Dandelions are definitely a weed when they are in our growing fields, and yet we love them. I love their bitter greens in a foraged pesto. I love their dried roots mixed in my winter teas. I love how gorgeous their brilliant yellow petals are. I lov… — Dandelions are definitely a weed when they are in our growing fields, and yet we love them. I love their bitter greens in a foraged pesto. I love their dried roots mixed in my winter teas. I love how gorgeous their brilliant yellow petals are. I love how tenacious they are, growing everywhere, mostly uninvited. I love how relentless they are despite so many human efforts to rid them from lawns and fields. I love seeing them fill fields and pastures, indicating the absence of some gross herbicides. I love their abundance for their ability to feed a large number of pollinators. I love the length of their season, knowing they provide food for the full pollinating season. I love watching our kids learn how to paint their faces yellow with the flowers, photo by Adam Ford

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have yellow onions, carrots, red potatoes, yellow potatoes, fingerling potatoes, spinach, baby lettuce, mesclun mix, scallions, pea shoots, radishes, baby bok choi, salad turnips, and arugula.

If you are coming to the farm to pick out your veggies from the display cooler, you don’t need to use the order form below.

CSA Bag Delivery Order Form

Fill out the delivery form by noon on Tuesdays.

CSA pickup and delivery days and times

Still crossing our fingers hard that our first year trying to grow strawberries for the summer CSA works out…. soooooo much moving row cover off and on, off and on, keeping these tender blossoms safe this spring, photo by Adam Ford

Summer CSA Signup

The summer CSA season starts in a little more than two weeks. We still have plenty of room, but we are nearing capacity, so if you plan to do the summer with us, sign up here.

Summer CSA Details

Farm News from Kara

(Optional bonus reading)

In our early years of farming, a much more experienced farmer told me that farmers are eternal optimists. That idea totally resonated. You have to have a certain relentless optimism to try things over and over again each year, believing that this year is the year that every crop will grow just spectacularly, despite something failing, underperforming, or struggling in years past. It’s more than optimism, of course. It’s observation and learning, to address a past crop failure, learn how to do better, and enact those strategies going forward. But the underlying energy of optimism is always there: “This WILL work,” “The peppers will yield like a confection from Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory,” “Flee beetles will give up on destroying our brassicas, and pick up a different pastime.”

Spring, specifically, is a time of year when that optimistic mindset is abundant. Everything wants to grow. Plants are changing so fast. This is our little window to set everything up for success for the main growing season. It’s also a challenging season, because we begin to start seeing certain plans begin deviating from the intended goal. And they always do, because this is a complex season to manage on a vegetable farm. We want just the right amount of rain, minimal wind, gentle high and low temperatures as baby plants get establish in the fields, tiny germinating seeds to pop up in weed free soil, robust baby plants that flee beetles don’t have a chance against. And while we want all these conditions in place, it’s also the busiest time of year, and difficult to give every planting the attention it needs to spot the beginning of issues before they become larger problems. And yet, like clockwork, we experience some repetition of spring veggie gardening woes. This week, when Ryan checked under some row covers at germinating and transplanted plants, he found a young planting of bok choi and salad turnips just germinating that were decimated by flee beetles. A different planting of broccoli struggled to establish after transplanting and needed several hundred plants to replace the ones that didn’t make it…fortunately we had just enough extra plants left over to replace them. A planting of cilantro hidden under some row cover had a low germination rate, which means cilantro might not be available for the week when we would otherwise be harvesting that patch. (I know cilantro is a love it or hate it type of food, but this farmer LOVES it, and puts it on most things during the summer.) And maybe most annoying of all, the super cute chipmunks have been in full force digging up and eating sunflower seeds from the cell trays in our greenhouse, and topping other sunflower seedlings that have already germinated. None of these are new issues, but no matter the steps we take to address the myriad things that can make us want to bang out head against the wall in spring, some of them still happen.

So that’s part of farming. The failures, frustrations, redos, stresses… optimism consistently being tested. But it’s obviously all still worth it, (or we have some hilariously imbalanced level of optimism to keep trying, ha!) because we will reseed the brassicas, replant the broccoli, and amend the flower plantings, and make some changes to increase our chances of success next time around.

*A couple years ago Ryan planted several types of daffodils around the property, and I really enjoy the different colors and petal shapes, photo by Adam Ford*

And not everything was annoying this week: The team got a good jump transplanting many of our onions out in the field, we seeded the last round of baby plants for other people’s gardens, zucchini and summer squash got transplanted and covered up, Cindy keeps cruising on a lot of final touches on our propagation house extension project, most plants are growing really well, and we harvested lots of wonderful veggies to send out in many directions.

This week we will get the rest of the onions and leeks transplanted, and maybe even start trellising the tomatoes for the first time of the season.