The bad news is that it sucks “living outdoors in the fresh air” when the fresh air is like it was on Wednesday:

The good news is that it’s not that bad. Well … ok it kind was. for a few days I felt much like that one guy in Robocop right before he got exploded by the car …. turns out that air quality thing is no joke, damn.

Also on the Bad Newscast is that we have accrued only 0.02″ of “rain” this week, going into a week of humid ninety degree broiler.

But now I am not only feeling better, but I have that whole “OMG I feel so awesome now in contrast to how I was just feeling” thing going for me.

And the field … it really looks pretty damn good …. because the drip irrigation is being run for hours each day, which does a good job where we have crops but shares almost none at all with the lurking weed seeds that are a major ingredient in our soil mix.

And! Baby chicken season! I don’t care how depressive you feel or how much existential dread is gathered upon your brow, baby chicks are a ray of sunshine. (and the nice happy kind not the burn you to a crisp and give your WWOOFer heatstroke kind) – they just inspire such optimism. Gargoyle again hid a nest up by our house, and hatched out 13 babies again!

Inside the Box

• Salad Mix (arugula, lettuce, Tat soi, bekana, pea tips, a few leaves of lambs quarters)
• Green Onions
• Green Garlic
• Garlic Scapes
• Sunflower Shoots
• Radishes
• Turnips
• Bok Choi

Now that we have kids I am going to accept cyborg augmentation for these newsletters; the robot says, “Here are some recipe ideas that feature two or more of the items from your CSA box:

1. Stir-Fried Bok Choy with Green Garlic and Green Onions: Sauté sliced green garlic and green onions in a pan, then add chopped bok choy. Stir-fry until the bok choy is tender-crisp. Season with soy sauce or your preferred stir-fry sauce.

2. Roasted Turnips and Radishes: Toss sliced turnips and radishes in olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and roast in the oven until tender and slightly caramelized. Serve as a side dish or add them to a salad.

3. Radish and Turnip Slaw: Thinly slice radishes, turnips, and green onions. Toss them together with a simple dressing made from lemon juice, olive oil, honey, and salt. Add some chopped radish greens for extra freshness.

4. Bok Choy and Turnip Stir-Fry: Heat oil in a wok or large skillet, then add sliced turnips and stir-fry until slightly tender. Add bok choy and cook until wilted. Season with a mixture of soy sauce, ginger, garlic, and a touch of honey.

5. Radish and Greens Pesto: Blend radishes (including the greens), sunflower micro greens, green garlic, and a handful of nuts (such as almonds or walnuts) with olive oil, lemon juice, and salt. Use this vibrant pesto as a spread or sauce for pasta.

6. Turnip, Radish, and Green Onion Salad: Thinly slice turnips, radishes, and green onions. Toss them together with a dressing made from olive oil, vinegar (such as apple cider or rice vinegar), Dijon mustard, and a pinch of sugar. Add some torn radish greens for extra flavor.

Remember, these are just a few ideas to get you started. Feel free to get creative and modify the recipes based on your taste preferences and the ingredients you have available. Enjoy exploring the flavors of your CSA box!”

Good job, robot? Not sure about the microgreens in the pesto idea though? Maybe.

So begins our 10th year of doing the CSA … for a DECADE now, we have been growing, harvesting, washing, packing and delivering our veggies to our vegetable tribe. Look! Here’s the first ever CSA newsletter from us – some of you were there then too!

We still haven’t had a real rainfall, to our sad lack of surprise. (total recorded rain since April: 0.30″) This is … interesting. We wish the early boxes we send out could be awesome but no matter what, it is a nope dudes que sera sera you are farming in a place named The Barrens.

But …, the irrigation is keeping the plants alive through the perilous “shallow roots in hot sandy soil” period, and soon their roots will be deeper and hopefully where water is steadily available.

It’s the driest spring we have ever faced, but as I look at the field, and really, to me it looks good. Well, the survivors do … yeah that brassica army did their thing again (AHEM BREE) and devoured an absurd percentage of the broccoli, cabbage,kale, kohlrani plants (Farmer Kristin quote: “which brassicas did they eat? they ate everything. First it was the cutworms, then it was the deer.”)

But they didn’t really get everything, and we rolled with some punches and many things abided and so have we and here we go again! When I look out at the field, the plants look optimistic and I feel it, too.

Inside Box One

Don’t forget to be careful not to rip the tabs on your boxes (they are new and stiff so it requires some mindfulness) – and to return them to your pickup spot next week! Bwahahahaha

• Arugula Salad Mix – (arugula with some red lettuce, bekana, and tat soi).
  The drought meant that our salad row germinated poorly while we were busy trying to get all the crops into the ground … and we assumed it was going to rain, at some point, because it’s spring and it has to rain sometime right? But no. Arugula is hardy in drought and it came up pretty well … shading out the lettuce that tried to come up once we tried to rescue it by hand watering the bed.
  
