That abnormal, irregular, precarious Spring is behind us (good riddance), we are firmly planted in Summer soil, finally warm to the touch, and we’re experiencing a motivating sense of relief and accomplishment.

Spring ought to be a sprint. It’s about acceleration and rapidity, fast twitch muscle fibers. There will be hurdles, not always evenly spaced or easily anticipated.

Summer ought to be a marathon. It’s about pace and endurance, slow twitch muscle fibers. Randomly but not unexpectedly, there are still hurdles.

In the Wintertime, we feel more like livestock farmers, herdsfolk. Ewes are uncomfortably pregnant in the barn. There are late-night barn check-ins, assisted deliveries, and bottle-feedings. We’re working to keep warm and dry, giving our animals comfort, without completely isolating them from their natural, seasonal outdoor environment and authentic behavior.

In the Springtime, responsibilities shift, accumulate steadily, and we feel less like rugged Yellowstone ranchers and more like delicate Nursery horticulturalists. The livestock, Mother Ewes and toddler Lambs especially, having weathered the cold vulnerable months, have proven their self-sufficiency and earned the trust necessary to allow a realignment of focus toward the garden and its preparation. It’s time to start thinking about feeding humans, ourselves and our shareholders. We are working in the Nursery and the Hoophouses, tediously sowing and nurturing immature seedlings. The garden is populated gradually. We’re able to contend with the weeds. We don’t yet have to commit time to the harvest.

In the Summertime, our eyes start to glaze over a bit. Responsibilities have accumulated exponentially. The sheep and their aggressively-maturing lambs need to be herded to new pasture with appropriate forage every day. The chicken paddock needs to be similarly managed. The nursery is busy again with young seedlings growing for late summer/fall transplants. The garden is full. Beds that were harvested in the Spring are flipped and reworked for the too-soon return of cool season vegetables for Autumn harvest. We struggle to contend with, and our crops struggle to compete with, easily germinating and rapidly growing summer weeds. There are ongoing fresh harvests requiring mindful pulling, plucking, handling, and storage. Long season summer crops need to be managed and maintained. All the things are happening and everything needs to be done. This time of year we admit, humbly, that it’s a whole lot. But we’ve not lost our appreciation for the privilege to coexist and grow with the farm’s complexity, diversity, and seasonality. We’re very grateful for the opportunity to encounter and navigate so many useful, profound lessons and experiences.

Week 6 CSA Harvest:

New Potatoes

We hope folks have been able to enjoy their New Potatoes promptly and creatively. We’ve had standard fried and browned skillet slices, boiled and baked whole Potatoes, and a strange purple/blue mash that sounded creative in our heads but was admittedly cartoonish on the plate. Last week, we harvested mainly from our Yukon Gold and Adirondack Blue Potato hills while this week, we’ll dig small red spuds from our Spring garden. We’ll supplement with leftover Golds and Blues from last week’s harvest. These tubers are still new and minimally processed, so we recommend preparing them soon as they will not have the shelf stability of traditionally cured storage potatoes.

Carrots

A nice Carrot harvest indicates that a gardener has finally got it figured out. Every aspect of Carrot cultivation is complicated and can make them a challenge to grow successfully. They can’t be transplanted but need to be direct-seeded and carefully germinated over a period of as long as two weeks. They sprout slowly and unevenly, much slower than their weed competition. In order to form substantial and uniform roots, the soil needs to be well-prepared, loose, and aerated. They need to be thinned aggressively to allow properly-spaced sowings and regular growth. They require patience and adequate moisture. They need to be pulled carefully. They’re worth it.

We’ll know when our Carrot production has evolved from amateur to truly professional when, rather than carefully and nervously pulling one eligible root at a time, we’re able to mindlessly yank handfuls or 6-12 mature and uniform carrots all at once. This Spring’s Carrot harvest has shown hints of legitimate professionalism and it feels like an accomplishment, an evolution. We’re delighted to share these delicious, nutritious roots.

Snow Peas

We’ve never grown Peas under plastic, well-trellised in a hoophouse, as we have this season. What a difference it has made! We can hardly believe our eyes each morning when we peek inside and see taller vines, new flowers, and mature, harvestable pods. Spring Pea season ought to have winded down by now, but it endures, and we’re thrilled.

Kale & Collards

Curly Kale, Dinosaur Kale, and Collard Green varieties continue to grow nicely, despite the approaching dry summer heat. We’ll continue to harvest nice leaves until they start to slow down and lose quality. Kale and Collards are cool season crops and typically thrive in the Spring and Fall.

Sun Gold Cherry Tomatoes

These candy vegetables are starting to ripen. As with Peas, this is our first season seriously growing tomatoes in a hoophouse. Everything grows “better” under plastic, but “better” is subjective. The foliage certainly grows faster, too fast maybe. We need to maintain these vines regularly or we risk them growing out of control. Lower leaves need to be pruned, side shoots need to be suckered, we need to keep the vines and bushes lightweight and manageable.

We’re practicing the “lower and lean” Tomato vine management method both in the hoophouse and in our field beds. Each Tomato vine grows up a string toward the 12-foot ceiling of our hoophouse or the top of their 7-foot field trellis. When the vine reaches the ceiling, ideally, the fruits at the bottom of the plant have ripened and once they’re harvested, the top of the plant can be lowered back down the string, allowing further space for the vine to regrow back up the string. When the vine again reaches the ceiling, the second fruit set ought to have been harvested and the vine can be lowered once again. This process repeats all summer long. At the end of the season, Tomato vines, especially Cherry varieties, can reach lengths as long as 30 feet.

Currently, our hoophouse Tomato foliage is growing too well while our fruits are ripening slowly. The vines are 12 feet tall, touching the ceiling, with fruit sets of as many as 70 Cherry Tomatoes still green. We can’t lower the vine until those fruits are harvested, but we need more headroom to allow the vine to continue growing upward. It seems like we will be required to trellis creatively in the upcoming weeks. It’s a challenge, but it’s awfully fun. It’s awesome.

We will begin distributing our few sweet and ripe Sun Golds this week. Our first harvest will be light, just a treat, but expect the availability of ripe Tomatoes to increase dramatically through July and August.

Sweet Peppers

As available, full-sized Green and ripe Purple Bell and Sweet Italian Peppers will be included in this week’s box. We love to grow peppers. Bell Peppers, Carmens, Shishitos, Anaheims, Jalapenos, Bananas, and other specialties diversify our staked and weaved rows of Pepper plants. This week’s harvest is sweet, so don’t worry yet about anticipating spice. We will prepare you when the heat comes.

Head Lettuce

Good Lettuce is significantly more difficult to harvest after the Solstice. Lettuce loves cool, uniform weather. In the heat and drought of Summer, the plants are more sensitive and can get bitter fast. While we’re working on some heat tolerant varieties for later in the Summer, we’re still harvesting Spring-planted, cool season Lettuce stock. In an effort to delay the inevitable onset of Summer bitterness, we had stategically interplanted these greens under the shaded canopies of trellised Tomato and Cucumber vines, but Lettuce is a not a Summer crop and after the Spring drought, our leaves may have more bitterness than we’d hoped for. While we think it’s still acceptable and certainly useful, your salads may require some extra dressing. We’re harvesting Green Crisp Salanova heads this week.

Summer Squash

To call this year’s Summer Squash harvest prolific would be an understatement. Zucchini, Yellow Squash, and bicolor Zephyr Summer Squashes will be included again this week.

Sage

We’ll include leaves of Sage this week as we allow our Basil to regenerate. Eat it, dry it, save it, smell it, burn it, however you like. Successions of Cilantro will continue to be sown to compliment Summer harvests.

Garlic

We’ve harvested our Garlic bulbs and have begun the process of curing them for long term storage. Like New Potatoes, the Garlic distributed this week has had less processing time and should be prioritized as future deliveries will have more long term stability.

Eggs & Flowers

Egg production is steadily increasing and we are happy to distribute full and half dozens to shareholders again this week. We are relieved to report no raccoon or mink issues this summer! A reminder that we will take any egg cartons you may have laying around your home to re-purpose here - as well as any food scraps that we can give to our flock to pick through - or to add to our compost pile.

Bouquets are big, diverse and vibrant this week! We are officially overwhelmed with flowers so if you didn’t sign up for a weekly flower share but would enjoy adding-on flowers any given week for a special occasion just text one of us and we’d be happy to coordinate that with you and get it added to your delivery box.

With the Solstice came the rains, at long last, with their good water, auspiciously saturating a desperate and dissonant landscape. Last week, we were fortunate to have the opportunity to rest, recover, and rejuvenate with family on North Carolina’s southern shore. We were 600 miles away when those steady rains came, unable to experience that relief in the moment, in person, in real time. But upon returning to the farm, we were overwhelmed instantly by the obvious praise and celebration resonating throughout the biological congregation. Crops for which we felt a diminished hope of any extended harvest season found a second wind and summer long-season varieties were offered the cool drink they needed to officially transition from vegetation to reproduction. To us, it doesn’t feel hyperbolic to say that our return to the farm, after just five days away, was a psychedelic experience. Walking from bed to bed, from one corner of the farm to the other, our chests swelled and our eyes welled with awe as we dug down for mature roots, gazed up at intimidating canopies, and looked new blooms right in the eye.

In reflection upon this strange Spring, we analogize dissonance, intentional tension, in music. Dissonant harmony, out of context, is anxious and unsatisfactory. Without an understanding of what came before a dissonant sound, or an expectation of what is to come after it, a listener can hardly experience it as anything other than uneasy, tense, out-of-tune, clashing noises. But Mother Nature is a seasoned jazz artist with a profound gift for creativity and improvisation. Sure, we were anxious as she calmly arpeggiated that dissonant chord from the end of May through the first half of June, but she had a plan, she knew her direction. Appropriately, she used the Summer Solstice as a performance opportunity to resolve that chord. We feel the peace, the relief, the harmony, that she had planned all along.

Week 5 CSA Harvest:

New Potatoes

We were able to plant four different varieties of potatoes in the early spring: Red cobblers, Yukon Golds, Blue Adirondack spuds, and the traditional white Kennebec variety. Some varieties mature faster than others and are traditionally categorized as Early Season, Mid Season, and Late Season.

