CSA Newsletter for Week 11

Farm Update

Fred harvesting apples on Monday night.  We
were able to get 14 crates full before we ran
out of light!

Hi everyone!  We are now officially halfway through CSA season, having finished up week 10 this last week!  Just a reminder that Labor Day is coming up next week on Monday, September 3.  We will still be having the Alma drop-off as usual, so if you have other holiday plans and can’t make it to the drop-off, just let me know!  If you let me know by the day before the drop-off, I can postpone your share and get you a double share the following week, or you can pick up your share on Tuesday the 4^th in Mt. Pleasant instead.  Now that school is starting and people are less likely to be on vacation, my guess is that we’re going to have a lot more people at the drop-offs!  Most days, we have several people who don’t make it, so we often have a few shares left over at the end.  That works out pretty well, because then people who forgot to come the previous week are often able to get some extra veggies.  But with fewer people missing the drop-offs, just make sure to check in with me first before you grab an extra share if you had an unplanned absence from a previous drop-off.  If you arranged with me beforehand to hold your share, then you should be on the list for an extra share, and you can go right ahead and grab that.  But if you accidentally miss a week, just check in with me before you grab double the following week, because that allows me to monitor our stock of veggies and make sure we have enough for everyone!

In other news, we finally got some good rain!  We are so thrilled that we didn’t have to irrigate at all this week, and the plants are definitely happy too!  On Monday night, Fred and I went out and harvested a whole bunch of our Paula Red apples.  There is a peculiarity about that variety that causes them to often drop from the trees even before they’re fully ripe, and once an apple hits the ground, we can’t give it out due to regulations.  Since we knew that they would probably all drop as soon as the storm blew through, we hurried out on Monday night and harvested as many apples as we could until we ran out of light, and we ended up with fourteen of our black crates full of apples.  So now that they’ve had some time to ripen, we’ll be bringing them to the drop-off this week!  They are delicious for pies, sauce, or fresh eating, and I’m pretty sure my kids have already eaten about half a bushel.  Also on Monday, Fred put in the first fall planting of spinach!  It won’t be ready to harvest for a while yet, but that will be the spinach that appears in your CSA shares in October.  We’re also wrapping up our huge onion harvest this weekend!  We planted a ridiculous volume of onions this year, and now that we have our wonderful barn, we have enough space to bring all the onions inside where they can wait, safe and dry, until we bring them to the CSA drop-offs.  So the last of the onions are coming out of the fields and into the barn this weekend.  That’s how I know that fall is coming; if there can be said to be a “harvest season” in our type of farming, this is probably the beginning of it.  We’ve brought in all the potatoes, we’re bringing in the last of the onions, and in the next month, we’ll do large harvests of beets and other root vegetables for the fall.  If the CSA season could be represented by a bell curve, then we’re just to the right of the apex, where the line starts to dip toward the bottom.  But we still have 10 more weeks of veggies to go, so here we go into week 11!

What to Expect in This Week's Share

If you are picking up at one of our traditional style drop-offs (Alma, Mt. Pleasant, or Midland), here’s what the options will be at the different stations.  If you have a half share, you’ll choose one item at each station, and if you have a full share, you choose two items at each station.

• Sweet corn for everyone!
• Potatoes or carrots
• Cherry tomatoes or slicing tomatoes
• Lettuce or apples
• Kale, microgreens, or zucchini
• Basil, cabbage, or green pepper
• Onion

If you have a prepacked share (Midland hospital, St. Johns, Lansing, Okemos, or home delivery), here are your options.  If you have a half share, you’ll choose either share A or share B, and if you have a full share, you can choose two of them.

