*Kohlrabi in the field, photo by Adam Ford*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have summer squash*, zucchini*, kohlrabi, green cabbage, salad turnips, garlic scapes, rhubarb, scallions, baby kale mix, baby bok choi, green curly kale, lacinato kale, spinach, baby lettuce, baby arugula, pea shoots, and mini romaine heads.

What is kohlrabi? It’s a wild looking veggie that tastes kind of like sweet broccoli stem. It is eaten raw (grated into a salad, sliced for dipping) and cooked. Kids love it. This week’s recipe at the bottom of the newsletter is one of the more simple kohlrabi recipes to get your feet wet if it’s new to you.

*Sorry about incorrectly estimating the arrival of zucchini and summer squash last week. We make these estimates of what will be available about 5-6 days before we harvest them, and sometimes we’re off. Zucchini and summer squash are tricky to judge…the plants set many small fruit early that don’t size up because of a lack of enough early male flowers for pollination. At a certain point, they explode! We expected the explosion last week, but will need to wait just a little longer. We hope that explosion will be this week, but plants continue to play tricks on us, keeping us on our toes.

If you’re placing an order with the online form, it’s always helpful to put a preference in the “substitution” option so we know what you would love if our harvest guesses are off. Most of the time we won’t need to do any substitutions, but listing something that you know you would enjoy helps us know what you might like if we do need to make a sub. Sometimes our early week veggie estimates are off, sometimes a pest destroys a planting between harvest plans and actual harvest, sometimes we pull a crop and find that rodents have actually destroyed everything…..

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Farm News

(Optional bonus reading)

Writing a brief description about kohlrabi above reminded me of how unbelievably new at farming I was the first time I worked for a veggie farm. I worked at an incredible CSA farm in New Hampshire, Temple Wilton Community Farm. That farm is well known in the biodyanmic farm world, and they usually found employees with some amount of farm experience; I came with zero knowledge of vegetable production. I made so many absurd mistakes because I had no idea how plants grew, and the head farmer, Anthony, assumed I had at least some basic knowledge, and therefor didn’t always provide enough instruction for a brand new farmer. For instance, there was the time I planted a ton of broccoli about an inch or so apart because I thought broccoli shot up from the ground in those cute little florets that were nicely cut up in Chinese take out. But actually each broccoli plant needs about 2 feet of space and grows a large head surrounded by even larger leaves. Whoops. There was also the time I lovingly fed all the carrot tops from harvested carrots to the dairy cows after work, because I loved cows and those bright green tops seemed to be such a treat for the cows. About a week into that habit, Anthony made a comment while we were transplanting hed lettuce at sunset about how he was stumped about why the milk production was slowly but noticeably going down despite the cows all being on new pasture. He remarked how it was as if they were eating lots of carrot tops. Which I explained they definitely were eating carrot tops, thanks to me… and then I learned about carrot tops suppressing milk production. Whoops. It was a season with a tremendous learning curve, and some of that was just learning the basics of veggies. I worked only with Anthony, so when I learned something new, his voice was the only person I heard something new from, and he had a strong accent. So when he introduced me to kohlrabi, I naturally pronounced this weird, new-to-me veggie exactly how I heard him say it. I don’t really know what he thought about my pronunciation of “kohlrabi” but one of the CSA members finally asked me if I was making fun of his accent when I said kohlrabi…. Definitely not, but that’s when I learned how to pronounce it consistent with the rest of my diction. So much to learn when you dive into veggie farming!

This week the team continued to trellis tomato plants, move tarps around to prep new fields, weed, transplant, and seed more fall crops. The team finished transplanting our wild attempt at a flower garden that will hopefully be a wonderful, colorful pick-your-own flower garden later this season. (We have always planted flowers to invite full season pollination to the veggie fields, but this year we are optimistic these flowers will also grow well enough to enjoy as flowers as well, not just pollinator food!) Ryan is closely monitoring pest pressures and our kiddos helped me clean up the propagation house after a bustling spring season of so many pre-ordered plants. Sky especially loved sorting all the 4-packs from the 6-packs from the mini deep cups from the mini shallow cups from the tomato cups.