• lettuce
• rainbow chard
• radishes
• spring cabbage
• super new potatoes
• fennel
• garlic scapes
• a couple of carrots

Radishes – This will be the last week of radishes until the fall so if you are a radish fan, savor them.  If you are not a radish fan, be happy you won’t see them for awhile.  Apparently, one way to eat radishes if you don’t like the spice is to roast them with some salt and balsamic vinegar.  It’s suppose to mellow them out and sweeten them up.

Spring cabbage – YEA!!!! FIRST CABBAGE OF THE YEAR!!!  For returning members who remember many weeks of cabbage last year, don’t fret, there will be much less cabbage this season(we planted a lot less).  We are planning to have 3 cabbages in your box this year, spring, summer and fall.  Spring cabbage is the first one to appear and is best eaten raw.  Spring cabbage is much more tender, milder and sweeter than main season cabbages and make amazing salads/coleslaws.  I wasn’t going to put carrots in this week(there are so few of them that are ready) but I wanted to make sure you had cabbage, fennel and carrots so that you could make one of my favorite salads.  Very easy to make, just cut up/slice/grate your cabbage, fennel and carrots into a bowl with oil(seasame is good), salt and vinegar(apple cider vinegar is good too).  Add raisins if you like a little more sweetness.

New potatoes – These very early potatoes are called Warba’s and are always the first potatoes ready in the garden.  They are best harvested and eaten young and small.  You don’t want to overcook these gems or over-season them.  Boil them for 10-15 mins and then toss them with some chives or green onions and butter and salt and pepper.  If you have some garlic scapes(conveniently in your box this week), you could add them to the mix as well.

Garlic scapes – speaking of garlic scapes, here they are!  The garlic cycle begins with green garlic(in your box last week), followed by garlic scapes, then fresh garlic and finally dried garlic.  Garlic scapes are the flowering stem of hardneck garlic plants.  You can make them into pesto, you can pickle them, you can cook them or eat them raw.  I like to chop them up and pan fry with new potatoes.  My second favorite way to eat them is to leave them whole, toss them while oil and salt and roast them in a pan in the oven until the skin gets crispy.  MMMmmmmmm

Swiss Chard – No kale this week because I wanted to put in swiss chard.  Swiss chard will make many appearances this season just like kale so make sure you find some good ways to use it.  For those new to swiss chard, the best way to think of chard is to use it as a stronger tasting, hardier version of spinach.  Chardakopita(spanakopita with chard instead of spinach) is a favorite on the farm.  When all else fails, use it as you would any ‘green’ you find in the box; chop it up and put it in a stir-fry.

A little late this week on the post because we have been busy picking strawberries in between all the other farm work to do at this busy time of the year.  While you will recognize many of the same things in the box this week, there are also some new recruits hiding in there.  One of our customers sent a link to this website(http://www.williams-sonoma.com/recipe/search/?cm_type=gnav)  where you can enter one or more ingredients and find some great recipes to use.  One of my favorite websites is http://www.epicurious.com/.  I like this website because of the review section in each recipe.  Here you can see really how the recipes turns out and if a few modifications can improve things.  Here is what will be appearing in your boxes this week:

• rhubarb
• lettuce
• kale
• green onions
• kale
• salad turnips
• green garlic
• kohlrabi
• fennel
• strawberries

Rhubarb – LAST WEEK FOR RHUBARB!  This is it for rhubarb for the season so enjoy it fresh or freeze it to enjoy at a later date to remind you of the joys of spring.  Here are 5 ways to enjoy your rhubarb at any time of the day :http://blog.williams-sonoma.com/5-rhubarb-recipes-for-every-time-of-day/ .

Green Garlic – Often confused with green onions, these are baby garlic plants.  Use as much of the green garlic as you like.  The bottom part can be used like a milder version of garlic cloves and the neck/top/leaves can be used as a garlic flavoured green in sauces, stir fry, etc.

Kohlrabi - This is the alien spaceship looking thing in your box this week.  The greens are totally edible as a mild, kale-like green.  The swollen bottom can be peeled, cut up and eating raw with some delicious veggie dip.  One customer mentioned that it tastes like “broccoli stem” which I agree is the best way to describe the taste of kohlrabi.

