As stated earlier in the first newsletter, this week started out very hectic and we did not have  the time to get to the newsletter until now, Wed morning before the market. 

  We got a good rain, which the plants all needed but set us back on the harvest Monday. The kids are done with school, so there's been all that running around, and we were readying some guest accommodations for an organic  farmer from Florida who will be staying with us for a couple weeks  to do some work, and hopefully learn from one another. So it started out a busier week than usual. We will be back on track next Monday evening with the newsletters. 

  This was a week of many greens, and I'm sure many of you might be wondering what some of them are. 

This week's shares are as follows:

Small: mustard greens, kale, lettuce, garlic scapes, chives

Regular: mustard greens, kale, swiss chard, lettuce, arugula, dandelion greens, braising  mix, lettuce, garlic scapes and mixed Italian herbs.

It's looking like we will have summer squash for everyone by next week, more radishes and broccoli as well.

I will post some recipe ideas later today after the market, so in the meantime I hope everyone can find some recipes they like.  We will also be adding a few items for special order on the website in the next couple days. We will be sending out an email to members explaining how to utilize the online store shortly once  we've gotten it updated.

      Summer is officially here and came in with a hot sunny day perfect for cultivating and sidedressing plants with fertilizer and ended with a lovely summer storm to water it all in. 

    While we still don't see buds on the peas (which were replanted later than usual due to poor germination in the early spring) the cucumbers and summer squash are blooming like crazy. Growing vegetables all these years you sort of get used to patterns and this season is breaking lots of pre-established rules. Summer squash before peas? But we learn to go with the flow and take whatever mother nature throws at us; the good and the bad.

   I addition to our close relationship with the weather, we also like to build and maintain close relationships with our local businesses. So, that being said, we are happy to announce that we will be working with Backdrop Organics  to offer their products to our CSA members.  We will be getting their products on our online store soon for members to order to be added to their shares, but in the meantime you can also order directly through them. They will need your order by Thursdays to be delivered in your following week's shares. Their commitment to tasty organic food shows in their products. So take a moment to check out their offerings of fair trade organic coffee, non gmo popcorn and their divine hot cocoa mix.  (Their Jamaica Me Crazy coffee is to die for and gets us up an running on early mornings here on the farm) While we are working on offering some more products (such as organic teas, maple syrup and honey) to be added to shares from some of our friends' small food businesses, this is the first official agreement and we are excited to be working with Katie and Andrew and to share their awesome products with you!

   This week's share contents: 

Small Shares: lettuce, garlic scapes, radishes, kale, parsley, (and strawberries we'll start rotating through by drop site, as  we won't have enough this week for everyone.)

Regular Shares: lettuce, garlic scapes, asparagus, kale, radishes, swiss chard, parsley and mizuna for Tuesday pickup and mustard greens for the remainder of the week's members.


While we were a bit disappointed with the yield of the strawberries this first season picking them, we hope regular share members  enjoyed them last week. It seems they came on, and peaked all in one week. We had planned on offering u-pick to members but that wouldn't be worth your's or our time. If you're looking for someplace to pick organic berries for freezing or making jam, we recommend Greyrock Farm, who if offering upick during their farm store hours. 

The first 4 weeks of the CSA it has been a lot of greens and we hope everyone has learned to love them. A lot of people ask us at the markets why we don't have tomatoes and cucumbers, or zucchini or beans yet. The answer is quite simply; they are not in season. But rest assured they will be before you know it. Being a CSA member keeps you in the loop of the seasonality of the crops grown here in NY, not shipped in from out of state or out of the country. Before the days of global food trade and hybrids bred to ship and have a longer shelf life (albeit loosing much in flavor) this is how everyone ate. While the tomatoes are starting to set fruit, we patiently wait for them to ripen. The carrots are burrowing their long tap roots deeper and deeper for moisture in their beds. Bees buzz the cucumber flowers, pollinating. Pepper flowers open with their white blossoms. We watch it all grow and develop, watch for pests and deficiencies. And soon there will be more than greens in shares. 

But in the meantime, here are some links for some great recipes to get more out your greens, both old favorites and new to you tastes. Mizuna, Mustard Greens, Garlic Scapes Kale, Parsley


​We hope everyone enjoys week four of their Summer share.


    

    From too much rain last week to weather like an Indian Summer this week. At least the forecast is calling for some warmer temps for our warm weather loving crops. While we've started picking strawberries from the field, the cooler temps and cloudy skies seem to have impeded their ripening. We will start rotating strawberries into shares this week starting with regular shares. If you don't see them this week, you will over the next few weeks. This is our first season harvesting the strawberries, so it's a new crop for us.
  
   Farming is always a gamble. You can do everything right and still loose to bugs and weather. That is one of the reasons we chose a CSA as our marketing model, and grow such a wide variety of crops. It sort of acts as crop insurance, so if one crop fails there are more to take take it's place. A few crops we had to replant already this season due to the weather and pests, but others you don't get a second chance until next year.  

   All of our winter squash is finally in the ground, with varieties such as butternut, delicata, acorn, spaghetti, red kuri hubbards, and pie pumpkins to look forward to  in the fall. Our summer squash is started to form buds, so they should become available soon as well. The first planting of broccoli is growing beautifully, but still not forming heads, but we'll keep looking! Tomatoes and sweet peppers are budding as well, and the cucumbers are climbing their trellises in the greenhouse. We also planted melons (sugar baby watermelon and cantaloupe) in our small greenhouse. They love the warmer temps and we haven't had success with them here in the past, but are counting that giving them a more hospitable growing environment will result in an abundant harvest. 

