I’ve often been told that July and August don’t test your gardening skills, they test your patience. July and August always seem to be the time of year when pests come out in full force. Both those we know, and those we’ve never seen before. It’s also the time of year where diseases start popping up.

The excitement and anticipation of watching the first seeds germinate back in March, or getting to put the first plants in the ground back in April, have faded. We’ve watched millions of seeds germinate, and planted thousands of plants. At this point, those things are old news. We still have lots of crops that we are impatiently awaiting to harvest. However, we seem to be spending more time lugging around irrigation, and watching plants in hopes that they can pull through from whatever disease or pest is currently trying to wipe them out.

Our biggest stressors this year have been our potatoes and our greenhouse cucumbers. The potato bugs are out in full force this year! Those things seem to be multiplying by the second. Normally, our crew would crawl along inspecting each plant for bugs and larvae. This year, we simply don’t have the time or the man power to devote the required attention to get rid of the bugs. So we do what farmers do best, and we improvise. We’ve hooked up some snow sleds to a tractor, and use brooms to knock off as many potato bugs as we can. It’s not quite as thorough as doing it by hand, but it takes significantly less time and people. We’re just hoping the little potatoes can pull through.

I’ve started trying not to make eye contact with the cucumbers. It seems every time I look at them, a new one has perished, gotten a mystery disease (that it’s about to spread to all its friends), or attracted a swarm of pests. I often think to myself, “would anyone really care if I just ripped these all out?”. Then I think back to the night before when I ate two for dinner and had another one for lunch…so yeah, I guess we better keep them. They make me want to rip my hair out, but they’re so darn tasty.

As gardeners and farmers, we spend lots of our time doing research about the best seeds, the best tools, the best fertilizers, and the best harvesting methods. We gather all the skills and resources that we possibly can. In these cases, yes those skill can come in handy, but it’s mostly about having the patience to not give up. When we’ve tried 3,4,or 5 different methods for getting rid of the potato bugs, and none of them work. It would be really easy to throw in the towel and let nature take its course. That’s not what we do. We put on our patience pants, and try something new. We look up new resources, we reach out to friends, we give the bugs a stern talking to, but we never give up and throw in the towel. Farming isn’t always easy, but boy is it worth it. I mean just look at these vegetables showing off. Have you ever seen anything more beautiful?!

In your box this week:

Lettuce – Zucchini – Tomatoes – Dill – Parsley – Cucumbers – Greens Mix – Carrots – Snap Peas

This Garlic Butter Zucchini and Tomato Pasta is Summer on a plate. It’s fresh veggies and herbs, topped with butter and cheese. This dish is really versatile. You can add any other veggies you want like corn, kale, or cauliflower. It’s also great with a protein like steak, chicken, or some butter beans.

I know most of us eat the snap peas straight out of the bag, but if you’re not a fan of raw peas, try these Snap Peas with Lemon and Dill. They’re an easy side dish, you can serve them with some bread and spreadable cheese for a quick appetizer, or my personal favorite is to mix them with pasta. I like to chop the pods into thirds, make this recipe, then mix it in with pasta, a splash of heavy cream, and some cheese. It’s delicious and easy to turn into a bunch of new recipes.

We have officially reached the point in the season I like to call “hurry up and wait”. In the Spring, we are rushing to get everything seeded and planted right on schedule. Then we’re rushing to get the crops in the field as soon as the snow is gone. Then we’re rushing to get the plants weeded before they get too big. Now…we wait.

The tomato plants are filled with tomatoes…but they’re all green, so we have to keep waiting.

The Zucchini has lots of fruit on it…but it’s not being pollinated, so we have to keep waiting.

The melon plants finally have fruit on them…but they’re itty bitty baby melons, so we have to keep waiting.

The pepper plants are getting really big…but the peppers are still too small, so we have to keep waiting.

The garlic has put on its scapes…but the leaves need to die back before the bulbs can be harvested, so we have to keep waiting.

