Hi All - Don't forget to grab your boxes this week at pick up! Remember that if you ever need to reschedule your pick up or change location (either @market or @farm), you can do that through Harvie. You just need to have any changes made by the end of the customization window for that week, Mondays at 10. If you ever have any last minute changes, please contact us directly and we'll try our best to accommodate.
Lot's of spinach this week, which is exciting because we're nearing the end of our spinach harvests for the early season. Spinach does not germinate well in warm soil, and when growing in hot weather, it tends to bolt quickly. For those reasons, we stop growing it for a couple of months in the summer. We still have another couple of beds growing that we're hoping will turn out nicely in a couple of weeks, but the spinach seeding is over until August/September. Since most of you have spinach in your boxes this week, how about an extra spinach recipe?!
This one comes from a CSA member - Thanks Shelly! Homestyle Sausage, Potato & Spinach Soup - it sounds delicious and it comes with the Hoot Owl Farm CSA member seal of approval!
Many of you will also be getting kohlrabi this week. A very strange looking vegetable, kohlrabi is technically a cross between a turnip and a cabbage. It's really good raw, with a dip, or slightly cooked too. For raw, just peel off the tough outer skin with a knife and it's all fair game inside. The kohlrabi this week comes with a story...
You'll notice that you have one good looking and one maybe questionable looking kohlrabi. The good looking one is included in your shares, and the questionable is included because it'll taste just as good and since we can share the back story with you guys, you might not mind a little ugliness, lol. We sometimes use a tool called a 'tine-weeder', it's meant to be run over a bed when the crop that you're growing is still very small - there are many tines that wiggle and jump all over the bed (from vibrations against the soil) so the crop has to be small enough that the tines go around it rather than getting tangled up. The intention is to kill very tiny weeds that have barely just germinated (thread-stage) so that they won't mature and become a problem later on. Anyway, we used that tool on the newly transplanted kohlrabi, and watched as it grew up beautifully...from a distance. Upon closer inspection, at least half of the planting had developed the unsightly scars that might be noticeable if you got a bonus 'ugly' kohlrabi. We're certain that this was from the tines nicking the small plants and then growing into the scars you see. Anyway...we learned that lesson. The tine weeder is great, but not so much for bulbing plants that have already started to develop!
We started picking a little bit of summer squash (zucchinis) this week, so expect to start seeing that in another week or two. Once it picks up, it'll be a staple for most of the summer. We also plan to do our first picking of basil tomorrow. Basil harvesting starts out slowly, because we're essentially pinching off the growing tips of the plants, but that quickly becomes exponential as each pinch produces two branches and so on... Look forward to seeing you all at pick up. Have a great week!
Cheers, Rudy & Bonnie
