Greetings,
We hope you all had a great Thanksgiving filled with gratitude for food, family, and health. We kept our gathering small, joining with my parents in Northfield. But we had a second cause for celebration, as Anneli's 4th birthday landed on Thanksgiving day this year. We had a fun-filled day celebrating the joyful and loving kid she has grown up to be!
Meanwhile, it has been a pretty quiet week at the farm. Justin took a well-deserved vacation and visited family in Arizona for a week. Kara spent a few days working independently in the packing shed doing prep work for the upcoming CSA shares.
My time and efforts have been directed towards cleaning out and organizing around the farm. Inspired after re-reading a book called The Lean Farm, I'm actively pushing back against my hoarding instinct that has caused me to hang onto tools and supplies that haven't been used in years. Recalling "Lean" principles - developed by Toyota in their auto manufacturing setting - made me realize how much harder it is to operate on a farm where the things used regularly are drowned out by the things used infrequently or not at all. It's tempting to use our luxury of space here at the farm - indoors and out - to hang onto stuff that "may be used someday," but it's very freeing to simply say goodbye to these things and pass them on to new homes. I cannot say it's been a fun process, but I'm quite sure I'll thank myself next spring!
An update on greens for upcoming winter shares: We were lucky to have abundant greens in our late field plantings along with warm weather fairly late into the fall. This allowed us to bulk harvest kale and spinach to dole out during these earlier winter shares. This week's box will feature the last of the field-picked greens (spinach and curly kale) along with arugula from the high tunnel. The next two boxes (mid December and early January) should have very abundant salad mix (see the featured photo above). We will then pivot back to our cold-hardiest crop, spinach, for the final two shares in late January. There'll also be some tunnel-grown mixed baby kale showing up in shares at some point.
Because we expect to have ample greens coming out of our high tunnels, and because our greenhouse is undergoing some renovations, we likely will not plant any microgreens this winter. Microgreens need warm growing conditions and full sunlight or artificial light because they need to actively grow (as compared with high tunnel spinach and salad, which are mostly grown at this point and kind of hunkering down). We just don't have the proper facility to grow them this winter. One goal of our greenhouse renovations is to create a microclimate (think insulated greenhouse within a the larger greenhouse) that can be heated efficiently and allow microgreens to grow under primarily natural sunlight during winter months.
Notes on select items in this week's shares:
- Curly kale: This field-harvested kale saw many a freezing night in late October and early November. Hard frosts help sweeten it up but also cause some slight yellowing on the fringes of the leaf curls - hardy as kale is, 22 degrees is still stressful for the plant! We served this in a raw "massaged kale" salad at Thanksgiving and it was superb.
- Spinach: This spinach came from the same field harvest as last share's, and it looks as fresh and green as the day we harvested it. It tastes forwardly sweet to my palate - enjoy!
- Arugula: Planted in early October in the high tunnel, this arugula has its characteristic flavor but is quite mild on the heat/spiciness spectrum. Pull out some goat cheese, roasted beets, and candied walnuts for a fancy salad!
- Sweet Dumpling, Butternut, and Acorn squash: These squashes often have different applications in our household. Sweet dumpling is among the sweetest and is delicious simply baked and eaten plain. We recently made this recipe for southwest style stuffed acorn squash and highly recommend it. Butternut is also tasty prepared this way, but, as we sometimes bore of baked squash mash, we like peeling and cubing butternut to give it more texture. Roasting with olive oil, salt, pepper, and a bit of curry powder is a favorite, as is sautéing with onions and kale.
- Purple top turnip: We love these to had notes of pungency to our winter soups. We also roast and enjoy them plain, or boil along with potatoes and mash them all together with some salt and butter.
- Gold potatoes: We had another delivery of spuds dropped off this week by our friends at Driftless Organics.
- Carrots and garlic will be the same as last week, and yellow onions offered, as well.
- We also have red beets that you can swap into your share, and 5# bags of carrots that you can purchase as extras.
Have a great week!
Dana
