Category Archives: CSA

Week 11 – Rebooted

The week was kind of a roller coaster, with rapid highs and lows, sudden twists and turns, and questionable safety measures.

remains of raccoon-ravaged sweet corn
remains of raccoon-ravaged sweet corn

The summer’s temps and humidity have been ideal for the propagation of all kinds of fungal blight – early and late blight, tomato and potato blight, leaf and stem blight, Anthracnose and Anthrax.  Chunks of our melon rows to what we think was Anthracnose – including our favorites, the Christmas Melons; sad face. Most of the potatoes are looking rather blighty.

infected melon plants being removed
infected melon plants being removed

 

The pepper plants are also kind of hard to look at; they are not diseased at all, in fact they are vibrant and green and leafy … but many are flowering not at all, or too little and perhaps even too late, depending on what the weather does. So much went into raising them, keeping them alive through the cold nights, transplanting them, keeping them weeded … and we may only be getting little green annual shrubs for most of the effort. But, que sera, sera!

We’re fortunate, really  – things could be far less awesome than they are.  At the market, we chatted with a larger-scale tractor-based farmer – he’d just lost 100% of his massive tomato planting to Late Blight – something like fourteen 300-foot rows of plants, dead without producing a single tomato. Yikes.

We’re seeing signs in certain tomato plants that sure look likely to be blight of some type – and with the yesterday’s rain followed by 3 more inches forecast over the next day or two, conditions will be ripe for all the blight-bringing fungal and swimming spores to get frisky.  But so far, the tomato plants are a source of joy and beautiful bounty – especially satisfying after last year’s poor tomatular showing.

One of the reasons that we like to grow for a CSA, in spite of the difficulties, is the sheer variety of things it mandates that we grow.  It’s great to have all these varied crops in play, because very year, due to factors beyond our abilities to predict or control, some things will flourish and others will flounder and fail.

We are getting better at Surfing It as it comes, and at getting back on the waves and riding them with a grin after being knocked down into the rocks.

On and on and on and on, on the river flows ....
On and on and on and on, on the river flows ….

Toward that end, every year we try to bring our friends together for a “reboot” – some time together with tribe and separated from usual scenes … ideally near and in a river.

Amy & Kristin almost done with the 7-mile journey downstream
Amy & Kristin almost done with the 7-mile journey downstream

This year we had perfect weather for wading into the Saint Croix with pool noodles and floaties and flowing through the trees for 7 miles and 5 hours before coming back ashore at our campsite.

emerging from the flow after 5 hours
emerging from the flow after 5 hours

It was refreshing.

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We got home and got back to work – with a renewed appreciation for it all …  transplanted out some new fall greens, squished caterpillars and worms and beetles and  larvae, worked to better keep the devouring deer, rabbits, and racoons out of the field, and progressed in the assembly of the high tunnel, a scaled up version of the Lego structures that our 8-year old WWOOFer had made, digging through boxes for the correct components, carefully joining them according to directions, and step by step bringing a whole together from a collection of parts.

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(Grown-up farmer Legos are just bigger and more likely to maim you … and the directions are a whole lot more confusing.)

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Destroyer of Sweet Corn captured in the Chicken Compost – where he filed the trap and covered himself with handfuls of smelly early compost in his failed escape efforts …

Today the beginning of a 2-day rainfall began just as we finished harvesting the last of the crops, before we had things divided up and boxed.

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We enjoyed weather-appropriate music while we worked with Kristin’s parents & Neighbor Marcie, and thanks to their help we finished early, in spite of the necessity of finding new ways to operate in the downpour.

