Week 8; July 22, 2021
What’s in the box?
parsley
spinach
green leaf lettuce
fennel
sweet corn
new potatoes (reds of blues)
bell pepper
cucumber
zucchini/ summer squash
broccoli or cauliflower
onions
Notes on the box.
Notes on the box
We are so happy that we had good germination on this spinach since it usually won’t grow in hot temperatures. Same with the lettuce still tasting good.
We had to make a hard call on whether to harvest sweet corn this week or wait. It was much spottier in it’s maturation than normal and we think that’s due to the temps and drought. So while it might not all be perfectly filled out, we didn’t want to wait another week when it might be starchy or worse, non-existant because the racoons decided to eat it all!
Potatoes will be either blue or red. We hope you enjoy these beauties! They are new potatoes, so should be eaten sooner than later since they are not cured for storage.
Cosmic Wheel Creamery Cheese Shares.
This week is Garlic and Scallion Quark and our swiss cheese! We don’t have the perfect aging conditions required to get the nice perfectly round holds in our swiss, but it still tastes really good! We hope you enjoy it! The quark is a favorite and goes really well with roasted potatoes or on a cold veggie sandwich. Yum!
Recipes.
coming soon!
On the Farm.
Don’t forget that you can schedule holds on your CSA shares by clicking the link in the delivery email! You can also add coffee or now MUSHROOMS to your CSA box through the same link. Check it out and let us know if you have any questions!
This week you get to meet Isaac! We are very grateful to have him here on the farm and are so grateful for his thoughts on what it’s like to be doing this work! Here’s what he has to share about working on the farm:
Working on the farm has been the most fascinating and fulfilling job I have ever had – and beyond that, it feels like a life changing experience. At the end of the first day, I couldn’t believe it had only been one day: I had been involved in such a variety of tasks and done so much. Sometimes even now I stand at the end of a Friday and think back through the week and try to quantify how much I have learned and experienced. In one recent week, I washed, weighed, and organized 660 bunches of carrots/beets/turnips, unloaded haybales into the barn, transplanted corn on the back of the tractor, put out fencing in the fields in 90-degree heat, drove around on the John Deer Gator looking for our bull in the long grass of the north field(!), helped pack our 200 boxes of vegetable shares, and saw and learned about Monarch butterflies – as well as a multitude of other little tasks and harvesting all sorts of yummy veggies!
I love being around the animals: hanging out with the farm dogs, feeding the pigs, and seeing everything from cranes to foxes to snakes. It feels like everything is going through its own journey on the farm. I like asking questions about the science behind the plants and their processes and trying to understand all the variables involved in growing vegetables. I also really enjoy working ‘the pack shed’: bringing in the harvest, washing, drying, organizing, and weighing, and figuring out how much we have of what, and how that will fit into the CSA boxes and our deliveries. Before all that, I put out new fencing each morning, moving reels and posts and water tubs around in the fields for the milking cows, so they have a new paddock to graze each day – the day-to-day practicalities of grass-fed cows! It is incredibly thought-provoking to see the way everything is connected: the cows having good grass to eat, producing quality milk, fertilizing the fields, and encouraging its regrowth in turn.
Working on the farm sometimes feels a bit like you are up-close and personal with Life, maybe like animals always are. You get to see the beautiful complexity and always-changing, interconnected nature of things, and how seasons and environment shapes all of it. It shows all the good parts and doesn’t hide the hard parts either. Every living thing on the farm is battling along, either trying to stand up next to its mom right after it is born, looking for food, or trying to find a quiet corner to remake itself anew, or do what it must while the weather allows. Or its just trying to grow in its planted spot, raging along with 5 other plants that are trying to make the same spot their own.
It feels like we are going into a different part of the season now, with different crops coming to the fore. No doubt working on the farm will remain just as wonderfully challenging, rewarding, and uniquely interesting – and fun! Because you can’t get much more fun than loading up 500 lbs. of seeding potatoes onto the wagon and blasting across the farm at Gator-top-speed, covered in dirt and drenched in sweat on a sunny, blue-skied Friday afternoon. Oh. If I were a vegetable, I would be a Brussel Sprout. They are popular in England, where I am from, and they are kind of weird. And if Anabel’s hair resembles a Broccoli floret, then, perhaps, as my own head of hair enters its autumn years, I look more and more like a balding Brussel sprout. Delicious and dignified though!