Fennel – The first week for fennel, yippee!  You will hopefully see fabulous fennel a couple of times this year so I recommend finding a couple of ways to use it.  This baby-spring-fennel will be the most tender and mild fennel of the season so I would recommend finding ways to eat this raw.  I like to chop up/julienne this fennel and eat it in a salad/coleslaw with spring cabbage(coming next week) and carrots(coming in a week or two).  The fennel will keep for a while is a bag in your crisper for a while is you want to wait for these other two veggies.

Strawberries -  With all the rain and cool weather this week, it was a challenge to get strawberries in your box this week, but we did it anyways.  It would have been nice to have had hot, sunny weather which would have made the berries sweeter and easier to pick but as we can’t control the weather, we have to work with it.  That being said, I still feel like the strawberries are delicious.  Please enjoy these strawberries knowing that they were picked by people(including myself) getting paid at least minimum wage(lots of berry pickers aren’t) and not sprayed with anything except rain and sunshine.  Please note, most of the berries were picked very early on Thursday morning and had a little bit of dew on them.  Combining that with the high sugar content of the berries means that the berries won’t last long.  I know it will be very hard but please in the berries within a day or two.

• 2 pounds of rhubarb
• 2 heads of lettuce(1 butter and 1 red oak)
• 1 bunch of spinach(if you don’t get spinach this week, it will come in a future box)
• 1 bunch of green onions
• 1 bunch of radishes
• 1 bunch of turnips
• 1 bunch of kale

Rhubarb:  This might be the only time you get rhubarb all year so enjoy it while you can.  Most people make crisps, crumbles or pies with it.  I like to stew it(cook it down to a sauce) with some ginger and maple syrup and them put it on top of vanilla yogurt.  If you want to save your rhubarb for later, cut/slice it into 1 inch pieces and put it in a bag in the freezer where it will keep for a year(until next years rhubarb is ready).

Salad Turnips:  These are the white radish looking things in your box.  Please note, THEY ARE NOT WHITE RADISHES!  Also, unlike a regular turnips, you don’t want to cook these.  Cut them up and put them in your salad, slice them thing as drizzle with vinegar and lemon juice or eat them as it whole.  For people who don’t like turnips, you will like these.

Kale:  Surprised to see kale?  Probably not, but hopefully it’s been a long enough time since your last bunch of kale that you were actually looking forward to it.  Start searching for recipes and talk to friends about things to do with kale as I promise you will be seeing more of it.  While I try to have a lot of diversity in the boxes, kale is something that grows so well in our climate and is so nutritious, that I feel like I need to put it in the boxes as much as I do.  A great book to help you deal with lots of kale is:  https://www.facebook.com/TheBookOfKale .  If you have any great kale recipes(other than smoothies or kale chips), let me know and I will pass it on to everyone.

the gang

In this group there are 3 breeds.  Orpingtons, Sussexs and Ameraucanas.

Orpingtons:

Archie

Above is Archie.  He is the alpha rooster in the hen house and takes care of the ladies.  We started with 3 kinds of orpingtons(buff, blue and lavender) and ended up with 1 buff orpington rooster and one black orpington hen(maybe lavender and blue make black?).  Orpington are hardy birds who are good at foraging and make good mothers.  They do well in warm and cold and lay a good amount of brown eggs.

Sussexs:

Sussex hens

We ended up with 3 Sussex hens(Coronation and Silver).  They are the white/white-black hens in our flock.  Sussexs are larger breeds who lay well in the winter.  Most chickens are summer layers meaning they produce a lot in the summer and a little in the winter, Sussex hens do the opposite.  This is a great quality to have, so in a small backyard flock, having a Sussex or two in your flock will help maintain a more balanced egg yield throughout the year.

Ameraucanas:

Ameraucana roosters have the most elaborate plumage in our flock as can be seem above.  Which is interesting because the ameraucana hens are some of the more plain looking hens in our flock(photo below).