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Week 11 Box:

  • Peppers – a mix of those hot and sweet peppers that have actually felt like making some things for us to eat! ones that are shaped like cayenne peppers or jalepeno they’re probably hot – if they’re bell pepper shape they’re probably not. Everything else is a mystery to be explored.
  • Potatoes – Adirondack Red variety ... it’s cooling off, maybe make some soup! “Nothin’ wrong with roasted potatoes.” – Kristin
  • Tomatoes – The wave is on! Sooooo may ways to use these … especially with basil! Tomato soup? Sauce? Bruschetta? We tried to only include ripe or very-nearly ripe tomatoes in your box this week – even if they’re yellow or orange or green, they should be ready to eat as soon as you want to. Heirlooms come in an array of ripened colors … so, like the peppers, taste, experiment, enjoy! Please do let us know if you have questions or strong feelings about any of the types!image
  • Tomatillos – Won’t be any next week (maybe later though) … if you still have some from previous weeks, find a good recipe that uses lots – a sauce, salsa, soup, etc – and use them all up together?
  • Broccoli florets aka Baby Broccoli
  • Italian Basil
  • Zucchini 
  • Corn – Sweet corn, hopefully – although there is a possibility that you may get a strange hybrid that cross-pollinated with one of the other types of corn we’re growing this year! (We staggered plantings to avoid this very thing, but then the first planting of sweet corn failed to germinate, and we had to do a second round 10 days too late … so they tasseled (corn’s version of flowering) at the same time as the flour corn. If you  do open one to find “Indian corn” kernels, enjoy; surprise! Perhaps cut it off the cob and make cornbread or put it in soup …

    WIDGET VS MUTANT TWO-HEADED CORN
    WIDGET VS MUTANT TWO-HEADED CORN
  • Cucumbers – The cucumber plants are increasingly calling it quits for the season – soon, cool refreshing cukes on a hot summer’s day will be only a memory, one to cherish in the winterbleak … for now, eat your cukes. And like ’em. :)
  • An Onion or two – According to Neighbor Marcie, the onion is, if not exactly the pièce de ré·sis·tance, the final piece to complete the week’s box and tie the other parts all together into a m*th@rfu¢k!ng nexus of potential recipes. QUOTE! (OK so she didn’t actually say that last part. I’ve been in the car for an hour and a half …)
  • Green Beans (Neighbor Marcie Variety – large boxes only)
fall lettuce bed coming up

fall lettuce bed coming up
cowpea flower

cowpea flower
Jim learning from the friendly neighborhood Bee Master

Jim Sehr learning from Rick the friendly neighborhood Bee Master
brown fruit chafer; Euphoria inda
brown fruit chafer; Euphoria inda

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StraightOuttaSomewhere

Week 10 – Compost Bandit & Almost Eye Patch

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This week our friend Amy again came out for a few days to hang out and help out – she made crock pickles with Kristin, helped trim tomato plants, and weed the perennial garden.
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We also hosted our first child WWOOFer: Javier the 8 year-old, who was accompanied by his mom Sarah.
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They spent a few days helping out around the farm and enjoying the space – Sarah more the former, and Javier more the latter.   She socialized and helped weed and plant and harvest, and when not working he entertained us and himself with his love for fort-building, chicken-chasing, Lego-building, and UNO gaming.
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On their second evening in the Albatross, we were all hanging out chatting when one of the hens started complaining loudly – to me, it sounded just like the scolding alarm a hen sounds when we go to gather eggs and interrupt her in one of the nesting boxes. When she kept doing it, we sent Reynaldo on an fact-finding mission.
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He returned from the investigation  and reported a large raccoon in the chicken compost pile, eating the fresh kitchen trimmings from the cafeteria. It had fled up a tree upon his approach. The hens were alarmed but unharmed – however, we didn’t expect that to last long. The raccoon would be back for more compost treats, and eventually the meaty hens and their eggs would catch his fancy.
Fortunately, a 2014 CSA member had kindly donated a live trap to us, when we’d had a porcupineskulking beneath our trailer at night, endangering our dogs. I set and baited it with a trifecta of peanut butter toast, sweet corn, and dog food.
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It was irresistible; when I hurried down to check the trap like a Christmas morning kid, the big racoon was looking back at me when I looked in the trap’s cage. I was interested in the eye contact it gave – just as soulful as any dog, but completely distrustful.
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It looked into my eyes and I knew it was wondering what my intentions were. It was cute, but also wild – it got scared when I tried to feed it a bean and lunged fangfully into the cage bars near my hand.
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After breakfast we loaded him into the car and transplanted him several miles and a river crossing away – when he ran into the woods, we saw he was missing half his tail, from some previous close call. If he found his way back somehow, we’d recognize him.
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We made good progress on the high tunnel – all the ribs were raised, the baseboards attached, and and many additional pages of instructions were decoded and supports were added.