To grow a high-yielding crop of storage potatoes, spud farmers allow the plant to complete its full season, hilling-up the beds and burying foliage along the way, encouraging sub-surface productivity. To get a high-yield, long-storage, staple crop, a farmer ought to potato patiently and cure thoroughly.

But, at least for this week, we’re not harvesting for storage. “New Potatoes” are those fresh spuds that developed early, just below the soil’s surface. They’re not yet cured for long-term storage and ought to be enjoyed promptly. With our current favorable weather conditions and appropriate soil texture, we’re able to dig around the plant base with our hands and pull out young spuds without disturbing the plant too aggressively. These thin-skinned, fresh tubers are extra creamy and flavorful. Often, they can be washed and peeled by hand simultaneously. This week, we’ll have Yukon Gold, Blue Adirondack, and Red new potatoes included with your harvest.

Head Lettuce

The Parris Island Cos variety. Cos is an heirloom term for Romaine lettuce. We really like this variety for its light green broad leaves and good flavor. The leafy heads are great chopped up for a salad base, used whole on sandwiches or as wraps.

Snow Peas

We harvested a whole mess of Pea pods before our break and they seem to be storing awfully well. Enjoy these Snow Peas while they’re available as we’ll soon transition from the cool Pea season to the warm Bean season.

Kale & Collards

We were not only gifted with steady, satiating rains over the past couple weeks but moderately cool temperatures as well. That’s Kale weather. Leaves look as good as they have this season and we’re excited to share.

Broccoli

Our broccoli was one of those crops that found a second wind at the end of Spring. Our Mini Broccoli variety is fantastic and versatile in that it can be harvested and used as a sprouting/flowering Broccoli, a longer-stemmed Broccolini type, or pinched as Mini Broccoli buds. Crowns have held up well in storage over our break and will be handed out as well. We’ve been alternating the delivery of these two varieties between our Sunday and Wednesday shareholders and will continue to mix it up. We recommend cooking this bunch as they’re not as fresh and have lost some sweetness through the heat and drought of the Spring. It would be wise to eat these promptly as we have kept them stored in our cooler for the past week.

Beets

Our shareholders may recall that we distributed a “Beet thinnings” harvest earlier in the Spring. We had directly sown the bed thickly with beet seed. We allowed those Beets to foliate in dense competition with their peers. Just before they began to develop roots, we thinned them for salad greens. This turned out to be a surprisingly beneficial strategy, and one we’ll likely replicate. We think the competition allowed for vigorous top growth and the removal of that competition enabled that potential to be directed downward. For direct-sown bull’s blood Beetroots, this is our best crop yet.

Carrots

The story of our Spring is artistically represented by our inaugural root harvest from our Spring carrot bed. A well-watered carrot in loose soil will grow evenly and symmetrically but for this year’s first pull, we have been blessed with many multi-legged carrot roots, or “dancers” as we like to call them. The carrot roots start out normal and singular but develop multiple legs in an effort to forage for a water source when moisture is not readily accessible. We have plenty of carrot beds left to grow and harvest for future deliveries. These ought to be more uniform and traditional but for now, it’s funky roots for us.

Summer Squashes

We are very appreciative to our Mom, Sue Zacharias, for keeping up with an exponential Zucchini and Yellow Squash harvest for the past week. The rule of thumb for Summer Squash storage is “One day on the counter, One week in the refrigerator,” but we’ve been accumulating these fruits for the past week, so it would be wise to prioritize them soon. Cook them up in a stir fry, bake them in a casserole, or shred, peel, and freeze them for future preparations. The Summer Squash harvest will be ongoing until the borers and bugs have their way.

Basil

While we wait patiently for our tomatoes to fill out and ripen, our Basil plants have been less patient and are hinting at flowering. It’s time to start harvesting. It’s difficult to transport Basil nicely. When they arrive, we suggest transferring your basil stems, if they have enough length, into a shallow bowl of water to preserve them prior to use.

Parsley

Like our Kale, our Curly Parsley enjoyed the recent cooler temperatures and saturated soils. It ought to be an appropriate compliment to your root preparations for this week.

Eggs & Flowers

We are again thankful to Erin’s mom Sue for keeping up with egg collection, sorting, and storing while we were away last week. We are seeing some new shell colors as Erin’s November classroom hatch is starting to mature and lay regularly. If you receive some tiny eggs in your dozen it is likely from these young pullets putting out their first nuggets. We hope it’s made up for with some double yolkers from our mature hens. Our goal in breeding is always to produce hardy hybrids that can handle frigid winters as well as the summer heat - and of course interesting colors, speckles and shapes that are a nice contrast to the traditional store-bought alternatives. We hope your families are enjoying the variety you get each week.

We are pleased to witness the results of our flower rows having exploded with blooms while we were away, making arrangements quicker and easier for Erin after yesterday’s arrival home from vacation. Only weekly subscription members should expect bouquets for week 5 with a variety of Sunflowers, Celosia, Coreopsis, Zinnias, Snapdragons, Cosmos and more!

Relief has arrived from the west! We hold real-time data in our hands. We can watch it approach from a God’s-eye view.

Without the blessings of modern technology and the miracle of accurate and dependable forecasting, would we smell it coming? Would we sense it? Would we read about it on a calendar or in an Almanac? Recreationally, we wonder how ancient agriculturalists, or even our great grandparents’ grandparents retained a morsel of sanity amidst such unpredictability, and we’re lucky that the thought experiment is just that- an experiment, an exercise, a daydream. Keeping crops alive in bone-dry topsoil becoming more and more hyrdophobic by the day has taken significant effort, but aren’t we lucky to have our creek, our well, our youth, and our patrons insuring such effort? We have our health and thus far, so do our crops. Thankfully, a well-earned, good night’s sleep rarely eludes us.

This has been an odd drought, a scary one. Larger scale, conventional farmers are worried, unsurprisingly. In the past month, they’ve sown into remarkably dry soil. If their crops were fortunate to find the moisture to sprout, they’ll struggle to mine the necessary nutrients for further growth without a good rain. We’ve heard of such farmers preparing themselves for a total loss. While they steer their tractors and drag their implements over acres and acres of cultivation, they navigate simultaneously the turbulence of agricultural variability and scale. It’s a high-stakes moment balancing the likelihoods of success or failure. We’re fortunate and reassured that we are allowed to share these stakes with our community, our shareholders, our stakeholders.

We’re relieved by the hope of rainfall in the next few days, but we also have a scheduled respite approaching on the calendar. We will be taking one week off of harvests and deliveries from June 17-24, with deliveries starting back up on the 25th. This is basically the halfway point for our growing season as we started preparing seedlings and early sowings in February and will continue growing through October. We took separate vacations last season so that one of us could be on the farm while the other is away, but this year we get to take some time off together. We’re very grateful, especially to our parents who have been willing to support us and keep an eye on things while we are away- a big ask on our part.

We will deliver this week, June 11th and June 14th, we will take a break from deliveries June 18th and June 21st, and we will start back up June 25th and June 28th.

Week 4 CSA Harvest:

Spinach

Long term Spinachin’ conditions ought not be hot. Many of The Goosefoots, or Chenopods, prefer the cool and the shade and the naturally saturated soil of such an environment. Amaranth and Quinoa are common Goosefoot grains while garden variety Chenopods include Spinach, Beets, and Swiss Chard. These cool season crops thrive in the Spring and the Autumn but struggle to grow nicely in the Summer heat. We work our Spinach hard in the cool seasons, cutting and coming back again and again. Though our varieties are slow to bolt (flower and attenuate), Spring Spinach will soon come to an end.

Bagged Lettuce Mix

We’re multi-cut converts. Growing multi-cut Head Lettuces has allowed us to create nicer mixes more quickly and efficiency than the traditional methods of baby greens production. It allows us to better plan and manage inventories and successions. Sowing a thick bed of baby Lettuces is simple, quick, and easy but there is a great deal of maintenance required to keep the bed weed-free and well-prepared for a quick harvest. We have many living things to watch over on our farm and there is great value in avoiding such a chore-heavy approach.

Snow Peas

Peas generally grow themselves. They feed lightly on the soil’s available nutrients and even contribute some nitrogen of their own. They sprout easily and worry not about pests or diseases. The construction of structural support is really the only struggle to grow a large crop of Peas. With our new hoophouse, we’ve been able to produce an early Pea crop better than any we’ve done before. We’ve learned a lot really look forward to restarting cool season Legumes like Snow and Sugar Snap Peas later in the Summer.

Kale & Collards

While the giant foliage of our Collard Greens gets funky as we near summertime, our other Kale varieties are growing well with the past week’s cooler temps and overcast skies. Shareholders will receive a bunch with their produce this week.

Broccoli

We spoke last week about the challenges of a good Broccoli grow, especially when we want to provide a large harvest/inventory all at once, without dedicating too many beds for a comparably unproductive crop. Last week, we were relieved to be able to share a bunch of our Sprouting variety with our Sunday deliveries and a single head from our Crowing variety with our Wednesday deliveries. We will switch it up this week, with Sunday shareholders receiving crowns and Wednesday shareholders receiving loose bunches.

Kohlrabi

Our remaining varieties and unharvested plants are sizing up and will be distributed again this week. Don’t throw away those greens! They’ll collaborate nicely and appropriately with the Kale included in this week’s harvest.

Cilantro

Many of our cool season herbs have remained surprisingly stable and productive through the Spring drought. We have a lot of Cilantro to cut and will hand out fresh, flavorful bunches this week.

Summer Teaser/Sampler

While our summer gardens have established themselves decently, we’ve been conflicted about how to handle their early fruit. Without rain, they’ve grown slowly and sometimes unevenly. Because we have natural irrigation upcoming and a short break from harvests ahead, we’re going to go ahead and pull some of these early baby fruits for families to sample this week. Baby Summer Squashes and Sweet Peppers will slip into this week’s produce boxes. Try them fresh and raw! Thin, shaved slices of Zucchini is a great way to mix up salad ingredients and while the peppers are small, they’re a teaser of what’s to come in July.

Eggs & Flowers

Our chickens are happy and continue to provide consistently this season. We have been readily incorporating eggs into our daily meals - and with Erin home on summer break from teaching, breakfasts look a lot more like casseroles, scrambles, egg-in-the-holes, frittatas - and less like David’s favorite- three or four butt nuggets cracked and fried over-easy in the skillet.

