It’s real dry out there

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.

Housekeeping

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.

We mentioned last week that we would accept returned materials including plastic bags from previous deliveries. We should say that we don’t intend to redistribute these bags for future deliveries, we will just re-purpose them on the farm. You’re welcome to dispose of them yourselves as well, whatever is convenient.

We are happy to take away food scraps, especially egg shells and organic vegetable wastes. Again, if it’s convenient for you. We like to always think about ways that we can “close the loop” here on the farm and throughout the logistics of the project.

Simply leave out your empty box from the previous week’s delivery and we will collect returned materials and replace the box with fresh food. A cooler is a better option if you won’t be around to bring vegetables indoors or to the refrigerator.

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.

Have a wonderful week!

Erin & David