Hey y'all! It's great to be back in the swing of farm share season! We have been growing crops for our Spring farm shares since December, and all through the start of 2022. This season, we will feature an amazing variety of vegetables. Shares will begin with lots of leafy greens, salad, and root vegetables for the first 4 weeks, then we will start harvesting beans, squash, and carrots, broccolini, and will culminate the season with all the summer staples, tomatoes, and berries. This crop planning means lots of seasonal eating in your home kitchen! I hope that you are just as excited about this experiencing the amazing flavors and nutrition of fresh, locally grown food.
This week, we have the best of the early Spring greens. March and April are some of most ideal months for growing lettuce in Louisiana, so we have a really beautiful and delicious lettuce mix. Using the six lettuces as a base, we then create some serious salad mixes! Salad and shoots mix aka (baby salad mix in Harvie) has lettuce, arugula, mustard, kale, sunflower shoots, pea shoots, tatsoi, Tokyo bekana, rainbow chard, and endive. Mesclun mix has lettuce, kale, mustard, and endive. Our Spring Mix has lettuce, tatsoi, and rainbow chard; and finally our Microgreen mix has pea shoots, sunflower shoots, and rambo radish microgreens. Salad is my favorite bunch of crops we harvest! Using our new label maker, I know y'all are going to enjoy having all of these mixes and greens labeled. Each week, I can put exactly the ingredients in each one of the mixes.
There are a few bundles of carrots left. We harvested them this week when we filled the old beds. We have lots of new carrots planted (yellow and purple!!) and they will be ready to harvest baby carrots in about 5 weeks. In the meantime, we have some stunner rainbow radishes, and several bunches of daikon radishes. There's also a nice first picking of green onions. There may be some veggies on the inventory list you haven's had. I really recommend for everyone to try the sunflower shoots and tatsoi. Those are two of your farmer's favorites. They are the sweetest greens, and each one is really tender and flavorful. I think you may even like tatsoi more than spinach! Sunflower shoots are the best greens for sandwiches and that's a hill I'm prepared to die on. Lots of fresh herbs this week as well, so I hope you take advantage of this most pleasant and plentiful time of year. There’s over 20 vegetable choices!
Extras and swaps from our farmer friends have never been better! Honey and free-range eggs from Stowe Creek Farm in Farmerville, grits from Joy Walk, hot SAUCE from Ft. Sumner, and jam from our farm are all special, flavorful, and keep dollars in the hands of local folks! I'm more cooperative than competitive, and I love being able to bring in other farms who supply goods we don't grow. I can't wait for peach season!
Next week, we will start offering the first sets of bok choys, as well as the return of the wonderful watermelon radish! Other than those two things, the inventory is going to be the same.
We have added several new delivery and pick up options, so current members, definitely glance at those to see if we have a more convenient option for you. A really big thank you is extended to Allan Futch at Dean of Flowers in Farmerville, and Mr. Don at the Morehouse Farmers Market in Bastrop for hosting pick up locations! As always, another huge thank-you is extended to Fiesta on Eighteenth. It's our most popular pick up location, and their staff have been wonderful hosts. You can now find lots of our specialty salad mixes in their produce section!
As far as auto-renew, I apologize for not being able to offer the full window for the deadline. We ran into an issue building the delivery, because I set the auto-renew deadline in conflict with the delivery going live at five this evening. If you did not want to auto-renew, you can skip this week, and send me an email to cancel.
Good news! We started farm shares three weeks earlier this year than in 2021. We are dedicated to growing food in all four seasons. Every season has been ripe with opportunities to learn and improve the quality of our produce. Our farm is thriving right now, all thanks to people like you who have made a choice to change the way they access food. Thanks to our farm shares and new sales outlets, Kaden and I are finally able to pay both of ourselves an actual living wage. Sometimes, it's unbelievable how far we have come since our very first CSA season. It makes me proud to say, "My brother and I own a farm in Marion."
Cook something good this week!
Best,
Conrad Cable