Bouquets are headed to our weekly and biweekly folks this week and feature more Dwarf Sunflowers, Daisies, Elegant Clarkia, Celosia, Fleabane, Yarrow, Cosmos, False Indigo Greens & Velvet Grass. We hope that when we return from our trip our flower rows will have exploded with new blooms!

Have a wonderful couple of weeks and don’t hesitate to email, text or DM us if you have any questions about your produce this week or how to use/store it. No deliveries the week of June 19th!

When we look out on our restless and thirsty Summer gardens, the crops seem to look back and say “we’re ready when you are!” They are sprinters, dug into their starting blocks, waiting anxiously for the pistol to fire. While we’re not yet losing sleep worrying about massive crop failures, without a good rain, these field vegetables will grow slowly. Sans natural irrigation from above, these plants may approach or even knock lightly on heaven’s door. We can spend all day hauling well water and drenching the rows, but nothing replaces a good rain. The farm & gardens patiently await this good water and we’re eager to share the difference it’ll make once it arrives. As of Sunday evening, our last garden bed will be officially shaped and planted! While this is a milestone and a refreshing accomplishment, it’s only the beginning. Early spring vegetable beds will be harvested fully and completely, flipped and replaced with summer crops and succession plantings.

Week 3 CSA Harvest:

Head Lettuce

We will be delivering full heads of Romaine Lettuce this week, harvested fresh the morning of delivery. The broad-leaved, deep green plants were interplanted tightly with Cherry Tomatoes in our hoophouse, so explains the surprising tomato aroma reminding many of us of our grandmothers. The large Cos leaves are substantial and versatile and will be ideal for lettuce wraps, sandwiches/tacos/burritos, or chopped up for Caesar-y salads. It’s unlikely, but If we run short on mature Romaine heads, we will deliver full Green Butter heads, which can be disassembled leaf by leaf from the bottom/core and bagged up or used fresh in myriad side dish configurations. Despite our odd and unanticipated dry Spring conditions, these heads have been reasonably well-irrigated and protected.

Bagged Salad Mix

We’ll continue to assemble mixed baby salad varieties into a bagged mix for shareholders this week. This process is more involved, more time consuming, than a single cut head Lettuce harvest. We’re foraging the garden beds for mature spring mix Lettuce, multicut head Lettuces, with other useful snips and thinnings to create a unique, resourceful, seasonal mix.

Beetroot & Kohlrabi Bundles

We love to grow root crops, Beets especially, and we don’t typically have trouble producing an impressive early crop. We fully intended to do just that with our Spring Beet crop, but the critters had their own intentions during late winter/early spring. Like we’ve mentioned before- the pests, hoophouse rodents in this case, seem to know what’s good for them. They have little interest in greens like Lettuces, or even Spinach for the most part, but they’ll go way out of their way to nibble on the Brassicas and other Goosefoots like Beets and Chard. Many of our earlier Beetlings were topped by such critters and we were only able to save a small percentage of this succession. These Chioggia Beets were interplanted in our hoophouse with Snow Peas and their mild-flavored candy cane roots contribute much shaved atop a lofty salad.

We refer to Kohlrabi as “cabbage apples.” Its an odd, eye-catching vegetable, unrecognizable to the many uninitiated. The root crop can be peeled like an apple and bitten right into, or shaved to top a bed of greens. We always enjoy these raw, but there are many options to roast them like Turnips or Radishes. It’s cold hardy, easy to grow, and fundamental to traditional Northern homestead gardens.

Please don’t overlook these tops! They’re just as useful as other traditional salad greens. Chioggia Beet Greens, distributed in this bunch, are David’s favorite salad green. Beet greens, like Swiss Chard, have a buttery/crunchy texture with unique flavor that rarely expresses bitterness. Kohlrabi greens are beautiful and interchangeable with standard greens like Kale and Collards. The pests seem surprisingly reluctant to approach these Brassicas, unlike their Asian and tender cousins Bok Choy and Arugula. Kohlrabi is so versatile & easy to grow- as a root crop, for its special greens, and as storage forage for livestock, we’ve joked about renaming our farm “More Kohlrabi Meadows.”

Beet Greens/Thinnings

After losing some Beet seedlings in the early spring, we went ahead and directly sowed a fifty foot bed with a thick deposit of Beet seeds. Not only does a direct-sown bed like this eventually need to be thinned, but Beets are unique in the fact that they often produce multiple plants from a single seed. This week, as we have thinned these beds, we’ve saved the thinnings and bundled them to be mixed into this week’s salad arrangements.

Radish

With our limited control over irrigation, we have to make decisions/set priorities as to whether a crop will be treated, so to say, as a “garden crop” or a “field crop.”

From our perspective, “garden crops” are those vegetables and varieties that benefit most from the farmer’s consistent attention and control. They’re easily manipulated by moisture and fertility. They ought to live in our Spring garden, or in a hoophouse, closest to our home, closest to the well, with carefully-managed overhead and drip irrigation. Short season greens and roots like radishes ought to be treated as “garden crops.”

Radishes are fast and easy to grow, but they’re sensitive to inconsistent moisture. Too little or infrequent irrigation is a disservice to the vigor of the individual plant and to the steady growth of their nutritious tops. Inconsistent drenches of rainfall can cause the roots to split, an annoying, though not disqualifying, injury to quality and marketability.

We were unfortunately cornered into growing this Spring’s Radishes as “field crops.” Although there will be plenty of roots to go around, the tops are not as flashy as we expect. You’ll be forgiven if you decide to disregard this harvest’s Radish greens and fully favor the roots.

Parsley

Our rows of Curly Parsley are well-established and just fine despite the heat and lack of rain. While it is still technically the time for cool season herbs, we will continue to incorporate them. Warm season and slower growing annuals like Basil and new Rosemary sprigs will be available closer to Summer.

Dill

We’re finding ourselves on somewhat of a Dill-kick, regardless of the fact that it’s prime season. We keep finding ways to incorporate this herb into our dishes and it never seems to fail.

Snow Peas

We have our best ever crop of Snow Peas flowering and maturing in the hoophouse! With our expanded cooler capacity, we’re able to to a better job this season harvesting crops with indeterminate and longer harvest windows like Peas. As long as we keep picking and store them well, you’ll have high quality Snow Peas to add to salads and skillets this week.

Snow Peas are grown for the entire pod to be enjoyed. The internal peas themselves are reluctant to develop, but contribute semi-sweet flavor all the same. Snap Peas, while more versatile, require more intentional harvesting. Sugar Snap Peas, when harvested at just the right time, can be enjoyed full-pod just like Snow Peas. But traditionally, they’re harvested, snapped, and scooped after the internal Peas have fully developed. Pea plants need picked, and when they’re picked consistently, gardeners get access to immature pods, mature sweet Peas, and overgrown dried at the end of the season to be harvested and stored for future cooking & cropping.

Mini Broccoli

Broccoli is an awfully tricky crop to incorporate into a small scale farm, especially crowning Broccoli varieties. Like Cabbage, Broccoli traditionally takes up a large footprint in the garden, stays in that garden bed for many days before it matures, and ultimately provides only a small head or crown. It’s hard to justify, but we must try. What kind of traditional homestead would we have here without Broccoli?

One strategy we’ve employed is to grow a sprouting or branching Broccoli variety in addition to the traditional crown cultivars. As was remarked about Peas earlier, sprouting varieties provide a longer harvest window with indeterminate flowering buds. Rather than waiting and waiting for the large plant to finally produce that small crown, after many days in the field, for a very short harvesting period, we are able to accumulate mini Broccoli and store them until we’ve reached an inventory we can fairly share with our community.

We are close to reaching that critical mass, enough to be confident we will have Broccoli bunches for at least this week’s Sunday deliveries. If we haven’t replenished our inventory by Wednesday, those families will receive shares of Kale & Collards. The following week, we’ll switch, and those families who have not yet received Broccoli will be provided for, our intentions being to distribute to each family a uniform, fair share.

Kale & Collards

We’ll only be distributing Kale & Collards this week if our Broccoli inventory is slow to keep up. If you receive Kale and/or Collard Greens, expect Broccoli the following week.

Eggs & Flowers

The birds are tolerating the recent drought well but we are relieved they’ll get some cooler weather here soon! They are loving all the extra greens and fresh scraps we have this time of year to supplement their diet. We have around 80 adult hens giving us ~5 dozen eggs a day, 30 pullets that will be laying additionally mid-summer, and about 60 chicks that will begin in the fall/winter. Last year at this time we had quite a lot of predator pressure, but we have kept our flocks in much safer locations, further from the tree line and closer to our house and road. We are optimistic we can keep the raccoons away this summer!

We still have some time before our Zinnia, Dahlia, Snapdragon, Celosia, Cosmos, Blue Salvia, Gomphrena, etc. rows really take off in the garden. For week three, our monthly flower shareholders will receive their first arrangements, along with our weekly folks. This week’s jars contain early Sunflowers, Wild Daisies, Amorpha (False Indigo), Rue, Cornflower, Velvet Grass, Blanketflower, and more!

It feels like all we are doing is moving water around this past week, and it’s awfully early in the season for us to feel this way. Our spring garden, located closest to our house and well pump, has a decent array of irrigation tools. We are able to use sprinklers and drip irrigation to evenly hydrate good portions of this garden, most importantly when rain is absent from the forecast. The whole garden is hose-accessible. Our hoophouses are located in this garden and having reliable access to pressurized irrigation can be pretty critical here.

But our summer gardens are remote. There are no convenient or efficient ways to water these crops and we must rely on rain. But in the absence of precipitation, like what we are experiencing during this early spring drought of sorts, we simply have no choice but to haul water. We have an irrigation trailer equipped with tanks that may be filled at the house and driven out to be distributed throughout these big summer gardens, but it takes some time. We have a water pump that connects to our jeep’s power converter, which can help, but it’s slow-moving and there’s a lot of hauling and dumping buckets. For scale, it takes about eight individual five—gallon buckets to water a 50-foot row of summer crops and our big gardens have about 80 of such rows. We would rather be pruning tomatoes, addressing the cucumber beetles going after our squash patches, and thinning carrots. So it goes.