   One might think that with all the plants in the ground, that all that's left is to sit back and watch them grow. This is not the case at all. There are daily field walks, seeing what's ready to harvest, looking for bugs and signs of disease and nutrient deficiencies. There is also weeding and trellising, and all the harvests. (we harvest 3 times every week, between Tuesday's CSA and Thursdays and Saturday's markets.) We have simplified some of the weeding chores with specialized tractor equipment, but there is still hand hoeing and good old on hands an knees weed pulling. 

While there hasn't been a huge variety of harvest for CSA yet these first few weeks, with some crops set back from the wonky weather, and not ready to harvest, and some having to be reseeded, there is plenty to look forward to, and some great greens in shares this week. And some crops are only available in the early weeks, so enjoy them while they're here!

This week's share contents:

Small Shares: Asparagus, garlic  scapes, lettuce, swiss chard, radishes (french breakfast or cherry belle) 

Regular Shares: all the contents of the small shares and braising mix (a mix of brassicas including mustards greens, tat soi, red bok choi, and chinese cabbage) (please be advised that this may change to mustard greens for Thurs and Sat shares)  and Green kale. Strawberries will start rotating into regular shares this week. So if you don't get them this week, you can look forward to them in the coming weeks. 

Garlic scapes. Some of you may be excited, as this is a once a season crop, some may be wondering what the heck they are. They are the flower buds that form on the hard neck garlics that need to be pinched off to create big dense bulbs of garlic. They can be used in place of garlic in any recipe; we used some last night in our mashed potatoes. They have a bit more of a milder flavor than garlic cloves and can be roasted whole with your asparagus. Here are some more ideas of how to use your scapes. Garlic is one of our favorite crops. Planted in late fall, it provides from early spring in the form of garlic greens, then later as scapes, and then later as green garlic and then stores well into the winter.  I use garlic in almost every meal I cook, as it adds flavor and it's health benefits.  In one recent study raw garlic was even found to kill cancer cells in petri dishes overwhelmingly better than any other vegetable. Garlic respells bugs, an oil infusion can help settle ear aches and other other ailments. 

We hope everyone has been enjoying their shares so far and are looking forward to filling their fridge with this week's. A reminder that we love when folks share recipes. Please feel free to share recipes you try and love in the blog comment section here or on our facebook page. The recipes we share are just a few of many possibilities, and we're certain that you'll find more. Sharing will help other CSA members make the most out of their CSA. 
​

     The fields finally got some much needed rain this week, which made plants happy and our boots grow with a few inches of mud.  So here's hoping some of our direct seeded early season greens bulk up for next week; arugula, mizuna and mustards. Of course  with the rain comes the weeds. We've taken to calling this the June Monsoons, when it seems we get all the rain all at once, (always after getting irrigation set up in grueling heat)  which makes getting out in the fields with equipment  impossible. So it will will be a lot of hand weeding until things dry out some and we can use tractor cultivation and hoes. While it has been a bit more rain than needed, we are happy to report that the time spent in the spring digging drainage trenches and utilizing our bed shaper to raise beds off the ground level has paid paid off, as normal washout spots are not washing out and we don't expect to lose crops to excessive rains like we did last year. 
   We got a chance to try out our new Jang seeder and planted more radishes, carrots, and cilantro. We really like this new investment, as it allows us to plant one bed all at once rather than pushing our seedway seeder up and down our long beds 2-3 times. We'll see how well it really works when the seeds start to germinate. This is a precision planter that not only saves us time and labor, but also seeds; dropping seeds at perfect spacing and only one at a time, it will also save us seed and time thinning. It can be pulled by the tractor or pushed by a person. For a small scale farm with minimal workers, this will be one more step towards efficiency on the farm.

This week's Shares are as follows:

Small Shares: lettuce, swiss chard, asparagus, garlic greens and red russian kale

Regular shares: all the contents of the small shares plus mint and spinach

While we were hoping to get radishes and a bit more variety in your shares this week,  some stuff just needed a bit more time to grow after the dry month of May. We have spotted some strawberries ripening in the field as well. So we are anticipating within the next week or two you'll starts seeing those in shares as well, and we'll give CSA members the first notice when and if we open up the patch for u-pick.

We've also found that the garlic scapes are starting to form. While you may be  thinking "what's with the garlic greens and scapes? I just want cloves of garlic" this is the seasonality of things. Garlic greens and scapes can be used in place of garlic in any recipe and keeps the garlic coming throughout the season. Garlic is staple in most kitchens and recipes and is one the most cleansing vegetables known to mankind. The greens and scapes are a seasonal treat while the cloves hold us over from late summer into the winter months. 

Despite the rains this week we were able to get so many more transplants in the ground. Our greenhouse is full of cucumbers, the high tunnel full of tomatoes and we'll be working on the melons  in the smaller greenhouse later this week.  Two plantings of pickling cucumbers, summer squash, our hot peppers, paste tomatoes, and rutabaga have all settled their roots in for the long haul this past week, along with lots and lots of potatoes. 

While we mostly saute our greens in our house and serve over pasta, we know some of you are looking for more creative ways to use your greens. Here's a link to a recipe for stuffed kale leaves, which you could very well substitute with the swiss chard as it is much bigger and probably easier to wrap. 

Many folks have stopped doing CSA's over the years because they've said it is simply too much food. While this is the reason we've created the small share option there are many great ways to use up your produce before the next week's harvest. While the early season shares tend to be a little less dense than the later season will be, the greens only have about a one week shelf life in the fridge. So here are some tips from a die-hard on how to make the most of your CSA share. While the article is aimed at late season crops, we hope you'll find it useful throughout the season as it offers creative uses of various vegetables. 

We hope all went smoothly with picking up shares last week and everyone enjoyed their share of the harvest.