We fill our waiting time by weeding, pruning, trellising, watering, and giving the plants an encouraging talking-to. We know that soon, the weekly boxes full of lightweight, lush greens will end. In their place will be heavy boxes, overflowing with a rainbow of produce. We just have to be patient.

Starting with this week’s box, we have an extra special surprise for all of you. New this year, we are sending eggplant! We don’t have enough space in the greenhouse to grow the number of plants required to send eggplant to everyone at the same time. We have a carefully planned out list to ensure that every site will recieve eggplant by the end of the season. If you don’t get eggplant this week, don’t worry. You’ll get it eventually, just in a different box.

In everyone’s share this week:

Basil – Broccoli – Cauliflower – Carrots – Green Cabbage – Cucumbers – Garlic Scapes – Green Onions – Snap Peas

This Asian Cabbage Slaw with Basil is a rainbow on the plate. It’s crunchy, spicy, light, bright, and so delicious. I love adding some salmon or peanut tofu to make this a full meal. It’s also delicous on top of pork tacos or a chicken sandwich. The recipe calls for green and red cabbage. The red cabbage is there to add more color to the plate. Substituting the red cabbage for green, so you can use your entire head of green cabbage, won’t change the flavor at all.

This recipe for Triple Pea Salad with Whipped Goat Cheese is a great appetizer or light lunch. This is bright and summery from the lemon and mint. It’s creamy and tangy from the goat cheese. Top it all off with three different types of peas. What a fun way to taste the difference in peas, side by side.

This Eggplant Caponata is bursting with flavor. It has a toasty, eathy flavor from the pine nuts. The olives add a briny, salty flavor. The herbs brighten everything to break through the richness. This is traditionally served as an appetizer with crusty bread. It would also be great on a sandwich, or mixed with pasta.

Holy heat wave! We hope all of you are staying cool and hydrated this week. Most of our crew aren’t big fans of the heat, but we appreciate them sticking it out and working hard through all types of weather. Thankfully the staff freezer is stocked with popsicles and ice cream to help cool down after a hot day.

Around here, we like to joke that in this kind of weather you can watch the vegetables grow right in front of your eyes. You’ll look at a plant one day, and by the next it seems to have doubled in size. However, not all plants like the heat as much as others. Cool weather crops such as radishes, peas, spinach, and most brassicas like when the day time temps stay at 75 or lower. Once the daytime temp consistently stays above 75, the veggies start to change. Radishes become extra spicy, brassicas and spinach bolt, and peas can become tough and bitter. Thankfully we live in a place where the night time temps still get cool enough to balance out the hot day time temps, so this doesn’t happen as often.

Even some of our warm weather crops like squash, peppers, and tomatoes can be bothered by the heat. If the day time temps are consistantly above 90, the plants start to protest. Tomatoes will pause putting on new fruit, and ripening exhisting fruit. Peppers tend to drop their flowers before they have a chance to be pollinated, leading to less fruit per plant. Cucurbit (squash, melons, and cucumber) plants tend to create a higher ratio of male flowers. The female flowers are the ones that produce the fruit. The male flowers are only there for pollination. It might look like the plants are happy because they have lots of flowers on them, but chances are, they’re mostly male which is why new fruit isn’t being produced.

Fun fact: Did you know tomato flowers only have a 50 hour window of when they can be pollinated. If the flower isn’t pollinated within that timeframe, it won’t result in a tomato.

Since this isn’t our first rodeo, we have lots of tricks up our sleeve to help the plants when it gets hot out. Remember a few weeks ago when I talked about us mulching some of our vegetables? That mulch will be very helpful this week in ensuring the plants retain moisture so the soil drys out slower. We also shift our watering schedule. We’ll also water the plants in the early morning, or later at night when the air temp is a little cooler. When it’s super hot out like this, we tend to shift our harvesting time from the afternoon to early morning. This is very beneficial in helping our crew stay cool in the greenhouses before the hottest part of the day. It benefits the plants by reducing some of its energy demands. With less fruit, the plant can sit back and relax a little which puts less stress on them.

