CSA Newsletter for May 2022

Farm Update

Hi everyone!  I hope you’re doing well and enjoying the weather!  We’re certainly glad that it’s no longer consistently cold and rainy, and it has been a very busy time at the farm for the last few weeks.  Once the weather turned for the better, we had to rush to get all of our plants in the ground in a lot less time than we’d normally have, because we normally would have been able to start several weeks earlier.  We’ve been planting in both the fields and the hoophouses; we continue to put cool-weather crops (such as lettuce, spinach, kale, bok choy, and potatoes) in the fields, and we’ve been transitioning the hoophouses (which are unheated greenhouses, also called coldframes) to their summer fare.  The coldframes previously housed our overwintered plantings of spring mix and spinach, which we’ve finished harvesting and turned back over into the soil.  Now we’re busy planting those same hoophouses with the tomatoes, cucumbers, and zucchini that will be in the CSA shares this summer! (In the picture above, you can see Fred and Taran transplanting the zucchini plants we started in the greenhouse into one of the hoophouses.)

With all the heat and rain we’ve been having lately, the crops have really taken off, and so have the weeds!  People often ask how we stay on top of the weeds in an organic system, because we can’t spray herbicides like conventional farms do.  Truth be told, we’re never 100% on top of the weeding, because there are just too many acres, and the weeds grow incredibly quickly.  But we try our best, and we have a few handy tools that help.  This year, we bought a new cultivating tractor that exists solely to make the weeding easier and more efficient.  It has adjustable tines that dig into the soil, so when you drive it over a bed of plants when the weeds are still small, it pulls up, buries, or otherwise disrupts the weeds in between the rows, but leaves the plants we do want safely in place.  So when I go back and weed that bed, I can simply focus on the weeds that were growing so close to the crops that they didn’t get disrupted, which saves a lot of time.  I’ve been doing quite a lot of weeding lately, which I actually love, but my back is still getting used to being bent over for hours at a time after a long winter spent mostly upright.  But I know that as the season goes on, my muscles will get used to it, and I’ll no longer have to do yoga stretches during my lunch breaks and after I finish up for the evening.  But weeding is one of my favorite things to do at the farm, because I can turn on an audiobook or some good music on my phone, and go to town turning a weedy mess into perfectly clean, orderly rows of food.  There is a lot of satisfaction in standing up after a few hours of weeding and seeing how much better it looks than it did before.  It’s like watching one of those before-and-after organizing shows, but with messy fields instead of messy houses. (I took the above picture of one of our beds of very young spring mix just after I had finished taking out all of the weeds, because it just looked so different!)

Planting and weeding have definitely been the two main focuses of the farm over the last several weeks, but we also completed our annual organic inspection on Friday!  Normally our inspection occurs later in the season, and it always falls at a super inconvenient time like mid-October.  In October, we’re still running the gauntlet that is harvesting for the CSA, but it’s harder because the weather is colder and rainier and there is less abundant variety, and most of our summer help has gone back to school.  And preparing for our organic inspection involves producing a season’s worth of paperwork, harvest dates, planting dates, sales records, photocopies of seed packets, and all manner of other information so the inspector can verify that we are abiding by the organic certification standards.  We always request to have our inspection before we hit the busiest point in the season, and this year, it was able to happen!  On Friday, Fred and the inspector walked around the farm so the inspector could make sure we didn’t have anything we shouldn’t (like synthetic chemicals, treated lumber, and the like), and then they came in for a few hours of checking out our records and filling out paperwork.  All in all, it was a lot easier this year than most, and it took only half a day instead of the full day it normally takes, and now we’re done for the year!  We’ll still have to let them know if anything changes (like if we order more seed, we’ll have to send them paperwork proving that it came from an organic source), but that should be pretty minimal.  And I know that in October, we will be so glad that we don’t still have that ahead of us!

And pretty soon we’ll make the transition to a lot more harvesting!  We’ve been harvesting a few early season crops so far, including spring mix, spinach, kale, radishes, green onions, ramps, green garlic, cilantro, and microgreens.  (If you’re wondering, you can find many of these things at Greentree Cooperative Market in Mt. Pleasant and Argus Farm Stop in Ann Arbor.)  But we’ll be gearing up for the CSA before we know it, and then we’ll be harvesting tons of food daily!

I’ve had several people ask about when the CSA is starting, and while we don’t have an official start date yet (because when the veggies are ready depends on what the weather does), we’re looking at the third or fourth week of June.  So mark your calendars for the week of either June 20th or June 27th, but I’m hoping for the week of the 20th.  That’s usually when we start, but this year the cold weather held on for so long that we couldn’t get into the fields until a lot later than we usually do, which might mean that we have to start the CSA a week later than usual.  We don’t really know yet, but as soon as we know for sure, I’ll send out a big email with the official start date!

And in case you or your friends were wondering, we do still have some CSA shares available!  If you want to sign up and haven’t done it yet, you can check out all the information here at our website, and then just fill out this sign-up form.  Then I’ll email you an invoice, and you’ll be all set!  Just let me know if you have any questions!

So begins the countdown to the start of the CSA!  I can’t believe it’s only a month (or so) until we get started, and I am so excited to get to see all of you again!  If you’re new to the CSA this year, I’ll be sending out a newsletter in a few weeks with everything you need to know for your first CSA drop-off, but in the meantime, feel free to email me anytime with any questions you might have!  Thanks so much, and we’ll see you all soon! :-)

Recipe

It’s spinach season!  In our house, we go through a lot of spinach, usually sautéed as a side dish, as the base for a salad, or cooked into omelets.  If you’re looking for something new to do with an old favorite, check out these 95 Ways to Use up a Bag of Fresh Spinach from A Taste of Home!