  So, we have plenty of arugula and almost no lettuce and I hope you like arugula because you’ve got a half pound or so of it …. dress it with honey mustard, olive oil and lemon/garlic, or viniagrette. Also stands up well to strong flavors like blue cheese, and is complemented by sweet stuff such as apples. raisins, etc.
  
  
• Green Onions – use the whole thing!
• Green Garlic – can also use all of this, but you have to really slice the green tops thinklu across the grain. If you get some scapes forming, those are also good chomping. We didn’t plant any of this, this year … these are refugees from last year’s “we have a new baby” weed party field. I think they realized they were dwarfed by the weeds, and decided to hunker and bide their time, coming up fast and hard this spring instead. Which is cool, because otherwise we’d have none to enjoy right now.
• Radishes – springtime zippy-bomb variety pack. Pan fried radishes with bacon … that’s a thing. You can roast em, slice them into your salad, or google for “CSA radish recipes help me,” or the like.
• Bok Choi – it’s fine raw but most popular in stir fries.
• Pea Shoots – Combine them with any salad or us them as a salad “topper.” They are fabulous wilted on stir-fry. Or on sandwiches, “topped” on soups (especially thicker soups or chili) … or mix ’em into your salad.
• Grape Jelly – We have one just neighboring home out here on the farm, kitty corner from us. We have always considered ourselves incredibly lucky to have them – and now you can share a little bit in our fortune with this jelly. Neighbor Dave & Neighbor Marcia aren’t just neighbors and O.G. CSA members – they’re also vignerons! OK, I had to look that word up – they cultivate a lovely vineyard, and last fall it was bursting with grapes … a bounty that they shared with us! We don’t make wine … but we sure love homemade jelly. So enjoy some unique grape jelly, made by your farmers, with wine grapes from fellow CSA members!

It has been dry. You guys know this one – the last two years have been extraordinarily dry. After the incredible amounts of snow and ice the farm had over the winter, we thought the pattern had changed at last, and we looked forward to free water that falls from the sky like in the days of yore.

However, as soon as the freezing temperatures stopped, so did the magical sky moisture. Over the entire month of May, we got a combined total of just over 1/10″ of rainfall here.

Earlier this week, a huge rainstorm moved through the area …

… but a narrow corridor of dry was right in the middle of it, and we remained within it, receiving just a brief burst of rain – a meager 0.08.”

But, as Otis was fond of pointing out – “better than nothing!” He was pretty excited to see real raindrops falling on the field:

So, we we run the drip irrigation daily – to keep the shallowly-rooted baby crops alive and growing, as well as the 400 tiny trees and shrubs we planted at the end of April, as a future windbreak and privacy screen. We feel lucky to have our infrastructure and experience at levels where we feel equipped to ride out drought.

It’s been a busy spring, but not a bummer spring … the drought is a pain but really, so is almost everything we do and deal with out here living this lifestyle; it’s another opportunity to remember to reframe perspective and see how lucky we are and how beautiful our lives can be.

Silver linings on the lack of rain clouds aren’t insignificant, either … the weeds in the field are barely even emerging, outside of the thin moisture lines from the drip irrigation, so the crops are getting a good head start on them. Plus this is a bad mosquito year – probably the most we’ve had since the epic monster mosquito massacre of 2014 … but we know they’d be insanely worse if it hadn’t been so dry here. So when we watch the huge thunderclouds rumbling past just a little bit to the west or the east, leaving us dry … we just run the irrigation again and shake our heads with a smile.

In other news, hmm well we picked up bird watching this year – set up an array of feeders, and started checking off every new species we spotted. Turns out we live in a major migratory corridor and all kinds of colorful tropical birds come through here, so it’s been fascinating to learn about them all with Otis (if you like birds, I strongly recommend the Merlin Bird Identification app for your smartphone … it can listen and tell you what birds are vocalizing around you automatically, it’s sweet.)

Seems like it’s been forever since the end of last season, but shocking that it’s already time to get things boxed and delivered again. Time does it’s weird thing; wait how are the Boys already so big and my hair so gray?!

Your weekly CSA boxes will be starting up on the second Tuesday of June … get ready because here we go again!

Well, it sure has been an interesting year, again. The most memorable part was probably the Battle for the Crops with the local deer army, I’d say. It was also our first year farming with two kids – and the combination of an infant and a boy was certainly quite a challenge.