A note on washing/packing- It is always our goal to avoid washing our produce. We like to leave the decision up to the consumer. We learned in a general agricultural practices training course that the vast majority of food borne illness originates not in the field, but at the washing station. The fewer hands that touch the produce between farm and customer, the better. If a crop has been overwhelmingly soiled because of weather conditions of if it’s a soily root crop, we will give it a quick rinse, otherwise, we leave it up to your family. Unless its a mud-caked root crop, we never wash any of the food we eat from the farm.

Week 2 CSA Harvest:

Spring Mix Lettuce

There are a few different strategies to growing salad lettuce during the springtime. We can direct seed thick bands of loose leaf “spring mix varieties,” grow them as baby greens, cut them into loose handfuls in the field, wash & bag them indoors. The bands will grow back quickly for a second harvest. Cool, typically moist spring soils allow for even and reliable germination if seeding directly into the garden, making spring the ideal season to direct seed loose leaf mixes in such a way.

We can also start individual plants in the nursery, transplant and grow out these multi-cut head lettuces, allowing the head to fill out before harvesting the leaves, but leaving behind enough of the plant’s core and foliage to produce a second head to be harvested likewise. This is a strategy about which we were skeptical in previous seasons, but we’re warming to the idea. It’s a quick, clean, uniform harvest. We have much greater control of germination and plant inventory. This is the strategy adopted by most commercial growers, and it’s starting to make more and more sense to us.

This week, we’re bagging mixes which combine lettuces grown using both methods. This means the lettuce mix has a diversity of varieties- delicate multicolored loose leaf spring mix, frilly & crispy iceberg-types, crunchy romaine leaves, and dark red oak leaves.

Kale & Collards

The Brassicas that are included in our seasonal crop plan are technically all the same plant- mustard. The specific cultivars evolved artificially to accommodate the preferential traits selected by centuries of farmers, gardeners, and homesteaders. Broccoli was bred for its flower buds, kale for its leaves, kohlrabi for its sweet root bulb, radish for its spicy root bulb, bok choy for its leaf/stalk mass and ratio.

The plants can be interchangeable. Broccoli leaves makes a great replacement for collard greens. Over a long season, Cabbage plants produce side shoots that are indistinguishable from Brussel Sprouts. Radish and turnip greens can be used just like Kale.

This week’s Kale harvest will include three varieties- Broad & veiny Collards, curly/crunchy green Kale, and dark & elegant Dinosaur Kale leaves.

The long, dark green Dinosaur Kale leaves are great chopped and mixed into salads. The green curly kale leaves are more weathered, as they’ve had a rough spring dealing with flushes of flea beetles, and they’ll be better suited to be used as “smoothie kale",” or rubbed with oil and cooked up into “chips.”

All of the kale varieties, and this week’s Bok Choy stalks, can be prepared as you would Collard Greens, and we would recommend it. Slice the leaves and the stalks into thin ribbons, excluding any tough or hard ribs from the centers of the leaves, marinate and fry them up with the oils of your choice- we prefer an olive oil/butter combination. Don’t burn them, but a little crispiness, especially with the green curly kale, is nice.

Bok Choy Stalks & Bunches

We’ve harvested our main spring Bok Choy heads, but are left with many vigorous plants from which to harvest stalks. We will distribute bunches of stalks for your family to incorporate this week.

Spinach

We’ve had a lot of experience this spring with “the miraculous hand-harvest of Spinach.” We harvest our Spinach by hand, one leaf at a time, selecting for the best samples of each bunch. And every time we make our way down a row, there’s a “feeding of the 5,000” phenomenon. You get to the end of the row thinking you’ve meticulously harvested all the best leaves only to look back and realize there is plenty more to choose from. The extended harvest of a good Spinach crop is always full of pleasant surprises.

Green Garlic

We would typically have spring onions, or scallions to offer, but our onions are way way behind schedule this season. Hopefully our Green Garlic serves as an interesting and invigorating substitute.

Microgreens and Shoots

We will be cutting shares of Brassica microgreens or Pea shoots as they are available. Families will receive whichever variety has reached an appropriate maturity by the day of their delivery. We’ll likely have pea shoots for our Sunday families and Brassicas for our Wednesday folks this week.

Cilantro

Cilantro is an awfully easy herb to grow in the spring. It prefers to be directly seeded in the garden, it loves cool weather, and it grows quickly. The tricky thing with Cilantro is that it prefers a cooler season than the summer vegetables it traditionally compliments- tomatoes, peppers, etc. Our cherry tomatoes are flowering and filling with fruit, but it will be a bit before we see the critical mass that we need to begin harvesting and distributing to our families.

We love cilantro, but some folks think it tastes like soap. Is yours a “cilantro family” or are you “supertasters?”

Dill

A share of baby dill, harvested from an interplanted row of wide-leaved crown broccoli, will be easy to incorporate for our families with egg shares this week. We love adding herbs like dill to egg salads. It’s early for cucumbers, but we hope to have dill and dill microgreens to collaborate with cucumber harvests later in the summer.

Eggs & Flowers

Those shareholders who purchased biweekly flowers will get a bouquet this week as well as our weekly flower shareholders. Monthly shareholders you can expect your first jar next week! This week we are including various sunflowers, peonies, wild cherry blossoms, zinnias, dame’s rocket, bluestars, mountain mint, fleabane, false indigo, and more! Colorful half and full dozens with all their uniqueness are headed your way too! We hope you are enjoying the golden yolks packed with lots of essential nutrients - we love to throw kale, spinach or microgreens in with our morning scrambles.

Though the creatures of the natural world have no Sundays, their days are filled with Sabbaths.

(Wendell Berry, paraphrased)

We’re chopping, snipping, and yanking our first harvest for 2023 this week! A diverse selection of cool season whole foods will be included in the delivery with a variety of salad ingredients, flavors, and textures with which your family can arrange meals and side dishes throughout the week. As we are harvesting, preparing, and thriving on our own share of this week’s harvest, we do not under-appreciate this unique privilege. Not only do we have the opportunity to acquire tillable land, not only do we have the time and physical wellness to cultivate the land, but we have the insurance of a dedicated community of supporters allowing it to be sustainable and worth it all the while.

With Mother’s Day and the almanac’s “last frost date” behind us, clear skies & dry soil in the forecast, and anxious vegetable seedlings stretching to be planted in their forever home gardens, we’ve been excitedly shuttling, transplanting, and trellising summer crops like tomatoes, squashes, and peppers into our big summer gardens. The earlier we plant, the earlier transplants will recover from the shock of the move, the earlier we will have ripe fruit, the longer the season will be, and ultimately, we’ll experience a greater overall yield by the fall frost. But a late frost came, as it ironically and inevitably does. In general, our spring garden, populated with cool-season frost-tolerant crops, ought to be able to take it. Our time, attention, and energy, therefore, was focused on protecting our summer gardens, populated with warm-season crops vulnerable to a good frost. When the frost lifted, we were pleased to see very little damage to our summer garden- a relief indeed, and a justification for an annoying afternoon of tedious and unexpected maintenance. So it goes. Change is the only constant. This week’s delivery will include the following whole foods:

Green Butter Lettuce

If we were asked two weeks ago about the item of which we’d be most proud for our first delivery, we wouldn’t have hesitated to point to our head lettuce. It’s a wise decision to grow head lettuce. It’s easy to grow, the pests stay away, and the harvest is simple. We love the complete absence of any processing in the harvest, pack, and delivery. When we had shareholders picking up their boxes from the farm in previous seasons, we would often go out and cut the lettuce head and hand it directly to the family. This kind of direct, straight-forward food production is what we are all about.

Then came the frost. While we were busy fretting over the exposure of our summer crops, we neglected to keep an eye on our spring garden, with the assumption being that the frost would be light & patchy, and the cool season crops could handle it. Our resources were limited and we had to triage crops to receive frost protection materials in order to prioritize those most vulnerable.

The frost was indeed patchy, but those patches were heavy. One of those unseasonably heavy patches settled sneakily over a row of Green Butter Salanova lettuce, discoloring the overexposed lettuce heads and taking these overconfident farmers down a peg or two.

We will still harvest the heads, but they will be bagged as loose-leaf lettuce instead of delivered as full heads. There may be a little discoloration to a few leaves, but there ought to be plenty of bowl-filling buttery leaves left for the week.

Bok Choy

Flea beetles are difficult pests to responsibly manage on our farm. We have a very hard time keeping them away from Brassica crops like Bok Choy, Arugula, and other Mustards on our farm. We tolerate them with some crops more than others, depending on how the pests degrade the final kitchen experience. Bok Choy can usually be prepared just as satisfyingly with or without pest damage.

This week’s Bok Choy is mature, broad-leaved, and substantial. It’s a lot of food. It’s not likely something you’ll want to eat raw. We often simply throw a bunch of stems in a medium-hot buttery skillet, cover them, and cook them down until the stems tenderize. You can also chop the stems and leaves to prepare the same way, or throw them in a soup. You’ll notice that the greens compress and the discouraging flea beetle bites become significantly less noticeable.

Mustard Greens

Shareholders will receive a big bad of salad mustard greens this week. This nutritious Brassica mix includes Red Mustard, Mizuna, Tatsoi, Kale, and Arugula. The flea beetles found this bed of greens as well. We often reassure folks of a few important points regarding bug bites on their greens. If your salad greens have bug bites, it means a few good things: there was no pesticide applied to this crop, the crop was sun-grown in living soil rather than in an indoor hydroponic system and is likely more nutritious, plus minimal plastic was used to grow this crop.

We struggle with the economical and environmental cost/benefit of deterring such pests. Our options are as follows and we would love to hear your input/opinion!

Organic pesticides- we could use these pesticides and still claim to be “organic” and we sometimes choose to do so. But while these sprays are organically-derived and “safe” for organic production, they are broad-spectrum and destructive. Something like 85% of the insects in our garden are beneficial. Do we really want to sacrifice all the beneficial insects working to create a balanced soil environment just to easily manage the problem pests?

Insect protection cover- It feels antithetical for us to continue to purchase a whole bunch of plastic crop protection. These plastic products have short lifespans and are not 100% effective anyway. Mindlessly covering crops with plastic is a slippery slope to indoor growing. We want to farm more like homesteaders and less like commercial growers. We think that tolerating harmless, aesthetically-displeasing bug bites can be important to this approach.

