Well, we finally got some rain. Only a half of an inch, but it felt significant. Like we’d broken the drought, and now perhaps the floodgates will open up for us. Or at least give us an occasional trickle.

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It helps that the crazy heat wave broke – sure, we’re still dry, but at least we’re not under the broiler all day as well.

So it feels good now, and looks hopeful ahead. That said, the parched and burning weather has definitely taken a toll. Even with lots of watering, the cool weather crops are suffering.

It’s frustrating and sometimes depressing but we know we’re doing the best we can, given our many limitations in this best-of-all-possible-worlds.

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Hope you’re enjoying this beautiful weather, these utterly amazing moments of consciousness, and the following vegetables:

Inside Box 3

Salad Mix – (lettuce, arugula, tat soi, pea tips, bekana) – The salad row has not been a fan of this heat. We didn’t pick any to sell at the market his week, so there’d be more for you – but even then, it was barely enough even after we picked and re-picked anything that looked good. This week’s mix is going to taste a bit more bitter, as a result of the heat it grew in – if you don’t like the flavor, it is pretty easily countered with dressing or other additions.

Radishes – French Breakfast & Cherry Bell

Basil Microgreens

Radish Microgreens

Green Onions

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Dill

Kohlrabi

Purslane – this “weed” is popular in Mediterranean dishes. Here are some ideas if you don’t have a plan in place.

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Well, today got off to an intense start and I’m coming down off the adrenaline now.

This morning, we wanted to fill up some rinse water basins for the salad mix. Our solar battery bank was a bit low, so I started up our generator in order to run the well. It started up LOUD, way way louder than usual. This was a concern, but we needed to water and it was still putting out electricity properly, so I let it run hoping it would settle down and smooth out. It did not settle, nor smooth. It started on fire.

Blowing on it was futile. It spread to the plastic housing. A little water from a nearby bucket wasn’t enough. The fire got larger inside the generator as it spread. The hose to the mushroom logs did the trick, and the fire was stopped before it spread or exploded.

Fortunately, it was still under warranty, and we had our old one (functional but loud as bellowing hell) on standby. But dang.

And here I’d thought I’d had my peak adrenaline moment of the week on Friday morning.

I woke up at 5:30 with the sun, trying to make sense of what I was hearing from outside. Something was .. yelling? Repeatedly. From down by the chicken yard? I threw on my robe and headed toward the sound.

I started recording – capturing the unusual cry for identification purposes, suspecting that whatever it was might hear me coming & disappear before I could see it.

But as I got nearer and nearer to the sound’s source – inside the chickenyard fence), it did not run away and I rounded the last tree trunk in the way, expecting to see a fox or maybe a fisher cat or coyote but definitely not a black bear cub and oh cute oh shit where’s Mom and I turned around and got of there and that’s in the video too:

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Momma had led her cub into the chicken yard and then climbed over the fencing to knock over the garbage can with the chiclen feed inside.

But baby couldn’t follow her over the crushed fences and got stranded. After spending some time up in the tree yelling “MOM!” over and over, he came down, met our flock, and found his way back out into the woods the way he’d come. Ten minutes later his cries stopped and we knew Mom had found him.

The next night I set up a game cam to see if they came back, but instead discovered we have an obese raccoon with no tail and strange lumps hanging out in there at night.

I don’t know, it’s been one of those weeks. Maybe for you too.

But I guess interesting times don’t seem like much of a curse to me.

Inside Box 2

In other news, there is a farm happening here. There is no rain happening. It is unclear if rain will ever happen, or has ever happened. It is not as hot as last week, though. And the clouds are beautiful. Oh, right, the farm … the weeds are being countered, the irrigation working hard to save lives. Zucchini is flowering. Some tomatoes are forming. The crops are not flourishing, but they are surviving.

• Salad Mix (Red & green lettuces, arugula, pea tips, bekana, maybe a leaf or two of mizuna)
• Green Onions – they are starting to bulb a bit …
• Radishes – oddly, this batch was in much better shape than the last week’s radishes. Milder and better formed. Delicious roasted. Don’t forget to chop off the greens before storing so the bulbs don’t get squishy! The greens can be either cooked, or blended into a pesto … which would a great idea to combine with the …
• Garlic Scapes – we scavenged these off the Free List from a local gardener to share with y’all. The flower of the garlic plant, basically, full of flavor. Chop finely and treat like raw garlic in whatever you’d like.
• Microgreens – either Red Cabbage or Kale
• Cilantro – god I love the way it smells. This is the last of it for the foreseeable future due to the hot weather. Tastes a little bit coriander-esque because it was starting to bolt.
• Fresh-ground corn meal – use this ASAP for maximum freshness!

