And here we go again – another season kicks off in earnest today! We will also start going to the farmer’s market now every Saturday morning in Saint Croix Falls – if you’re in the area, stop by and say hello.

I seem to have forgotten how to write these things. Words? Words. Words!

Well, let see. Since we last sent out a communiqué, we’ve been focused on preparing the field for the season. Transplanting, seeding, tomato trellising, weeding, war with quack grass, fencing.

Last year, with the new baby and the c-section recovery, the weeds got ahead of us and we spent the rest of the year struggling to not drown in their shadowy tendrils. We were damned determined not to let that happen again, and put all our efforts into a successful mission to cover all possible bare ground covered in some form of mulch.

The cool season crops – salad, broccoli, potatoes, radishes, turnips etc – are nestled into thick blankets of hay, which retains precious, tenuous soil moisture as well as prevents most weeds from sprouting.

The hot weather crops that will be harvested later in the summer mostly went into black landscape fabric, which suppresses the incredible weed seed bank and warms the soil beneath, making heat-loving plant roots happy.

This tactic turned out to be an unexpected lifesaver this year. We had a surprise frost in the middle of June, a month past the official USDA “Last Frost Date” for our region – the field got down to 32 degrees overnight, which would normally wreck havoc with crucial crops such as tomatoes, melons, zucchini, and peppers. And this frost was bad enough to damage and kill plenty of even cool weather crops like kohlrabi, potatoes, and cabbage.

However, the hot plants managed to survive, oftentimes undamaged. The preceding day had been nice and sunny – and in the light, the black fabric warmed up the soil around them – which then slowly flowed up and out through the planting holes over the course of the chilly night, preventing catastrophe.

Hay, that’s a happy ending, so I’ll stop there and turn it over to:

The Weekly Box:

Spring Salad Mix –  we hydrocooled and dried it, but recommend a final wash before serving to remove residual soil.

• Lettuce (green and smidge of red – for some reason it refused to grow much this spring!) 
• Bekana – an Asian green – if bok choi and Napa had a baby, this would be it.
• Pea tips –  the usual type, plus a new fancy frilled variety
• Arugula 
• Mizuna

Lambs quarter 

Consider this wild harvested ;). This delicious weed is in the same family as spinach, quinoa, and beets and a nutritional super green. We snack on raw leaves, but if I’m using a lot in a meal I usually cook it – probably would be your best bet. It can substitute for spinach in recipes (curry, quiche, gratin etc.). Note: you may notice a sort of whiteish powder on the leaves – this is natural to the plant, and nothing to worry about (we did rinse and spin them dry)

French Breakfast & Lady Slipper Radishes & Greens

Lately we’ve been slicing plenty of radishes up onto our salads (leafy and egg), soups, and sandwiches. The greens aren’t good raw, but are delicious wilted/sauteed. And this is probably a good time to inject this:

The basic pesto guide:

A lot of herbs and greens (including radish greens, lambs quarter and scallions!) make great pesto:

• 2 cups packed herbs/greens
• 1/2 cup grated hard cheese
• 1/3 cup toasted nuts/seeds
• 1/4 to 1/2 cup oil
• Salt to taste

Green onions aka Scallions

Chive blossoms 

Kristin recommends infusing vinegar, snipping them into salads, or tempura-ing them. Read other idears heres.

Apple Preserves (either Apple Pie in a Jar, Brandied Apples, or Cinnamon Fireball Apples)

Some sweet canned goodness from last Fall’s apple boom – harvested from friends all around the area. (This year, we will be getting a ton of local apples from a friend in exchange for gopher trapping services!) We’ll happily reuse the jar if you return it with your box

More Pics For You

The first box delivery is a month and a half away!(?(!))

With our short growing season, our main work throughout April was of course planting in the greenhouses – we start seedlings in small blocks of soil, which are later either transplanted directly into the ground, or into somewhat larger blocks of soil, which are later transplanted into the ground.

The sunlight keeps the greenhouse toasty during the daytime, and before the freezing nights, we fire up our rocket mass heater for 30 minutes to an hour. This charges up the huge clay bench that runs the length of the greenhouse with heat that is slowly and inexorably released over several hours, warming the trays of seedlings – from beneath, which keeps their forming roots especially happy.