Spinach

This was a solid spinach crop. We like to provide diversity in salad ingredients in terms of texture, plant family, and size. We were successful with this effort this week. Shareholders will receive broad leaves of lettuce, medium and baby spinach, crunchy, spicy, spindly mustard greens, and microgreens for concentrated flavor and nutrition.

Green Garlic

We thinned our spring garlic bed, harvesting “green garlic” for deliveries this week. Keep these refrigerated and use the greens as you would scallions or green onions. The garlic round/clove can be used like regular garlic, just be sure to keep it in the refrigerator.

Brassica microgreens

We love this microgreen salad mix. These microgreens take only a week to mature. We grow these in our indoor nursery, under lights, though we hope to experiment with outdoor/greenhouse microgreens this summer. This is the freshest crop we offer. We carry trays of living microgreens on the delivery route and harvest them fresh at your location. This mix includes varieties of Broccoli, Kale, Kohlrabi, Arugula & Cabbage. These micros are useful in salads, mixed in with eggs, or thrown into smoothies. They’re versatile and they last a long time in the refrigerator.

Parsley

Our herb offering this week will likely be Parsley, though other herbs are coming on including cilantro, dill, rosemary, thyme, oregano, sage, etc. We will provide a bunch of herbs as they are available, but it’s likely that we will have curly Parsley included this week.

Pea Shoots

Micro crop varieties are generally divided into three categories- Sprouts, Shoots, and Microgreens.

Sprouts- These “greens” are more like “yellows,” as they are typically grown without light.

Shoots- Generally, the only difference between “sprouts” and “shoots” is photosynthesis. Shoots are exposed to light and tend to be tall and stemmy.

Microgreens- These are typical micro crops with full flavor and leaves.

This week’s pea shoots may serve as a quick snack, or a unique topping to a diverse salad.

Happy mother’s day to our community’s miraculous matriarchs! Our last email update was delivered on Earth Day weekend, a time to be intentional and specific about celebrating and appreciating our Mother Earth. This weekend, as we thank and honor our essential female human predecessors- our mothers, our mother’s mothers, our mother’s mother’s mothers- we’re given an opportunity to visualize our deeply rooted, widely branching trees of descendance, endurance, and proliferation. We ought to reflect on our perennial, often dormant, living historical root systems, the lush vegetation of the present, and the bolting, flowering buds of the future.

We accept or assume that one doesn’t decide to grow crops for 40+ families, or choose to support such a purpose, without an omnipresent appreciation for the natural world and her mother. Whenever we travel into Columbus from the farm just outside of Granville, we pass a billboard alongside route 161 that reads “Every day is earth day to a farmer.” Its message provokes thought, reliably. Is it a call to action? Is it just a subtle reminder to appreciate the farmer or to appreciate the planet? What kind of farmer are we talking about and is this farmer truly a representative of Mother Earth or simply a capitalist? None of us would be involved in a CSA project like ours if we weren’t somewhat skeptical about the idea that conventional farming values sustainable stewardship. So what should this mean? What does earth day mean to a farmer and what does every day mean to a farmer? What kind of reflection does a message like this provoke for you and your family?

It seems the purpose of Earth Day is to insist that our citizens prioritize what is most basic and essential to our health, wellness, survival, and general existence: the environment of which we are all a part and on which we are all dependent. And what of Mother’s Day? If every day is Earth Day to a farmer, every day is Mother’s Day to… every thing. Every thing has a mother and every thing owes existence to its mother. The sun was formed in the nebulus womb of the Milky Way, the solar system and its many bodies owe existence to the motherhood of this star and her gravity, and all life within our biosphere is offspring. We all have mothers, our food had mothers, and our food’s food had mothers. It’s mothers all the way down.

This feeling of “appreciating the obvious and easily underappreciated” is a pervasive sensation on our farm and within our lifestyle. As the formality of Earth Day inspires individuals to redirect their attention toward what is truly critical, as the federal Mother’s Day holiday insists we take time to honor the one individual responsible for our precious consciousness, we hope the CSA season is a formal way for you and your family to stay directly connected to environmental and communal authenticity.

With the current accommodating mild and dry weather and the risk of heavy frost now in the past, we have been hurriedly preparing summer garden beds and filling them generously with tomatoes, peppers, and squashes with interplantings of herbs & salad greens. While our spring growth has dragged a bit, We are making great progress preparing for summer vegetation. Our indoor grow room is officially cleared out of young seedlings and our propagation hoophouses are thinning as the spring procession of transplants reach their final destinations in fertile field soil. Once the hoophouses have been ultimately emptied of herb, flower, and vegetable starts, we will transplant cucumbers under the plastic tunnels, stringing and trellising them up to the structure itself, keeping them hot & humid for what we hope to be an extended growing season.

Our first of 20 harvests will be distributed Sunday, May 21st and Wednesday, May 24th, about a week behind when we had hoped to begin harvests. Worry not though, families will still receive 20 weeks of harvests throughout the summer, skipping June 18th and 21st (family vacation), with the final delivery being the second week of October.

Logistically, vegetables & herbs will be packaged/displayed in a cardboard box. We purchase more than enough boxes for our membership, but please leave your used box at the delivery location to be replaced the following week. The same system applies to egg cartons. Please leave your used cartons out to be replaced at the next delivery. Flower bouquets are delivered in glass jars. If you have jars you can donate, we would be happy to re-purpose them. We will also take your organic food scraps, egg shells, and/or compost!

We’re a week away from our first harvest and the following spring crops are nearly eligible: Mixed Brassica Greens, Spring Mix Lettuce, Spinach, Bok Choy, Kale, Collard Greens, Head Lettuce, Microgreens, Parsley, Green Garlic, and Arugula.

Thank you all again for your support. It’s going to be another crazy growing season but we are ready for it! We look forward to meeting/interacting with old friends and new shareholders. Our first harvest is only a week away!

It may be that expressing any surprise at the strange and fickle seasonal weather patterns of modern Ohio is foolish, still, it was an atypical early spring. But after an oddly warm February, an oddly cold March, and an oddly dry April, there should no longer be any worry that our growing season is established. As our biosphere warms, awakens, propagates, and stimulates the rapid expansion of floral and faunal biomass that we see crawling, inching, and floating all around us, the responsibilities of nature’s caretakers accumulate and seasonal horticulture requires more of our immediate attention.

We want to reconnect and introduce ourselves to returning and new shareholders of this upcoming 2023 harvest. To our returning CSA members, we thank you dearly for your annual investment and encouragement. We certainly couldn’t have done it, and couldn’t continue to do it, without you. You’ve been patient, flexible, and assuring. Your participation has allowed us to pursue a lifestyle providing a truly unique and invaluable day-to-day experience. Our animals, our plants, our soils, our own bodies are healthier and happier because of you. This analog/digital hybrid community incorporates us into a symbiotic network despite being physically rooted to our land and unavoidably isolated. We are like heirloom garden tomato plants, stuck in soil. We depend fully on the attention and support of transient selfless pollinators. They use our pollen as currency, exchanging and bartering, funding the start of this resilient new hybrid variety. As in nature, in harmony, we collaborate as a cooperative and healthy ecosystem for mutual and influential benefit.

To our new shareholders, welcome! We’re fairly new farmers with a fairly modest operation, but our production efficiency and quality gets better each season without sacrificing organic and regenerative principles. We are ready to provide your family with our best harvest yet and a full season of diverse, fresh, and local whole foods. As new or perennial CSA shareholders, you may or may not need to be reminded of the virtue of your investment. Your family is funding a farm that is, without compromise,…

Organic- Though we lack an official organic certification, we can assure that your food will never be sprayed with inorganic or synthetic, broadly destructive pesticides, herbicides, or fungicides. Our animals are grass-fed and pasture-raised with supplemental grains sourced as locally as possible.

Regenerative- We work unreasonably hard to avoid any degenerative practices within our farm & gardens. We tread lightly on the soil, using hand tools as often as possible, mindful of our use of fossil fuels. We till minimally, using tillage equipment and tools to simply shape and amend our established garden beds, avoiding deep soil disturbance and destruction. We hope to maintain fertility not by shipping in synthetic chemicals derived from fossil fuels, but by recycling our waste and incorporating local composts and fertilizers.

Sustainable- We strive to minimize our use of materials, prioritizing recyclable and reusable inputs in our production and distribution, consistently aware of our waste and downstream influence.

Local- Our long-term goal is to figure out how to “close the loop,” completely eliminating outside inputs contributing to our farm’s productivity. For now, it is still necessary to bring in organic amendments like local compost and production materials like local potting soil. While we temporarily depend on these inputs, we intend to source them as locally and responsibly as is reasonable.

Our farm’s borders contain roughly six acres of managed pastures, cultivated gardens, and native/wild land. It’s a small but mighty ecosystem supporting and naturally satisfying flocks of over 100 laying hens and roosters, two dozen sheep, and scores of varieties of annual and perennial vegetables, fruits, flowers, and herbs. Sheep and Poultry are regularly rotated around the property providing fresh paddocks to forage. The omnivorous poultry aerate and stimulate the topsoil, scratching for bugs and seeds while the herbivorous bovidae prune and mow bushes, forbs, and grasses. We employ Salatinian regenerative “mob-grazing” techniques, rotating micro paddocks daily, keeping flocks tightly grouped and closely managed using electric fencing in order to concentrate nutrients, manage pasture condition, and prevent over-grazing.

To begin this winter farm update, we’ll express first our great appreciation for this season’s new shareholders. Your intentions are admirable, your contribution is generous, and your support is absolutely essential. With your funding, we are able to realistically pursue a simple, more ideal traditional lifestyle, seek better ways to sustain our minds and bodies, and ultimately share what we experience, learn, and grow with this CSA community. We are proud to collaborate in this small ecosystem of primary and secondary consumers, with its efficient harmony and symbiosis. The shareholders and the farmers share a unique opportunity to exchange what is, we sincerely believe, tangibly natural, and objectively good.