Share A:                               Share B:

Sweet corn                           Sweet corn
Potatoes                                Carrot
Cherry tomatoes                  Slicing tomatoes
Lettuce                                 Apples
Zucchini                               Kale
Green pepper                       Cabbage
Onion                                  Onion

Recipes

It's starting to look like fall out there!  With both apples and kale in the shares this week, it's time to bring out a great fall dish, Kale, Avocado, Apple, and Bacon Salad!  Doesn't that name just sound like autumn?  Especially with the maple syrup in the dressing, this is the perfect salad to bring out on  one of the upcoming slightly less balmy evenings.  Enjoy! :-)

CSA Newsletter for Week 10

Farm Update

We brought in a major part of the potato
 harvest this week!  Fred drives over the row
of potatoes with our old-school potato digger,
which picks up the soil the potatoes are in.
Then the potatoes and soil roll down a series of
rollers, where the soils fall through the spaces
between the rollers, and the potatoes are
deposited on the ground for us to follow behind
and pick up.

Hi everyone!  Hope you're all doing well!  We're just about halfway through the season, and it's already starting to feel like summer is winding down!  Maybe it's all the school supplies in the stores, and maybe it's the fact that in a few weeks, most of our employees are going back to school, but it feels like a distinct shift in the season.  August is kind of the golden age of summer for us, because most of the planting is done for the year, and there isn't the sheer insane volume of work that is characteristic of June and July.  There is still quite a lot of work to do, but if we're going to sneak away from the farm for a day or two, now is the time to do it, because we still have plenty of help.  In September and October, our constant presence at the farm is pretty much a necessity, because we'll have about a third of the available labor that we have right now.  So with that in mind, Fred took off yesterday afternoon to go camping and hiking at the Nordhaus Dunes near Ludington, and I took the kids down to the Midland Farmer's Market.  It's always so much fun to meet other local growers and producers, and I really appreciate the awesome community of small farmers here in mid-Michigan!  It really is an increasingly unusual life we've chosen, full of long hours of work in the summer and near hibernation in the winter, where your income is uncertain and success is far too dependant on the whims of the weather, and yet there is such an inexplicable richness to it.

In other news, things are going pretty well at the farm.  Fred actually took Thursday off from the Midland drop-off to speak at a soil seminar up at Morgan's Composting, which is where we have our custom organic soil fertility mixes made up each year.  As always, we could definitely use more rain (I think that is pretty much the running theme of this season), but we've got plenty of great summer veggies coming up in the shares!  There might even be a few more items that aren't on the list that will make an appearance at the drop-offs, depending on when things become ready, so don't be surprised if you see a few more veggies on the tables that weren't listed in the newsletter.  See you all this week! :-)

What to Expect in This Week's Share

These little lettuces in the greenhouse
will be transplanted into the field soon.

If you are picking up at one of our traditional style drop-offs (Alma, Mt. Pleasant, or Midland), here’s what the options will be at the different stations.  If you have a half share, you’ll choose one item at each station, and if you have a full share, you choose two items at each station.

• Potatoes
• Onion
• Carrots or sweet potato greens
• Cherry tomatoes
• Lettuce or tomatoes
• Zucchini, kale, or basil
• Leeks or delicata squash

If you have a prepacked share (Midland hospital, St. Johns, Lansing, Okemos, or home delivery), here are your options.  If you have a half share, you’ll choose either share A or share B, and if you have a full share, you can choose two of them.

Share A:                               Share B:

Potatoes                                Potatoes
Carrots                                  Carrots
Onion                                    Onion
Cherry tomatoes                   Cherry tomatoes
Lettuce                                  Tomatoes
Zucchini                                Kale
Leeks                                     Delicata squash

Recipes

If you're a stranger to delicata squash, you've got an exciting treat coming up!  This is my absolute favorite of the winter squashes, with it's thin skin and wonderful texture!  You can prepare it the same way you would any other winter squash, or you could try out this recipe for Maple-Roasted Delicata Squash with Red Onions from Epicurious.  Also new on the CSA list this week is sweet potato greens, which is exactly what it sounds like.  It's the leaves of the sweet potato plant, and they're awesome!  You can cook them in a similar way to kale or chard, but they're so much more tender.  We actually had no idea you could eat them until a CSA member picked some up at a farmer's market in Minneapolis on vacation and told us about them, and we were shocked at how good they are!  So try out this recipe for Stir-Fried Sweet Potato Leaves, or just saute them in coconut oil for a fantastic side dish.

