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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As you likely noticed, it was incredibly hot all week long. Of course, since we spend a lot of time in the open field and don’t have air conditioning, we most definitely noticed. With highs around 90 every day and lows in the 70s, it feels like peak summer indeed. We’ve done lots of DIY evaporative cooling … which is a fancy way of saying “we got wet and let the heat dry us off again.”

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We’ve had several solid little rainfalls, and the plants are super happy about the combination of moisture and heat and sunlight they’ve been blessed with. The corn has shot way up (can you find Kristin standing tall in the photo at the top?) – the horrendously stinky barrels of liquified carp we put in their portion of the field really seems to have been their jam.

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Inside Box Five

• Pickling & Slicing Cucumbers – we misplaced the slicing cukes until the boxes were all packed up … we didn’t have time to repack everything, and didn’t want to squish the other stuff – so the slicers are on top of the boxes!
  
• Beets (mostly Detroit Dark Red variety) – the greens are edible too; treat exactly like their close relative, Swiss Chard.

• Zucchini – the first of 2020!
• Micro-Greens – each box gets either cilantro, radish, or basil micro-greens; note that if you receive the basil, do not refrigerate it! (basil leaves blacken when exposed to cold temps)
• Sugar Snap Peas & Snow Peas

• Onions
• Broccoli

• Savory – this herb is compatible with a wide array of dishes, just the way thyme in. (In fact, the two can be easily used interchangeably.) It’s one of the main ingredients in the herb blend “herbs de Provence,” and is commonly paired with beans, vegetables, pork, lamb, stuffing, and sauces.

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All week I thought I was going to be writing a newsletter about the drought. I was ready with all kinds of facts and metaphors to frame the impact the lack of rain was having on us here. But finally, after an endless purgatory of teasing rainclouds, browning grasses, and dusty ground, the rain gods smiled upon us!

And not just any rain – I’d say it was a perfect one-two precipitation punch. On Sunday, just over an inch fell to deeply wet the parched soil. On Monday morning we sprang into action! We’d been waiting for weeks to cover the bare ground among the rows – but needed some real rain first, so there would be some moisture to conserve. So we tore apart the remaining bales of spoiled hay and laid down a thick barrier wherever the soil was bare – this not only helps avoid dry ground and erosion, but also smothers weeds and, when it eventually breaks down, adds precious organic matter to the soil for future years.

Overnight, we had a pleasant surprise deluge – a second round of soaking rain, over an inch again! It was done before we woke up to harvest, having done its magical work of soaking the new hay layer completely. (And it was just right – not too little, but also not too much; just southeast of us, our friends were being swamped and washed out by over 8 inches of rain during the same two storms!)

The delay waiting for the rain to come was nerve-wracking at times , but really, it turned out to be wonderful. The remarkably dry conditions stunted weed growth, while the plants – aided by weeding and drip irrigation – got well established. The field looked downright joyful this morning, and so did Farmer Kristin.

Inside Box 4

• Micro-Greens – either red cabbage, cilantro, or curly blue kale – if you are able to return the boxes, we’d be happy to wash and reuse them!
• Spring Onion Transitioning into Summer Onions
• Radish Pods – zippy, crunchy, and unusual! We planted a specific type of radish just to let it go to seed, producing these for you in abundance. Here are some good ideas if you’re wondering.
• Butter Crunch Lettuce Heads

• Kohlrabi – two large or three small per box! We made some into slaw yesterday, using our Julienne Slicer (or, a grater would work … great)
• Rainbow Swiss Chard – best when cooked, the gorgeous stems are the main event!

• Broccoli – the early crop is doing great this year!
• Sugar Snap Peas & Snow Peas – the flat pods are generally enjoyed in stir fry, but really both are delicious raw. The plump sugar snaps can be stringed if you’d like, by snapping off the stems and peeling down.

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This week we spent plenty of time watching red radar blobs on our phones and dark rainclouds in the skies, as they came tantalizingly close to the farm, but never quite arrived. Always provides more opportunities to practice our “what will be, will be”-ing, as well as ample gratitude-grounds; drought conditions make us grateful for the quiet new generator and fresh solar battery bank, which make irrigating the field much simpler!

Speaking of gratitude, Thank You!!! to Shareholders Al & Dan (The Goat People) for the giant wagon of hay mulch, and to Neighbors Marquardt for both the ice fishing shack we have turned into a laundry room, and the second chicken-security gate!

The week we have often enjoyed the routine tasks of the season; weeding, squishing potato beetles, staking pepper plants, pruning tomatoes, harvesting for market, cleaning the hen house, and joining forces with the chickens to transform food waste and buckets of spent brewery grains into rich soil.

It’s a good life.

Inside Box 3

Kohlrabi and Bok Choy with Fried Garlic – Maybe try a recipe like this that uses multiple items? It’s always fun to see what you can find by typing in a few ingredients you have on hand + “recipe” into Google, and seeing what comes up!