To add to the mystery, these simple looking brown hens lay blue-green eggs!  You might have heard of easter-egger chickens or have bough multi-coloured eggs at a speciality store or farmers markets.  Almost always, the coloured eggs have come from an ameraucana.  Ameraucanas are small, very friendly birds which lay large eggs for their size.  Ameraucanas seem to be a good bird to have in a flock as they are easy to handle, small and lay high quality and good looking eggs.

While we bought and hatched eggs last year to get this flock going, the plan this year is to let the hens to the hatching themselves and start to grow the flock naturally.  It will be interesting to see this process continue.  At the moment, we have gone from egg to hen.  The goal now is to go from hen to egg to chick.

Seed Catalogues

As I sit here in front of a pile of seed catalogues and put in my orders, I realize that this is the point where money begins to leave and not much is coming in.  It starts right now with seeds, then as we begin seeding, we need potting mix, fertilizer, trays, lights.  We also need to order row cover and compost.  Tractors need to be serviced(and repaired) soon and diesel tanks need filling.  A new truck will be needed this year and a new cold frame has been purchased.   Rent is also due as we do not own the land where we farm.  The list goes on and expenses grow until September when hired labour is starting to be decreased.

In a normal business(farming is not a normal thing anymore), income is usually brought in throughout the year and expenses are going out more evenly as well.  Unlike farmers, people who do not farm usually make more money and are able to use some of this to cover expenses that spike during certain times of the year.  Most small scale farmers are lucky to make minimum wage throughout the year and at the end of the season, if I have money in the bank, I feel lucky.  Any money that is left at the end of the season usually goes back into the farm in the form of machinery/infrastructure purchases and repairs.

So, what I am getting at is that by offering a CSA program, we can avoid taking out a loan at the beginning of the year to cover expenses until the summer when we actually begin to sell things.  It is also helpful in planning(and general motivation) to know that we have eager customers waiting for our food.

This is why so many farms are offering CSA programs now and why this type of marketing will continue to grow.  It is a model which can benifit both the farmers and customers.  Farmers get money, a guaranteed market and a reason to continue farming next year.  Customers get a guaranteed supply of delicious and nutritious local food now and into the future from someone they know.

Over the past week, I have been getting a lot of emails about when we will begin selling shares in our CSA for 2013.  There was also a list of people on a waiting list last season who didn’t sign up in time and wanted to know when they could sign up for this year.  So the answer is, yes you can sign up now.  Information about this year can be found HERE and you can sign up online HERE.

A lot of people are surprised when they come to the farm in the winter and look at the fields.  When people think of farms in the winter, they think of cold, wet fields with last years dead crops rotting in the field.  So when they see the lush, green growth of our winter cover crops combined with the winter cash crops still growing and alive in the fields, you can imagine their shock.  Even I am surprised when I look down from my house and see a sea of bright green in the fields.  In fact, the fields look greener in the winter than they do in the summer.  The photo above was taken a few months ago(it is even more lush now) and is a good example of our barley cover crop growing nicely.  Barley is one of a few grains or legumes that will overwinter in our climate.  Depending on when we get the fields cleaned up in the fall and when the rains begin, we could plant either oats, barley, rye or peas.

So why do we spend all this time and money planting a crop which we will never harvest?  Well, there are a few good reasons.

1)Without the plants to block the rain, the soil would in theory get ‘beat up’ by the rain and would loose a lot of it’s texture.  A hard crust would form on the surface and block oxygen from moving down into the ground.  This would kill or at least harm the beneficial organisms(fungi, bacteria and insects) residing there.  The unimpeded rain would also wash lots of nutrients down into the aquifer which would be lost from the fields(and pollute rivers, lakes, oceans, etc).  The plants help to take up the excess nutrients and hold on to them until we till them in the spring.  The nutrients will then be released and available for our cash crops.  Agricultural nutrient runoff is a problematic issue around the world.  For example, the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 had a dead zone the size of New Jersey.  If everyone was growing cover crops and using compost instead of synthetic fertilizer, these dead zones would be a lot smaller and less frequent.