CSA Newsletter for Week 9

Farm Update

This pretty red lettuce is just one of the varieties in our
spring mix.

Hi everyone!  It’s been another busy week at the farm, and an eventful one!  Probably the biggest news this week is our new delivery vehicle, which many of you saw this week!  The old one, which has been on its last legs for about a year now and has defied the expertise of three mechanics, has finally been replaced.  Over time, pretty much everything on that old vehicle has gone out, and by the end, almost nothing on it worked.  We brought it into the shop three times, and they couldn’t figure out what why it would suddenly become very loud and slow down once we hit a certain speed, and no one on the internet could offer any insight either.  So once that speed threshold became so low as to be well below the speed limit, we knew we couldn’t make that old truck limp the rest of the way through the season.  So on Monday, Fred made an emergency trip to Grand Rapids and bought our new vehicle, which has been so nice!  It’s wonderful to be able to drive on the freeway without having to pull over and restart the truck every 10 minutes, and it also has air conditioning in the cab, which went out on the old one long ago!  There are many things I take for granted and fail to appreciate, but those are no longer on that list.

In other news, our fall plantings of carrots are doing well and looking great!  We haven’t had to irrigate as much either, since we got plenty of rain last week.  We have been seeing quite a few of those gross tomato horn worms in the coldframes, but that’s just par for the course in August, and I daresay we might even miss them in January.  Each part of the year brings its distinctive experiences, and we are definitely in full-on summer now!  The sun is out, the weather is hot, and things are growing!  Even though it's a lot of work, just the sheer vitality and expansiveness of August makes this one of my favorite times of year!

What to Expect in This Week's Share

Swiss chard growing in the sunlight

If you are picking up at one of our traditional style drop-offs (Alma, Mt. Pleasant, or Midland), here’s what the options will be at the different stations.  If you have a half share, you’ll choose one item at each station, and if you have a full share, you choose two items at each station.

• Potatoes
• Cherry tomatoes or microgreens
• Green beans or carrots
• lettuce or broccoli
• zucchini, kale, or basil
• Surprise veggie
• Onion

If you have a prepacked share (Midland hospital, St. Johns, Lansing, Okemos, or home delivery), here are your options.  If you have a half share, you’ll choose either share A or share B, and if you have a full share, you can choose two of them.

Share A:                               Share B:

Potatoes                                Potatoes
Cherry tomatoes                   Cherry tomatoes
Green beans                          Carrots
Lettuce                                  Broccoli
Zucchini                                Kale
Surprise veggie                     Surprise veggie
Onion                                    Onion

Recipes

So lately, I’ve had a bunch of people ask me what we do with kale at our house.  Maybe they’ve never quite taken a shine to kale and want to find out what we’re doing that makes us love it so much, or maybe they’ve gotten into kind of a kale rut and want to press reset on their routine.  So if you’re in either one of those camps and are looking for some new ideas to get you really excited about kale, check out these 47 Kale Recipes that go Beyond Salad.  Yup, 47 recipes!  I know that’s a lot, but you’ll almost certainly find a few things you’re really excited to try!  Enjoy!

CSA Newsletter for Week 8: Our Awesome 2018 Farm Crew!

Farm Update

We included some of our lovely sunflowers in the shares last
week, and it was so nice seeing these sunny blooms out on the
tables with all the vegetables!

Hi everyone!  We hope you're all having an awesome weekend so far!  Things are going pretty well at the farm this week.  We got a little more rain on Thursday (nowhere near the big downpour we had at the Midland drop-off, but enough to help keep the upcoming plantings watered!)  This weekend, we'll be putting carrots, lettuce, and various herbs in the ground, and we also completed a really large seeding of lettuce transplants in the greenhouse recently.  We may also be planting the spinach for this fall in the next few days depending on the temperature.  The spinach usually suffers in the height of summer due to the heat, but we've started to see the overwintered spinach start to come back, which is a pretty sure sign that it's time to plant the fall spinach.

