My favorite moment from this week was the Sunday evening that the whole crew spent on the screen porch,watching as the massive thunderstorm system rolled past and toward us.

The first of the cells were dozens of miles to our south, yet still visible as the constant silent barrage of high-atmosphere lightning snapped streaks across the roiling clouds.

And we weren’t the only ones watching.

The lightning bugs – which had been present but not all that common up on our hill, were out in unprecedented numbers, all around us – and not just casually blinking while leisurely flying around, either – they were darting and dashing, their lights flashing stroboscopically through the shadows of the oaks and pines.

It was an incredible display (sadly not capturable on my phone), and it seemed clear that the fireflies were flashing in response to the electrical storm going in the skies around the farm. Maybe this was really why they’re called lightning bugs!

Other than the storm, it’s been a pretty standard work week on the farm – plenty of weeding and mulching in the field, and pruning and trellising tomatoes in the high tunnel. Oh and we set the field on fire a little bit … Kristin was flame weeding while WWOOFer Marty ran the extinguishers, keeping the hay mulch from catching … until a miscalculation left him afield with an empty extinguisher just as the a new section of drier mulch caught fire in earnest.

I heard the screaming from all the way up on the hill, and came running with a big bowl of water, joining Sarah, Rob, and Marty in putting out the several patches of flaming hay that had erupted during the confusion.

Once the flames were vanquished, we took stock of the damages : a melted section of irrigation hose, and several beet plants with one side singed. Not too bad, well worth it in exchange for the refreshing burst of adrenaline and that old lesson renewed … fire is a tricky monster, even when it’s being your friend.

What else? The first ripening has begun among the tomatoes – just cherry tomatoes for now, but so it begins … there are lots of green ones throughout the rows, ripe with promise, if not redness.  The peppers are peppering, the okra is downright okratic.

It’s good to be growing.

Box #5

During the course of today’s harvest, Neighbor Marcia went to check on the three baby chickens … and discovered that a fourth had just hatched!

Happy literal birthday, little chicken.

• Garlic – fresh dug & uncured, which means great flavor and a lack of the papery skin you’re probably used to. Treat like regular garlic!
• Baby Carrots –  cut off your tops!
  
  We leave them there because they’re beautiful, let you know they were harvested today, and they’re edible! Great for vegetable broth (perhaps with your green onion tops?) But if you are saving your carrots for a future day, give them crew cuts before they hit the fridge, or the carrots will get all rubberylike.
  
• Zucchini – the first of several, gods willing. Kristin recommends that you chop them up and sautee them with garlic and onions, and after removing it from the heat, throw in some basil!
• Kohlrabi – The aliens are getting larger and more menacing … but are still tender even at this size, as the Grand Duke variety is bred to get big without becoming woody.
  
• Spring Onions –  The green onions have now graduated to the next phase of onion plumpness!
  
• Sugar Snap or Snow Peas – If they’re flat, hey’re snow peas and ideal for stir frying – if plump, they’re sugar snaps and best raw … in my opinion. Really, you can do both with either!
• Purple & Italian Basil – DO NOT REFRIGERATE!
  
  It will turn black and you will be sad. Put the stem in some water, or leave it in the plastic bag on the kitchen counter if you’ll be using it within a few days.
• Deconstructed Napa Cabbage –  it’s been a lousy year for Napa cabbage – we planted extra this year, and to our dismay it all started to flower instead of growing complete heads. It must have been the weather this year, as several of our grower friends from all around the area have had the same thing happen.
  
  Instead of sending them to the chicken compost pile, we decided to embark upon a laborious salvage mission – pulling apart each head, removing bad leaves and the flowering centers.
  It was a ridiculous amount of work and not very pleasant (our volunteer helpers almost revolted, but we stemmed the rebellion with a box of donuts). Napa has great crunch, and is very versatile – can be used fresh and raw, or stir fried, or fermented into delicious kimchi!

 

 

It’s hot. And all last night it was somehow hotter. And wetter. Not rain – we’d have loved rain – but sticky, icky humidity. The air was so wet that the mosquitoes dog paddled through it, diving through chinks in our screen armor, and snorkeling their faces down through our sweaty skin, all night long. It was a lousy sleep, but hey, it was over soon enough, as we woke up with the dawn to race the sun’s desiccating rays to the salad and pea rows.

This week’s harvest was brought to you in part by a grant from strong coffee.

But really, mostly, we’re exhausted because life is awesome and we’ve been graced with a lot of fun people and times. We’ve been up too late, imbibing too much, having too many people over, and perhaps even spending too many hours floating languidly down the Saint Croix River, sunburning ourselves in unusual spots.

