hands have been!) But this is one of the cheapest ways to fill your family’s needs, eat more vegetables and improve your diet at the same time!! This takes a lot of work & commitment to do what it takes to feed your family locally harvested produce. Give this a chance. It takes two years to get used to getting your produce this way. The first year is the hardest. The second year is so much easier because now you have information you need on how to use the produce and take care of it from your first year. And if you are dissatisfied, please give CSA a chance with another farm. Every farm is different and each one is unique on what it grows and how they distribute produce. When you spend one dollar with a local vender, it gets used 7 more times within your community! Don’t send your hard earned dollar to a “box store” who will send it to their corporate office out of state.

Feeding people is our passion. We are committed to providing the best tasting organic produce. We have fed thousands of people and donated thousands of pounds of produce to communities around Northern Colorado throughout the years. We have never done anything so important or made us as happy. Thank you for being a part of this! We love you all and appreciate your support more than ever! We cannot exist without our Members; who happen to be the most compassionate people about supporting local farming and eating organic produce. We are looking forward to being your farmers in 2012! Have a wonderful, restful winter and think of us when you pull out vegetables from the freezer!

Jacquie, Jerry, Alaina and Kyle Monroe

Click here to take survey

Thank you very much for your time! Thank you very much for your support this year! We cannot make any changes with your CSA if we do not know about any issues. With your input, we can make this the best CSA in the State!

The Monroe’s

Next week I’ll be out of town, so unable to post the newsletter, so Jacquie will be providing hard copy next week also.

Sorry for any confusion!

Produce: This week you will be getting Yukon Gold potatoes, sweet white onions, summer squash, banana peppers, jalapeno peppers, bell peppers, green beans, corn, a purple prudence or Golden Globe tomato and your regular tomatoes, orange honeydew and one of the three varieties of watermelon.

Listeria: (as found on the internet) is a bacterium containing six species. It is commonly found in soil, stream water (and ditch water), on plants and in food. Although it has low infectivity, it is hardy and can grow in temperatures ranging from 40 degrees (your refrigerator temperature) to 98.6 (your body temperature). Listeria can be found in uncooked meats, uncooked vegetables, unpasteurized dairy products and processed foods. Pasteurization and cooking kills the bacteria. Thoroughly scrubbing your produce & cutting surfaces and drying them off with a paper towels are recommended. This bacterium is normally targeted by a healthy immune system before it can cause an infection. But it can be dangerous for the elderly (anyone over the age of 60), pregnant women and people with compromised immune systems.

2012: We registered several members for 2012 renewals at the Festival. If you didn’t get a chance to tell us you are interested in renewing your membership, please call or email to let me know. There is no obligation until you pay your fees! (I will not respond to your calls or emails!) Statements will go out in January for your 2012 Membership & Produce Fees. The biggest advantage of doing this now ~ no paperwork later!

Festival: We had the best weekend! 498 members along with 24 guests arrived with big smiles to enjoy a day on the farm! Kids enjoyed knocking down the yowling cats off the fence, knocking down milk bottles, playing Frisbee golf and running their steeds in the horse races. Adults & kids had fun exploring the farm, picking out their pumpkins, hayrides, eating great food and picking vegetables. The main event this year was the mules. Jerry Sr. used to farm with horses back in the 30’s. To celebrate our 75th anniversary, we had two teams of Belgium mules pulling a disk and a harrow. Members got to see how these animals did the “hard work” back in the day. Oh boy were these guys big! The best part of the day for me was to see Jerry’s Dad’s face when he saw those animals; we were all crying!

Contest Winners: Several entries were made in both the pickle/relish and jam/jelly divisions. Next year we will separate the relishes from the pickles. Jennifer Loper won first prize for her relish and Nicole Hines won first price & over-all best jelly. Each winner will get $25! We need to recognize Jamie Yeast for his fantastic
t-shirt design. On the front mentions Monroe Organic Farms, llc./2011 and on the back shows beet roots with the caption, “rooted in Colorado for 75 years”. Jamie will get $50 for this awesome t-shirt design for our special 19th Harvest Festival!

