CSA Week One

This is the flyer we gave out with this week's CSA basket. I hope to post these every week of the CSA since they're a nice little diary entry on the farm. Photo below by Cornelia!

News from the field:

Wet, wet, wet. We had the wettest May on record, and so far, June is keeping up the pace.

The rain, or better put, the lack of sun, has slowed down the plants’ growth. For example, we have full sized tomatoes sitting on the vine in our greenhouse. But tomatoes need sun to ripen, and for the past week these tomatoes have just sat there, green and pretty, but still green. We need some sun!!! So while we have a nice basket for you this week, it is not as overflowing as we had hoped. Believe me, once the sun comes out and the crops take off, we will make it up to you.

The rain also has put us behind on our field work. June is when we are busy finishing annual plantings, and getting ready to tackle the first brace of weeds. Our big annual plantings include potatoes, onions, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, leeks, cucumbers, melons, corn, summer and winter squash. They’re all in the ground, but a little behind schedule. We need warm, sunny, dry weather to help those things grow.

But we haven’t been as bad off as some. Veggie farms in Burlington’s Intervale lost their whole season because they were two feet underwater. We haven’t had any standing water at all, so that’s something.

And we suspect that we will be compensated for a slow spring by a hot summer, or a long fall. Just like how last year started cold, but then took off. Everything always seems to balance out in the end.

In the Basket:

Mesclun - Our mesclun is a mixture of several different lettuce varieties, cut at a baby size, and several different types of brassicas, such as mustard, tatsoi, and arugula.

Arugula - Hold on to your taste buds! Make a fancy sandwich, toss with warm pasta, add to salad.

Salad Turnips - When you grab a bunch of these, your first thought may be, “What the . . .?” These are an Asian variety of turnip grown specifically for raw eating, like a radish. We like them sliced up in salad or eaten in chunks dipped in dressing. The greens are good – and good for you – gently cooked.

Beets!! - Baby beets for roasting, boiling, or even slicing razor thin with a peeler to put in your salad. Don’t forget to eat the greens (cooked) too!

Kale - A cooking green chock full of vitamin A and more. Kale is one of my favorite vegetables, but you do need to cook it for at least 5 minutes to make it tender. Check out Nichole’s recipe!!

Cucumber - An early treat from the greenhouse!

Bok Choy - A mild and tender Asian green for stir fry or steaming. We like to stir fry the bok choy in a small amount of peanut oil and then season it with soy sauce and toasted sesame oil.

Large basket CSAers received the above plus two pints of sun gold tomatoes and a bundle of herbs.