We planned for it, as much as we could – tried to make things as low maintenance as possible … which really doesn’t equate to much ease, with a farm our size, without pesticides and herbicides and employees and tractors.

Although we had hardly any WWOOFers to help compared to previous years, we were kept sane by the steadfast, incredible support of family – Kristin’s mom and dad came out to the Farm for nearly every harvest day and market to spend time with the boys, freeing up Kristin and I to get things done .. as well as helped with innumerable projects, meals, and loads of laundry.

It would not have been possible without them, and I cannot adequately express how grateful I am that they are in our lives – not only because it makes the pragmatic aspects of farming possible, but because philosophically, deeply, we believe in the importance and value of living as an inter-generational family – the way our modern American society has degraded and broken this type of connection and support is, I believe, one of the reasons it is so sickened.

In 2013, I married Kristin, changed my name to Sehr, left behind my city life and moved onto this old Sehr family land, embarking on an adventure that has led me into a depth and variety of experiences that I’d never really dared to hope for. I live and work alongside my family, raising two new humans intimately connected to the cycles of the seasons and rhythms of life on this earth. It is all I want from life; I feel no lack, no need for more, no yearning for different … how lucky I am, to have found this life, this land, this experience of Being.

So thank you, Deb and Jim for your support over this last decade, and thank you, CSA Shareholders, for supporting us with your dollars and interest and collaboration, for another year. It’s been another enriching turn around the Sun; farming the Barrens, greening the wasteland, finding joy and bringing forth life and love from such an unlikely little scrap of land on the outskirts, within the borderland between civilization and the forces of nature that inexorably and patiently work to reclaim it.

This is Life. We are Living. Thanks, again, for being fellow members of our symbiotic network, it’s been wonderful to be supported by you, to get to know you, and get to feed you.

inside the final box

• Tetsukabuto Squash – You should wait for 5 weeks before eating these – the flavor will be concentrated in the flesh, if you can wait. Tetsukabuto squash has a relatively low moisture content and when cooked retains a firm texture with a pleasant starchy quality. The flesh is not quite as sweet as a butternut, but when roasted, its earthy flavor develops rich notes of hazelnut and browned butter. Will store for 4-6 months in a cool dark place. Here’s a good overview, or you can search for a recipe that looks yummy …
• Onions
• Garlic
• Shallots
• Dried Beans – 1 cup dried should yield 3 cups cooked. Expect these to cook faster and don’t store them in a sealed container (paper bag is fine) as they are fresh dried beans, and have a higher moisture content.

• (Calypso, Cranberry, or Tiger Eye variety)– This year we experimented with several rows of beans that we let dry out on the plants in the field. We’ve done this at smaller scales for ourselves in the past, but needed to come up with a way to shell and winnow (remove the dead husks and plant matter) a much larger quantity, in order to share with you. Our old wringer washer was the secret to joining the industrial age … we ran all the plants through the rollers a couple of times to pop out the beans, and then dumped the output from bucket to bucket in front of a fan which blew away the chaff.

• Potatoes
• Carrots
• Kale
• Ground Cherries

On the day of the party, it drizzled into the morning, ending a few hours before things kicked off, and then it came back a few hours after the last party guests went home. And that was just how perfect the whole thing went. The fall colors were vibrant and varied, the sunshine and clouds in an idealized aesthetic balance. My camera was plugged into the music and so I took no photos but that let me just soak in the beauty, and be recharged, reawakened to how much we love growing for the network of humans that we do, and reminded of how much we love our existence embedded in this land, within this network, this local ecosystem of sky and sand and animals and plants and each other and you.

So that was nice.

We have freezing nights in the coming week. The season is not over, but the end has been set into motion. Our seasonal life here cycles while shooting forward, spiraling into the unknown. It’s the ride we bought our tickets for, and I have yet to feel buyer’s remorse … 10/10 would live again

inside Box 17

Potatoes – reds and whites or maybe just reds but either way good for roasting, putting in soup or making into potato salad.Onions – a staple.

Butternut Squash – a moist squash good for pumpkin pie and other baked goods, or puréing into soup.

Radishes 

Salad Turnips – last of!

Tomatoes 

Green Tomatoes – not the kind that are ripe when green but the kind that one would make fried green tomatoes with or perhaps a Green Tomato and Gruyère Tart, or even something sweet like green tomato cake.

Brussels Sprouts – 100% not sprayed with any chemicals, not even organic approved ones. Hopefully through our careful picking this isn’t too evident. 

Sage & Thyme – seasonally appropriate herbs. Hang them to dry you want to use later. 

Radish Microgreens

Next week is the last week of the 2022 CSA!