EverGreen Farm

CSA Newsletter, Week #15

In your share this week:

• basil
• dill
• kale
• Swiss chard
• yellow Walla Walla onions
• red onion
• leeks
• cucumbers
• zucchini
• summer squash
• broccoli*
• 1 lb. "Music" garlic**

*The broccoli is starting to make it's way into the shares.  For this week, there were only enough for Smoot and Alpine.  We will get them to all CSA members as more are ready to harvest.  We received so many positive comments on the broccoli last year that we wanted to grow another plentiful crop this season.  Unfortunately, the young broccoli transplants were a favorite of the grasshoppers.  Good thing Shain planted more than necessary and we were able to plant again.  But the grasshoppers got a lot of those too.  Sadly, we'll only have about half the broccoli as we originally intended. 

We've had some set backs on the farm since last week's CSA deliveries.  First was the storm that came through on Wednesday afternoon as I was gone delivering produce.  I knew something had happened as soon as I drove into our driveway.  The sun was shinning, but there were very large puddles everywhere - a sign of significant rain fall.  Coming into the house, Shain told me the farm had been hit be a severe hail storm.  From experience, we both knew there was little hope of any outside crops surviving - especially the newest rows of salad greens.  The next morning I took a walk around the farm to confirm our suspicions. 

Shredded salad greens.

Then it went on to rain, and rain hard, for nearly a week.  There just isn’t much we can do with weather like that.  The shell peas are the only outside crop I still have hope for (besides the potatoes).  They are lying on the ground and some of the pea pods show exterior damage, but I’m hoping with some sunshine they will still fill out to harvest.

Because of the storms, we switched our Friday weeding crew to cleaning up our first batch of garlic.  It was such a nice surprise to have 8 helpers come and get all of it done in one morning!  It rained all day, but we were careful to box the garlic in ventilated boxes and cover them to bring into our home where it is (supposed to be) nice and dry.  This is where our next problem of the week developed.  Two days after bringing in all our beautifully cleaned "Music" garlic to store on a rack in our home, Shain pulled out a box and discovered it had started to mold!  We dropped everything and quickly cleared away our living room rug and furniture to make room for laying out all the garlic in hopes to save it by spreading it out in the sun to kill the mold and dry out the ruined layers.  We've had some garlic mold before, but never to this extent.  We are confident that this situation can be remedied with some time and more work cleaning it up after it is completely dry.  Another lesson learned for a strange wet weather pattern this time of year.

**We sorted through all of the problem garlic and were able to pull out just enough good bulbs to give each member a 1 pound bag.  Please store it in a dry, well ventilated area.  If you see a dark spot on the outer skins, peel it off (could be mold) and use in the next month or so.  Fortunately, the edible part of garlic is under multiple layers of skins so any mold on the outer layers will not be harmful.  We are very sorry for this inconvenience.  (We know how much everyone loves garlic so we will do our best to make this right.)

Update:  Thankful for some extra time in the schedule today (Wednesday, delivery day) that allowed us to come inside and reorganize my kitchen so we could get all the garlic up off the floor and onto a large metal rack.  I have a front room again! 

There are many good things we are seeing around the farm.  Lot's to keep us happy and upbeat.  The basil is lovely!  The leeks are ready much earlier than ever before.  We love the yellow Walla Walla onions!  It hasn't frozen yet.  There are several weeks of great food still to harvest! 

Have a great week and ENJOY your veggies!

Tara

 

 

 

CSA Newsletter, Week #14

Leeks.

In your share this week:

• salad mix
• kale
• carrots
• basil
• leeks
• zucchini
• squash
• cucumbers
• yellow onion
• golden beets - we are leaving the tops ON the beets so you can eat them.  Soon, they won't look so good, or there won't be room in the share bags to keep the tops, so enjoy them while you can.  Remember to remove the tops from the beets soon.

Quotes from last week that remind us why our work is important!    Kids who love kale!  Made my day!  Great example for us adults too.

From CSA member Dawn - "We are definitely not tired of the kale. That is the only green that Violet (22 months now!) knows by name, and the first thing she eats from her dinner. If she feels that she wasn't given enough kale and we still have kale on our plates, then she points and cries "Kale! Kale! Kale!" until we share. It's pretty funny. We serve it to her steamed with a little nutritional yeast."

