This week in your box . . .
Braising Mix: If you missed the braising mix last week, now’s your chance! Hopefully you picked up a copy of my turkey meatballs with greens recipe. If not, I’ll put out a couple more this week on the table with your boxes. Try replacing pasta with these sauteed greens or toss them into your green salad for a variety of flavors and textures.
Mixed Radishes: One of my favorite things about a CSA is when members share recipes. Farm Share member Cindy shared a recipe with me this week for Baked Roasted Radishes as she looked for a new creative way to try radishes that arrived in her produce box. Preparing radishes this way is a great way to replace the high starch potato commonly found in our daily diets. Cindy and her husband enjoyed them with a little ketchup and hot sauce ….. like French fries. Here’s the link https://www.wickedspatula.com/crispy-roasted-radishes/ Thanks Cindy!
Beets & Beet Tops: One of my favorite meals is a simple beet salad. Cook your beets ahead of time so they are ready to top your greens. Add a little feta or goat cheese and some glazed nuts and you’ve got a delicious salad. Beet tops can easily be sautéed in some olive oil; add your favorite seasonings like garlic and sea salt. They can also be stir fried into rice or cous cous or scrambled into eggs. They add tremendous nutrition to juice drinks too if you have a juicer at home.
Bunching Onions: Wonderfully mild to slice and eat raw or cooked. Eat the bulb and stem!
Rainbow Swiss Chard: I had to learn to like Swiss Chard, but now I enjoy it in my lasagna and stirred into my scrambled eggs on a weekly a basis. It’s so nutritious to start your day with a serving of greens. Green Cabbage: This cabbage is quite sweet as it was started in January. Cabbages that winter over are typically a bit tougher and spicier.
Spinach: I’m getting my first cut of spinach with much more to come. It’s very limited in supply this week so make sure you have your preferences set on your Harvie account.
Microgreens: This is my last harvest of the broccoli and mild mix microgreens for awhile because my supplier is out of seed, but it’s the best so far. A few experiments with light and temperature have revealed they really do better outside in my greenhouse than inside the farmstand. There is much more foliage. Hopefully I’ll have some sunflower shoots for you to try in the next couple weeks.
Extras: After weeks of increased hand washing, alcohol based sanitizers, in addition to the normal exposure to dirt and water while farming, my hands are chafed beyond belief. I whipped up a batch of my Soothing Skin Salve and have made it available to you this week too. The beeswax stays on even after a couple hand washings and is providing tremendous relief while my skin tries to recover. My salve is made with organic olive oil, organic beeswax and certified therapeutic essential oils that target healing skin and itching. It works great on my lips too.
Organic Eggs: Lg and XL Dozens
What’s Happening on the Farm?
The rainy weather was just what we needed and the field soaked up it up readily. The fact that it didn’t puddle and I could rake the beds one day after the rain stopped, tells me that we were in dire need of the rain.
In an effort to conserve water, Daily Blessings Farm uses drip irrigation, and I only water’s twice a week after initial germination. Drip irrigation also helps reduce weeds, water evaporation, and fungal diseases. Other strategies, like mulching are used to keep the weeds down and keep the soil warm and moist. Daily Blessings Farm sits on the Daily Reservoir. The property was originally settled by Mr. Daily who grazed his cattle on Sloan Mountain. We still occasionally find his barb wire fencing when working out in the woods. He dug our pond which is seasonal and fed by Britton Creek. I have pictures of Mr. Daily logging parts of our hill with mules back in the late 60s/early 70’s.
I took advantage of the rainy days to propagate more seed trays for the greenhouse that will be planted in June for fall harvest and get a few construction projects done. I’m also organizing the produce packing/washing shed and giving everything a thorough scrubbing.
In the last couple sunny days, I’ve planted the early jalapeno peppers, shishito peppers, orca dry beans, black turtle dry beans, Japanese and Italian eggplants, Tadorna leeks, lemon cucumbers, and ornamental corn (for Thanksgiving arrangements).
The potatoes are in need of mulching if anyone wants to come help spread straw around the plants. It’s important to keep burying the potato stems. They are in fact an underground stem, not a root. So the more stem you bury, the more potatoes you get.
Have a blessed week and thank you for subscribing to the Early Spring season. I hope you found it to be a valuable addition to your diet. Next week our Late Spring season begins which is sold out, but summer and fall remains open at this time.
Carrie