It’s been great, but we’re excited for some home/work time, to get re-grounded; we’ve been leaving the Farm far too often for our tastes, as we make important connections with friends and family – and prepare to trade our house in South Minneapolis for a nest egg to hatch out here in the Sterling Sand Barrens.

It’s all wonderful, all worthy, and we sure as heck recognize how blessed we are to face every single one of the stresses we have  … but still, damn I’m hoping to fall asleep early tonight, wake up late, and spend several days without leaving the Farm at all.

Box #4

As usual, everything in your box was harvested fresh today!

 

• Salad Mix (red & green lettuce, green mizuna, arugula, pea tips, baby kale)
  We’re getting toward the end of spring salad days, as the heat cranks up and the cool-weather-loving plants throw up their seeds in surrender to summer.

  

• Beets (mostly Detroit Dark Red & Chioggia varieties) – Kristin likes to use feta cheese with beets, sometimes simple olive oil and salt and pepper, or compliment them with citrus flavors. We often roast the beet roots, and then chop the beet greens and toss them in toward the end, letting them wilt and combine into a beetastic dish.
  
  (Since we are obsessed with doing all in our power to preserve the freshness of your food, we cut off the greens and bagged them together –  once they leave the ground, root crops left attached to their leaves lose moisture and become withered and rubbery and sad.)
• Sugar Snap Peas –  also getting toward the end of these – the plants hate this heat and aren’t doing much in the way of flowers (future peas) anymore.
  
• Green Onions – These are getting bigger now – did you know that the bulbing of onions is triggered by shortening day length?  So now that we’re past the summer solstice, the onions are putting on some girth.
• Broccoli – A good harvest this week!

  

• Hakurei Salad Turnips – these are done until maybe fall – you’ve had them a few times, maybe change up how you’re using them – if you’ve been enjoying them raw, try them roasted, or vice versa!
  
• Sage – We ate ours in grilled hamburger this week and it was delicious; highly recommended. If you’re not able to use it now, it’s easy to dry and use later!

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s been a strangely wet dry week.

Although there have been several days where we worked in the rain and got wet, there hasn’t been enough rain to really ever soak the soil – just slow, steady drizzles that don’t really add up to much. And it’s been chilly, too – down into the lower forties at night – so low it even blackening the tips of the basil plants..

All the chilly weather has the plants growing slowly – it’s strange looking back to this time last year, and realizing just how ahead things were – even crops we planted later than we did this year! Fortunately, even the weeds have been slowed down a bit.

The voles have rejected our peace treaty, and really upped their evil quotient this week – they’ve taken to utterly destroying our tomato plants, eating their root systems up  and leaving the healthy-looking plants to dangle from their trellis strings like hanged men for us to find in the morning.

So far, 8 plants have met their doom this way. This is quite an escalation, and if it continues we just might have to dynamite the entire farm and start over.

First though, we’ll try reasoning with the vermin again, and then maybe come up with some kind of vole-dance to drive them away.

The raccoons have been very active this spring as well – we’ve already evicted three from our chicken yard this spring, and lost two wayward hens that weren’t sleeping in the secure coop at night. Bears, however, have not been seen at all – very unusual for us at this time of year. We think that WWOOFer Sarah’s canine sidekick, Kingsbury, has been driving them away. They’re definitely in the area, just not on our land, which is great.

 

This was a week of transition. Meg & Eldon, two of our springtime WWOOFers that helped us get the field started have moved along out into the wide world, and we’ve been joined by Rob – a friend of Sarah’s who comes to us from Habitable Spaces in Texas, where we have spent many a wintertime , and where we first met Sarah, as well as Marty and Jeff, who both were out helping us this week. It’s an interesting exchange program we have going with them, in which humans flee the summer Texas heat and join us, and then flow back South when the cold returns.

And in a transition that seems somehow connected, we both poured the first foundation on our land this week, and decided to sell our beloved house in South Minneapolis. (We have’t lived there since 2013, but have been renting it out.)

The root cellar will give us a place to store, ferment, and cure food, beer, flower bulbs … in the winter it will keep things from freezing, in summer it will keep things cool yet moist – and in all seasons, provide a storm shelter for when the trailers just aren’t as stuck to the ground as we’d like them to be.  I’m not sure that there are many things that feel quite as much like putting down roots as pouring concrete footings for a root cellar!

As for the Minneapolis house … I really never thought I’d leave it all, let alone be able to sell it, but I’ve slowly realized over the past four years that it’s no longer where my heart and soul are, and although it will always be magical, it is now so firmly in our past.

The change has been made, and it’s time to let go of the pieces of chrysalis that sheltered us in our earlier forms, to focus on the new, living home we’re creating together here.