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Construction went faster this week – in part because we had more experience, but largely because we had good help – Jim continued as project foreman, and we were joined by Neighbor Dave and his tractor – which allowed us to forgo awkward tippy ladder work, and instead simply work from inside the raised bucket, with all the necessary equipment and tools up with us.

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Part of the work required using self-drilling metal screws to secure pipes together – this created hot shards of flying metal. We discussed how eye protection should be worn, but I didn’t want to stop working to lower the tractor bucket, run up to the shipping container, and put on the safety glasses … so of course, within minutes of the conversation, a piece flew into my eyeball before I could blink. I could feel it when I blinked. I hoped it would go away n its own, so I kept working – but after the efforts were one for the day and I splashed water in my eye, I could still feel something scratchy in there.

So Kristin took a look, and reported grim news – there was as tiny piece of metal stuck in my eye, in the white just outside the iris.  The hot shard had apparently sizzled into the surface, and stuck fast. At least the heat probably made it sterile, I reckoned.

Fortunately, our friend Chris Thrift had donated to us not just the safety glasses that I hadn’t bothered to wear – he’d also donated a single use eye wash kit, which I used to vigorously squirt a stream of saline solution into my eyeball, while looking every-which-way and laughing at the absurdity of it all.

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Fortunately, it worked,and the wound the hot metal left behind seems to be healing up quickly.

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Today after harvest, Reynaldo rode back to the Cities with the CSA boxes,where we took him out to the same Vietnamese restaurant we brought him when he first hit town – and then we saw him off at the Greyhound Station after 2 months on the farm – and he left us a wonderful parting gift of an oil painting of Widget!
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In the Field, the pepper plants look lush and happy but still are not peppering … the clover cover apparently just provided too much nitrogen for them to care about trivial things like flowering or fruiting.
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Widget has been stalking through the pumpkin and spaghetti squash rows stalking invasive ravenous rabbits – which are not only taking out baby plants in the field, but raiding the greenhouse, climbing up on a cooler, and devouring two trays of kohlrabi starts.
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It’s been a tough year for kohlrabi at Que Sehra Farm. But the tomato plants are doing better than they ever have for us, as are the corn rows.
Speaking of corn;

Week 10 Box

  • Sweet Corn Sugar Buns & Buhl varieties We picked it right before leaving the farm – you may want to devour it soon, because the sooner you eat, the greater the sweet … the sugars begin converting to starch as soon as they’re picked. Cooking sweet corn stops that process – but really, the best way to eat sweet corn is raw, on the cob, right now.imageThe less sweet-tasting type is the more yellow colored Buhl sweet corn – an old-style, non-hybrid variety … the kind of sweet corn your grandparents would have eaten, before sweet corn was cross-bred to hold their sweetness longer.
  • Spaghetti squash – Cut in half, scoop out the (tasty & edible if roasted) seeds, and bake it in the oven until you can scrape out spaghetti-like strands with a fork. Best if not overcooked. You can microwave it too – as-is if you want it to explode, or with vent holes if you’d prefer it didn’t. There are a lot of good recipes out there.
  • Fennel herb – It will be droopy and sad looking when it gets home, but just stick it in some water overnight – and it will stand back up. It’s often paired with fish, but is also great chopped into salads.imageGoes well with oranges and apples and other fruit. Mouth freshening when eaten raw in the field.
  • Tomato Medley – they’re ripening!!! I wish I’d taken a picture of them all spread out on the processing table in their colorful glory. The stripy Green Zebras are ripe even while still green – feel them to see if they’ve softened – if so, they’re ripe! Actually, all your tomatoes should be about ripe this week. Enjoy the variety!
  • Tomatillos – like tomatoes, they keep out on the counter and don’t need refrigeration.  They will turn yellow and get sweeter the longer they sit out. Until it’s too long and they rot. Good in a sauce with chicken or pork.
  • Potatoes – I would probably make some potato salad with mayo.image
  • Eggplants – some Thai, some Italian, some white like the original eggplants were.
  • Thai Basil
  • Aromata Basil (large shares only) – it’s rather purple.
  • Cucumbers can’t stop wont stop
  • Summer Squash Zucchini – we have been loving our zucchini in cakes, pancakes, tacos, tots, kebobs, and almost everything else. One day they were in all three meals; it was good.image
  • Beets and greens – don’t throw away those tasty greens! Yes, you.
  • Broccoli (large boxes only)