From CSA member Cora - "My 3 year old is the exact same! He helps me chop it and the chard nightly for our salad and eats it all along the way. We put it in smoothies for lunch and eggs for breakfast! More more more, we can't get enough of the Kale either! Thank you for having such a wonderful mix of greens!"

Thought I'd share a few pictures to demonstrate the efforts we and the workshares are taking to provide you nice, clean veggies each week.  Sometimes there is a lot more going than may be apparent just looking at your bag of salad mix, carrots, etc.

These three rows of salad greens are what we harvested from for this week's salad mix.  Last friday was dedicated to weeding sections of these rows so we could even hope to harvest.  Then on Monday morning, Shain and I carefully cut from the areas that were cleared for us.  In this picture above  you can see one row I was working on.  Near the bucket is a section I'd already cut from, then a few more feet of greens that I came back and finished cutting. Up ahead is the very weedy section that needs to be taken care of by our weeding crew again this coming Friday.

After Shain and I cut the 30 pounds of greens we needed this week (each bucket of cut greens weighing around 4 pounds), we start the washing process.  Each bucket goes into a sink full of water and is sorted and washed by hand, then to a second sink for another sort and wash before it goes into a large, commercial salad spinner.  The next step is to take even parts of the various greens and mix them all together to create the salad mix.  Last, the mix is bagged, weighed and sealed.  (This batch of salad greens is not only very weedy, it's also been rained on a lot, so it's very dirty.  The water from the first wash demonstrates this very well.  If the water in the second wash gets too dirty before the batch is finished, it's dumped and filled again with fresh clean water.  Rinse. Lather. Repeat.)

Carrots go through a similar process.  After the carrot tops are removed, we fill the buckets of carrots with water to start loosening the mud.  Next, they go in a sink and are sprayed with water until clean.  Then they go in a second sink of water to rinse again.  Workers then put the cleaned carrots into clean buckets and take them into our work area to be bagged.  During this entire process we are sorting out the broken, split or other "ugly" carrots not meeting our standards.  Today we only did about 5 buckets of carrots because that's all the that was in the row to harvest.  Last week we harvested eight 5-gallon buckets of carrots!

Cucumbers!  Another farm favorite for many people.  Over a week ago Shain came in the house and said he had a nice surprise for me.  I was hoping he'd say it was a ripe tomato, but not yet.  Instead, a fully developed cucumber!  (Almost as good as a tomato.)  He said the plants were loaded with small cucumbers and we have them for the CSA soon.  Imagine my surprise on Monday when he said "I HAVE to harvest cucumbers today, they are everywhere!"  He brought in bucket after bucket of them.  A total of 99 on Monday alone.  I'll pick a few more on Wednesday to make sure we all get 2 this week.  Yeah!

Garlic: before & after

We had some extra time today after putting together all the CSA shares.  So we worked on all the garlic that has been hanging to cure in our shed.  Today we were able to chop all the "Music" variety into bushel baskets and boxes.  The next step is to clean it up.  As you can see in the photo above, it looks a little rough in the beginning, but in the end - it's beautiful!

Have a great week and ENJOY your veggies!

Tara

CSA Newsletter, Week #13

In your share this week:

• snap peas - last of the season
• salad mix
• fresh garlic, "Music" variety
• kale
• carrots
• sweet, yellow Walla Walla onion
• Italian parsley
• Swiss chard
• zucchini or squash*

*The zucchini plants are producing about half of what they did this same time last year.  Crazy!  (Another crop that is showing signs of being stressed out by the weather.)  There aren't enough zucchini to make jokes about and not even enough to give to all our CSA members in the same week.  Looks like I'm back to keeping track of who we give them to each week and we'll rotate to each pick up site as we try to make it "fair" to everyone. 

Snap peas are done for the year.  We usually get 3 weeks of harvest off the plants and that's how it went this year too.  We picked approximately 250 pounds of peas off our two rows of plants!  That's a great harvest!  Our long row of shell peas are growing nicely too.  The plants are full of blossoms and there are already many flat pods.  They will be ready soon.  This is one of the times when Shain's carefully planned out succession plantings is working well.  He plants the snap peas first, then the shell peas about a month later, then the fillet beans.  The goal is for us to spend a few weeks picking each crop without much wait in between or any overlap.  Peas and beans are small and picked one at a time, so you can imagine they are a bit time consuming to get enough to divide between all our CSA members.