2)If you go pulled out a handful of soil from a field with nothing growing in it, you would be hard pressed to find much going on there.  Now walk over to an area with cover crop growing, dig up a handful and you will find lots of fungi, worms and little tiny creatures scattering about.  Soil is an ecosystem just like a forest and without the cover crops(the equivalent of a tree in a forest), there wouldn’t be much of an ecosystem there(could you imagine a forest without trees?).  The plants provide cover from the rain which helps with oxygen in the soil which helps things live and grow.  The plants are also feeding fungi which help break down dead things which help feed bacteria which small creatures will eat and….. it goes on and on, but I will stop here.

3)The last important reason for growing cover crops is to add organic matter to the soil.  Each year, as we harvest food and sell it off the farm, we are removing organic matter(mostly carbon) from the soil.  There are two ways to add organic matter back into the soil, compost and cover cropping.  Unlike compost which is very expensive and environmentally destructive to move around with fossil fuels, cover cropping uses the energy from the sun to take carbon out of the air and put it into a plant.  When we till these plants back into the soil, we are adding the carbon that these plants have taken out of the air and putting it into the soil, replacing some of the carbon we lost in food production.  By growing cover crops, we are using the free energy from the sun to do our hard work.  All we have to do is plant the seeds.  Now, when I look up at the sun and down onto bare soil, I see a wasted opportunity to improve the soil and that is some of the motivation I use to plant cover crops.

So it is with this in mind, I want to wish everyone well during the darkest, coldest time of the year and thank everyone for their support and hard work.  It won’t be long before the days begin to get longer and we begin sowing the seeds that will become the food which nourishes us throughout the year.

• 1 head of savoy cabbage
• 2 winter squash
• 4 pound of bulk beets
• 2 pounds of parsnips
• 2 pounds of carrots

Winter Squash - Thanks to our extended summer and some fancy vine pruning, we managed to get some winter squash in your boxes this year.  You should have 1 large(or 2 smaller) red kuri squash and 1 delicata/festival or acorn squash.  I wanted to put 2 different kinds of squash in your box because the 2 types are quite different.

The maxima’s(the squash with the softer, corky stem) are called ‘dry’ squashes and are great for baking into pies, breads, soups etc.  They are usually sweeter and have a more meaty texture.

The pepo’s(the squash with the harder, pumpkin style stem) are called ‘wet’ squashes and are usually roasted or stuffed with goodies and baked.

These squash should be kept in a dry place(your kitchen would work well) and should also get better after a couple of weeks.  Keep an eye on them and if any damaged areas start to rot, eat the squash up right away.  Normally I would have let the squash ripen a bit more in the field but we had some serious frost last week and needed to get them out of the field ASAP.

Savoy Cabbage - This is my favorite type of cabbage.  We grow this type in the fall because it seems to hold well in the field through the wet and cold winter months.  I love the texture and sweet, buttery taste of the leaves when cooked.  My favorite( and easy) way to prepare this cabbage is to sautee some onions in oil and then add some chopped cabbage(with some salt and/or soy sauce and cayenne pepper and butter if you like) and slowly cook the cabbage until it softens a bit.

Beets - The last week for beets and I thought I would include my favorite beet recipe for people who don’t like beets(like me):

Chocolate Beet Cake -

What you need:

• 3 oz unsweetened chocolate(I just use chocolate drops)
• 1 + 1/2 cups white sugar
• 3 eggs
• 1 cup of oil
• 1 + 3/4 cup of flour
• 1/2 cup cocoa powder
• 2 tsp baking soda
• pinch of salt
• 2 cups pureed beets(about 6 medium)

1)Peel and boil the beets and puree them to get 2 cups

2)Melt the chocolate in a bowl above some boiling water

3)Mix together sugar, oil and eggs

4)Mix together(in another bowl) flour, cocoa, baking soda and salt

5)Add beets and melted chocolate to sugar, oil and egg mixutre

6)Add wet mixture to dry mixture and mix

7)Pour mixture into rectangular baking dish and bake in a pre-heated 350 degree oven for 25-30 minutes.