 

“Last Week’s CSA” by Shareholder Amy:

11874175_10103318643643490_1561018961_n… and some pics she took:

grape vines movin' on up

grape vines movin’ on up

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Some of our pics from the week:

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Week 9 CSA Newsletter – Halfway to Winter!

Ok, so I killed the laptop this week (I heard a critter outside the window, possibly the White Cat that’s been spotted repeatedly in the vicinity, went to peek, stumbled in the dark, and crunched the screen inside the laptop bag on the floor) – so this newsletter may be short and full of typos. More typos than usual, even. We’ll just see how this works, posting from a touch screen device ….

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This week, we finally made some serious visible progress on the huge high tunnel greenhouse that we got the USDA grant to build – over half the 14′ high ribs were raised and secured to their baseboards.

imageAlthough we knew the dimensions and had laid out the foundation weeks ago, it didn’t really sink in just how looming the structure would be until the ribs went up – easily the largest structure on the land, dwarfing the seedling greenhouse we built last Spring, and surprisingly visible from all over the farm.

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Saturday after Market harvest, three of the four WWOOFers headed toward their homelands in Montreal and Alabama, leaving just us and NYC Reynaldo on the farm for the time being. Farewell on your roundabout journeys home, and hopefully our paths will cross again!

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It was my (Gabe’s)  birthday on Monday, and we started the day with an amazingly delicious brunch – Neighbors Dave & Marcie joined forces with shareholder Maaren and her Wandering Fire portable pizza oven.

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In the field, the tomatoes are mostly hanging out being green and waiting for hot nights or Santa Claus or something. We are going to be taking steps to intervene and hurry them along this week, because the nights seem to be getting cooler and I swear I see trees up here already putting on their autumn colors. The pepper plants seem to have gotten too much nitrogen in their rows, which we planted in an expanded part of the field that had been in clover for two years – apparently this had fixed more nitrogen than we’d really expected, so the pepper plants are big and lush and green and leafy –  but not flowering or peppering all that much, which is frustrating to say the least, after all the work and transporting back and forth we out into them all spring long. Hopefully the boost of magnesium we provided with Epsom salt foliar feeding will get them going! The squash continue to spread like wildfire, devouring walkways and menacing neighboring plants. It’s a good problem to have, at least. But some are showing signs of vine borers, so we will be doing more surgical interventions this week to save them. The melons look great.

We took down most of the pea trellising, donated the pea plants that we cut down to the neighbors’ cows as a tasty treat, and tilled the rows for new plantings. (We couldn’t remove half of one row though, as the trellis and pea plants were inextricably entwined by the sprawling pumpkin vines two rows away. )

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We planted new rows of cilantro, dill, mustard greens, and pea tips. The salad turnips we planted last week came up and we hay mulched around them. A bunny or bunny squad has been munching mercilessly on the soybeans, transplanted broccoli, and even the beets – we sprayed the survivors with some homemade deterrent concoction made from dried hot peppers, fresh marigolds, and garlic bulbulets. Widget has been hunting them too, but so far the rabbits have remained a step ahead…

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the week 9 box

  • Tomatillos – make them into a salsa verde with tomatoes and onions, or perhaps prepare them like fried green tomatoes on their own. After husking, rinse off the film on the skin for best results.
  • tomatoes – a variety of the brave individuals that have broken from the green pack and actually ripened.
  • italian basil
  • Potatoesred & blue Adirondack varieties (mostly reds this week) – we dug up some plants that finished early, many of which seemed to have been terrorized belowground by the Vole Menace. It’s a miracle that nature lets us have anything at all.
  • Broccoli 
  • Green & wax Beans – With some beautiful contributions from Neighbor Marcie, who let us (well, Reynaldo really) harvest some of her abundant crop to include in your boxes this week
  • Kale – either red Russian, curly blue dwarf, or Dino depending on which box fate assigns to you.
  • Onions
  • Arugula – tender and fresh and not intensely peppery, because it’s not old stuff from spring, but volunteers that came up from the seeds of last fall’s planting.
  • Cukes
  • & Zukes – have you ever tried making “zoodles”? They’re great! 