Unsurprisingly, the pace is slower at the farm during wintertime. We don’t take the winter sabbath for granted. Literally and figuratively, our world and each of its particles moves slower, allowing greater bandwidth and space for reflection and imagination. We have access to invaluable time with which we can revisit the meditation about who, where, how, and most importantly, why we have decided to live this way. This season, we’ll strive to simplify the “where” regarding both the inputs and outputs of our farm and gardens. We’ve taken a minimalist approach to marketing and distributing our outputs this season to avoid uncertainty, inefficiency, and waste by offering only the home delivery CSA option. It doesn’t get much simpler, fresher, or more direct in distribution: Often times on delivery day, fresh whole foods are harvested by the growers themselves and loaded fresh into the growers’ vehicle to be delivered by the growers directly to the shareholding community. It’s not an exaggeration to claim that maybe the only way to get fresh food more efficiently is by foraging with your own hands and feet or harvesting from your own backyard garden!

We seriously consider from “where” our garden inputs travel. We take great care and pride in, when necessary, sourcing our garden inputs locally. As important as it is for us to efficiently deliver whole foods directly from garden to table, it’s equally important that we generate and acquire organic inputs as close to home as possible. Our “where” becomes somewhat interchangeable with our “how” as, in collaboration with our organic and human scale farming practices, our insistence on locally-sourced soil amendments encourages us to produce in the most ethical, responsible, regenerative way we know. Off-farm compost comes from Price Farms Organics in Delaware, Ohio, where they combine animal bedding and manure from the Columbus Zoo, local food waste, leaf hummus, and recycled coffee grounds into a nutrient-rich compost blend that we incorporate into our garden bed preparation. Our seedlings and microgreens are grown with Tilth potting soil from Cleveland. It’s an organic soil mix with nutrients from local food waste compost. Ohio Earth Food organic granular fertilizer, from David’s hometown of Hartville, is made up of composted chicken manure and other organic poultry industry bi-products. We incorporate this slow release fertilizer to feed hungrier crops and provide a deliberate micro nutrient boost. Chemical pesticides and synthetic fertilizers derived from fossil fuels are never used on the farm.

The obvious or basic “who” of this operation is the consumer, you and your family, to whom we’ve expressed our sincere gratitude in this update’s opening paragraphs. But to be honest and transparent, our purest motivation really is not to feed the world, or to promote a profitable commercial business/brand. Our “why” has always been about self-reliance- to remember how to feed ourselves, to sever our demand from the collective need, to detach with us as much weight off of the communal supply chain as is realistic, to prove that it’s possible. With all due respect to the necessity and miracle of mass conventional food production and marketing and our admittedly lingering (though dwindling) reliance upon it, we simply want to thin out the grocery store produce section. As we struggle to embody the change we’d like to see in our world, while we romanticize about potential progressive ripples radiating omnidirectionally from our small country farm and each of your dinner tables, we are predominantly motivated to provide optimal, simple nutrition for individual families including our own.

Our season has come to an end. Thank you again for your investment and support this season. We’re relieved and grateful to have concluded a second CSA season, having acquired new knowledge, friends, and experiences along the way. We genuinely feel lucky to have the opportunity to attempt such a project and could not do it without you.

Mother Nature will always be stubborn. She’ll be reluctant to cooperate. She’ll be unpredictable. She’ll present new challenges every season. We have to remind ourselves about this independent variable. We will be surprised by something every season. Maybe it’ll take a lifetime to accept, but we’ll never master the garden because we are not the masters of it, she is. We had a better garden in 2022 than we did in 2021, but things went wrong. Some problems could have been prevented, some should have been prevented, some couldn’t have been avoided. We can have experiences, learn from experience, anticipate based on experience, but ultimately we need to learn to be comfortable with what may be the only thing guaranteed on our farm any given season: failure.

We don’t control how late the frost lifts in the spring or how early it settles in the fall. We can’t control if, when, or how much it will rain. We can’t even really control how well we can stick to or keep up with a crop plan week to week. But we can get a better sense of our abilities and limitations year to year. We can determine what worked and what didn’t. We can adjust, shift, and pivot. Our CSA program will be different next year than it was this year. If you’re interested in participating again, be on the lookout for updates about changes for next year.

The following sections include conclusions we’ve gathered about different crop families and projects we’ve worked with at Morckel Meadows in 2022.

The Brassicacae family includes dozens of cold hardy, cool season vegetable varieties that we never hesitate to include in our crop plan, but often struggle to grow, harvest, and present nicely. They’re valuable crops. They’re valuable in our personal diets, to our shareholder community, to potential commercial markets, and they’re undeniably attractive to the diversity of organisms cohabitating our woods, pastures, and garden beds. We once read that if a garden’s plants aren’t being nibbled-on by wildlife, the garden is not part of the surrounding ecosystem. While we genuinely believe in the approach that this ideal inspires and the thoughts that it provokes, we hope to do a better job keeping problematic pests away from our precious produce, while we encourage a balanced and restorative population of beneficial insect and animal life. As we continue to learn and improve as gardeners, we hope for fewer worms to pick off of our cabbage and broccoli, fewer flea beetles punching holes in our arugula, and fewer aphids congregating on our fall kale stalks.

The concept of “succession planting” is pretty critical for a successful homestead garden, especially when considering lettuce and leafy green production, and it becomes significantly more critical the more a garden scales up in size. If a crop like a head lettuce or salad mix doesn’t easily store or ripen, it’s ideally available and fresh all of the time. If the availability and maturity of the harvest is to be regular and consistent, the regularity and consistency of the planting must be likewise. In the late winter and early spring, when all there is to do is plant, it’s less difficult to manage a succession planting schedule. As responsibilities accrue throughout the summer and chores include not only planting but cultivating and harvesting as well, keeping up with that disciplined succession becomes challenging. So it is at our farm at least.

We want to express our gratitude and remind our shareholders that they continue to fund a noble, purposeful project. As new farmers growing unconventionally and audaciously, we need all the support we can get. It is only through the Community Supported Agriculture model that we can even consider pursuing small scale farming with all its challenges. It has only been with your participation that we can justify growing our own food traditionally, organically, using regenerative practices. This community of mindful consumers has been more than supportive. Thank you.

The frost came early this year! We’ve had patchy frosts for over a week now, nearly a month before we were scraping windshields last season. We’ll continue to liquidate the remaining crops for the final two weeks of the season. We try to keep boxes consistent for home delivery and farm pick up harvests, and from share to share, but some items may need to be distributed as available. For example, home delivery shareholders may receive a different variety of head lettuce(s) from farm pick up shareholders, a different herb, etc.

We have Salanova and Romaine head lettuce varieties going out this week for fall salads. Admittedly, we struggle with growing head lettuces later than springtime, but we continue to learn a lot, we’ve made progress this season, and we hope to implement better strategies next year for more consistent harvests all season long.

We have rows of cool season greens from where we can harvest this week. The trick is selecting a green that will provide a decent yield for the whole community with what remain in the gardens. Your box this week may contain one or two varieties of these leaves to diversify your salad bed.

The pepper crops are the resilient summer holdovers. We’ll waste not, continuing to distribute plenty as long as they maintain through the chilly nights and mornings ahead.

The ratio of red to green shishitos has shifted left on the color spectrum. As we’ve mentioned before, red Shishitos are predictably spicy and will be considered our heat of the week. We are clearing the plants this week and ought to have a generous handful of wrinkly peppers for your family.

Our heatless Jalapenos have been interesting for us this season, but we’d love to hear some feedback as to how you’ve appreciated them. It’s been nice to treat a Jalapeno-type pepper as a sweet pepper without the intimidation of a traditional Jalapeno’s heat. We’ve stuffed them, diced them, and sauteed them.

This was our first year growing banana peppers and we were blown away with the yield of the rows and the size of the individual fruits! It’s barely an exaggeration to claim that we might-could fill every shareholder’s box with banana peppers only. It may be true. We won’t do that unless you ask, but there’s plenty of bananas available for anyone that can use them.

We have a few cool season herb plants continuing to produce and we will distribute sprigs and bunches as available.

Week 19 shares will include our final mason jar bouquets of the season. We’ve learned so much about ornamental cultivation this season and have big plans for the future. Hopefully you’ve enjoyed these unique weekly arrangements as it has been a joy to create them. We will have autumn wreaths to share for our final week 20.

The day’s length has been officially surpassed, stealthily and abruptly, by night’s, and it’s time to celebrate Autumn’s relief during these final months of 2022! Our growing season is fading out, with the majority of our summer crops (peppers excluded) having appeared at last for curtain call and taken their final bows for the season.

Sweet Potatoes & Yams are unique and welcomed crops on our farm. They’re the sort of delicious, densely nutritional, storage vegetables a homesteader would be wise to grow. Theoretically requiring less input than their Irish friends, the harvest remains a big old dig- time consuming and physically demanding. Yams aren’t cultivated from a sprouted tuber like white potatoes. They’re typically started as cuttings or clones overwintered from the previous fall dig. The cuttings, or slips, are transplanted to the garden long after the threat of any spring frost has passed. New leaves sprout and the vine surveys the landscape, gripping and penetrating soft ground, sprawling out over the bed with leaves, stems, and eventually, beautiful shy purple flowers. The best thing to do to ensure big and numerous tubers is to give it a long summer, so you plant early and wait patiently for a harvest near, but not after, the fall frost.

As we’ve learned to expect and ought to get comfortable with, issues arose with this season’s yam crop- issues both anticipated and unforeseen. The crop had an ideal start, though. Our slips, purchased from another organic farm, arrived on time/early (they’re often delivered late) and we got them in the ground right away. In August, to our surprise, we noticed fully-formed tubers poking out of the soil way ahead of schedule. The yams just appeared early and easily, without the standard purple flowers that traditionally trumpet their arrival. While it was exciting to see the early fruit at the time, as we harvest, we are still awfully confused as to how or why one came without the other. We suppose we have further googling to do.

We’ve spoken before about the divergent emotions regarding the cathartic satisfaction or otherwise painful disappointment of a root vegetable harvest. A good harvest and high yield may be anticipated or even expected, but the truth is just under the soil surface or umbrella-ed beneath the crop’s canopy. You don’t really know until you dig and with Yams or Sweet Potatoes, you don’t want to dig too soon. So when we saw early fruit, we simply thought “Stay calm, this row is thriving, focus on other things, In October we’ll have an amazing yam harvest.”

