Week 2 Delivery; June 10, 2021

What’s in the box?

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green onions
salad mix
radishes
kale
romaine lettuce
arugula
spinach (medium and large)
beets (most medium and large)
cucumber (small and a few medium that didn’t get beets)

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Notes on the box.

It’s a good week for salads again!
The Radishes are spicy because of the hot weather, but they make a great radish salsa or go nicely on some bread and butter or in a sandwich.
The lettuce is still yummy, but we are watching for bitterness that can sometimes happen when it warms up.
Beets will store best with roots removed from tops. The tops are edible as well as the roots. These young beets have tender skin that doesn’t need to be peeled.

Cosmic Wheel Creamery Cheese Shares.

Aquilla is an aged Jack style cheese. I sometimes call it our potato chip cheese because once I start snacking on it, I don’t want to stop! I like to dice it up in a salad or make a cheese sandwich or just snack on it. We have been eating snacks for dinner every night this week. Just cheese and crackers and radishes and quick sandwiches with lots of lettuce.
The feta will go great with the beets or spinach or arugula in a salad. It’s good on a pizza, too!

Recipes.

Sauteed Beets and Greens
Wash beets and dice roots or cut into thin slices. Add the red stem section of the beets and the diced beets in a pan with a tablespoon of your preferred cooking fat or oil. Sautee for a few minutes and then cover the pan. You can add some minced garlic or onion. Chop the Beet Greens corsely while roots are cooking. When roots are fork tender, add the greens and sautee until wilted. Salt to taste. Simple and good. Really lets the flavor of the beets shine.

Arugula Gimlet Recipe - maybe I’m too hot and my brain is melting, but this sounds like a good weekend treat to me

Grilled Steak Salad with Beets, Arugula, and Green Onions

On the Farm.

We are seeing a lot of the typically shoulder season crops that we plant lots of for the early boxes start to bolt in protest of the heat and dryness! But at the same time we are watching summer crops grow super quickly right before our eyes. It’s a Spring like no other as far as this weather goes. The good thing about planting many types of diverse crops is that generally we will have a nice bunch of crops that favor whatever type of weather we get. So we are seeing summer squash coming on early. Tomatoes are very happily growing as is the corn. But consensus among all crops is that some rain would be excellent!
We have been busily moving irrigation around in efforts to save tender newly transplanted babies. The extra efforts there had us running out of time to get to our friends farm to harvest the rhubarb! But if it’s still good and can stand a harvest despite the heat, we will be harvesting it for the next box.
We are doing our best out here in the high temps. We hope you all are finding ways to keep cool and stay safe!

What’s Growing on?

lettuce
radish
garlic scapes
cilantro
cucumbers
rhubarb?
summer squash?
carrots?

Week 1 Delivery; June 3, 2021

What’s in the box?

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Spinach (bagged)
Arugula (bagged)
Romaine (red or green)
Herb Pot
Pac Choi
Salad Mix
Radishes or Salad Turnips (medium and large shares)
Cilantro (medium and large shares)
Oak Leaf Lettuce (medium and large shares)

Notes on the box.

Herb pots contain a combination of parsley or sage, basil, and oregano. You can pot the herbs out into larger containers or into your garden. Or you can keep them in a sunny window and water them regularly and pinch what you’d like for fresh herbs as needed. Fresh herbs are a great addition to salad dressings and minced and added to finished food for a nice bright flavor.

Lettuces and greens will keep best in a plastic bag in your crisper in the fridge.

Radishes and Turnips will keep best if you remove the root from the green tops. The Turnip Greens are excellent for eating. Radish tops are also edible, but we like them best added to other greens. If you make an arugula pesto, adding radish tops is a great idea!

The Spinach is young and tender. Great fresh or mixed into hot pasta where it will cook from the residual heat.

Cosmic Wheel Creamery Cheese Shares.

Cheese shares are packed in a separate box from veggies. It will be at the drop site with a label that says CHEESE. The box has a liner and freezer pack to keep the cheese cool. Please take only your share (one bag of cheese) and not the entire box! There’s a list inside the box with the names of people who have ordered cheese shares. If your name isn’t on the list, please don’t take a share. Please close the box after getting your cheese. If you should have gotten cheese and there’s none there or your name is not on the list by mistake, please let us know and we will make it up to you.

Today we sent our First Snow, which is a soft ripened cheese and fresh cheese curds! If you got a First Snow with a black label, it is ripe and ready to eat NOW! I usually like to send them a little firmer than they are, but my timing wasn’t quite spot on for the first delivery…. anyway, they are very tasty now! But, I wouldn’t wait long to eat it or it may become over ripe. The First Snow with blue labels can keep in your fridge and will continue to ripen, or you can enjoy them now but they will be firmer. First Snow is a tricky cheese for me, but when I get it right it’s so good! So I keep practicing and hoping to get a more consistent cheese.
The curds are great for snacking on.