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Frog in the tadpole pond

 

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Farmers market spread

 

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Slinging veggies at the cafeteria

Week 8 CSA Newsletter – the Can-incidence

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There was a fun coincidence this week – as I mentioned last week, we now have 6 people and 3 dogs at our farm with one thing in common – we all spent time at Habitable Spaces, the sustainable farm & artists’ residency in a tiny town in Texas called Kingsbury. And they’re not just casually located there – Shane & Alison, who run Habitable Spaces, are central members of a political battle to maintain Kingsbury’s independence from nearby Seguin, which is trying to absorb Kingsbury like The Blob.

Kristin, the dogs, and I spent two months there this winter helping out and building them a wood-fired earth oven. Reynaldo (who we’d met in Mississippi before we went to Texas), went there shortly after we left, on our recommendation. A month or so later, we recommended it to The Brazilians (Cristiane, Lucas, & Neo) by email when discussing their WWOOFing trip, and they happened to be right by Kingsbury when they got the message – and so they went too.  And after they traveled on, Alabama Spencer came to Kingsbury – where he heard about us and our farm, and decided to include Wisconsin in his cross-country trip route.

Reynaldo came to Que Sehra Farm first – then last week Spencer arrived here an hour before the Brazilians did, where we swapped tales of the people and dogs we’d all met in Kingsbury, and Reynaldo showed them the amazing, almost-completed  oil painting of downtown Kingsbury that he’s been working on here for the last few weeks.

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On Friday, we all took a break from the field to go forage for edible mushrooms and take a dip in the Saint Croix river. We found plenty of beautiful chanterelles (which Kristin made for dinner than night with pasta, butter, herbs, and a fresh Chicken of the Woods mushroom we found growing just outside our trailer), and took a refreshing break in the cool, fresh waters of the St Croix.

On the way back to the car, I detoured through the woods, hoping to find something else good.

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I didn’t find mushrooms – instead, I found a rusty old beer can, in a small cache that had sat together since the 1960s. I could tell from a distance it was an odd can – not a brand I was familiar with. And I burst into laughter when I turned it around and got a good look.

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Kingsbury Beer, from Kingsbury Breweries – I hurried back to the other Kingsbury veterans to show them the find. None of us had ever even heard of Kingsbury beer before – and we loved that we happened to find a can of it in the woods while foraging with folks with Kingsbury as our common thread.

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Good times!

It’s been a very summery week – in fact, we went river swimming three times this week, avoiding the baking (poaching, really, with this humidity) sun of the open field and renewing our spirits and bodies by floating in the stunningly beautiful Saint Croix – wide, slow, clean – without a single sign of mankind in any direction.

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Alabama Spencer found a giant rock in the river, and decided to pull it out and haul it all the way back to the van.
Alabama Spencer found a giant rock in the river, and decided to pull it out and haul it all the way back to the van.

Then back to the farm, where summer’s hallmarks are popping up in ever increasing numbers – the first ripe tomatoes! Eggplants! Peppers! And did I mention TOMATOES!?

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The tomato plants look better than any previous year, thanks to a combination of our improved soil, new mulching and trellising techniques, and great growing weather.

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In fact, most everything in the field is going great right now* – sure, a couple crops are not doing as well as they should be, and there are voles and weeds and bad-guy bugs, but overall, the forces of good growin’ clearly have the upper hand.

spider defending the broccoli

spider defending the broccoli
wasps are farmers' friends - here one is eating a cabbage looper worm that had been munching our leaves

wasps are farmers’ friends – here one is eating a cabbage looper worm that had been munching our leaves

 

Box Eight

The experience we have from last year, the help from our awesome WWOOFers, and the regular rainfalls have really worked out well – we’ve keep ahead of the weeds like never before, and are excited to have some room to breathe to take time to go flow with the river, and get beds prepared for the crops for late summer and fall.

solarized bed being prepared for lettuce
solarized bed being prepared for lettuce

Warning: now that the boxes are getting heavy, be sure to pick up your box from the bottom – just in case the weight is too much for it!