We also planted green garlic, onions, our salad mix components, and snow & sugar snap peas in the field, wilted the rising army of early weeds with a propane torch, and set up the electric deer fence for the season – it’s not tall, but the 3-D structure is designed to confuse deer with their poor depth perception, making them hesitant to try to jump it.

We had a WWOOFer come help for a few days, but for the most part it’s just been us, settling into the land and the rhythms of Spring, which seem increasingly familiar now, on our 5th year living here. Productivity is of course lessened by our happily-mobile 1 year-old, but we’re figuring out how to best work and play with him full time – for many tasks, Kristin works solo, enjoying solitude and podcasts, as well as the freedom to think through projects without the pressure or complications of help, while I entertain Otis, keeping his voracious appetite for new experiences sated.

It’s a good life.

We were happy to live it ourselves, but it’s even better to share it with a shiny new consciousness. And we’re grateful that you’re here eating the bounty we create with our lives.

Here’s to a a bountiful & beautiful season for us all!

Wow.

This year sure shot past fast, considering how many eternities and infinities were crammed into every day and week of it.

It’s a good time for it to come to a close; there is a ton to do around the farm to prepare for our first winter with the baby, plus all the field and greenhouse clean-up, party preparation, and heck, maybe we can even find the time to get the bread oven built somehow.

And it’s been so, so gloomy, I love the Sun. I am not a fan of long periods of gray, even though the monochromatic gloom of the sky provides a beautiful backdrop to the fiery autumn maple leaves.

Anyway, yeah. It’s been a heck of a year. From the late-departing Winter that leaped straight into a blazing, humid droughty Summer to the early frosts and the chilly damp of this sunless purgatory, the weather has been an ongoing challenge.

While we did the dance of the first-time parents, our produce productivity plummeted. The weeds staged a triumphant comeback, bursting back from the single seasonal round that they’d ever lost, the voles staged parades to celebrate our decision to try no-till another time.

Our foes, such as they are, are at least worthy ones.

And you know what?

It was a good year.

In the field, the strong and the serendipitous survived, abiding along to the always-implied strains of “Que Sera, Sera.”  It didn’t really feel stressful. In fact, I think it seemed less stressful than any other year, really.  Sure, we made a lot less money, and The To-Do List got longer rather than shorter.

But it was worth it. It was a season where our major crop wasn’t a vegetable, and the major construction project wasn’t a guest shack, or greenhouse, or a root cellar.

It was the year that we let the farming and the homestead slide into the background ever so slightly, and let them work for us, a bit more on their own. They carried us through: the habits, foundations, mechanisms, and momentum we’ve scraped together in the half a decade we’ve been learning how to live on the Farm.

And this allowed us to grow our Otis as our primary focus, making it possible for him to sink nourishing roots, to rise into the light – with the living farm and forest his ecosystem.

We three grew a lot this year.

Season Six is already, even mere days later, lit by a magical glow in my memory.

And wow, am I excited for what’s to come.

Box 18

Baby Sweet Potato – As in, a baby-sized sweet potato. We haven’t given these out before, because there is a rather long curing process to develop the sugars and the potatoes aren’t ready to be dug until late in the year. They are not particularly sweet, but they are tasty! They cooked up quicker than I expected, possibly because of their freshness. Try making home fries, sweet potato hash browns, or maybe frying or grilling slices of them. I find that coconut oil compliments them nicely.

Butternut squash – These work well for soup and baked goods (it would substitute well in any pumpkin recipe) because they are moist. I also like them because they are easy to peel, so they can be cubed or grated. Nothing wrong with just baking them up in the oven either.

Brussels sprouts – People were enthusiastic about these in last week’s box, so here they are again! These ones are more normal-sized.

Cabbage – the critters love them too.

Leeks

Kohlrabi – I expected these to be bigger but it seems that they are just maintaining. Has anyone noticed how cloudy and cool it has been???

Potatoes

4 Varieties of Kale – I like kale in squash soup. Neighbor Marcia recommends kale with cubed sweet potatoes.

Sage – works well with squash and potatoes and in hearty winter stews. Dries well for later use too.

This is the week where this song is constantly in our heads as we scurry about trying to save food from the formidable forces of nature and get it safely delivered to you all:

The Fall has proven to be as unforgiving as the Spring was for us – we had a frost last Friday night, and a freeze this Friday night, which killed off all the hot weather crops in the field.