In your box this week:

Broccoli – Cauliflower – Lettuce – Lettuce Mix – Greens Mix – Carrots – Cucumber – Garlic Scapes

It’s strawberry season! Use up some of your greens from this week, and pair them with some locally picked strawberries for this Chipotle Chicken Salad. This salad has smokey chicken, crispy bacon, juicy sweet corn, and a bright cilantro dressing. It’s perfect for a hot summer day. If you aren’t a fan of chicken, this would also be great with steak, shrimp, or tofu.

If you want salads this week, but are looking for something new, try grilling your lettuce. The head lettuce in this week’s box is perfect for grilling. Grilling the lettuce helps to carmelize the natural sugars which tones down any bitterness in the lettuce. It also creates a wonderful smokey, savory flavor. Grilled lettuce can be used in almost any salad. A great starter recipe is this Grilled Romaine Salad.

Oh boy it was a busy week on the farm! Last week’s main focus was getting our tomatoes trellised and our caterpillar tunnel moved. 

For those who don’t know, a caterpillar tunnel is a greenhouse that’s intended to be moved each year. It’s comprised of metal hoops that sit on pieces of rebar that have been hammered into the ground. Plastic gets draped over the hoops, and is secured with string. It sounds simple, but it’s a task that requires lots of hands, precise measurements, and little to no wind. Despite it being the warmest weather we’ve had this season, our amazing crew got it all moved and reassembled in two days. 

We choose to grow some varieties of our canning tomatoes (those more susceptible to disease) in the caterpillar tunnel because it not only extends our growing season, but it also protects the plants from disease and harsh weather.

When we weren’t working on the caterpillar tunnel, we were pounding in posts to start trellising tomatoes. We trellis our outdoor tomatoes using the Florida Weave method. 

This involves twine being looped around posts, and pulled tight against the plants. The twine works to not only stabilize the plants, but also lifts the leaves and fruit off the ground. We prefer this method over standard cages because it takes up less space, costs less, and is faster to maintain throughout the season. 

Thanks to all the rain we got recently, our crew will spend much of the upcoming week weeding and hoeing.

We’ve had a few people ask about hail–yes, last Monday’s storm did include quite a bit of hail here at the farm! It was a fortunate time for it though, and we seem to have gotten by without a lot of damage. The crew had harvested Thursday’s Bok Choy just before the storm hit or its brittle leaves probably would have been shredded. You may notice some slight damage on the broccoli heads as well. Our main long-term concern is for the onion crop; their leaves have quite a bit of bruising on them. That can reduce their ability to size up fully and can also introduce pathways for disease to infect the plants. All in all, we’re grateful that the damage wasn’t more significant. 

In your share this week:

Garlic Scapes – Napa Cabbage – Beets – Lettuce – Cucumber – Carrots – Kale – Green Onions

This heat wave makes me want salad after salad, but sometimes I want to spice it up. This Napa and Kale Slaw is the perfect salad for this week’s box. It combines crispy napa cabbage and earthy kale, with chickpeas and breaded cauliflower. Then everything is tossed in a creamy and spicy jalapeno ranch. Adding cucumber, carrot, or green onion to this would be delicious. If you aren’t a fan of cauliflower, try swapping it for chicken, shrimp, or tofu.

If you aren’t a fan of eating beets, but like enjoying an adventurous cocktail, check out these 7 beet cocktail recipes. Some are sweet. Some are earthy. Some are spicy. All of them feature beets in a creative way!

Garlic scapes can be used just like you would regular garlic. Some of my favorite ways to use them are in scrambled eggs, on top of pizza, or in this scape and white bean dip. This dip is wonderful with fresh veggies (like those carrots and cucumber in your box), crackers, or warm bread.

It is officially Summer, and Mother Nature is bringing us the heat this week. We are excited for the plants to get some warm weather and rain. 

With the heat and rain coming, our crew was extra busy last week trying to get as much field work done as we could. The big project for the week was getting mulch on all of our onions and tomatoes.