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Just as we woke up to harvest today, the thunder started rumbling, and before we were out the door, the downpour began – fortunately, we’d known it was a possibility, and gotten the beans all harvested as the sun went down Monday night (handling bean plants when wet spreads disease).

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I donned swim trunks and a raincoat, and got the processing area ready while Kristin made us breakfast – by the time we finished eating, the rain had slowed enough to harvest in, and stopped in time for lunch and packing up the CSA boxes – which contain:

  • one of the first Tomatoes of the season! – more to come … I maybe sort of tried to convince Kristin to let us eat tomatoes all week on the Farm instead of sharing just one per box with ya’ll, but she overpowered me …
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  • Basil – two kinds are in the same bag: . Italian Basil is the green leaves and smells like you’d expect basil to smell. It’s good for Italian food, of course … and goes great with tomatoes. Thai Basil has a purplish tint, tastes spicier, and is often used in Asian dishes – although it can be used along with sweet Italian basil. Here’s a good overview of the difference basils, with some recipes.
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  • Pepper medley – hot and sweet varieties
    These are the hotties – if you don’t like much heat, you can remove the seeds and the white membrane that the seeds are attached to, to cool them off:
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    And these are the sweeties – if you don’t like mild peppers, you can poke a small hole in the side and inject them full of habenero hot sauce or something similar. But that would be kinda weird, really:
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  • Beets – Best when roasted, although can also be good grated raw, in wraps or salads.
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  • Beet Greens -Beautiful, nutritious, delicious – these are really top notch greens, not just a byproduct to be discarded! Great for creamed greens, Use in place of Swiss Chard if you have a recipe for those that you like. (such as a chard tart) .Kristin makes an amazing salad with beets roasted in olive oil, salt, and pepper. Then skin them, put the liquids from the roasting into a pan on the stovetop, and add lemon and orange juice, and reduce it down to a light syrup. Wilt some chopped up beet greens in this syrup for a minute, and then toss with the chopped up beets.  Maybe add feta cheese, goat cheese, fresh herbs (basil or mint).
    beets & beet greens
    beets & beet greens

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  • Broccoli – tender young side shoots – better consistency and flavor than large heads.
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  • Zucchini – there are four different kinds, green standard ones, mint green stripey guys, yellow crook necks, and the Pac Man ghost-shaped pattypans. Have you ever had chocolate zucchini cake? It’s delicious – Kristin’s mom made us one this week, and it was a huge hit with everyone.
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  • Cucumbers – a mix of slicers and picklers – all good for salads, sandwiches, etc. We like to snack on them raw when working in the heathere are some slightly less simple recipes that are also perfect for summertime.  Or make what Kristin has been serving up all week – a sesame cucumber salad!IMG_1783
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  • Onions – eat them.
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  • Beans –  a mix of varieties that play well together – the ones with purple coloration will lose their color when cooked, so serve those raw for best effect.
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  • Okra (Large boxes only) – As northerners, we had little to no experience with okra until we started growing it. We’ve learned that it’s best to cook them by sauteeing them whole . Here are six recipes that promise a non-slimy okra experience.

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yeah, the directions for the new solar charge controller makes tons of sense

yeah, the directions for the new solar charge controller makes tons of sense
the old tool shed is filled with moths that fly out in your face whenever the door is opened. The fattest tree frog I've ever seen lives in there, feasting upon them.

the old tool shed is filled with moths that fly out in your face whenever the door is opened. The fattest tree frog I’ve ever seen lives in there, feasting upon them.
Widget came to the Farmer's Market for the first time on Saturday!

Widget came to the Farmer’s Market for the first time on Saturday!
Where's (Rey)Naldo?