We ordered a giant 11′ wide roll of row cover and saved the salad row from the icy grip of death, which was great … but now there are deer that have learned that they are quite capable of leaping over our electric fence, and they are huge fans of the salad buffet we salvaged, as well as the fall carrot and beet’s tops, the kohlrabi, etc. Once in a while they graze on the weeds too, which is polite of them at least.

And they’re not the only hungry mammals making munchmeat out of our crops – an invasion of pocket gophers has pushed into the carrot and salad rows, as well as the greenhouses.  They aren’t even bothering to fill their holes in, so that they can run back and forth and gorge to their fat little hearts’ content.

Hell, even the chickens have decided to start invading the field, and only grudgingly scatter back when threatened with stern admonitions.

So, we have plenty of battles to choose from whenever the spirit to fight takes hold. My fighting spirit is on the rebound now, thanks to the wonders of strong antibiotics and the highest recommended dosage schedule of ibuprofen. My advice is to not simply ignore a cracked wisdom tooth filling until it starts hurting. Do you want pain? Because that’s how you get pain. As well as an inability to either open or close your jaw. Fortunately, it’s a necessary and legitimate farm task to hang out with Otis and keep him happy, which was quite both doable and therapeutic even with a swollen throbbing half of a head.

All the above kinda sounds grim maybe, but life on the farm doesn’t feel that way at all. We have good company, beautiful surroundings, a fascinating tiny human, and the days are never boring. I wouldn’t want anything else.

Inside Box 17

And this would be the week that Jack Frost came to the farm. His visit was marked by sweeping the creosote from the chimney, the first firing of the wood stove, sheets over the pepper plants, salvage harvests of the final field tomatoes, and screens being swapped for storm windows. The predicted low for our township on Friday night was 38, but we’ve learned that our low spot in the glacial valley will usually drop further, so we were not taken unawares by the frost that came to the field, icing leaves and freezing flowers, with the temp bottoming out below 30 degrees.

It’s hard to believe that just the weekend before, I was sweating on the screen porch and not wanting to go outside into the sunshine, but that’s Minnesconsin for ya. And it looks like there is worse to come this week – I see a predicted low of 30, which could mean a hard freeze of 20 in the field! So this will be a week of preparing for that.

Woo hoo!

inside Box 16

Today was marked by yet another instance of rainy harvest, which seems to have happened a ridiculous number of times this season, given how very little rainfall we’ve had in general. It makes it tricky to pack things into paper bags, but other than that we made do pretty easily with the help of a couple of retired market canopies.

Salad mix– Neighbor Marcia suggests using these leaves in wraps and on sandwiches.

Potatoes – The “All Blue” variety. They may make an odd-looking potato leek soup, but we figure you get white-fleshed potatoes most of your life. Plus these are more nutritious!

Jester acorn squash – Mom cuts these in half and steams them upside down in the oven, and then fills the bowl with butter and brown sugar. Or you could make it a main dish bu salting, oiling, baking and filling it with chicken and wild rice soup or a rice pilaf.

Ground cherries – the sweet and cute little sibling of tomatillos. We sorted out any bad or green ones but, to spare our sanity may have left some that were not completely ripe. We like both flavors – the sweet and tart and the smooth mellow ones.

Leeks – We figured out a great way to plant these using a slightly tapered table leg. Seems to have worked out well! There might be dirt between the layers, since the whole white part is grown underground. If you slice them lengthwise, you can clean out any grit that snuck in. Some recipes say to discard the green top part, but it’s still quite edible. Chop em up and sautee them in dishes!

Parsley- Great in soup, and tis the season … potato leek soup? If you roast veggies, you can toss this with them when taken from the over, to balance the earthly veggies with a fresh bright flavor.

Sweet Pepper Medley – With hard frosts looming, we harvested all the sweet peppers in the field, so this box is bountiful with them! Have you tried simply eating the red ones raw like apples? Quite good.

Eggplant – The cold weather this week is going to put an end to eggplants. We ate some sliced, salted, and fried (no batter or coating) the other night and I thought, I am going to miss you eggplant.

Salad Tomatoes – Some of the season’s last!