It was a lovely week, with a trip to our magic waterfall and swimming in the Saint Croix and some good rain that got here and some bad storms that missed us and lots of blackberry picking and lobster mushroom foraging.

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On Thursday morning I woke up and opened my eyes and Kristin rolled over and said “we need a place to cure some onions.”

“OK. Some? How many is some? Dozens? Hundreds?”

<a moment of silence>

“Thousands.”

Oh boy! So I set to work brainstorming how to create a space for them; they would need shade, maximum ventilation, and protection from rain. We don’t have much indoor space here, so we’d have to build something!

For the base, I knew one of the big sturdy pallets (donated by an Action Squad fan) would probably work well. Once measurement revealed that it would fit perfectly beneath the truck topper that The Neighbors Marquardt had just given us, everything started to flow easily, and in a few hours, Marty and I built a sturdy shed with four 4×8′ chicken wire shelves.

And so, the Onions Shack joined our shantytown, as the sixth repurposed Truck Topper.

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I repeatedly went outside over the course of the following days, just to admire it.

Some vegetables happened this week too, but that was on Kristin’s end and she is the driver and I’m the newsletterer so this is what you get. I suppose the boxes say all that needs to be said anyway, so let’s get to

Inside Box 10

• Sweet Onions – eat them raw or caramelized!
• Sweet Corn – eat it as soon as possible for maximum sweetness!

• Broccoli – the spring broccoli plants have sprung back into action with these cooler temperatures, pushing out abundant tender side shoots.

• Micro-greens (Radish, Cilantro, or Red Cabbage) – I have been trimming them with less stems this week, hopefully they’re even better now!

• Slicing Cucumbers
• a party of Tomatoes
• Cherry Tomatoes

• Zucchini
• a Melon! (Lily, Sun Jewel, or a mystery melon that we lost track of the name of)

Good.

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Well, I thought this newsletter was going to be mostly about seasonal shifts and foraging bounties of lobster mushrooms & blackberries, and maybe something about how I first came to this land exactly a decade ago, and fell instantly in love … but now, instead, we are going to talk about the wild chickens of the woods.

Yes, there is a delicious wild mushroom called Chicken of the Woods, and yes, I did find one that was too old to be eaten while we were out finding lobster mushrooms early in the week.

Yes, we did offer our members some of the fresh, beautiful specimen we discovered while out foraging for wild berries a few days later.

And yes, our CSA members, Neighbors Marquardt, did gift us a second massive Chicken of the Woods mushroom yesterday!

However, none of these are what we are most excited about at the moment. While we were harvesting for your boxes today, Marty went into the chicken yard to dump some culled cabbages for chicken food and future compost.

And while in there, he spied a gang of tiny chicks fleeing into the dense underbrush behind the chickenyard.

They hid too well for us to find, but while we took our lunch break, they re-emerged … eleven beautiful babies wisely following their proud momma (who we’d noticed had gone rogue in recent weeks, sleeping somewhere secret in the woods, rather than the coop).

So we all fanned out through the woods, forming a gentle line of shooing and baby talking, moving the family to safety – first, through the gate into the chicken yard, and then through the door of the little truck topper coop, where mama and her brood can relax in safety and privacy as they grow up a bit.

The herding went off without a hitch, and now the farm is feeling bright and cheerful, in a way that’s hard to explain but inarguably real for us all.

There is new life on the land here, new sparks for us to tend and bring up into our magical, grubby existence on the edge between the Barrens and Civilization.

It’s beautiful, and we are well reminded of that today.

Inside Box 9

• Potatoes (red purple, yukon gold, and/or maybe russets)
• Green Cabbage of Unremembered Variety
• Eggplant – the season’s first! You probably remember that they will soak up a lot of oil when cooking, so choose an oil that you like the flavor of.
• Shallots
• Zucchini – all the kinds
• Cucumbers – big slicers and littler picklers
• Cherry Tomatoes
• Savory herb – will pair great with the potatoes!
• Micro-greens (either basil (don’t refrigerate!), cilantro, radish, or a mix with cabbage, kale, and amaranth)
• Tomatoes – they are ripening more slowly with these cool nights; use the soft ripe ones first, and let the firmer ones finish ripening on a counter for later in the week.

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In the summertime when the weather is hot
You can stretch right up and touch the sky
When the weather’s fine
You got berries, you got berries on your mind
Have a drink, have a drive
Go out and see what you can find

If the veggie’s ripe take it in for a meal
If it’s not ripe yet just let it stay in the field
Speed along the rows
Pull a weed or maybe three twenty-five
When the sun goes down
You can make it, make it good and really fine

We’re not bad people
We’re not dirty, we’re not mean
We love everybody but we do as we please
When the weather’s fine
We go hikin’ or go swimmin’ in the stream
We’re always happy
Life’s for livin’ yeah, that’s our philosophy

Sing along with us
Dee dee dee-dee dee
Dah dah dah-dah dah
Yeah we’re hap-happy
Dah dah-dah
Dee-dah-do dee-dah-do dah-do-dah
Dah-do-dah-dah-dah
Dah-dah-dah do-dah-dah

Alright ah

Chh chh-chh, uh, chh chh-chh, uh
Chh chh-chh, uh, chh chh-chh, uh
Chh chh-chh, uh, chh chh-chh, uh
Chh chh-chh, uh, chh chh-chh, uh
Chh chh-chh, uh, chh chh-chh, uh
Chh chh-chh, uh, chh chh-chh

Inside Box 8:

• Shallots – use like onions … but with milder, more complex flavor.
• Carrots – a medley of three colors of carrots

• Zucchini
• Broccoli – the spring planting is growing kind of oddly due to the recent heat waves, but it’s still yummy!

