CSA Newsletter for March

Farm Update

Some little baby lettuces are starting to come up
in the coldframe!

Hi everyone!  Not a lot is growing at the farm right now, but we are keeping busy with off-season projects in preparation for the upcoming season.  Fred has been working on pruning the blueberry bushes for the last few weeks, which is a surprisingly time-consuming endeavor.  Fortunately, he estimates that it will only take about another eight hours of work, and then we'll be done with the blueberries!  He also recently built a germination chamber, which increases the speed with which seeds come up, as well as the percentage of seeds planted that actually germinate.  Last year, we made a really basic one that was essentially a folding table covered with greenhouse plastic that had a space heater inside, but this year we constructed the new and improved version.  The new one is much better insulated, will have space for many more flats of seeds, and it will take up less space in the barn.  Speaking of seeds, the majority of our massive annual seed order has arrived, so we'll be ready to rock when the weather turns around!  We're waiting until it's just a little warmer to begin seeding our flats with the seeds that will become microgreens and field transplants.  Right now it's a little too cold for them to thrive in the greenhouse (and a little too expensive to try and heat said greenhouse), but it's only a matter of a few more weeks before we'll be able to start our seeds.  In the meantime, we've been working on record-keeping and paperwork tasks that we won't have time to do once the season starts. 

The new germination chamber has many wire
shelves inside where we can place flats of
seeds.  The heat and moisture inside the
chamber (provided by a slow cooker filled
with water) help increase the germination
rate of the seeds we start.

As much as Fred finds paperwork generally useless and boring, he was glad to have something low-stress to work on after the big wind storm we had on Sunday!  Whenever the forecasts call for high winds, we know that the chances are high of sustaining damage to the coldframes.  Fortunately we didn't lose any of our structures, and we were able to minimize the damage to the coldframes.  Some of the spinach that we had overwintering inside took a beating (because we had to roll up part of the plastic on the ends of the tunnels to keep them from getting lifted up and destroyed, and the freezing wind sweeping through the structure really did some damage to the spinach).  But the danger is over and all of our greenhouses are safe.  Now we're counting down the days until the weather starts to turn and we can get back out there for another season!

Recipes

The trouble with winter in Michigan (aside from the snow, freezing temperatures, icy roads, etc.) is the lack of locally available produce.  I do a lot of canning in season so we have plenty of tomato sauce, apple sauce, and pickles to fall back on, and we store a bunch of root vegetables for the long winter months, but we always end up having to supplement with produce from the store.  And after years of eating our veggies, I've been spoiled by great produce, and store veggies that have been shipped in from far-flung places just seem kind of lackluster and sad to me.  Fortunately, spring is right around the corner, and we should be seeing the first of the hearty greens grown in coldframes around Michigan start to appear in co-ops and farmers' markets before the end of the month!  So when that happens, and you're able to get the first winter spinach of the year, definitely check out these Spinach Brownies!  They're not a traditional brownie with chocolate (although that would probably be good too), but they're more of a baked spinach side dish with a brownie texture.  And what's not to love about that? :-)