In Your Box:

• Bok Choy

• Head lettuce: “Grandpa Admire”

• Radishes

• Salad mix

• Scallions

• Spinach

• Strawberries

Farm News

Welcome to your first delivery of our 2024 CSA season!  We are so excited to begin feeding your family and bringing in the harvest from our fields.

We are so grateful that you’ve chosen our farm to supply your family with local, sustainably grown produce this year. I truly love what I do here on our farm, and I’m so grateful for your support as we live out this passion.

The first box of the CSA season always feels like opening night for a play or a movie premiere. For months I’ve been putting in long days, shivering in early April and sweltering in the heat of June. I’ve put thousands of seeds in the ground, kept them watered and weeded, and watched them grow. And now it’s time for the big reveal! All of that work is turning into vegetables and fruits for your table.

As exciting as it is to start delivering veggies, there’s also a part of me that regrets harvesting anything. A healthy bed full of growing plants is truly beautiful, but to harvest veggies you have to pull most of them out of the ground and ruin the picturesque sight. Unfortunately just looking at vegetables doesn’t provide much in the way of nutrition, so I suppose I’ll have to ruin the perfect look after all.

This week’s box

Our most welcome addition this week is the strawberries. We grew strawberries for the first ten years we farmed here, but when that original bed died off I had a hard time getting a new bed established. They haven’t been happy with the drought conditions we’ve had the past three years, but the plants are enjoying every drop of the bountiful rain we’ve had this year. We grow three different varieties of strawberries, so hopefully they’ll continue in our boxes for another week or two.

This week’s head lettuce is an heirloom variety called “Grandpa Admire.” The seeds for this variety come from Seed Savers Exchange in Iowa. This is a buttercrunch variety named for a Civil War veteran named George Admire. It’s not clear which side he fought for in the war, but we’ll remember him for fighting for delicious lettuce!

Another highlight this week is the spinach. As long as it can handle the heat we should have a few more weeks of harvest from our spinach beds. This spinach can be chopped small for mixing in a salad or it can be cooked down for any recipe using boiled spinach.

• Please email me if you will be away for a week and don’t need a box or want extra veggies when you return.

• Please return your boxes! You are welcome to take the box home with you when you pick up, but please return it next week when you come back for more veggies. You may also empty the box into bags or your own box and leave it at your delivery site.

Grains and Greens Casserole

• 2 TB olive oil

• ½ onion

• Bok choy or komatsuna or vivid choi chopped into small pieces

• 1 bunch kale; stems removed and coarsely chopped

• 10 oz baby spinach

• 2-4 garlic scapes; minced

• 3 cups cooked brown rice (or quinoa/barley/lentils or a combination)

• Salt and pepper to taste

• 3 eggs; beaten

• 2 cups shredded Swiss cheese

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees.  Oil a 13 x 9 baking pan

2. Add olive oil to the skillet or wok at medium-high heat. Add onion and garlic and saute for 5-7 minutes.

3. Add all the greens (in small batches) to the wok and cook until wilted.

4. Remove greens from heat to a large bowl and cool.  Stir in cooked grains and add salt/pepper.  Stir in eggs and cheese.

5. Transfer to a prepared baking dish and cover with aluminum foil.  Bake for 35-40 minutes.  Remove foil and cook until the top is lightly browned.

Coming up

Next week’s box will be quite similar to this first one.  We are expecting bok choy, garlic scapes, head lettuce, kale, radishes, salad mix, strawberries and spinach.