• We grew it last year, dried it over the winter, and shucked, stone-ground, re-stone-ground, and sifted it for you yesterday. It totally made my day when the random amount of cobs that we pulled out to process turned out to make EXACTLY the 44 cups worth of finished product that we needed for you! Want to get excited about your corn meal? I want you to, too. So here read this: The Search for Mandan Bride
• Rhubarb Chutney – We had rhubarb to share! Chutney is like …a sweet and savory tangy chunky barbeque sauce, kinda. Use with meat or perhaps tempeh, if you are a vegetarian. Here’s the recipe we used if you’re curious about ingredients or anything.

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I don’t think there is any way to talk about the week we’ve had or the field or the veggies or the future of life itself without Talking About the Weather.

As you are almost certainly aware, it is HOT. And it has been hot. And it’s going to stay hot. And this Hot came snarling on the heels of it being dry for weeks and then Cold too; in a one week span we went from covering the plants to save them from impending freezes to watering them copiously to save them from roasty toasty doom.

As you can imagine this has been a complicated dance. Stressful, sure. But also interesting, which is always nice – even when it’s hard to feel it from within the thick of the interestingness. (Like a day of raising and lowering and reraising and relowering all four sides of a giant greenhouse, trying to balance the defense against relentless high winds (close it down!) with defense against tripe digit sun roasting (open it up!).

The weather kind of sucks, sure, but I’m feeling optimistic – not that everything is going to work or that nothing will go haywire, but that it – the work, the stress, the joys and pains and beauty and lessons and sunshine and burns and flowers and fruits and thorns – will be a good use of our lifetimes, a worthwhile way to live.

I feel lucky to be living this dream, and I’m glad you’re all here with us.

Now let’s eat some vegetables.

Inside the Box

This morning, we woke up around 5:00 to get the leafy greens harvested before the sun got brutal with them, and to get as much as possible of the rest picked and packed before it hit the 90s. (Everything in the boxes was picked today.)

The harvest went smoothly, thanks in large part to a little help from our friends – Marty and Maddie rocked the picking and packing, and Grandpa Jim hung out with Otis while we harvested all of this stuff for you:

• Salad Mix (several varieties of red & green Lettuces, Arugula, red & green Mizuna, Tatsoi, & Pea Tips) – a cool weather loving crop … we are watering like crazy, but can’t be sure how it will fare.
• Spinach – with the early heat, our spinach crop was all right on the verge of “bolting” (which makes it less tasty), so we we harvested it all for you today! Spinach ravioli might be calling you this week.
• Bok Choi – this is usually stir-fried at our place with whatever else is on hand.

• Green Onions <- link – These will continue to grow and bulb, and we will keep including them in your boxes. We love these and use them constantly and we want you to join our cult.
• Radishes <-link
• Radish Microgreens – add some zip to any dish! We had planned on doing some different flavors of micros for this box, but were thwarted by a series of unfortunate events that I am going to blame squarely upon one particular chicken. Anyway, the flavor of radish is pretty much the trademark of the first CSA box of the season, so celebrate the radical radish this week!
• Cilantro – this heatwave is sadly most likely going to murder this cool weather crop, so enjoy it while you can!
• Chive Blossom Bouquet – Pick the petals off with your finger tips – and sprinkle them on a salad perhaps. They provide a little bit of chive flavoring, in addition to the obvious visual appeal. Or you can infuse vinegar with them! Or mine for idears here.

• Recipe of the week: Steak Tacos with Cilantro-Radish Salsa

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PS – y’all are extended family now, so you’ll be among the first to hear about the newest magic growing out here on the homestead … :)

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Howdy again everyone! I’d planned to write up a year-in-review post shortly after the Harvest Party, but life took a weird turn and I wound up in the hospital instead. No, I didn’t catch Covid at the party (as far as I know, no one did woo hoo!), but I came down with … well, we still don’t know what it was. If you came to the party you might recall that I had a sore hand, which I blamed on rough-housing with some children the previous night. I thought I’d sprained the tendons in my hand somehow.

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Well, it got worse and worse, swollen up like a balloon and excruciatingly painful to the slightest pressure, and by Tuesday I was in the ER and then under general anesthesia for surgery, for debridement of the presumed infection within my wrist joint and tendons. After several days in the hospital on IV antibiotics they sent me home with a port in my arm so Kristin could continue giving me antibiotics intravenously for the next two weeks.

