Another week of beauty, seven nights with the whippoorwills back from wherever they’ve been and the cricketsong and the rustling commotions of the flying squirrels, seven days of morphing clouds or sunshine and blue skies.

We did a bunch more preservation and canning of the seasonal abundances du jour – wood-smoking tomatoes, tomatilloes, and peppers for salsas, crafting and sealing away jars of sauces, and using the sun to dehydrate the massive Hen of the Woods mushroom gifted to us by Neighbor Marcia.

We foraged fruitlessly for wild grapes – they are apparently taking a year off, after busting it out so hard last year. (Works out well anyway since we still have a backlog of blackberries and dewberries to transmute.)

The corn stalks dried up, flocks of geese headed south, bear hunters roved the barrens behind their baying dog packs, and no one went swimming in the river. The humidity followed the geese south and good riddance to it. We slept well and spent as much time as possible outside.

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Inside Box 13

• Edamame – eat them from the pod, or in one of these easy recipes, perhaps.
• Basil with
• Garlic Chive Flowers

• Carrots – an assortment of orange and purples. I still haven’t caught the gopher, despite my repeated efforts, but carrots still exist.
• either Okra or Tomatilloes – depending on your dharma. We like pan-searing the okra pods (whole, unbroken). For tomatillos, there are soup recipes worth exploring (we mostly make ours into salsa).

• ripe Sweet Peppers
• Cucumbers
• Spaghetti Squash – prepare it like winter squash; carve in half, scoop out the seeds, bake cut side-down until soft – use a fork to pull apart the strands into pseudo-spaghetti. Would be good with butter, garlic, and fresh basil … hey we have basil and garlic chives in this box!

• Zucchini
• Tomatoes

• Cherry Tomatoes – 2020’s can’t stop won’t stop crop
• Onions

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It was a week of lots of eating lots of fresh pico de gallo, canning corn relish, helping our friend Steffan prepare for his outdoor wedding here next month, and finally completing the new velociraptor cage all around the processing area, to keep the chickens from strolling in and hanging out.

It was also a week of strange and amusing critter happenings.

First something was screaming horribly in the woods in the late evening and early morning hours. Like, loud terrible repeated shrieks of utmost dismay … which turned out to be a hunter using an app that plays sounds designed to draw in predators, like the coyotes he was hunting.

Then there was the creature that haunted the Fish House – the repurposed ice fishing shed that WWOOFer Jenny has been staying in. Something was inside the wood stove in the middle of the night, scratching and scrambling and being terrifying. When we came to investigate, there was nothing to be found … well, nothing alive. There was however, a flat, mummified, long-dead flying squirrel preserved in the ashes.

We told her not to worry, it was just the ghost of the squirrel and he couldn’t hurt her. Of course, the sound came back a couple hours later, and she spent the night in her car. Then next night, it returned, so she opened the woodstove … and a quite- alive flying squirrel came ambling out into her cabin.

Eventually, it went out the door, and eventually, she got back to sleep.

Inside Box 11

• Hot & Sweet Peppers – hot peppers are either cayenne or jalepeno. Sweet peppers are a mix of other peppers – all larger than the hots.
• Sweet Corn
• a Melon! – a magical blend of fate and free has brought you either a watermelon, Crenshaw melon, or Musk melon.

• Tomatoes – they are definitely slowing down lately, and getting less perfect as the season slides down further from summer;s pinnacle, starting the descent into autumn. We have many more ugly ones now for saucing and salsas … and fresh pico on everything.

• Basil: (either full-size or micro-greens) – “Don’t put them in the fridge,” he repeated, again.
• Cucumbers – maybe slowing down
• Zucchini – not slowing down
• Cherry Tomatoes – hitting their stride in the field!

• Sweet Onions
• Shallots
• Micro-Greens (either radish, kale, or amaranth)

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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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