• Cucumbers (Picklers & Slicers)
• Assorted Tomatoes – they are coming on strong now! May include green-when-ripe variety, as well as yellow and orange ones

• Micro-Greens – four of you are randomly getting flavorbomb basil microgreens – don’t refrigerate them or they’ll turn black and yucky. The rest of y’all have a colorful mix of amaranth, kale, kohlrabi, and mustard greens.
• Green Beans (and a dash of Purple) – they’re slowing down finally!

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It was a week of storms and transitions here on the farm. Just like last year around this time, we took shelter in our root cellar from a threat of tornadoes and straight line winds – and just like last time, the winds bypassed us, doing no harm here … but raising some hell just a little bit beyond us. (In fact, our own CSA shareholders and neighbors “The Goat People” had a big old oak blow down right on top of their helpers’ car!)

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In other news, we did a lot of wild berry foraging again (raspberries are fading, blackberries are starting up), our dogs both made huge strides in recoveries from their maladies (a spinal injury and a severe grand mal seizure cluster), and Keegan & Charley (the lovely couple of WWOOFers we had staying with us for the last month and a half) moved out of the ice fishing shack to embark on a new adventure, battling an oil pipeline.

The season has shifted for us, it feels – from prepping & planting to maintenance & harvesting taking up most of our time. It’s a foundational pivot, and one impact is that even during heat waves, we sometimes find our thoughts turn toward winter. With the pandemic, the future is even murkier than usual. Magic 8-ball’s stuck on “Cannot predict now” and the soundtrack on “Que Sera, Sera.” But these are just early stirrings, without any concern. Because right now it’s peak, glorious summertime, and Life is in full, beautiful swing all around us.

Ain’t it grand?

Inside Box 7

It was a crazy raining downpour harvest this morning! The rain smashed our farmers market canopy, but Grandpa Jim came to the rescue and franken-fixed it with parts from one of our old dead ones. The boxes are really looking like summertime now, with rainbows of color from tomatoes and beets and zukes …

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• Tomatoes – the season’s first heirloom and cherry tomatoes! Most are ripe, some are just close to ripe … can be hard to tell since they come in so many colors (even green!) so gently squeeze to if they have a little bit of give to the skin. If so, they’re ripe!

• Beets
• Green Cabbage (Early Jersey Wakefield)
• Big Onions

• Bean Medley (Green, wax, and purple green beans)
• Microgreens (basil, kale, kohlrabi)

• green and golden Zucchini
• Cucumbers (picklers and slicers)

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This week the heatwave broke, and the foraging began. After many sweltering days and unforgiving muggy nights, we were quite relieved when a cold front finally pushed through, dropping a good deluge of rain as it also dropped the temperatures down to tolerable levels.

The repeated soakings made us hopeful for mushrooms, but our forays yielded only a couple small ‘chickens of the woods.’

However, getting out and beating the bushes led to the realization that the wild raspberries were blowing up! We’d been waiting for this for a couple of years – ever since the logging trucks stripped the trees from the county forest near us. But after last year’s berry harvest was a bust, I’d kind of forgotten the predicted berry bonanza … so this was a most welcome surprise.

We have spent many hours out picking this week, with yogurt cups strapped around our waists for two-handed dexterity, boots and pants for the poison ivy and ticks, hats for the deer flies, and an arsenal of choice swear words for the mosquitoes. Patches of wild red raspberries waved to us from the open savannas, and clusters of firm, deep purple “black cap” raspberries winked from the shady fringes around shrubs and small trees.

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Enjoying the berries was something I had to remind myself to stop and do – in the goal-oriented framework of acquiring maximum berries for canning, it was easy to forget to stop and enjoy the fruits of our labors! Jam is mouthwateringly delicious, but still cannot compare to a handful of fresh-picked wild berries of various ripeness/tartness, eaten all at once, under the bright blue skies and radiant sunshine of Summertime.

Inside Box 6

We harvested in the rain all morning for maximum freshness! The ceaseless drizzle kept us and the veggies nice and cool; the humans could have probably done with a little less dampness, but the veggies loved it.

• Carrots – Cut the greens off (leave a couple of inches of stem) before you store them in the fridge, or they will soon get rubbery and sad! Don’t just throw ’em away though – you can make pesto, or add them to sauces or salads! Later in the year, we will probably cut the greens off at the farm and send just the roots to you, so enjoy them now!

• Beans – (Green, Yellow, and Purple) – Perhaps the most tedious crop to harvest! They hide all over within the low, leafy plants. and must be picked gently (so flowers aka future beans aren’t knocked off) and completely (so the plants continue to produce tender new beans.

• Kale mix – (Tuscan, Curly Blue, Crimson, & Red Russian) – the kale plants are a favorite snack of various caterpillars – we tried to get you the nicest leaves available, but expect a few harmless holes – the hallmark of pesticide-free kale!

• Onions – A lot of onions were planted this year in hopes of being able to provide them within every weekly box, because they are so darn versatile … and yummy.
• Zucchini

• Slicing Cucumbers
• Micro-Greens (radish, turnip, or kohlrabi) – this is our first year growing these, let us know if you’re liking them?
• Thyme – it looks like Thyme.
• Mexican Tarragon – often used in meat or egg dishes, this herb is also said to have various medicinal qualities. Not sure how you want to use yours, but it might be useful to know that the Aztecs used it in a powder which was blown into the faces of human sacrifices before they were killed! Or, maybe just make into a digestive calming tea or enjoy it on your breakfast scramble. Here are some tips.

Another week. another box bursting with fresh deliciousness! Hope you’re enjoying it all as much as we are.

love,

us

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