Where’s (Rey)Naldo?
Okra has rad flowers

Okra has rad flowers
sweet corn silk

sweet corn silk
cabbage turning into kraut
cabbage turning into kraut
Neo wants the chickens' stale buns

Neo wants the chickens’ stale buns
fall crops starting up in the greenhouse
fall crops starting up in the greenhouse

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PS – We saw the White Cat again – on the drive to the Farmer’s Market on Saturday, not far from the Farm. We thought she was dead on the side of the road … but no, she was just hunting, and crouching perfectly still on the edge … and of course, she bolted when Widget and I approached to see if she was alive or in need of help …

CSA Week 7 News – White Cat & Kingsbury Veterans

Happy CSA Day everyone!

it was kind of a hairy trip bringing a 8x12 porch home on a 4X8 trailer, but we made it.
it seemed sketchy bringing a 8×12 porch home on a 4X8 trailer, but we made it, thanks largely to the guy who gave us the deck’s awesome scheme for getting it loaded easily

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We started off the week with some Craigslist freebies – 80 some gallons of potting soil in nice lidded 5 gallon buckets, some sturdy pallets, a hose reel (for winding up and storing drip tape lines), and a nice wooden 8×12′ deck – which temporarily serves as a little raised area off our bedroom door, and which will eventually serve as ~half of the platform supporting the free 12×17′ screen porch we scored a few weeks back – making a bug-free hangout area to eat meals and sit around outside in.

so much free potting soil!  (in the white buckets. the black garbage cans are filled with cafeteria kitchen trimmings, for compost)
so much free potting soil! (in the white buckets. the black garbage cans are filled with cafeteria kitchen trimmings, for compost)

WWOOFer Ariel left to continue her journey Westward on Saturday after the Farmers’ Market harvest was done, and then on Sunday three new WWOOFers and a dog joined us – Alabama Spencer, and “the Brazilians,” Lucas, Cristiane, and Neo the Dog – who are actually from Montreal, although the originally came up from Brazil. They have wonderful accents.

Amusingly, now all 6 people at the farm  (the 3 new folks plus Reynaldo and us) ALL last WWOOFed at the same farm down in Texas – Habitable Spaces, where we stayed for two months this winter and built the earth oven.

the Veterans of Habitable Spaces crew
the Veterans of Habitable Spaces crew

Reynaldo went down there shortly after we left, and then The Brazilians and Spencer came and went, before continuing on their respective roadtrips across the USA, before all converged on our farm. We enjoyed catching up on the goings-ons down at Habitable Spaces – all the dogs and cats and animals, and the good people we’d met there, as well as the progress on the garden we’d helped build, the pizza oven, the bottle-brick shower-house,  and everything else.

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We haven’t seen the bear lately, but we’ve had a new furry visitor hanging around, scoping out the compost, and hiding out up in our oak trees.

Reynaldo spotted it first, skulking up the driveway – but the next morning when he asked us about a white cat, we half-suspected he’d seen a possum. Or a ghost. But then the neighbor reported a sighting too, and then Kristin and I got a good long look in our headlights – bedraggled white critter with a black blotch face … Kristin got out of the car and tried to talk nice to it – and of course it fled. But that thing ran in a way I’ve never seen a cat move, launching into the woods in a burst of flat, arcless springs, wasting zero energy on unnecessary vertical lift. It was the way it moved, not its wild fur or stunted frame, that made it perfectly clear how fully feral it was.

The next sighting was as it ascended a tree with the same uncanny speed, after Widget had spotted it. I tried talking nicely to it to demonstrate we were friendly, and Kristin left an offering of dog food down at the tree’s base.

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We haven’t seen it since.

In the field, things are moving along nicely – it seems amazing how quickly things have blown up and outward – the squash are all monsters, taking over neighboring rows like the Blob, burying the paltry little okra plants, weaving through the pea trellises, climbing up the fence and shorting out the electric deer defenses … it’s pretty wild, I’ve never seen them so vigorous.

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I think the regular rainfall we’ve been getting is a large part of it, in addition to the additional organic matter (hay & compost) that we’ve been working into the soil where they’re planted. We ate our first potatoes, beets, rutabaga, and eggplant of the season – early harvests ahead of the main crops.

