This week Ranger brought a new friend home, the ice-shredded field is recovering, and I no longer squish the potato beetle larvae; now I pick em & drop them into a bucket of soapy water that I wear on my belt. It feels more like foraging than hunting, which is pleasant.

It also, and moreso, feels good that last week’s tentative optimism was likely justified. Sure, it’s hot and muggy – but yesterday we took a Waterfall Day, and it was ridiculously perfect: the bad storms skipped by just north of the Magic Waterfall, and the heat dome stayed just south of us … the serendipitous vortex there worked its magic, made our day, and massaged our souls, which we perhaps quite needed.

inside Box 3

Otis took photos at today’s CSA harvest (he was mostly interested in being allowed to take the “aerial” shot from atop the semi trailer.)

• Bok Choi – the older leaves tell the take of the last week’s drama . Since the stems are the main event, we left some on even though the leaves have been through hail n back.
• Kohlrabi – to know it is to love it. I like it chilled and sliced, sometimes salted and peppered.
• Sunflower Microgreens – Grandma Deb puts them in salads, sandwiches, and scrambled eggs, when not eating them plain.
• Cabbage – we removed the brunt-bearing outer leaves.
• Sugar Snap Peas – don’t eat too many handfuls without anything else. Turns out they contain a ton of fiber and something called Galacto-oligosaccharide, which is a complex carbohydrate chains that humans lack the proper enzymes to fully break down. They pass into the large intestine, where gut bacteria ferment them, producing significant amounts of gas. Don’t ask me why I know. And don’t tell Kristin I’m writing about this in the farm newsletter.
• Snow Peas – stir fry favorites
• Salad Turnips
• Mint (Peppermint & Apple Mint) – one has fuzz and one doesn’t. I don’t remember which is which but they smell and look different …. make a muddle mix in your mojito. Or tea. Or infused water, that’s a thing. Wait, isn’t that just tea?
• Green Onions
• Garlic Scapes – How About Garlic Scape Pesto
  • Ingredients:
  • 1 cup chopped garlic scapes1/2 cup toasted nuts (walnuts, pecans, or pine nuts)1/2 cup olive oil1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese Juice of 1 lemon
  • Directions: Pulse scapes, nuts, and cheese in a food processor. Slowly drizzle in olive oil and lemon juice until it reaches the desired consistency. Toss with pasta or freeze in ice cube trays for later.

And Jasper took field pics today:

We came into today’s harvest renewed, and hopefully some of that will show in your food this week.

By the time you read this you will have already noticed that the box this week is …. surprisingly lightweight. Pretty vacant. Well. Remember last week, when I said something about how even though the rain skips around us, at least the storms do too? Yeah..

After 13 lucky years, our luck ran out. Last Friday, we were in the field harvesting for the farmer’s market when our phones blew up with a tornado warning. Radar showed a purple blob among the incoming red stormclouds, rolling straight at us. . I watch radar like some dudes watch sports and I knew it was a doozy and I knew it wasn’t going to miss. I hurried from the field, shut the high tunnel up tight, rounded up the kids and the dog and the cat and herded them into the root cellar.

The purple blob came into view over the western treeline. Crazy clouds. I don’t know what they’re called, but I think they’re hail clouds. Because we didn’t get a tornado or even much for wind, but we got a sustained and intense downpour of ice . “Shreddy sized.”

When we emerged the world felt like someone left the freezer open and smelled of the insides of plants. “Like someone just mowed a lawn, but the lawn was our vegetable garden.”

We scooped thick piles of ice away from the tattered remnants to avoid adding freeze damage to their 99 problems.

It was bad. The worst we’ve had in thirteen years.

So your box isn’t one of the best in those thirteen years.

But ….

We have seven new baby chicks, peeping and hopping and serving as the living embodiment of hope.

And on the heels of the storm, we began a visit from one of our O.G. WWOOFers – Grace, who was here for all of the 2016 season!