Thank you! We had a great big crew to help us get everything set up. Tents, tables and chairs went up in a flash! Thank you to the ladies who did all the chopping of the vegetables. All of you did a fabulous job and I loved the fact I didn’t feel you needed any supervision! Myrna (my mother) wanted to tell Robert Hartmen, Carmen Waldman and Tracy Yamashita how much she liked working with you. She said all of you had a great sense of hummer and really made the day fun for her. Thank you to everyone else who volunteered. We couldn’t do any of this without you! It was really nice that people pitched in even though they hadn’t volunteered for anything! “Extra hands make light work”, my grandmother would always say! Our cleanup crew was small, but efficient! I guess everyone wanted to see the Broncos play because we started to shut down the place at 3 o’clock. Chili roasting went on for a couple more hours, but everybody was fine with that! We just sat around and had a great conversation!

Freeze Warning: I can’t believe I am saying this, but it will freeze before we know it! We need volunteers! If you are available to come to the farm and pick vegetables at the last minute, please get on our Freeze Warning List. We normally don’t get more than a two day notice that it may freeze. Call me with your name and phone number (please do not email me for this one; I won’t be able to check email for a couple more weeks!) We try to get as much as possible picked and put into shelters so that we can extend the season as far as possible. We can get a freeze here anytime after the 20th of September! For those of you looking for another opportunity to volunteer, we have one for you!

Thank you again to everyone who came to the Festival. We had a great time showing off your farm. We look forward to seeing you next year!

Jacquie, Jerry, Alaina and Kyle

Sweet
First Place – Spiced Red Wine Jelly
Second Place – Raspberry Jam
Third Place – Tomato Preserves

Savory
First Place – Sweet Pickle Relish
Second Place – Corn Relish
Third Place – Bread and Butter Pickles (labeled B&B on top)

If these were your entries, we would love if you would share your recipes for to be posted on the blog. If you know who made any of these, please get me their names and contact info.

Congratulations to the winners!

Be sure to check in first thing when you arrive – see the check in area near the tents – and parking will be on the north side, weather permitting.

Various games will be offered on the front lawn.T-shirts, hats and cookbooks will be for sale – everything is $12 per item, cash or check only. All proceeds raised from these sales is used to provide shares to families in need, so be supportive!

The festival is a potluck – the farm will provide hotdogs and hamburgers along with drinks, but each family should plan on bringing a side dish or a dessert that will feed 8.

We are optimistic that we’ll have horses and mules performing demos of farm activities throughout the day.

The ever popular stick horse race for the kids begins at noon.Once again we’ll have a jam and canning contest – all contestants need to have your entries to the judging stand by 1:00pm.

Hayrides will be offered throughout the day, and there should be enough pumpkins for everyone to get one.

Chile peppers are available for self picking throughout the day. Each family may have one tray roasted at the farm for $5 – please be patient as the line is sometimes long for this. Alternatively, you may easily roast them yourself at home on the grill.The apple press will be running until everything is pressed – families are asked to bring a bag of apples if you’d like to participate.

We look forward to seeing everyone on Sunday!

Monroe Winter 2011_12

to get the  form!

See you at the festival!

Produce: This is week 12 out of an 18 week season. You will be getting Red Potatoes, Walla Walla Onions, golden or Chioggia beets, slicing cucumbers and lemon cucumbers, a mixture of summer squash, fennel, Edamame beans, banana peppers, jalapeno peppers, green and Ivory peppers (Ivory peppers are a very pale yellow) corn, a mixture of Roma, yellow and regular tomatoes, orange honeydew, Charleston Gray or Crimson Sweet watermelon and muskmelon. Guess what everyone? The melons are all coming on at the same time – so you will be getting a lot of melons for the next couple of weeks! Edamame beans are an edible soybean and are best rapidly boiled in heavily salted water for 7 to 9 minutes. Cool slightly before eating. Just slide between teeth or shell and use in soups or a mixed veggie dish.

Well, after weeks of extremely hot weather, it has cooled off. This is wonderful for the human body, but it will slow down the maturity of crops. The perfect temperatures for tomato ripening are day-time temps below 95 and night-time temps above 65. Anytime we do not stay within those parameters, tomatoes will just sit there and wait until it gets warm enough or cool enough for them to ripen. With that in mind, we have a huge field out there waiting to be picked. They are the biggest, green tomatoes wanting desperately to be red! I feel this will still happen sometime this month. If you want to be put on the “Wail List” for tomato and pepper picking, please call me with your phone number and let me know if you can come on Sunday during the day or Tuesday/Thursday evenings or all of the above!

