Newsletters 2025
In the share this week:
1 bunch salad turnips
1 bunch radishes
10 oz bag salad mix
5 oz bag spicy salad mix
1 bunch kale
1 bunch swiss chard
1 bunch green onions
Thoughts from Farmer Anna:
Welcome to the 2025 CSA season! We are happy to be getting going and have lots of beautiful greens to share with you this week, but it has certainly been a difficult spring so far on the farm. I can't remember a wetter spring since we have started farming here 13 years ago. On the plus side, we have barely needed to run the irrigation. On the downside, it's been very challenging to find windows to get crops planted and even when we do the soil is not as nicely workable as it typically is. We've worked hard to increase organic matter in our soils and to decrease compaction, but all of this heavy rain has really compacted the soil. This makes it harder for plant roots to branch through and get the nutrients they need. We are doing our best to gently work the soil and we did have quite a lot of cover crops planted over the winter so that helped immensely in holding our soil together. I also have a really great team of farm employees this year, so we are actually fairly caught up on our to-do lists and I do expect to have some great crops coming on this season. These first few weeks of spring shares may just be a little on the light side.
In very exciting news - we have decided to jump in and try our hand raising chickens this year! Our baby chicks arrived in the mail last Thursday and have been cheeping and eating and pooping in the little brooder box I made for them (see pic above). We decided to get Icelandic chickens from a small farm in Wisconsin. These chicks are a genetically diverse land race descended from hearty birds that eked it out on Icelandic homesteads for generations. They are supposed to be awesome foragers (read lower feed bills!) and a great help with farm composting. They aren't the most productive egg layers, but will continue to lay eggs in winter which is a plus. So far they do seem to love when I put a pile of veggies and chickweed in the brooder. We are really excited to watch them grow up over the summer and to start to put them to work on the farm!
The greens in your share this week are top quality! We've been eating a lot of big meal salads lately and you could combine both your salad mix and spicy mix (baby mustard greens) together for a tasty mix of colors and flavors. Both the salad turnips and radishes are great toppings on a fresh salad. We also like to snack on both these roots veggies with just a little sprinkle of salt, or dipped in ranch or hummus.
Since it will be cool this week, maybe you'll like to turn your oven on and make a quiche with some of the cooking greens in the share. You could combine both the swiss chard and kale (and even the spicy mix if you like) in a recipe similar to this one below:
https://surreyfarms.net/2023/08/02/chard-and-spring-onion-quiche/
I'm hoping our beets will be sizing up in the next week or two, along with kohlrabi, spring onions, napa cabbage and more! We are planting up a few varieties of winter squash tomorrow and I'm actually feeling good about doing so with the cool, cloudy weather. Squashes and cucumbers tend to be fickle with transplanting, so it's nice if it's not so bright and sunny right after planting.
Hope you all have a great week!