Each year we grow two types of crops: cash crops and cover crops. Cash crops are all the vegetables that end up in your share boxes. Aka: anything that we grow intending to sell. Cover crops are things like rye grass, clover, or buckwheat. We don’t intend to make money off of these. They are planted to cover the soil to prevent erosion, smother weeds, help with both harmful and helpful pests, and to put beneficial nutrients back into the soil. 

The cover crop we use the most is cereal rye. This is a really great cover crop because it’s deep roots work to loosen compacted soil, it grows quickly which helps to smother weeds, it’s great for sequestering nitrogen, and it makes amazing straw. 

Each Spring/Summer, once the rye has matured but hasn’t set seed, we chop it up and use it as mulch. It’s a lengthy process that requires specific timing, but it saves a lot of time later in the season. We put down mulch between all of our onion beds, and around all of our tomatoes. This not only helps to cover bare soil so weeds don’t grow, but it also helps to retain moisture in the soil. Over the years, we’ve streamlined the process so it goes much faster. However, from chopping to spreading to completion, still takes about 2-3 days. 

Once all the onions and tomatoes are mulched, any leftover rye gets baled. These bales will be stored in the barn to be used this fall when we cover our garlic for winter, and next spring to mulch our greenhouse tomatoes. 

Now that mulching is done, we can give our outdoor tomatoes a whole lot of love. Soon the crew will begin putting up the caterpillar tunnel to cover some of our tomatoes. They’ll also start adding support strings as a way of trellising the tomatoes. 

In your box this week:

Carrots – Radishes – Lettuce – Broccoli – Green Onions – Pac Choy

If you aren’t a fan of bok choy (also called Pac Choy), or are new to the vegetable, try out this Bok Choy pesto. I made it last week and enjoyed it on shrimp tacos, on top of a tofu bowl, and as a dip with crackers. Bonus: this recipe is also great if you swap out the bok choy for spinach, so save this for later. **The recipe calls for 4 small bok choy which would be equivalent to the one regular sized bok choy in your box**

This recipe for broccoli and cheese galette requires a bit of a time commitment, but I think it’s worth it! The crust is flaky. The center is cheesy and gooey. The broccoli is still crisp and tender. It’s perfect for a rainy night curled up on the couch. If you want to try a faster version of this, you can use store bought pie crust which will considerably cut down on the time. Just note that a store bought crust is usually only 9 inches, and this recipe is assuming your crust is 14 inches.

It was another week of dodging rain, and enjoying all the sunshine mother nature offered. 

This has been a very strange Spring. The zucchini, winter squash, and melons haven’t done much growing thanks to repeated nights in the 40s. A few of our melon plants have a flower or two on them, but the plants are too small to support fruit if it gets pollinated and decides to grow. On the other hand, our cool weather crops like bok choy have gotten so warm during the day, some of them are starting to flower. You’ll see some of those in your share this week–the flower stalks are actually delicious! 

In non weather-related news, the crew worked really hard last Tuesday to get more of our storage cabbage in the ground. This year has been exciting getting to plant with our new-to-us carousel planter. It has significantly decreased planting time. However, there is a lot more stopping and adjusting as we continue to learn about and navigate the new planter. We think we’re finally figuring it out, and it will hopefully be smooth sailing for the rest of the season. 

When we weren’t planting, the crew was giving the crops some much needed love and attention. Our greenhouse tomatoes have baby fruit on them! This marks the time when we start removing bottom leaves from the plants to increase air flow and help the plants avoid disease. The Colorado potato beetle is already showing up in large numbers. Our crew spent a few hours hunting for adult beetles, and searching for their eggs. The sooner we catch the eggs, the less damage the potato plants will endure. 

This time of year marks what I call “maintenance season”. We still have a few crops to be seeded and planted, but most things are already in the field. Now our focus shifts to keeping the plants alive and happy. We will do lots of weeding, hoeing, pruning, fertilizing, and pest inspecting in the coming weeks. 

In your box this week:

Lettuce – Baby Bok Choy – Beets – Greens Mix – Broccoli – Green Onions

If you’ve been around for a while, you probably know that I love shakshuka. This Root to Leaf Beet Shakshuka is the most fun version I’ve tried so far. It’s lighter and less acidic than a traditional tomato based version. This one uses every part of the beet, which is a great way to use up the beet tops if you aren’t sure what to do with them.