It’s always interesting, and every day is an adventure.

We are so grateful for the luck to have found a living we love to make.

Box #3

Sugar Snap Peas – you can do so much with these delicious, versatile favorites …  including just eating them all straight out of the box before anyone else in your family finds out what they’re missing.

 

Chop Salad Mix –  (red & green lettuce, mizuna, baby kale, pea tips, arugula) Bigger leaves for your eating pleasure – enjoy it full sized, or chop it like it’s haute.

Scarlet Queen Turnips –  so scarlet that an unnamed helper (STEFFAN) accidentally harvested a bunch of beets today. We’ll blame their absence on the voles perhaps.

 

Bok Choi Leaves & Sprouts – you know how to eat the leaves I reckon – treat the flower stalks similarly, chop ‘em up and sauté them. Tender, delicious, and not deadly poisonous at all.

Green Onions –  I’m really trying hard not to link to Booker T and the MGs this year but I’m weakening.

Purslane – Perhaps the most nutritious and delicious weed we battle on the farm! We actually let this patch grow up a bit as a temporary ground cover beneath the corn, so we could harvest it for y’all today. Enjoy the tangy, sorta-lemony crunch fresh on sandwiches and salads.

Broccoli – the variety we grew this year has been confusing me about when it’s ready to harvest – bits of the flower develop fully, while the majority of the head remains tight and poised to grow more … it might have gotten larger if we waited, but it’s plenty delicious now. Don’t toss the leaves – they’re awesome eating.

Oregano –  in the little herb bag on top! Perhaps chop it up and use it in a salad dressing, with the green onions, some oil, salt, and vinegar, or throw it in a pot of beans as they cook! If you don’t feel like using it right away you could dry it or infuse some vinegar with it.

 

 

The night of last week’s CSA harvest, an insane wall of wind followed us back to Wisconsin, striking in the middle of the night, waking everyone up with howling and shaking and falling trees and debris thwacking against windows and walls. I’ve never heard the wind so loud at the farm – nor felt it so strongly … when I stepped outside to see the storm, it almost blew me over – my robe was flying straight out behind me like Superman.

Pretty neat, but I quickly opted to duck back inside in case it got stronger still. Fortunately, it lasted only a couple of minutes before settling into less gusty rain and thunder, and our damages were minor – several downed trees, a smashed window in the outhouse, a tree-hung chandelier that spun so fast it shed nearly all its crystals, some tomatoes and peas knocked off their trellises, and a whole lotta branches and random stuff blown all over the place.

The next morning, as we cleaned up the mess, we learned just how lucky we were, as on Facebook farm after farm not far south of us reported absolute devastation by hail – shredded row cover, smashed crops, and major losses. We often curse the way that weather systems seem to always skirt by us in the Barrens, but this time, we sure were grateful.

The crops are really taking off now, with the looooong sunny days boosting their growth (today is the longest day of the year, in fact!).

The tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, peas, and okra are all flowering … as well as many of the cool weather crops, which we’d rather were not! The bees are loving it though.

In the May newsletter I mentioned how the logging nearby had run over the remains of the “The Architect’s Land” – the amazing ruins of a 1930’s homestead built out of car body panels and logs – which we scavenged and salvaged to build the Rust Shack.

Well, we learned something pretty cool this week, from a 95 year-old neighbor who lived here on the edge of the Barrens for almost a century:

“The Architect”’s name was actually William Henry, and he used to own a 120 acre parcel … which came across the road … to include our land. The hill that our trailer and the Rust Shack sit on was known as “Henry Hill” – he lived on our land! So without knowing it, we’ve been rescuing the ruins of William Henry’s homestead and moving them up onto his old hill.

The more we learn about the local history here – of the Barrens and of our land itself, the more fascinating it becomes – and more it feels like home … exactly where we’re meant to be.

Box #2

• Sugar Sprint Snap Peas – the very first arrivals – there aren’t many yet, but these are just the vanguard.
  
• Pea Tips
  
  
• Hakurei Salad Turnips – mild, delicate flavor you can just snack on plain if you want! The greens are edible too – you could saute them with the greens from your radishes perhaps!
  
• French Breakfast Radishes
• Romaine Lettuce
  
• Kale (Red Russian, Dwarf Blue Curly, Scarlet, and Dino …. with a couple token mustard greens for zip)
  
  
• Green Onions
• Garlic Scapes – the weird looking twisted branch dealies are actually the flower stalks of garlic plants, and taste like it. Mince them up finely and mix with sour cream or cream cheese for a tasty garlic dip, or toss it in near the end of your cooking.
• Grand Duke Kohlrabi