Know Your Farmer

Farm Update

In the greenhouse, our nasturtiums and violas are growing
 well and looking pretty.

 Hello everyone!  We hope you are enjoying the abundance of the season! Here at home have been eating a lot of tomatoes, and we were also able to cook a couple of the first butternut squash.  The hot dry summer was not good for most of our crops, but the winter squash did very well and taste great.  So expect plenty of good winter squash over the course of the rest of the season!  The tomatoes have hit their peak, but we will still have plenty for several weeks.  The cool season crops are really starting to take off and we will finally start getting into a lot more lettuce.  The deer have not been as bad as they were earlier in the season, although some came through the other day.  Fortunately the people who hunt on the back of the property every year have started to be more active, so we are glad they will be able to take some deer out and keep them a little more skittish.  The Brussels sprouts are starting to fill out and are getting milder in flavor, and we topped the plants this last week to encourage more of the sprouts to fill out quicker.  The pigs are getting big and lazy, but have torn through their pasture in record time.  All in all, things are going well at the farm, and plants, animals, and people alike are starting to settle into our fall rhythm.

What to Expect in Your Share this Week

Now that the weather is getting
cooler, the lettuce is starting to
thrive again.

Here are the options in each veggie station this week!  If you have a half share, you'll choose one from each category, and if you have a full share, you'll choose two.

• Snap beans
• Cherry tomatoes
• Beets or 4 tomatoes
• Cilantro, kale, or Delicata winter squash
• Potatoes or lettuce
• Surprise veggie
• Sweet peppers or garlic

If you have your share delivered to your home or workplace, or if you pick up at our East Lansing drop-off, here are your options for this week.  If you have a half share, choose one, and if you have a full share, choose two.

Share A:                                 Share B:

Snap beans                             Snap beans
Cherry tomatoes                    Cherry tomatoes
4 Tomaoes                              Beets
Delicata squash                      Kale
Lettuce                                   Potatoes
Eggplant                                 Butternut squash
Sweet pepper                          Garlic


If you have a preference for share A or share B, just let me know by noonish the day before your delivery day, and I'll make sure you get your preferred share.  If you don't have a preference, I'll just choose for you. :-)

Know Your Farmer

The bounty of summer!  It just makes me smile to see
this nice variety of summer produce.

For the last few years, there has been an increasing desire by consumers to have a relationship with the people who produce their food.  While this “Know Your Farmer” movement was kind of a fringe idea for quite a while, it is becoming a lot more mainstream as entities from the USDA to the New York Times encourage us to take a more active role in understanding where our food comes from.  I get to talk to many of you each week at the drop-off, but the CSA has gotten big enough in recent years that there are some of you with whom I’ve never actually had a conversation.  If you have your share delivered to your home or you pick up at our East Lansing drop-off, I may have never even met you personally.  So in order to help you know your farmer better, here is a little bit about who we are and how we got here.  Even if I’ve been chatting with you every week at the drop-off, you’ll probably learn something new about your Monroe Family Organics farmers that you didn’t know before.

We began Monroe Family Organics at the beginning of 2011, but I guess the story really begins in February of 2004, during our junior year at Michigan State.  We met through mutual friends at a Super Bowl party (the one with Janet Jackson’s infamous wardrobe malfunction, which we missed entirely because we were too busy chatting in the kitchen and not watching the game at all).  Within a few weeks we were dating, within eight months we were engaged, and we surprised everyone by getting married that Christmas, less than a year after meeting and with one semester of college left to go.  Looking back, that sounds truly crazy, but it’s only the first in a series of crazy sounding decisions that were exactly the right thing to do, including starting the farm. 

Fred had always wanted to start his own organic CSA farm; indeed, he began growing vegetables for the local farmer’s market when he was 16, and by the time he finished high school he knew exactly where he was headed.  I was on a different track entirely, studying to be a high school teacher, which I had similarly wanted to do for as long as I can remember.  We graduated that spring, and rather than starting our farm immediately, Fred took a position as a farm manager at a large vegetable farm in Ohio.  I also got my dream job, teaching high school French in a small rural district that was one of the best places you could ever hope to work.  We continued happily in our chosen tracks for five years, whereupon we found out we were expecting our first child.  We had always planned that when we eventually started having kids, I would stop working to stay home with them, and we would move back to Michigan to start our own farm.  So despite the economy at the time (this was in 2010, when things were still definitely struggling), as soon as our daughter Jane was born that fall, we left our stable jobs, moved back to Fred’s hometown of Alma, and hit the ground running to build our farm from the ground up in time for the 2011 season. 

Along with veggies, chickens and pigs, we're also
raising three small children. :-)

The original plan was that Fred would do the farm and I would stay home with baby Jane and help out at the CSA drop-offs in the afternoons.  We quickly discovered how lopsided that was.  Fred was running himself ragged at the farm because we as yet had only one part-time employee, and I found that I had quite a bit of time on my hands taking care of just my one baby.  Little by little, I took on more responsibility at the farm.  I went from helping at the CSA drop-offs and managing the CSA correspondence, to taking on the marketing, to doing all the record-keeping and accounting, to doing quite a bit of actual farm work.  During this time we also had two more kids, first our daughter Jessamine in June of 2012, and then our son Timothy last November.  The farm was also growing at a pretty fast clip, and we ended every season exhausted but grateful, and recharged over the winter in preparation for another hard-hitting season.  In fact, that’s still pretty much how it goes; nothing much has changed there.  Each year the farm grows and evolves, and so does our family.  We’ve moved out of the startup phase of the farm, but I wouldn’t necessarily call us established just yet.  There is always more infrastructure we need, new ways to expand, and new plans to make.  But through the good and bad in each season and over the course of our farming career, we are grateful to be doing this.  I look at the life we’ve built, and even in tough seasons (which this one definitely is), it is hard to imagine doing anything else with the rest of our years.

So that’s us, Fred and Michele, the Monroe Family Organics team.  We are so glad to be your farmers, and we hope to keep on providing excellent veggies to your families for years to come!

Recipe

This Pasta with 15-minute Burst Cherry Tomato Sauce is one of our favorite things to do with cherry tomatoes, and it is perfect for a busy weeknight because it is ready to eat so quickly!