This Bok Choy Salad makes a great side salad. It’s bright, light, crisp, and very refreshing. I like serving this alongside salmon, pork, or chicken. The recipe calls for 8 heads of baby bok choy. You can scale down the recipe to use the amount of bok choy provided in your box, or you can substitute some of the bok choy for greens mix. A lot of our greens mix is asian style greens, so the flavors will go really well in this salad.

Mother nature gave us some much needed rain last week. The plants, and unfortunately the weeds, are looking very happy.

The rain gave us some time to catch up on indoor activities. We potted up a variety of vegetables. To save space, we usually start up to 450 seeds in a flat tray. Once the baby plants get their seed leaves (their first set of leaves), we transfer them (aka potting up) to a tray with 72 cells. These 72 cell trays are where they will continue to grow until they are ready to be transplanted to their forever home in the field or greenhouse. 

The rain also gave us time to cut seed potatoes for planting. If you don’t know, seed potatoes are a specific potato that is grown with the sole intention of it being planted. They look identical to the potatoes we eat, but they are grown under very specific conditions. It is grown in designated fields by specific farmers. These farmers carefully watch the plants to ensure none of them get a disease. If you plant a potato from a diseased plant, you subject your entire potato crop to the disease. We cut the potatoes so each piece has two eyes which ensures a higher possibility of 100% emergence. Once the potatoes are cut, we allow them to sit for a day or two so the flesh can start to dry out and produce a protective callous. This locks in moisture, and keeps out bacteria and bad organisms, which prevent the potato pieces from rotting.

Once the sky cleared up, we spent some time in the fields getting more brassicas planted, doing some weeding, and setting up our trellis fencing for the peas.

This week we will be focusing on getting the rest of our storage cabbage planted in the field, and seeding some of your Summer favorites. The first rounds of green beans and dill will be in the ground by the end of the week!

In your box this week:

Lettuce – Turnips – Green Onions – Spinach – Rhubarb – Radishes

Turnips seem to be one of those foods people either love or hate. Most people who dislike them object to their peppery taste. If you’re one of those people, check out this recipe for Honey Glazed Turnips. Cooking the turnips will mellow out the peppery flavor a little bit. Adding the honey makes most of it go away. This recipe is also great with radishes.

We are sending some big heads of romaine this week. These Asian Lettuce Wraps are a great way to use up some of the romaine, aside from making another salad. This recipe is a summer staple in my house. It’s easy to make, and easy to customize. You can swap out the protein, add more veggies, and top them with an variety of items. Your green onions are a must with this recipe. Also try topping with any leftover radishes from last week, peanuts, or kimchi.

I love a French 75! This one with fresh rhubarb syrup is on repeat every spring. It combines a homemade rhubarb syrup with all the classic components of a French 75. It’s light, bright, and not too sweet. Perfect for a sunny day on the deck. If you prefer non alcoholic drinks, you can mix this syrup with sparkling water and a little lemonade. I like to garnish the non alcoholic version with an orange peel, to add another depth of flavor.

Happy Summer CSA season! Welcome to all of our new members, and welcome back to all of our returning members. We are so grateful that you’ve chosen to spend the next 18 weeks enjoying all of the delicious veggies our crew works hard to grow. 

A lot has been happening around the farm since our last newsletter a few weeks ago. Our crew has been planting, seeding, and weeding like crazy. Our summer squash, winter squash, outside cucumbers, melons, peppers, outside tomatoes, leeks and another round of brassicas were all transplanted to their new homes in the field. Most of those get planted by two people riding on our transplanter that is driven by one of the tractors. It’s a beautiful blend of human power and machinery. However, the peppers and tomatoes (all 1,500 plants), are each put in the ground by hand. It takes a full 8 hour work day to get all of these in the ground. Thankfully they’re really tasty which makes all the labor more worth it.