With our final harvest less than a month away, the garden, and its potential yield, is what it is. There’s not a lot that can be planted and harvested in less than a month and there’s not a lot left that can be changed or adjusted. It’s a sweet feeling to know that we’re nearing the end of this year’s project with objective successes on which to reflect. It’s a bitter feeling knowing that we can’t go back, correct our past failures, or make current adjustments, that the 2022 crop plan is in the books, that it is indeed what it is.

Thank you again for your support this season. We can’t help but distract ourselves day-dreaming about how to use lessons we’ve learned to build an even more healthy, beautiful, efficient, balanced, productive, well-tuned farm & garden next spring.

We dug out and accumulated the last of our spuds, to be distributed this week. As available, a mix of Yukon Golds, Kennebec white potatoes, and red spuds will be shared. We learned a lot about growing potatoes and made some significant changes to the way we approached the crop. It’s important that we prioritize preparing potato beds early, get the seed treated and planted promptly, give the plants plenty of space, and actively hill, weed, and cultivate the beds throughout the season.

Bok Choy, along with other cool season brassicas like Arugula, Brussel Sprouts, and Cauliflower, remains firmly in the frustrating category of crops that we have yet to completely wraps our heads around. While most of our farm projects are less intimidating after a few years, a perfect, flawless brassica crop remains a somewhat distant goal post. While it’s no longer an issue about learning what we need to do to be successful, it remains a challenge implementing how to do what we need to do. Next year’s crop plan will focus much more on how to delegate time, labor, and resources rather than basically what it takes to grow a crop at a surplus scale.

We still have herbs left in garden, of varying quantities and conditions. We were able to get a decent fresh cilantro share cut for our home delivery folks this week. We’ll cut what we have left for farm pick ups and switch over to other available herbs like rosemary, thyme, parsley or basil as the cilantro is appropriately thinned.

“The footsteps of the farmer are his best fertilizer.”

The historical attributions of this particular quote trace as far back as ancient Greek philosophy, with the phrase and concept behind it having gone through plenty of iterations. As we reflect on this year’s harvest, the axiom rings true to us. Above all, a good crop requires attention and our successful harvests are always the result of adequate observation and cultivation. When a crop suffers or doesn’t reach its potential, it’s often the result of inattention or more specifically in our case, the reality of being stretched too-thin. So it goes. Each season, we’ll encounter difficult and important lessons about the extent of our agricultural bandwidth- physically, mentally, and emotionally.

After our second season, we have a good idea about our land’s capacity to produce. The greater, perennial inquiry is about how many crops, projects, and shares we are able to successfully juggle at once while keeping our sanity. Thus is the nature of a CSA. You’re all helping us figure this out. Our local farm share is diverse, fresh, and seasonal, but not flawless or specialized. Thank you again for supporting our growth and allowing us to encounter intimately this ancient, prehistoric practice.

We’ve alluded to the difficult season it has been for the cucurbit family on our farm. The squash bugs, cucumber beetles, and other pests are officially onto us. Butternuts will likely be the last of our squashes as the third sister of our three sisters garden didn’t work out as well as the other two.

We’ve talked about “three sisters” gardening before- the Native American practice of interplanting corn, beans and squash. We were happy to have successful corn and pole bean crops this season but the sprawling, vining squash plants that theoretically serve as ground cover in and around the garden have been impractical. The upright corn and bean crops, with their stilt roots and natural trellising, are easy to manage, but It’s a challenge to suppress the intermingling weeds between rows without stomping over the vines of the desired squash and melon crops. The weeds got out of control in this big field and competition was too great for the third sister this season- further lessons learned. We will adjust next season.

We’re hoping to get as much as we can out of our late season summer squash planting. Our hatred for squash bugs has become fiery. It has been eye-opening to see how fast and destructive they can be when not given their due respect. On our farm, summer squashes have always been prolific and easy to grow, but they’re not separate from our evolving ecosystem and actions will need to be taken to get this population under control next summer.

We have dozens of banana pepper plants producing wildly. If you can use bulk bananas for canning, let us know what you need and we can share the surplus.

Our first cutting of our late summer/fall spinach will be harvested this week. We’re still experimenting with varieties. Your share will include both smooth and savoyed leaves.

Seasonal farming in the midwest here around the fortieth parallel, providing for such a large group for such a long season, from the last frost of May to the first frost of October, requires a unique nonlinear endurance- one that admittedly demands from us further training, discipline, and dedication. Like all undertakings, endeavors, or projects, it requires operational organization, resource management, and raw, deliberate motivation.

As the summer transitions to autumn and we observe our land’s ebbing abundance, we not only seek to find fresh and ripe winter squash hiding beneath unattended weeds, with tired vines trailing them. We not only hunt for fresh wild mushrooms spored and fruited by cool nights, damp leaf mold, and spontaneous evening showers. We are seeking to uncover fresh enthusiasm for farming itself- enthusiasm that the farm’s inevitable variability offers herself, but regardless needs attended to, with stewardship, husbandry, and humility. Always in prospect and retrospect, we approach the final month of this year’s production here at Morckel Meadows, still grateful for, and appreciative of, our shareholders- the providers and beneficiaries of such elusive endurance and enthusiasm.

Okra is a miracle crop, it just is. Ornamental and productive, incredibly fast-growing, it does so much work for us in the field that it is only fair that we do a little work to honor its fruit, slimy as it may be and as much as it requires a taste many of us must actively acquire. We often treat and prepare it like frying fish- dipped in an egg, honey, and/or butter wash and rolled in something crunchy.

Velour purple filet beans. This is the first harvest from a second, fall succession of bush beans. Our first planting with these “extra-fine,” tender and elegant purple legumes seemed to attract critters, likely groundhogs, who methodically topped the plants, setting us back quite a bit in early summer. This row of beans is closer to the house and theoretically safer from such encroachment, far away from the critters’ entry points like the wood lines and the edges of our meadow overgrowth.

Our tomato supply is regrettably diminishing quickly. All good things must come to an end, we suppose and for us, It was an unquestionably good and successful tomato-growing season. The 2021 harvest, our first at any significant scale, was laced with failure. But this season, we were grateful not only for our increased success and production, but for the lessons and clarity we’ve developed about how we should grow next spring.

Our cherry tomato harvests are smaller and less consistent, but nevertheless sweet. We’ll harvest every berry available before the autumn frost.

We sampled raw, fresh-pulled red ripe Carmen peppers in the field the other day. These are clearly the best sweet peppers we’ve ever had. We were reminded of sprinkling salt on melon slices as kids. These peppers taste so fruity and sweet that it’s hard to believe there isn’t some trick being employed- like a hidden hand had already seasoned the pepper with a complimentary pinch. Our pepper patch has shown improvements this season. The fruits are longer, more uniform, and better-ripened. To see, smell, and ultimately taste the progress is quite a reward.

There has been a good bit of chopping, raking, and tugging going on at the farm this week as we clear and clean beds for fall and winter cover crops, with the end of the season slowly approaching. Thanks to our volunteers for their helping hands and to the rest of our shareholders for their support and good vibes.

We continue to pull ripe, cured squash from our 100 foot row of Delicata. Running parallel to these hybrid squashes live our Butternuts, gradually yellowing toward a ripe and ready orange. We’re patiently awaiting this year’s chosen winter squash to show us our first undeniable sign of Autumn’s arrival.

The tomato vines have officially passed their peak, becoming unruly and unproductive. Though many fruits continue to ripen on the tired vines, we anticipate offerings to slow in the coming weeks as Tomato harvests have shifted from sophisticated, pleasant fruit-picking to something more like an uncivilized scavenge or forage. There remain plenty of good bits and slices of full sized, ripened tomatoes left to enjoy. We expect smaller offerings of cherries, likely only a small handful this week.

We’ll be offering a number of special peppers this week with varying levels of heat. The yellow peppers are Bananas, rarely providing any noticeable spice. Wrinkly Shishitos are to be included. When they’re green, there’s about a 10% chance you’ll encounter any heat, but the reds ones are hotties. Our only full, uniform, green peppers this week are “Anaheims.” These are comparable to the Carmens and Bell peppers we’re all familiar with, but with a little kick to them (very little). While these rows of hot and special peppers took their sweet time this season, there’s plenty to harvest for the end of summer.

We love growing Okra. They grow from a peppercorn of a seed to a small tree in a single season. They require a harvester’s constant attention as it’s an unforgiving crop, like a summer squash. In the evening, you think you’ve pulled all the available fruit and by morning you discover woody monsters. Production is ramping up slowly and while we’ll only have a few for shareholders this week, there’ll be plenty to go around in September.

The brassicas are back this week. While they’re a necessary crop for any midwest garden, though they’re quite attractive to the critters. This week’s Arugula harvest has its blemishes, but they’re spicy and nutty and ought to be great as a salad base or a sandwich topping.

This is a busy, busy week for the Morckels on and off the farm. As you all know, Erin is back to teaching full-time, and her absence from the farm is palpable. David also maintains an off-farm career as a freelance audio engineer, working with sound crews at live events and helping to facilitate audio recording for local video productions. Balancing our important work here on the farm with our career responsibilities and opportunities can be a challenge and this week is particularly demanding.

This weekend, Erin is voluntarily providing flower arrangements for a good friend’s wedding and while we had hoped to arrange bouquets for both the event and our CSA shareholders, our available hours make it unfortunately implausible to satisfy both. We regret that we won’t have flower bouquets this week, but will continue to provide an ornamental accompaniment to our whole food shares for the remainder of the season. This week was a challenging one, and we appreciate your support and patience. Thank you again for the privilege to grow for you, an opportunity that gives us exposure to a unique, meaningful, and fascinating experience.

Delicata, a summer/winter squash hybrid is a farm favorite. It’s an acorn-type squash. They’ve been cured and ought to store well outside of refrigeration, though the skin stays tender enough so that peeling’s unnecessary. They’re versatile and while they’re traditionally halved from stem to bottom, scooped, and roasted, it’s not inappropriate to chop them into smaller, thin potato-like fry pieces and throw them on the skillet with stir-fry veggies.