News on the farm is pretty basic.  We are harvesting as much food each week as possible.  Some crops continue to phase out as new ones are ready.  Many crops are doing very well and that's so exciting to see (basil looks great!).  Others struggle and we wonder if they will ever make it and how we can do better next season (pepper plants are barely 2 - 6 inches tall, same thing happened last year, this is very strange because they've always been full sized and loaded).  We are doing our best to keep up with weeding, a constant struggle.  Shain continues to take old, empty rows and fix them up nicely for new plantings.

One conversation with the workshares this week is wondering if people are tired of all the kale.  This is one crop that is doing very well this year and continues to look good.  It's not too buggy for us (yet) so picking and washing the 30 lbs we need each week goes smoothly.  Our family does a lot of green smoothies and fresh juicing so our greens never go to waste.  We are also freezing some to use later in the winter.  We especially love to pull out a bag of frozen kale to add to either a potato or bean soup.  If you are feeling overwhelmed with the greens, remember they can be frozen.  Some people prefer to blanch them first (submerge in boiling water very briefly and then immediately in ice water) but I know many people who just stick them in freezer bags as is.

What wonderful foods are you making with your produce?  We'd love to share your recipe ideas!

Shain made another very yummy soup using the carrots, onion and garlic from this week's share.  Here's the link (with a photo):  Red Lentil Soup 

Have a great week and ENJOY your veggies!

Tara

 

CSA Newsletter, Week #12

In your share this week:

• fresh garlic
• kale
• salad mix
• spinach - it's bolting now, so this is the last of the early season planting, we'll plant more for the fall
• sugar snap peas - the kind you eat whole, pod and all
• zucchini and/or summer squash
• golden beets

I am happy to report that we have all our garlic dug and hanging to dry in our shed.  Thanks to our great workshares and some volunteers, it only took us two days! 

This picture shows Jay (Tara's dad) and Shain using broad forks to lift and loosen the soil down the rows of planted garlic.  This enabled workers to easily pull each plant from the ground, brush off clumps of dirt, and then count into bunches that were taken to hang in a shed.  This is our first year using the broad fork as a harvesting tool and it made a big, time saving difference!

Sadly, I am sorry to say that our garlic had a very rough growing season.  Somewhere between 1/4 to 1/3 of it was rotten in the ground when we pulled it up.  We've always had some garlic that is bad, but this year's waste is significantly worse.  While this is quite concerning to me, I am also thinking how wonderful it is that we "accidentally" planted too much last fall (which I explained in a previous newsletter).  That mistake turned out to be quite a fortunate happenstance because in the end, this years harvest gave us an over all yield that is just about equal to last season.  What happened?  We don't know.  Shain thinks it's a natural result of our challenging growing conditions.  We will plant from this batch of garlic again this fall and see how it grows next season.  Meanwhile, until we figure this out, we don't recommend anyone use our garlic for planting on their own, just in case it's infected with a virus.

Golden Beets, cleaned and ready to bunch.

Ever had golden beets before?  This variety and color of beet may be new for some of our first year CSA members.  If you think you don't like beets, you may like these.  They are wonderful and currently the only type of beet we grow.  Why?  They do so much better than many other varieties we have grown before.  Red beets require a lot more attention (planting and thinning) and they bolt more quickly in the heat and extreme temperature fluctuations.  I would describe the taste as mild and sweet.  The fact that they don't "bleed" is a bonus (for me at least).  Hope you like them!

Snap peas are still doing very well.  Our pea picking crew picked another 85+ pounds this week.  You can thank Mother Nature for the break in Monday's rains that gave us a 5 hour window to pick peas and cut and wash salad greens for this week's shares.

The weather was on my mind a lot this week as I put together our harvest schedule.  Peas, salad, and spinach were the priorities but these are all time consuming outside crops that can't easily be harvested in the rain.  The forecast has been for rains all week, so we could only guess which days the weather might give us small windows of dry skies.  Meanwhile, there was always plan B if it started raining too hard- to switch gears and harvest from the crops growing in greenhouses.  Monday and Tuesday mornings were both lovely and clear for us to harvest.  Just as I had hoped for so intently.  Thank you Mother Nature!  This farm girl needed the break.  (As I type this, it's evening and pouring rain.  I don't even mind.  Rain away.)  *Update:  Wednesday was a beautiful harvest day too.  Sunny and clear.  How lucky can we be?!  :)

Shain made a great corn and summer squash soup this week.  It was delicious!  He posted the recipe on facebook and I copied it to the recipe section of blog.  Link here.

Have a great week and ENJOY your veggies!

Tara