We made it through our biggest brassica seeding of the year. This seeding includes all of the cabbage that we will store throughout the winter. That’s almost 10,000 cabbage plants that were seeded in two days. Thankfully we have some vacuum seeders that help speed up this process so we aren’t putting seeds into a tray one at a time. This cabbage will be sent to our winter CSA members, Spirit Creek farm kraut, and local wholesale customers.

When the crew isn’t planting or seeding, they can usually be found in the field weeding. We try our best to stay well ahead of the weeding. This time of year is challenging because we have so many things to do and not enough time in the day. Weeding is most important when the plants are small. The baby veggies are working so hard to grow, we don’t want them competing with weeds for nutrients and sunlight. 

This week, the crew will be adding trellis to our peas, mulching our greenhouse tomatoes, transplanting more brassicas, and getting our next round of potatoes ready to go in the field.

In your box this week:

Green Onions – Spinach – Kale – Greens Mix – Radishes – Rhubarb

Happy May everyone!

Summer Share season is just around the corner! We’re planning for the first box to go out in just three weeks, the week of June 8th/11th. This is a good time to remind you that your balance for Summer, Preserving, and Egg shares is due by May 31st. Also, if you’ve been a member for a while, please take note that we have changed where your check should be mailed. All payments can be mailed directly to the Food Farm at 2612 County Road 1, Wrenshall, MN 55797 (or you can log in to your account and pay online). If something has come up and you don’t think you can make your final payment by the end of May, please reach out to Catherine, Janaki, or myself as soon as possible. We are happy to work with you to set up an alternate payment plan.

We still have Winter shares available if you haven’t claimed one yet. Those payments aren’t due until the end of August. We will send out a reminder as it gets closer to the deadline.

Now onto the fun stuff! We have been busy on the farm the last few weeks getting things prepped, fertilized, seeded, planted, weeded, cleaned, inventoried, and everything in-between. It’s always amazing to me how much gets done before the first Summer box ever heads out the door.

We welcomed new baby chicks who will help produce eggs for all of our egg shares. Ellis took great care of introducing them to Zuko (the livestock guardian dog), making sure they got water after their adventure, and getting them settled into their new home. Baby chicks means Spring has officially arrived on the farm, even if mother nature hasn’t gotten the memo yet.

Last week our crew worked really hard getting lots of plants in the ground in the field and the greenhouses. Thousands of onions, thousands of potatoes, and hundreds of brassicas all went into the field last week. Hundreds of tomatoes and cucumbers were transplanted into the greenhouse as well. Our crew members are feeling it in their muscles that haven’t been used for a while. This week we planted the first round of lettuce in the greenhouse, and the second round of brassicas went into the field. The second round of brassicas was extra fun because we got to test out our new transplanter. Thanks to a grant we received, we were able to purchase a new to us carousel planter. This new planter does a lot of the work for us, so our crew can plant faster and more efficiently. We still have a few kinks to work out, but we are really excited to see all this new transplanter can do for us.

With the new season starting soon, we are welcoming a few new faces to our farm crew. This week we have Emily and Nolan joining us for the full growing season. We are very excited to meet them, and have a few extra hands as we get the growing season into full swing. We are also having two interns, Sydney and Tabitha, from UMD join us for the Summer months until school starts again. Sydney and Tabitha will each be with us 2 days a week. Part of their internship is working with the Duluth Center for Women and Children to salvage and glean extra produce. Those veggies are used to put together meal boxes that are sent to families in the area who need a little help putting food on the table. We are so excited to welcome all of these wonderful people to our crew!

If you want to get a front row seat to the action, we love having volunteers join us on CSA harvest days, any Monday or Thursday, from June – October, from 9am-1pm. Volunteers get to meet the crew, see where the farm, and harvest and box veggies that end up on your table. Grab your gloves and a sun hat to come join in the fun! If you want to know what’s happening but prefer to stay inside, we post weekly newsletters on the website that detail what the farm crew has been up to, and any events on the farm (these usually include less physical labor than CSA days).