We’ve had quite the potato harvest. These aren’t the creamy, early, new potatoes from previous boxes, but rather the mature storage spuds we’re all used to. Their foliage died back after devoting all the plant’s energy to growing big tubers. They’ve been waiting comfortably below the surface for the right harvest time and we’re happy to have dug some big’ns.

The nights have been chilly lately haven’t they? It’s a welcomed hint at autumn for those of us working and enjoying the outdoors, but the tomatoes aren’t crazy about it. We’ll continue milking these plants for all they have but it’s been a long summer and they’re getting deservedly tired. Don’t disregard the splitties! We pick them ripe and intact but they’re getting more fragile.

Our frilly Salanova heads are back in the rotation. These are similar to traditional Iceberg and Romaine varieties. They’re useful chopped up for salads or as single leaves for BLT’s. They store well and ought to go a long way. The red heads are good luck :)

Thank you to our shareholders who have inquired about our lamb shares. If there are any more questions or curiosity, let us know soon as we have some interest from local shops and will offer whole/half shares publicly after we feel confident that our shareholders have had a fair opportunity to reserve this all-natural, precious, pasture-raised protein for themselves.

Cloudy skies and cold fronts have been friendly to our rows of summer greens and we’re happy to incorporate them into shares this week. Big colorful bunches of buttery, crunchy Swiss Chard and silky leaf lettuces will provide a base for salads this week, with head lettuces to follow into September.

We’ll be handing out a variety of bell peppers and sweet frying peppers this week. The welcomed precipitation has made our rows of pepper plants heavy with fruit, both new and red ripe. Delicious blistered and cheese-stuffed, heat-hinting Shishitos will be going out to home delivery shareholders this week as Sunday folks will likely receive banana peppers (there are plenty). Mild and hot jalapenos are accumulating exponentially on their bushes.

Our tomatoes are super ripe and eager to be sliced and diced. Our heirlooms have a whole lot of meaty mass this season, so if you notice a spot, blemish, or imperfection, simply work around it. These aren’t conventional store-bought, greenhouse grown, hydroponic, aesthetically perfect yet under-developed tomatoes. These are wild field tomatoes and to work around a few faults is a small price to pay for the dense purple, pink, and red meat waiting just behind any of that discoloration. If a tomato is truly over-ripe or undoubtedly unattractive, we keep and glean it for our own sauce supply. If it surpasses the standards of human consumption (a high bar by our saucing standards), into the chicken paddock it goes to be squabbled-over. We’re likely to find its progeny volunteering amongst the pasture grasses next spring.

In previous seasons, we’ve been anxious and impatient to pull carrots out of the ground. The lush foliage can allow a gardener to miscalculate their root development. The anticipation can lead to undisciplined, impulsive pulls that are not rarely anti-climactic. There’s all this build-up and excitement only to realized there’s a pencil-sized baby root in your grip. We’ve been guilty of these early harvests for years. Carrot beds were left to age a little longer this year as, with good conditions, they store well in the soil. We certainly grew bigger carrots. Rabbits cut into our yield a bit, nibbling at the tops but, as with our over-ripened tomatoes, we reserve these oddballs for our own supply to be saved with our storage potatoes for leg of lamb roasts in the fall and winter.

We’ll have a mix of leaf lettuces bagged up this week. It’s a mildy sweet mix of familiar gourmet lettuce varieties. These delicate greens and reds will compliment the more substantial, broad-leaved bunches of rainbow Swiss Chard.

We have a row of heritage Cilantro growing fast and we will start distributing this week to accompany your tomatoes and peppers. While it quickly regenerates, it’s unclear as to whether a critical mass will be available for both harvests this week but we’ll start by bunching some for our home delivery folks Wednesday.

Despite being back to teaching full-time, Erin continues to arrange unique and creative bouquets for your dinner tables this week. We hope that they bring joy to your families as they do for ours.

The beginning of August marks the midway point for our 2022 season and presents an important opportunity for reflection and evaluation. We’ve had W’s and L’s, homers and strikeouts, first downs and punts. We’re relieved and optimistic to have had a sweet corn crop, but pessimists regarding the fate of our cucumber tunnel. We’re happy we’ve maintained 10+ items per week, but disappointed with our summer greens gap. We’re happy with the regenerated condition of our pastures and the health and happiness of our sheep herd, but disappointed with our egg production and flock management. We’ve patted ourselves on the back and kick ourselves.

Our shareholders, nevertheless, have showed patience and grace, and we try to do the same for ourselves. We try to remember that the project is a noble and purposeful one, that it is only our sophomore season, and that while the disappointment of our shortcomings is indeed unavoidable, CSA is Community Supported, not Market Dependent, Agriculture. Thank you for participating in our community of like-motivated families, for your essential support, and for giving us this opportunity to learn and grow.

It has been quite a different season from 2021. The lack of rainfall on our farm has been more of an issue than we like to admit. With our limited means, we have always thought of intentional irrigation as necessary for establishing healthy seedlings, from infancy through late childhood, and rainfall as necessary for sustaining those crops to maturity.

The beginning of August marks the midway point for our 2022 season and presents an important opportunity for reflection and evaluation. We’ve had W’s and L’s, homers and strikeouts, first downs and punts. We’re relieved and optimistic to have had a sweet corn crop, but pessimists regarding the fate of our cucumber tunnel. We’re happy we’ve maintained 10+ items per week, but disappointed with our summer greens gap. We’re happy with the regenerated condition of our pastures and the health and happiness of our sheep herd, but disappointed with our egg production and flock management. We’ve patted ourselves on the back and kick ourselves.

Our shareholders, nevertheless, have showed patience and grace, and we try to do the same for ourselves. We try to remember that the project is a noble and purposeful one, that it is only our sophomore season, and that while the disappointment of our shortcomings is indeed unavoidable, CSA is Community Supported, not Market Dependent, Agriculture. Thank you for participating in our community of like-motivated families, for your essential support, and for giving us this opportunity to learn and grow. and adulthood. We’re in collaboration, an alliance, a duet with Mother Nature. We rely on her, as we don’t control all the variables. This strategy, in many ways, has unfortunately been less dependable than last season. This dry summer on our farm is undoubtedly presenting lower yields- slow, precarious flowering and uncertain fruit sets.

Our goal was, and continues to be, simple: Grow Good Food. It wasn’t necessarily critical to grow perfect food or restaurant-quality food. We just want to grow good food, a lot of it, naturally and organically.

This is sadly our last week having Erin on the farm full-time. She’ll be returning to the classroom next week, teaching AP Environmental Science and Biology.

This week, we have fresh, vibrant summer fruits and vegetables bouncing reds and purples back at you from the left and right boundaries of the visible light spectrum. We’re attracted. We’ve evolved the inability to look away from these beauties, and our bodies are rewarded by it.

We’ve thinned the cornfield significantly. Remaining varieties and leftover secondary ears have reached and passed maturity. The canopy is opening a bit, allowing for more energy to reach the trellising pole beans clinging to mature corn stalks, and the creeping cucurbits doing what they can on the ground floor. The remaining ears we share this week will be more mature, perhaps tougher, still ideal for cooking or boiling. We’ve been snacking on fresh ears in the field for the past few weeks and have found that the remaining harvest has lost some of its tenderness- not as good raw but still great boiled and scraped. The pests have officially figured it out and we’ve lost some nice ears to what are likely raccoons and other nocturnal mammals. The bugs have worked their way into a few tips. You may be startled to peel back the husk and find the presence of pests, but disregard that tip and keep peeling because there are plenty of sweet kernels tucked in safely.

Wild blackberries are in season and while the harvest amongst the brambles can be a bit treacherous and unpredictable, we’re excited to share this nutrient-concentrated forage with our food community. We’ll have pints ready for our home delivery folks on Wednesday and will harvest everything we can for Sunday’s pick ups. If interested, farm pick up folks are welcome to help pick for themselves when they visit the farm. Come dressed for the thicket!

Red Onions included this week have been in the works since February- a long time to wait for a vegetable that you typically only pull once. Onions are always a reminder of how strange our food values can be. A lot of time and effort goes into growing an onion on a small scale. They’re cheap, widely used, but often overlooked, or maybe even taken for granted. Of all the garden vegetables that a homestead could consider “worth growing” at the beginning of the season, onions are a perennial stretch to justify- especially from seed. But when it’s time to harvest, with all the senses involved, it sure feels all worth it.

Our experience with the mild Jalapenos has been interesting, and encouraging so far. We love the flavor of Jalapenos. Often times, we feel like we could use more flavor, more peppers or larger chunks, but can’t handle the unavoidable spice that comes along with the added mass. The “Nadapenos” have been giving us all the flavor we’d expect from a Jalapeno, but the’re gentle. They still tingle your mouth like a traditional hot pepper without what can be an overwhelming residual heat.

We’re continuing to pluck large Dragon Tongue beans from our 100 foot row. Hand-harvested beans, even on our small commercial scale, are hard to keep up with, and while these are more mature than we prefer, they’re still perfectly suitable for a good hearty meal. Additionally, we’re beginning to harvest pole beans from our “Three Sisters” garden block. As our sweet corn is harvested, the stalks remain, curing upright, supporting the vined and maturing pole beans. We’re now able to select mature pole beans dangling among the maize’s yellowed tassles. These are heirloom varieties rich with history- “Blauhilde” purple beans and “Cherokee Trail of Tears” green snaps. From a seed packet:

Pole. 65 days. This heirloom was brought from Tennessee by the Cherokee people as they were marched to Oklahoma by the federal government in 1839 over the infamous “Trail of Tears” that left so many dead and suffering. This prolific variety grows on vigorous vines. It is good as a snap or dry bean and has shiny, black skin.

Cherry tomato vines have been vigorous and unruly but continue to throw a constant supply of new and ripening fruit sets. We’re happy that we have been able to include these sweet treats week after week. We’ll continue to do so until production slows in the fall. The heirloom tomatoes are piling up! These field tomatoes are full of character. In exchange for full-flavored, soil-grown, natural tomatoes, we have to work around some cracks and blemishes on the fruits. Despite the imperfections, we find value in knowing these were produced in the open air, without the need for a large plastic structure. We like to be reminded that while a “perfect” tomato can indeed be grown in a “perfect” environment, a perfectly good homegrown tomato can thrive in a perfectly good open field, maybe where it belongs.