I hope everyone had a great first week of farm share deliveries! Welcome to our bi-weekly members whose first delivery is this week!
This Week
SO MANY NEW VEGETABLES are available this week! Some are in limited quantity, so I have them available as add ons and swaps. New this week we have romaine lettuce, sugar snap peas, fresh dill, purple kohlrabi and chioggia beets. There should be plenty of carrots for everyone! I apologize that we ran out so quickly last week. Our full line up of salad mixes is up for grabs. We also have some incredible bok choy, escarole, and mustard greens!
The rainbow chard rows are my favorite in the garden. It's so colorful and fun! Chard is one of my favorite vegetables to eat that we grow! I use it just like spinach, and it's so much fun for making wraps too. I apologize, but going forward we will no longer offer collard greens in the farm shares for at least another two months. Find out why in our farm update below.
Next Week
We will be able to increase our harvest of sugar snap peas, kohlrabi, and beets. Every week the carrots and scallions will grow in size. Harvest is continuing to look very promising for all of our vegetables growing right now! Cilantro will be ready soon!
Farm Update
Big news! We are now in our first grocery store in Union Parish, Big Star in Farmerville! We have had a great outpouring of support from the community. Big Star ordered 3 times in the last week, because they keep selling out! They are buying a lot of collard greens from us. Until I can step up our production, I will not be able to put any collards in the farm shares. I hope that you will understand. I always try to prioritize our farm share members, but this relationship with Big Star is essential to the survival of our farm.
In other news-it rained almost 5 inches last week here at the farm. It's been sloppy, slow work, but we are still trying to plant a lot of watermelons, cucumbers, bok choys, and salad greens this week. I'm grateful for every drop of rain, and most of all that it didn't all fall at once! Everything is looking really good this week, and we got some incredible growth on our carrot and beet crops.
I would like to take a moment to celebrate one of the biggest Current Farms supporters, Dr. Tonya Oaks Smith. Tonya was a farm share member since Spring 2021, and in that time never missed a farm share season. She was the leader of the Communications and Marketing Office at Louisiana Tech, where my fiancé, Emi, works and that's how she found our farm. Tonya loved to cook for her family, and her Instagram (@marleysmom) is filled with dozens of photos she shared of the meals she so lovingly prepared. Tonya asked us to grow bok choy around two years ago, so if you have eaten our bok choy, Tonya inspired us to grow it for the first time! She loved broccoli and so many of the leafy greens, plus any of our jams. I will always be thankful for her honest feedback that helped make our shares better in so many ways. You know, I talk all the time about developing a relationship between the farmer and the consumer. It didn't hit me until losing someone like Tonya this week, just how important that relationship is for me. I think about all of you when we are crop planning, planting, harvesting, and packing for your shares. I often see your faces in my mind when I'm harvesting a vegetable I know that you really like, or when I'm pushing hard to wrap up a long day. It's not true, but at the end of a 70 hour farming week, farming can feel like a thankless job, but when I reflect back on how much our farm shares meant to someone like Tonya, it keeps me focused that what we are doing is meaningful and important. Our hearts are just breaking for Tonya's husband and daughter, and the whole of her family. Louisiana Tech University is starting a scholarship in her honor. If you would like to donate to that scholarship fund, here is the link to the Louisiana Tech Scholarship Fund.
Thank you all for believing in us and supporting our farm. You mean so much to us, and inspire us to be the best farmers we can be. Later this Spring, I would love to put on another farm to table event here at the farm in Marion, so that we can build even more community around locally grown food.
Your Farmer,
Conrad Cable
