Greetings from Against the Grain and welcome to the First week of the 2021 CSA! If you are new to Against the Grain Farm’s Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), then Welcome! If you are an old friend, then Welcome Back! We hope that your taste buds will prove what we already know: that you are eating the best produce the High Country has to offer.
Just like last season, the customization period begins once this notification lands in your inbox (which should be around noon on Friday) and will end at 11:59pm on Sunday, May 23rd. During this customization window, you can make swaps to your box and add extras. Pick up your box at your chosen location on Wednesday, May 26th. Just as a reminder, if you'd like to change pick up locations for the share that is currently open for customization, please email Harvie support to request that change support@harvie.farm. Always feel free to double check with Holly to make sure the change was made. It is so important to the farm that CSA members have flexibility in their pick up location.
This newsletter platform will serve to keep you up to date on details pertaining to the CSA as well as happenings around the farm. Through out the season, different folks will be writing the newsletter and this week's contribution is from M Mueller, Biodynamic Farm Worker at ATG.
Now at the beginning of the season we have a wide variety of seasonal offerings, including tasty salad and cooking greens, kale, chard, spring mix, head lettuce, sunflower shoots, spring onions, and radishes. These vegetables are Nature’s gift to us after a winter of foods from the root cellar and canning jars and grocery stores; the sweet and bitter Spring vegetables are the perfect medicine to cleanse our systems and satisfy our palates with endless possibilities for new recipes and old favorites.
When you bring your CSA share home and arrange the contents beautifully on your counter for a look-see, then the vibrant colors and intricate textures, scents and feel of the leaf and root will begin to speak to you in the ancient language of well being.
What you may not know is that this perfection before you is the result of a season of seeding, soil preparation, planting, covering, protecting, harvesting, washing, and packing. These vegetables are brought to your hands by the gentle and loving care of our farmers, apprentices and volunteers. During the time of Covid19, when personal contact was limited, we were nonetheless thinking of you, planning for you, and growing for you in fond expectation--remembering back to vegetables most called for, the ones that gave most pleasure and remembering it all even down to your favorite varieties!
In the coming weeks and months we will present here a variety of viewpoints of life on the farm in hopes of bringing you closer to the divine origins of the foods you eat from our soil. Remember that when your vegetables arrive, they are still living, still imbued with the forces they received from earth and air and sky and clouds and rain and sun and moon and all the planets in all their living wonder dancing across the star-filled heights. All of these made your vegetables alive.
Here at Against the Grain, we keep our agriculture in the realm of the living: the living grass that feeds the cow, the lovely living manure she gifts to the compost which grows warm with caring for the millions of teeming tiny lives living within through the course of a year; still living, it meets the living Earth where the seed falls and sprouts alive and grows its way into your hands. How beautiful this delicate balancing act, keeping life in all our work. Because once food dies, the energy of life recedes and our bodies must work to enliven it again for our use. And that is hard work for the body to perform! But living food carries you along in the stream of the living, letting you know that you are connected to all living beings in mutual recognition. Gee, who would think the food we eat could be so amazing! Well, we do...
Much love and happy eating,
The ATG Farm Family and Crew
