Waiting for Good Water

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.

Housekeeping

We would like to send a notification text ahead of our arrival at your location and a confirmation message that your food has been delivered, but we are still missing some contact information, especially from our Wednesday delivery shareholders.

We’re impressed and grateful to our shareholders for recycling compost/food scraps and delivery materials with us. Your organic waste will be added to the compost pile or used to entertain, and diversify the diet, of our chickens. For your effort in helping our attempts to close the loop, our farm’s macro and microbiology will benefit.

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!

We wish we could share more about how we incorporate each set of box items into our daily meals. Please share your yummy salads and side dishes with us so we can reshare and brag about our awesome community!

Erin & David