Recipes.

Salad Dressings!

Cilantro Radish Salsa

Garlic Bok Choy with Chili Paste

Simple Arugula Salad

Arugula Pesto

Braised Salad Turnips

On the farm.

Happy first delivery day! We hope you are excited about having salads with every meal this week! A reminder that when you pickup, you should take the box with your name on the label. If you don’t have a box with your name on the label and you didn’t schedule a hold, please contact us and we will make it right! We make mistakes sometimes, but we will always correct them. Sometimes there’s a mixup at the dropsite, we do our best to correct those as well! If anything comes up (like your share is missing an add-on that you ordered) please let us know! Today is a warm day, so pick-up as soon as you can for best the best quality of your veggies.

This Spring has seen some pretty drastic temperature swings, but most everything is looking good in the fields. We are irrigating frequently and taking off and putting on row cover to keep tender plant babies warm or cool as needed. It seems like we haven’t had much between very very hot or very cool weather. We went swimming one day and a few days later had a fire going in the woodstove again! The hoophouses really came through for the first delivery. We are in the super busy portion of the season where we are still seeding, transplanting, weeding, and now harvesting and packing. The cows are at the peak of their lactation, so lots of cheese is being made. The days are so long that we can practically look out at the fields and see the plants grow (as long as it’s warm enough!). We are grateful to all of you for signing up and supporting our farm and local and sustainable foods!

We have the first farm event of the season on the calendar! It’s the EAT LOCAL FARM TOUR on July 10 from 10-4. More info will be coming soon, but we wanted to let you know right away so you can mark it down.

What’s Growing On?


2021 CSA season beginning next week!

The 2021 CSA season will be beginning for our members next week on Thursday June 3, 2021. On the farm, the 2021 season began in December of 2020 when we put in our seed orders and started the process of changing over to a new member management software. We appreciate your patience with the hiccups as we learn and put the new software into action! The tech side of CSA farming is a challenge for us. We are excited to be using CSAware, though. We like the online add-on store and the ability of our members to put holds on your CSA deliveries. If you are a member who is having any trouble with your account, setting hold dates, or anything else, let us know. It might take us a little while to figure out, but we will do our best to help!

Other than the office and electronic side of farming, our season began with our first calf being born on March 12. The theme this season for naming heifers is fast food menu items. So we have a calf named Butter Burger and one named Blizzard. We have 12 calves total this season, which means we are milking 12 cows. The pasture is lush and they are all doing well. Cheese making is going in full swing!

The other part of the beginning of the season besides starting seeds in the propagation house is welcoming the 2021 farming crew. We have a whole new crew this season. Magdalen, Isaac, Anabell, and Ann are all living and working on the farm. They started with a grand challenge of putting up a new high tunnel that used to belong to our friends at Steady Hand Farm. The crew was very much up to the challenge and did a really fabulous job! It looks great, as do all the plants growing inside. Everyone has also been planting seeds, transplanting, weeding, moving irrigation around, harvesting early greens, learning animal chores, and being wonderfully flexible as weather and circumstances throw all sorts of lessons in adaptability and perseverance our way.

It’s been such a cool spring! But things are looking beautiful in the hoop houses, so they will carry our first delivery. Hopefully we get some warmer weather soon so that everything planted outside will hurry up and grow! And we really are hopeful that the plants survive these suddenly very cold nights… Big big big hopes that we don’t have to re-plant all of the winter squash, corn, peppers, tomatoes, and other warm weather loving crops. Everything that we could cover is covered, but wow, this is so late to have temps in the low 30s…. So it’s a little touch and go for the first boxes with the wild temperatures we’ve had. Things in the field that we expected to be ready like radishes are on pause with the cool weather. But things in the greenhouse are ready to go! Here’s our projections for the first box:
herb pot
spinach
romaine lettuce
arugula
salad mix
bok choy
salad turnips?
rhubarb?

Cheese shares will have a square of camembert (First Snow)!

If you aren’t a fan of salads and greens, remember that you have 6 holds to schedule if you are a 16 week member and 2 holds to schedule if you are a 20 week member. You can log into your account to schedule a hold. Holds can be placed until Tuesday morning. Let us know if you need help!

I’ve also added coffee to the store! This item as well as mushrooms (when they are available) can be added on a week to week basis. Not as a subscription, but as needed. Let us know if you have any questions about that!

Thanks to the farm crew for all the photos. We are looking forward to the first delivery! Think warm thoughts and we will see you next week!