The beans are doing much better than last year – the Mexican Bean Beetles did much less damage (possibly thanks to the bug juice we sprayed), and we stayed on the weeds better this year.  The cucumbers surprised us today with a bountiful crop ready to harvest unexpectedly, putting out far more than we expected, with many more on deck.

The tomatoes seem vigorous and happy, with many green tomatoes on the plants – we spotted the first red ripening one yesterday, so more should be on the row soon, if we can get a couple of hot nights (this week the nights have been cool, down in the 50’s, which stalls ripening). The rows of pepper plants look healthy but many aren’t flowering much yet, which we’re going to address with some Epsom sale foliar spray, in hopes that a dose of Magnesium will kick start them.

We weeded several rows and weed-whipped the raspberry patch (that we started from free Craigslist plants last year) into shape, mulched a bunch, transplanted out some fall broccoli & Chinese cabbage, watered the baby plants that needed extra, and bug hunted for cabbage worms, potato beetles – and vine borers.

We’re now past hunting for the vine borers’ eggs, because the ones that slipped past our duct-tape patrols have hatched and burrowed into the stems to feed and grow. Instead, we hunt for their “frass” – the sawdust-like excrement that the extrude from the stalks of their squash victims. Kristin spent an hour or two last night stalking through the rows with killer intensity and a razor-sharp fillet knife. Where frass was spotted, she would slit the plant open and scrape out the disgusting oozing excuse for a worm out, preventing it from killing the entire plant later in the season, once it was fat enough to block all nutrients from the roots. She got almost a dozen of the little jerks.

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It was a good week.

 Week Seven Box

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  • Purslane – The tastiest and most nutritious weed on earth. If you have a garden, you may know and hate this stuff – but give it another chance! We’re not just trying to fob our weeds off on ya’ll, I swear – this stuff is amazing, and we eat it regularly.The taste is similar to spinach a little, but a touch lemony. Purslane aficionados prefer eating fresh young plants, especially young leaves and tender stem tips. Use it in salads or on sandwiches instead of lettuce or pickles. Purslane can also be cooked as a potherb, steamed, stir-fried or pureed (but it tends to get a bit slimy if overcooked.) It can be substituted for spinach in many recipes. We like it as a fresh side salad, and WWOOFer Reynaldo likes to chop up the whole thing stems and all and make it in eggs, and WWOOFer Ariel added at the very end of a veggie sautee to good effect. Let us know how it works for you!
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    Read more about this globally-popular plant here and here – and recipes here.
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  • Garlic – We are sad and sorry that this is the only head of garlic we have for you this year. We were SO excited for what we thought was going to be a great garlic year – we used a local bio-dynamic seed crop, carefully created a rich soil bed with lots of compost, and mulched it thickly last fall … but then the voles moved into the patch and overwintered there, transforming our expensive, and much-anticipated crop of garlic into baby voles and grandbaby voles. (This lineage beneath our feet in the field is why the wild White Cat needs to be our friend and hang out.) We have a defense plan for next year – we’ll be planting the entire garlic bed within a trench of buried hardware cloth, and cover the top with still more of the same …
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  • Early Jersey Wakefield Cabbage – great for cole slaw or homemade sauerkraut. We like sauteeing it in butter, since we aren’t big fans of traditional boiled cabbage, but your tastes may vary.  It’s the easiest veggie to ferment, just add salt!
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  • Pickling Cucumbers – Not just for pickling – they are great for eating fresh, but they’re also the ideal kind for making pickles. (The slicing cukes – which are no good for pickling – will be coming soon.)
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  • Summer Squash Zucchini – A couple green types, a couple yellow, and the big boxes got Pattypan ones as well – the things that look like Pac Man ghosts.
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  • Onions – you know how these work.

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  • Green Bean Medley (even though some are purple, they’re still “green beans” … )
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  • Herbs – Mint & Oregano – you can tell them apart by the smell! Mint’s great for tea or as flavoring in a dish. Oregano would be great sauteed with your zucchini. It dries well, so you can hang it somewhere dark and dry and then use it later.

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If you can't fix it, feature it.
If you can’t fix it, feature it.


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