Festival: This is the last week to RSVP for the Harvest Festival. We will not take late RSVP’s after the 10th of September. It is mandatory to RSVP before showing up at the Festival. Here is Peg’s info again: 303-329-8506 or wrdwrrior@comcast.net. Peg is also scheduling volunteers. Directions to the farm are attached!

Don’t forget the Harvest Festival is a Potluck. Please bring a side dish or dessert that is at least double what you would normally fix for a family of four. We will be grilling hamburgers/hotdogs and will provide the drinks, cups, plates & utensils. The Festival starts at 11a.m. and we will be asking everyone around at 4 o’clock to help clean up. With lots of help, it normally has not taken more than 45 minutes to an hour!

Always bring extra clothes for children and shoes you do not worry about getting dirty. Expect mud somewhere on the farm. We continually water and you never know when it may rain. Be Prepared! We are an organic farm, so please expect weeds everywhere you go. Especially this year, considering all the rain we had last spring.

Winter Share: Attached you will find a Winter Share Form. It is time for us to start planning for the Winter. Depending on how many people sign up for the Winter Share; tells us how much produce we need to store. At this time you will need to order your spring and/or fall animals for 2012. Please fill out and send back by October 1st with your check for the non-refundable deposits. [NOTE: The form wasn't attached to post here - you should get it from your distribution center when you pickup or call Jacquie.]

2012: Jerry and I have finally hit that point where we cannot continue at this pace any longer. We are considering getting a little smaller next year. We are curious to know who would be willing to give us a verbal agreement to renewing their memberships for 2012 in September/October and be billed in January for the same order as 2011 (though prices may change). Changes to your order can be made by phone in January after you receive your bill and we will fill out a 2012 Change Order Sheet. Down payments will need to be made by February 15th and you may cancel your entire order by that same date. If you do not plan on attending the Harvest Festival, please call me at the above number. We are trying to see how many shareholders are committed and where we stand on numbers. We will then decide if Distribution Centers will need to be closed, whether or not our routes will need to be changed and if we are going to continue to deliver Tue, Wed, and Thr. or just on Tue. and Thr. We have had 19 years of wonderful supportive members and we thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Ever since Jerry and I have met, we have been in the business of educating people about organics and building our business. We are the oldest organic farm in the state; we either helped start or attended the oldest farmers markets in the state and we are one of three of the oldest CSA’s in the state. We have done nothing else but educate and build for 27 years. But for our health, we need to make our lives a little simpler! Many of you have watched our children grow, our farm change and all of us mature into who we are today. Thank you for letting us know about your plans on being members next year.

Cooking Class: Our first cooking class was a success! Ten of us gathered for good food and wine. Wonderful ideas flowed not only from Mary Collette Rogers but from members too. This was an extremely enjoyable evening of friendship. Everyone cooked and everyone had fun. I couldn’t think of a better way to spend the evening! A special Thank you to Mary Collette & Everyday Good Eating for bringing us together.

Jacquie, Jerry, Kyle and Alaina

Directions to the Farm
From Denver, the Western Slope or Pueblo:
I-25 North to I-76 East. As you continue east, don’t panic, you will be driving for a while! Last town you will go through is Hudson. Very next exit is #34 or the Kersey Rd. Take this exit, turn left. Continue north for approximately 16 miles. Turn right at Co Rd 48. You are now on a dirt road. Travel 1 ½ miles. We are on the left or north side of road. Our name & house number (25525) is on the mailbox.
From Boulder, Longmont or Lyons:

I-25 North to highway 66. Take highway 66 east to highway 85. Highway 85 north through the towns of Platteville, then Gilcrest. At next grain elevator, Co Rd 44, turn right heading east. At Co Rd 49, turn left heading north. Travel 2 miles to Co Rd 48, turn right heading east. Another 1 ½ miles to the farm on left or north side of road. Our name & house number (25525) is on the mailbox.
From Loveland or Ft. Collins:

Take highway 34 east through the city of Greeley. Must take Fort Morgan exit to continue east on highway 34. Approximately 4 miles from this exit to Co Rd 49, turn right heading south. Travel 4 miles to Co Rd 48, turn left. 1 ½ miles to farm on the left or north side of road. Our name & house number (25525) is on the mailbox.