8)Enjoy

• 1 pound of carrots
• 1 bunch of collards
• 3 painted mountain corn cobs
• 1-2 cauliflower
• 1 bunch of green onions
• 1 pound of bush beans
• 1 head of radicchio
• 1 pound of anaheim peppers
• 1-2 gem squash

Gem Squash - Yeah!!!!! We have some squash!  With the really long, hot dry summer we had, our replanted squash plants produced something.  Gem squash are always the first squash that’s ready(because they are so small) and one of my favorites.  A South African staple, this little squash begs to be cut in half, baked and stuffed with tasty fillings(like caramelized onions, nuts, cheese, rice, etc.).  I wish we had more of these to put in the box but as it is, I had to really push the harvest just to get them in the boxes at all this year.  Enjoy and share!

Anaheim Peppers - These peppers, like the poblanos before, as a little bit spicy.  Again, the more seeds and pith(membrane) you leave in, the spicier it becomes.  Most people eat them green but I was trying to ripen them red as the flesh gets really sweet and tasty if you do.  I forgot to mention when I sent the poblanos that a common thing to do with these mildly hot peppers is “chile rellenos”.  Both poblanos and anaheims are great for this recipe which is basically roasted peppers, stuffed with cheese and fried.

Cauliflower - Cauliflower had never made it in our CSA boxes before and I wasn’t really planning on it this year either.  The reason is, cauliflower has a really, really, really short harvest window.  Once you see the head in the field, you need to pick it.  If it stays open and gets exposed to sunlight, it looses it’s white colour and begins to yellow and/or brown. Some people will go into the field and tie the leaves together to cover the head so that it can get bigger and stay in the field longer.  That is what I did today so that everyone can hopefully get some delicious cauliflower this year.  Fresh, organic cauliflower is not a very common vegetable because it takes ALOT of space in the field(the plants are huge) and you get one head per plant and no side shoot production like you get with broccoli and the harvest window is small.  So, enjoy your cauliflower raw, steamed, baked or in soup.  One of my favorite soups is curried cauliflower soup with Indian spices and yogurt.

Painted Mountain Corn - The corn this week is not sweet corn so don’t boil and eat it.  Take it out of the box asap and pull back the husks so that the corn can continue to dry.  Some people call this type of corn “Indian corn” but I don’t like that term because it leads people to believe you can’t eat it and only use it for decoration, I call this type of corn flour corn.  I would suggest that you use it for decoration now(thanksgiving is just around the corner) but then I would grind the corn into flour and make something with it.  If you have a flour mill use that.  If you don’t have a flour mill, a spice grinder works good too.  If you don’t have either, a blender would be my third choice.  Just twist the kernels off the cob when dry(a couple of weeks from now) and put them in a blender and turn it on high and leave it on until you have flour.  I use the flour mostly to make the best cornbread in the world.  I grow this corn because:

a)it is the most beautiful crop I have every grown or seen

b)it is a delicious and super nutritious food

c)it has a great story

If you are interested in hearing more about the painted mountain story(which I definitely suggest) then visit this page (http://www.seedweneed.com/index-1.html).  I think that along with knowing and supporting local food growing, we need to know and support local seed growing.  Painted Mountain Corn is a great example of someone taking food security into his own hands and doing something great for his community, local and global.

• 1 pound of carrots
• 1 bunch of beets
• 1 bunch of chard
• 2 golden jubilee sweet corn
• 1 pound zucchini
• 1 broccoli crown
• 1 pound of bush beans
• 1 pound of parsnips
• 1 celeriac

Celeriac - The milder, sweeter, better version of celery.  Personally, I really don’t like celery.. but I like celeriac.  It comes at you with all the great celery flavour but not so aggressively and in your face.  For me, I use celeriac in soups.  If we had potatoes and leeks, I would have sent them this week in your box because a favorite soup of mine in potato, leek and celeriac.  You can add it any soup you like but I like adding it to a mildish soup so that the sweet celery taste comes through.  Some people will cut up the celeriac into sticks and eat it with dip as well.  If your into purees, then celeriac makes a nice one of those too.  I left some of the greens on for people who really like celery.  They are almost like celery except stronger and more bitter sometimes.  If you have a juicer, try juicing them with some carrots and apples and beets.