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While I’d been in the hospital, winter had arrived for a surprise early visit,  Slowly, the swelling went down and the gnarly incision closed up, and even more slowly, the pain receded and I regained at least some use of my hand. However, the cultures they took from my wrist fluids failed to provide clues to what the heck had gone wrong – a mycobacteria grew from one culture, but was deemed most likely from contamination, and all the other cultures grew nothing at all. So .. we still don’t know what happened. Mystery infection, or some kind of runaway inflammatory process? Time may tell, or maybe it won’t … I just hope that never happens again because it sucked!

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With my hand now finally mostly-functional, we are working to get the farm ready for the winter, and next Spring – cleaning up the field, organizing the mess (we got a second new semi trailer … one will become to the garden center, the other a building material warehouse & workshop), getting wood piles prepared for the next three winters, and fighting the endless onslaught of mice, which are patrolling the woods in unprecedented numbers.

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Our usual canned goods sale was cancelled due to the pandemic, so once we sell what we can to ya’ll, we will finish buttoning up the farm for winter, and hit the road southward – we plan to spend most of the frigid season in North Carolina, with a couple stops to see family and familiar farms as well.

Next year we’ll be keeping the CSA at roughly the same size again, preferring to maintain the quality and sanity that we have learned to balance at this scale (let us know if you know that you will or won’t be signing up again, when you get a chance!) 

Stay warm, stay safe, and remember to notice the beauty around you and the things you love about your people. Thanks so much for surfing along with us this season, it’s been an honor to feed you and yours.

Love,

the Que Sehra Fam

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This week we finally tore into the north wall of our home – the 1953 travel trailer / deer hunting shack.

We’ve wanted to do something about it for years – it was in rough shape, and when the frigid North Wind came blasting across the barrens, you could feel it whispering into our bed. The lack of insulation meant condensation and decay where our hard-earned wood heat passed through the wood sheathing – and we knew it wasn’t structurally sound by the way it would shimmy and shake when we’d bang on it in vain efforts to silence the chewing, acorn-dropping mice within.

With another winter looming, and the Fishhouse vacant, we decided to finally make our move – dismantling our 2×4 bedframe and packing for a few nights “downstairs.”

Of course, this coincided with the coldest few nights around, so we made heavy use of the little sheet metal wood stove that had come with the free structure (an ice-fishing shack that breaks down into a nice flat pile of 4×8 panels for trailering out onto lakes).

Upstairs, the work went quickly; I tore out (and burned) the rotten wood paneling and the small amount of remaining insulation – just a few sad, soggy inches fallen to the floor. One old panel had been done in a quick and dirty spraypaint impression of a camouflage pattern by the deer hunters who’d come before us – nifty for historical context, but pretty fugly too. Most all of the wall consisted of only an empty air space (mouse space?) between the interior paneling and the thin metal exterior skin. The studs had mouse tunnels from section to section, and one spot was completely disintegrated.

While I finished gutting the wall, Grandpa Jim rebuilt the rotten framing. Steffan & Britney had given us some 1″ insulation from their wedding keg cooler – perfect to make our insulation upgrade happen. I cut out the requisite odd shapes to fill each void, and Jim cut new plywood to fit around the walls and windows. Another friend had donated dozens of bottles of Great Stuff foam that had been … although they’d expired in 2008, many were still perfectly functional, perfect for sealing up remaining gaps and cracks.

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Uncle Tom had given us some pretty 2-foot carpet squares, which completed the bedroom refresh. I don’t really have many pictures to share, but how much do you really care about this project, really? Sorry about that, but hey – that’s what happened this week! And for us, it was pretty sweet.

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Hrrmm, what else … more frosts, even colder than before. More field clean-up. Visited Brandon & Nora’s new baby / Bear’s brother, Jaden. And the town’s soybean farmers harvested their crops, rendering millions of lady beetles homeless … ugh, we’d hoped this year just wasn’t going to feature the standard annual plague, but no such luck!

Beats locusts, anyway.

Inside the Final Box

• Brussels Sprouts – Micro cabbages! If you eat bacon, these pair great with it. And onions. You can roast, pan-fry, or eat em rrrraw.
• Butternut Squash – Make a squash soup with the sage perhaps!
• Kale (Curly Blue, Scarlet, & Dino) – Might be great together with your sprouts, ie https://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/kale-brussels-sprout-salad-368295
• Sage – adds great flavor to stews, classic seasoning in stuffing. You can easily dry it if you want to use it later.
• Onions – there will be bulk boxes of these available in the after season if you’re interested!
• Purple Potatoes be like