We are so grateful for all of your support! We wouldn’t be able to do this without all of you. We’ll be back in 24 days to kick off the Summer season.

Happy Spring! I both can’t believe it’s already April, and that it’s only April. Winter hung around for a long time this year, but I can’t believe this means our Winter CSA is officially over. Both the baby plants and our crew members are grateful to get some warmer weather and sunshine.

Before I update you all with what’s been going on, I want to let you know that we have fewer than 10 Summer Shares left. If you or anyone you know has been thinking about signing up for a share, I would recommend doing it soon before they sell out. We still have plenty of Winter shares and preserving shares, so make sure you sign up for those too if you haven’t already.

Now back to what you all came here for, farm updates. Our potting shed has been filling up with onions, leeks, shallots, the first planting of brassicas (broccoli, cabbage, and kale), greenhouse tomatoes, and peppers. This time of year, the germination chambers are rarely empty, and the stacks of seed starting trays diminish quickly. 

Catherine has been busy getting our greenhouses ready for the season. Last fall she planted rye in all the tunnels to help the soil replenish nutrients and to support the all-important soil life that keeps our crops healthy. Once it gets to be 4-6 inches tall, we place black tarps over the top of it for about 3 weeks, to help kill it with a minimum of tillage. After the three weeks are up, we use various tools to prep the soil for planting. Our first round of greenhouse carrots, beets, and green onions were all seeded last week. Our greenhouse tomatoes are set to be planted by the end of the month. Broccoli, onions, and shallots are scheduled to be planted, OUTSIDE by the end of the month. Fingers crossed mother nature cooperates with our planting schedule. 

In the pack shed, Teri and I have been bagging and boxing vegetables for our wholesale customers. The coolers have quickly started to empty out as we finish off pallet boxes of veggies. Once our inventory gets low enough, we start closing down coolers so the spring cleaning can begin. Last week we closed down the first of our three coolers. It won’t be much longer before the second cooler is empty and ready for cleaning. Spring cleaning on the farm means deep cleaning and sanitizing everything in the pack shed after it’s been closed up all Winter. It also means taking inventory of our CSA supplies, farm tools, and seed starting equipment. April is our final chance to make sure all of our T’s are crossed, and our I’s are dotted. Once May arrives, we are in full growing mode until the middle of November. 

Things on the farm have obviously been very busy, so we are incredibly grateful for our wonderful volunteers who showed up to lend a helping hand throughout the winter. We know getting out of bed to put on far too many layers (then add one or two more), drive through questionable road conditions, and stand around in a chilly pack shed for multiple hours, isn’t everyone’s idea of a good time. Somehow, we keep finding amazing people who decide getting local veggies into your homes makes it all worth it. Thank you to all of our volunteers who showed up, packed veggies, coordinated pick up, and supplied us with smiles and laughs. We could not have made it through another CSA season without all of you! 

We have lots of cleaning, seeding, planting, weeding, prepping, and dog petting to do in the next 2 months. We can’t wait to see many of you again soon when our Summer season starts in June. Thank you for making this another amazing season! We couldn’t keep doing this without all of your support and encouragement. See you soon!

In your share this month:

Rutabaga – Russet, Yellow, and Baby Red Potatoes – Onions – Shallot – Garlic – Orange and Purple Carrots – Parsnips – Chioggia and Red Beets – Greens Mix

If you’re looking for a way to use up a small amount of a lot of veggies, check out these root vegetable fritters. They’re packed with veggies, cheese, and so much flavor. You can play around with using different colors of potatoes and carrots to change not only the color of the fritter, but also the texture and flavor. I like topping these with a runny egg for a delicious breakfast. They’d also be great as an appetizer, after school snack, or a side dish.

Spring time always gets me in the mood for potato salad. It’s the perfect combination of cozy, comfort food, and bright flavors. If you’re feeling uninspired by your usual potato salad, or you want to try something new, here’s a recipe for Alsatian Potato Salad. It uses white wine, chicken stock, vinegar, and Dijon to make a creamy dressing. If you aren’t a fan of mayo based things, this recipe is for you.