This is what you've been waiting for! The first week of your CSA veggie subscription starts now!
You'll receive a confirmation email on Wednesday with your final veggie box selections for the week as well as a reminder of your pickup address and times.
A cool spring
Recovering from the wetness. We received around 9 inches of rain this past week. Which is way more than we would ever want. Once you get past around 2 inches, the extra rain only hurts. We're glad its over at least for a while so things can dry out a bit. At the moment our boots are getting pretty heavy with mud.
If you are new to the CSA let me explain how seasonal eating really works. In early spring, the options are significantly limited. Although we do already have tomatoes and peppers in the ground in some of our high tunnels, they won't start producing for several weeks. The only crops we can have available now are those that enjoy cool weather and even some of those (like peas and broccolini) take time to get large enough to produce for us. So these first couple weeks, the options you'll have to choose from will be basically roots and greens. Lots of types and lots of them but not the entire gambit of vegetable offerings you'll find later on in the season. As we work through the season, more items will become available and a few will drop off availability due to the season. By late summer there will be a huge variety of items to choose from, but right now coming out of winter, selection and overall types of produce is most limited.
What do I do with THAT?
Some of you may have never even heard of, much less tasted, some of the greens you'll be seeing this week. Let not your hearts be troubled, they're all what we like to call "nutritious and delicious!!!!" But still, you might need to learn a thing or two about how to use them. First off, cooking greens, means you can consume far more of the nutritious and delicious goodness than if you left them raw. We don't normally cook lettuce (though a good wilted lettuce salad is amazing!) but nearly all the other greens are great cooked or raw. For roots, a quick and easy way to consume a large quantity is to make a sheet pan meal. Dice all the different kinds together on a sheet pan with some olive oil and salt and pepper and roast in the oven for a colorful side dish, or throw in some ground sausage and make it an easy main dish. (And yes, even radishes and turnips roast just fine). This is a great time to be checkin in at the Redfearn Farm Private Facebook Group for ideas on what to do with this early spring produce. Calling all you veterans out there, please post some of your meals and tips to help out the newbies especially these first few weeks!
Bread and Cheese Shares (bread also available as an add-on item)
Farm to Market Sourdough Artisan loaf
Hemme Brothers Applewood Smoked Block cheese
Thanks
Thanks again for joining us this summer. We've gone all in on CSA. We plan on 95% of our sales going through you, so we appreciate your patronage and quite literally keeping us in business. Our plan this year is to maintain our membership level from the previous year (i.e. not get any bigger, but hopefully get better). We're actually a little bit short of our goal of equalling last summer's membership, so if you have a friend you think might enjoy the CSA, please let them know about us. We have additional greenhouse space this year which is allowing us to significantly increase our cherry tomato and Italian pepper production. We hope you'll enjoy an improved member experience this season as you enjoy what the seasons have to offer.
Your farmers,
Dave and Sheri