We've also seen a proliferation of animals of the small and medium-sized variety lately.  The large animals (primarily deer) are gone now that we have our wonderful deer fence (I'm still not over being excited about that, it's been such a game-changer for us)! But we have been seeing a lot more frogs and toads, garter snakes, and the bane of everyone's tomato-harvesting existence, the humongous spiders who arrive to take over the coldframes each year at this time.  These spiders are seriously huge and terrifying!  All of the aforementioned creatures are mostly harmless, but we've also recently starting fighting a bunch of woodchucks that are eating our veggies.  So far, the battle has mostly consisted of us getting mad and yelling at them, which has (unsurprisingly) been largely ineffective.  The next step is to have a trapper friend of ours come out and set some traps for them around the farm, and we hope to make that happen in the near future so the woodchucks will stop eating all the food.  Every week at the farm is an adventure, and I'm looking forward to seeing what next week will bring!

What to Expect in This Week's Share

Is that another woodchuck?!?  Oh, no.  It's just Ben.
Thank goodness!

If you are picking up at one of our traditional style drop-offs (Alma, Mt. Pleasant, or Midland), here’s what the options will be at the different stations.  If you have a half share, you’ll choose one item at each station, and if you have a full share, you choose two items at each station.

• Potatoes
• Cherry tomatoes
• Green/yellow beans or lettuce
• Slicing tomatoes or lettuce
• Zucchini, cucumbers, or microgreens
• Onion, 2 shallots, or kohlrabi
• Kale or basil

If you have a prepacked share (Midland hospital, St. Johns, Lansing, Okemos, or home delivery), here are your options.  If you have a half share, you’ll choose either share A or share B, and if you have a full share, you can choose two of them.

Share A:                               Share B:

Potatoes                                Potatoes
Onion                                   2 Shallots
Zucchini                               Cucumber
Cherry tomatoes                   Cherry tomatoes
Lettuce                                 Slicing tomatoes
Kale                                      Basil
Carrots                                  Green/yellow beans

Our Awesome 2018 Farm Crew!

People often ask us how we're able to grow, maintain, wash, pack, and deliver so much produce each week, and there are two equally important answers:  The first one is that Fred is a logistical genius mastermind.  Seriously, I've been married to the guy for 13 years, and I'm still impressed daily with his ability to figure out the exact most efficient way to fit in all of the moving parts and unforeseen elements that the farm can throw at us.  And the second is that we have an awesome amazing farm crew.

Our crew this year consists of Fred and me, of course, and we also have three full-time and four part-time people who help us get everything done.  Without further ado, here is the roster of awesome folks who help bring food to your table each week!

Mary harvests cherry tomatoes in the coldframes
a few weeks ago.

Mary:  Mary is Fred's youngest sister, and this is the third year she's worked for us.  This girl is seriously wonderful, and we joke that she's pretty much our servant because she works for us at the farm all day and then goes home and helps baby-sit our kids.  So it's only a slight exaggeration to say that we couldn't live without her.  At the farm, her favorite tasks are harvesting blueberries and transplanting, and her favorite new skill she learned this year is manoeuvering the pallet jack.  She reports that her favorite memory at the farm this year was the time she and the others were trying to determine if peanut butter should rightly be called jam, because it is made from the mashed up fruit of the plant.  A serious consideration, indeed. :-) In the fall, she'll be leaving the farm to enter her junior year at Spring Arbor University, where she is in the nursing program.