In the intervening decade she had four kids, all near our kids ages, and the whole squad came to the farm for several days. Good times ensued.

Clan Grace headed for home after we finished up with the CSA harvest just now:

Inside Box 2

A moment of silence (or noise) for the kale, bok choi, and lost lettuce. I really wanted to include some “hail-massaged kale” but it was just way too ripped up.

But! We did get some lettuce for you – the leaves shielded by kale or weeds or their fallen brethren! The sweetest lettuces are these, according to Folklore.

The Snow Peas are sometimes blemished by hailstones. (We ate the ones that were blasted open while harvesting the rest.)

Salad Turnips

Oregano

Garlic Scapes

Radish Microgreens

Spring Onions

postscript

I, feel … hopeful. Things are definitely set back, and will need time to grow some new new stems and leaves. We’ll lose some things, but there are always some that don’t make it for one reason or another – and others that flourish. I see little tiny leaves pushing out of the wreckage. Life uh, finds a way. There are some really good, positive metaphors to be mined here, if you’d like.

But dang, it’s absolutely pouring rain here (I write these in the ride from farm to The Cities.) I’ll take my cue.

And so concludes Year Twelve of the Que Sehra CSA! Wait, actually is it Year Thirteen? So many years that we’ve lost track. This year was another good one.

Kristin, what about this season?

vocalizing enigmatically

nods. makes eye contact. takes a breath.

Furrows brow.

Laughs, and demands to know what I’m typing.

“Well, we never managed to get beets in the box; every year it gets worse. But we did manage garlic. And while we probably won’t ever try celery again, the celeriac was alright.”

Nods.

She realizes it’s all being written down, and refuses to say more.

Let’s let the veggies do the talking:

inside box Seventeen

• Tetsukabuto Squash – A delicious cross between butternut and buttercup styles, their flavor is quite good but will improve with age, so considering stashing it on the counter for a month or two. But keep an eye on it, and if anything starts to go toward bad, eat it promptly.
• Cabbage – is underrated.
• Red Potatoes
• Leeks – Last year we had no leeks at all. Next year may be a return to Large Leeks. Let’s predict it.
• Peppers
• Herb Bundle – parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme
• Celeriac aka Celery Root – cut off the outer part of the bulb and then roast it. Come people use the greens to make a tasty vegetable broth.
• Celery – it’s a marsh plant, so it’s a challenge growing it out in the sandy Barrens. You aren’t gonna eat it with peanut butter. Slice it against the grain, like a tough cut of meat, and use it in soups.
• Tomatoes – remember Ratty the chicken? She’s at it again, sneaking into the high tunnel through a side passage, to jump up and peck every darn tomato she can. We saved some from her this week for you.

We loved living the life we did, growing for you this year – and hope you loved living the life you did, while you ate what we grew. Hopefully we’ll see you at the party on Sunday – and grow for you again next year.

Nota Bene: It’s a chicken story newsletter

There’s this big bright white hen. Kristin says her name might be “The Colonel.” One morning the Colonel showed up for breakfast before I’d opened up the coop, and the next evening she wasn’t on a roost when I locked them up.

I’d recently realized that we had accidentally created a perfect secret nest sanctuary, when we hired a tree service to thwart a large looming pine that was showing a hunger for some of our rooftop infrastructure.), so I went looking there – but the thicket of branches was impenetrable as all get out and I saw no clear paths in, no feathers, no glittering eyes looking back at me.

Yesterday, when she came out of seemingly nowhere for breakfast, I decided it was stalking time.

But The Colonel didn’t want anyone to follow her and so it took some not inconsiderable time, patience, and stealth before she finally circled the fallen pine crown and in doing so, vanished.

As the song sayeth, she was in the pines, in the pines; where there stars, they never shine … deep beneath the layered canopies of thick pipe needle laden branches. I poked around until I finally spotted her – I could just barely see the bright white of her wing, and she didn’t move a feather or make a peep. Three times I tried crawling into the depths of the sideways canopy but ultimately retreated. I was in a bathrobe, after all. I went up the hill and fetched the electric chainsaw and started cutting. I was going down and into the pile, and it felt like I was carving myself a tunnel, boring into a bank vault perhaps.

