Current Share Crops
I hope you enjoyed your first share of the season! This week, we have another fantastic share for you, filled with delicious tastes of early Spring on the farm. New this week, we will offer Spring Mix as a new salad mix option. It has our lettuce mix, plus tatsoi and rainbow chard. It's sweet, mild, crunchy and buttery. Additionally, I renamed the baby salad mix to the "Salad & Shoots Mix". It's the farm salad, with thirteen different greens, and the mix that we have offered for almost a year. The new labels allow us to list the exact ingredients each week, so we hope you enjoy knowing exactly what is in the mixes. I also added a few bundles of bok choy. Next week, the remainder of the row will reach harvest size. Watermelon radishes are back! They are one of the most aesthetic varieties we grow! Green on the outside, glimmering red through the centers-it's an amazing plant! We planned more herbs this season, since we had survey requests for them. This week, you can add dill, cilantro, mint, chives, and lemon balm. I harvest all of these at once, and the aroma from a harvest tote full of herbs is something I look forward to each share week. I lowered several of the prices, so you can affordably add lots of herbs to create some fun culinary creations! I like to fill a mortar and pestle with a blend of herbs (dill, chives, and cilantro SO DADGUM GOOD) then add some oil, salt, pepper and its a great addition to anything. Alex is pulling the first hives of Spring honey in the next few weeks. He is out of Fall honey, so we are also out of honey this week.
Future Share Crops
In the coming weeks, we will begin harvests of green beans! The flowers will bloom any day now, followed by setting fruits. We started the seeds on Valentines day in our germination chamber, and transplanted 1000 plants by hand on March 1, inside one of our tunnels. Using row cover and the tunnel's protection, they survived snow and temperatures in the high 20s. We decided to go the extra mile to produce a special crop just for your farm share. We performed the same process for yellow squash, and were in the ground on March 15. I'm thinking in three weeks or less, the first bundles of squash will pop up in the share inventories. Starting in May, we will begin the first harvests of red Irish and Yukon potatoes, beets, carrots, and broccoli! Lots of great weeks lie ahead!
Farm Update
Farming is a journey, and we have arrived at another crossroads. We have had great success at the Ruston Farmer's Market. In four years, it helped us grow from backyard hobby gardeners to full-time farmers. We have not missed a Saturday since August 2020. Tuna and I had to have a frank conversation about profitability, leading to a discussion about the continuation of going to market every single week. Paying ourselves $15/hr (tell your friends to buy farm shares so we can get a raise!) and fixed costs, means we need to make $500 just to break even on labor, gas, and booth fee. Lately, we have been lucky to make that on a Saturday with just salad and greens. Instead of going to market, we are going to focus on providing you with a better farm share experience, plus expanding to retail sales and restaurants. We plan to use our Saturdays to focus more on the business side of running a farm. Our goals are to grow the farm, while decreasing our work days and hours until we work close to 40 hours a week. We have worked hard and believe we have built a dedicated customer base of farm fans like you though the farm shares to justify not going to the market weekly. It is the dream of my life to grow food for a living. It's been an amazing and fulfilling experience; one that constantly challenges my creativity, problem-solving, critical thinking, and observational skills. Thank you to the Ruston customers who have supported us through how Current Farms has grown and changed over the years. There is a mid-week pick up option for Ruston patrons, so you can still access our fresh veggies each week!
Where To Find Us
Please tell your friends and family who are not farm share members, that they can now find a large selection of our salad mixes at Fiesta on Eighteenth! It's exciting to reach new customers and give them an easy outlet for their first purchase from our farm. Remember to try Delta Biscuit Company on Tower Dr in Monroe, where we developed a custom salad mix for their menu! The "Jammy" burger with our hot honey pepper jam has been selling like crazy at Enoch's Irish Pub. I had one last Saturday night, and it's really good! Besides the fig honey pepper sauce, we are completely sold out of jam. You can find lots of jam flavors that are only available at Mercantile Monroe on Walnut St! I hope to be able to shout out more restaurants and retail spots in the coming weeks! I really think that the culture of food in Monroe is changing for the better.
Recipe Ideas
I love when you tell us about a special meal you prepared using your farm share. Remember that Harvie provides tasty ideas on your profile and though email. I thought I would include some ideas for the watermelon radishes this week! I'm a sucker for recipe web pages that aren't just one recipe, but are titled like "20 best recipe ideas for ...." because they seem to skip a lot of the boring beginning fluff, and often inspire me to create a meal that is my own. I have to say, that this link to "12 Best Watermelon Radish Recipes" looks like it could have been shot in Delia's home kitchen!! Watermelon Radish Recipes Shout out to her tagging us on social media with an amazing salad, which is the cover of this week's farm happening! The next link is not a recipe, but a really cool chart about herb pairings! I printed one off for our home kitchen fridge. Herb Pairing Chart
Closing
This week, I saw the Zora Neale Hurston quote "There are years that ask questions and years that answer." It's been on my mind all week. It really summed up all those years of my life I spent in exploration of the life that I wanted to live, and the questions I asked myself when I left behind a career in academia to grow food. I have asked myself so many questions, and used to ponder so stressfully over the future since we started farming. However, it really seems like 2022 is going to be a year I can look back fondly upon as one of those years when so many of my questions were answered. I am always so grateful for farm share members. You decided to make a few changes in how and where you buy your vegetables, and I promise you that it has a huge impact. Thank you so much, we love being YOUR farmers!
Sincerely,
Conrad Cable