Carson:  This is Carson's second year with us at the farm, and he is seriously great to have around!  He is working on his PhD dissertation in fisheries at CMU, and he pretty much knows everything about wildlife.  He's enthusiastic about even the most daunting farm tasks, stating that he likes pretty much everything at the farm except weeding carrots in the rain, and he's also the only person besides Fred who knows how to drive the tractor.  Carson is also really funny without even meaning to be, because we often think he's making things up when they're actually real things.  I was cracking up reading his response to the little survey I had everyone fill out, so I'm going to quote him directly about his funniest memory of working on the farm:

"I’m an ecologist/biologist type, so I’m regularly noticing and pointing out wildlife that I recognize at the farm. This year I got several strange reactions to my attempts to describe how the haunting, hyena-like sounds we often heard in the back field were coming from the winnowing wings of a pair of snipe – long-billed migratory game birds that look a lot like a woodcock. Thanks to old-timey snipe hunting jokes, I suppose I must have come across as if I was making a joke out of not knowing what the sound was, myself. Fred’s reaction was about the same when I told him that I saw two bobolinks on the farm…"

This is basically what talking to Carson is like all the time.  Enough said. 

Ben:  Ben has also been with us at the farm for two years, and he is actually the younger brother of a much-beloved employee we had years ago.  When we heard that he was old enough to work at the farm, we jumped at the chance to have him out there!  He recently graduated from high school, and we'll likely have him at the farm for the rest of the season even after our other students go back to school.  His favorite job at the farm this year was when he and Fred built out walk-in cooler a few months ago, and he says his funniest moment at the farm was learning that Austin, a fairly hard core ex-marine that worked with us for a few months, is afraid of spiders.  Ben has a perpetually positive attitude even when the days are long and the weather is extreme, and we so appreciate having him at the farm!

Carson, Ben, and Jewel helping plant 50,000 onion plants
just after the thaw in April.

Jewel:  This is also Jewel's second year with us, and she is one of the sweetest people you'll ever meet!  We also jumped at the chance to have her work with us after her crazy brother Keegan worked for us a few years ago, and she has been awesome!  Her most useful new skill she's learned this year is how to harvest strawberries, and she says her favorite thing to do at the farm is to find dumb questions to ask Carson.  In the fall, she'll be starting her freshman year at Montcalm Community College, where she intends to study Digital Arts.  Hopefully, she'll still be able to work with us this fall when her class schedule allows, because she is a total ray of sunshine at the farm!

Daniel:  Daniel is an old family friend, and he has worked with us at the farm for four years now!  He likes doing pretty much everything at the farm, because his prefers being in a state of movement, and keeping busy at the farm definitely allows him to do that!  In the fall, he'll be continuing his education at CMU, where he'll be studying elementary education.  He says that the most fun thing at the farm is that the entire season is like one continued conversation, where they just pick up where they left off talking last time, like they were never even gone.  He also enjoys that our crew can go from talking about weeding to quantum physics in a short period of time, and that it's actually a pretty common occurrence.

Danny:  This is Danny's first year with us, and he is the next in a long line of people who have followed in their siblings' footsteps to work at the farm.  In fact, his sibling is still there, because he is Ben's younger brother.  Danny's favorite thing to do at the farm so far is harvesting blueberries, and in the fall, he is going to continue with school and do some volunteering in military history museums.  His favorite memory of the farm is of the time Carson carried a gigantic weed around and asked if anyone wanted a Christmas tree, and then proceeded to throw it as far as he could.  I wasn't present for that, but it must have been a humongous weed!

Max:  Max is the newest and youngest member of the farm team!  He is the son of some friends of ours, and he comes out once a week to help us out and learn the ropes of farming.  He has a great attitude and is eager to learn, and we've really enjoyed having him around! In the fall, he'll be returning to school and his various sports and extracurricular activities, but we hope to have him back for years to come!

So that's our awesome 2018 farm crew!  They are seriously the coolest and hardest-working group, and I just can't say enough good things about them!  :-)

Recipes

Yay for green beans!  I just love them, and I am always excited when they finally come into season!  Here is a great recipe for Roasted Green Beans with Parmesan and Basil from my friend Rachel at Rachel Cooks.  And if you're looking for something new to do with your basil, you could try making a flavorful basil water!  Simply put some basil in a pitcher of water and let it sit for a little while so the flavor infuses the water.  If you're one of the many people who don't drink enough water because it tastes boring (I'm definitely guilty of this!), this is a great way to add some flavor in a healthy, non-sugared way!