Branch by branch, the way was cleared until I could crawl in and reach through and that’s when The Colonel finally make a break for it, revealing a cache of big clean eggs. It was a perfect spot, and I had to admire her skill in choosing an ideal location – secure and dry and comfortable – but winter is coming and chicks aren’t well equipped for it. I could tell she had just started to sit full time; the nest was full of eggs, as many as one hen could cover, but not yet filled with feathers – she was fixing to get it going, but her body hadn’t quite kicked into full broody mode.

So I piled 20 big eggs into a makeshift pouch of the front of my bathrobe, and went for egg crates, coffee, and breakfast. We had lots apples to juice, and tomorrow was the CSA harvest …

INSIDE THE BOX

• Winter squash lil’ butternuts 
• Fennel
• Carrot
• Brussels sprouts 
• Onion
• Kohlrabi 
• Radish daikon 
• Kale
• Pepper
• Eggplant
• Tomatoes

So we have a blind chicken this year. When Joan Jett lost her sight a couple of months back, it didn’t go well for her at first. She could find her way in and out of the coop, and maybe to the waterers, but she couldn’t get to the food before all the sighted members of the flock – and couldn’t navigate the social order.

Fortunately we humans eventually realized what was wrong, and isolated her in a private coop with her own water and food. She looked rough, and I thought she might falter and pass, but she grew stronger and seemed to thrive, even. She passed the summer regaining her luster, listening intently to the vibrant world around her, her sisters and daughters and rooster admirerers visiting through the chickenwire of her gated community of one.

She looked better, and I think I can tell that she doesn’t find her more limited lifestyle repressing. Last week, someone asked if she is still laying eggs – nope, I said – either the same illness that took our her optic nerves also messed up her reproductive system, or, well, stressed hens won’t lay eggs – so maybe it’s not easy for her being blind … which didn’t sit well with me, as I didn’t want to induce an existence of suffering, and it kinda-maybe-probably contradicted my just-stated subjective belief that she looked well in the way she held her head, the shine of her feathers, the way she looked around, sightlessly but still tuned in.

Yesterday, Otis announced that he’d noticed two eggs in her coop! I was … skeptical. I wanted to believe. But the eggs were strangely positioned, not in a depression but willy-nilly against the wall … the one with the access hatch. Which made me think that Otis might be playing a prank on me. When interrogated, he promised innocence … but sure acted guilty to my eyes. So I told him that I wasn’t sure what to think yet, but he remained my primary suspect….

Well, he was telling the truth.

Today while we harvested your veggies, she laid another, back in the far side of her coop. So Joan Jett’s recovery is official, Otis’s word can be trusted, my bullshit detector can’t, and if anyone wants to adopt a blind hen before winter, let me know. She’s a survivor, a good listener, and will make someone a lovely animal friend.

I didn’t get any updated photos of her this week, all glossy and iridescent, but I did get these:

inside box Fifteen

• Broccoli – hydrocooled for freshness!
• Hakurei Salad Turnips
• Red Potatoes – best for uses where they need to hold their shape, such as potato salad, roasting, boiling, and soups, because their waxy, low-starch texture prevents them from becoming mushy. They also make great smashed (not mashed) potatoes, adding color and a satisfying crispness.
  

• Onions
• Sweet Peppers – still mostly green, this is a year that peppers refuse to ripen it seems
• Thyme

• Tomatoes
• Cherry Tomatoes
• Eggplant

• Zucchini
• Bok Choi – Kristin is considering the stems as a celery substitute for ants on a log. Or dipping them into the oddly compelling fruity Mexican hot sauce we have.
• Winter Squash – You got one of these pictured, can you find yours?

Oh, and I was also wrong about the whippoorwills – they’re still here, and back to their nightly serenading.