• Super Salad Sack – Green lettuce, Pea tips, Red Lettuce, Arugula
  The Salad Days of Spring are starting to wind down, so you get a huge bag of mix this week!

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• Kohlrabi – this strange looking vegetable looks like a root vegetable (but isn’t) and tastes like broccoli stems (yum!). Maybe you could make it into a slaw with your Bok Choi!
  
• Bok Choi – we’ve been loving ours as salads with Sesame Dressing lately. There are two main types grown,  traditional and Shanghai – this is the latter. (Traditional bok choy has dark, crinkly leaves and crisp, white stems; Shanghai bok choy has spoon-shaped leaves and jade green stems.) Here’s a pretty decent overview of the many ways you might cut up and enjoy this versatile vegetable.
  
• Broccoli – the first harvest of the year! Enjoy the flower buds as well as the stalks, which are delicious when sliced up.
  
• Sugar Snap Peas – vegetable candy.
  
• Spring Onions – can you have too many? No. The correct answer is no.
  

• French Breakfast Radishes – last week of these beauties! Shareholder Tara shared a recipe for making a delicious soup with the greens:
  • http://slowclubcookery.blogspot.com/2016/06/gingery-coconut-milk-radish-greens-soup.html
  • Note: there aren’t enough radish greens in this week’s box to do this recipe on their own, but don’t worry – any additional greens (bok choi, salad greens) will work great.
  • Tara says: “SO YUM. I modified the recipe above as follows: heated the ginger, onion, and garlic in coconut vinegar instead of sauteing, used spring onions instead of shallot (from the box of course) and used a can of full fat coconut milk. It’s a very liquid soup, so for a meal best served with something else too, but seriously SO YUM! Oh and I didn’t try buttering the radishes, but what isn’t good with butter on it?! “
    
• Micro-Greens – Radish, Blue Curly Kale, Basil, or Cabbage – can you figure out which kind you got? Some are more obvious than others …
  
• Garlic scapes – a local organic farm had extra garlic flower buds, so Kristin went over and harvested some for you yesterday.

• It makes great pesto, but you might want to grill/roast them a bit first, to mellow out the sharp garlic bite (from experience … we all smell like garlic today still, from last night’s raw-scape pesto pasta).
  
• Here are several ideas for ways to use scapes in your meals!
  
• And here’s several photos of things peripherally related to your meals, seen this week:

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Although we still did plenty of transplanting and mulching this week, as well as pruning and beetle squishing, the main thrust of our labors have been the pulling, hoeing, whacking, and torching of weeds. It’s been ridiculously dry here, but our local weeds are a hardy lot; they don’t much mind the lack of rain. Fortunately, we’ve invested in a new inverter generator – it can run our drip irrigation for hours, using barely any gas and at a volume not much louder than a conversation.

This has also made it possible to add a modern-style washing machine to our new “laundromat” – a free ice fishing shack we’ve turned into our dedicated laundry room. (Thanks CSA Members Dave & Marcia for the ice fishing shack – and thanks CSA Members Willy & Linda for the washing machine!) We still have our old wringer washer as well, but now our WWOOFers can skip the learning curve on that and use something a little less intimidating and hands-on. Still using our clothes lines as our dryer though!

And hey, while we’re talking about upgrades and gratitude, this week we we also used a dog kennel that Willy & Linda donated – to build a new tall fence around the processing area, so our chickens can continue to range freely … but no longer try to hang around where we wash and pack vegetables!

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Speaking of which …

in Box 2

• Salad Mix (Red & Green lettuce, Arugula, Beet Greens, Mizuna) – the Salad Days are here! This bag will make a lovely Chop Salad, or a wonderful Chomp Salad if you like big greens like we do. Or make little lettuce wraps with the larger leaves? Hmm.

• Sugar Snap Peas – the first of the season! Just enjoy these ones raw, they’ll never be so tender again! Plenty more should be coming for stir fries and such in future weeks.

• Pea Tips – (bagged with the peas) whenever a deer gets into the field, they nearly always home in on these; the tender new growth of the sugar snap peas. They’re onto something! Liven up a salad or sandwich with a handful of these.
• Bok Choi – would taste great with a sesame dressing like this, along with some of your green onions.

• Radishes & Greens – shareholder Melissa shared this top-notch recipe for making pesto with radish greens; she says it’s the only way to go!

• Green Onions – we find these so useful and so versatile; we plan to give you onions to use pretty much every week, so let us know if you want any ideas or recipes for them. Basically, put some into most everything!

• Micro-Greens – a zippy blend of radish, kale, red cabbage, and amaranth. As I like to say about your farmer Kristin, “Though she be but little, she is fierce.” – like these radish microgreens!

Hope you all have a lovely week, and to see you all in person sooner than later!

Thank you!!!

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