In the share this week: 1 bunch beets 2 green kohlrabi 1 lb broccoli or 1 bunch turnips 1 bunch spring onions 1 bag sugar snap peas 1 bag salad mix 1 bunch parsley Thoughts from Farmer Anna: Welcome to the first share of the new season! Since we waited until June to start, you have some pretty bomb shares coming at you right away, with lots of substantial crops like beets, kohlrabi and broccoli. The farm is exploding with late spring crops that were planted in the early days of April. May was a very unseasonably dry month and now in the first week of June it feels like drought conditions. We have a pretty good irrigation system with a combination of drip tapes and sprinklers, but it's tough to keep up when we haven't had significant rain in weeks. Let's all hope for a good soaking rain soon! It's been such a whirlwind in the past few weeks here - it always is from mid-May to mid-June. We are starting to harvest more and more crops, while still finishing up all of the major spring planting of warm weather crops like squash, sweet potatoes, peppers, tomatoes and beans. This year we also moved into the house we've been building for the past year and are moving our wash and pack operations up to the new pack shed. It's a lot. We don't stop most nights until our heads hit the pillow. It's a beautiful kind of full though. Our new house is steps away from our farm fields vs. a trek up the hill. I can easily walk over and switch the irrigation. The kids have been coming over to say hi while I'm working during the day and sometimes I can convince them to pick sugar snap peas with me as the sun is setting (see above photographic evidence). We feel so lucky to have this land and to do this work of growing good food for our community! I really love the vegetables of spring. I'm pretty excited about the broccoli (that was a bit of a surprise as we starting harvesting before I thought we would) and the kohlrabi (related to broccoli and tastes like a combination of that and turnips) as brassicas are my favorite vegetable group. I'm thinking about making a broccoli peanut sauce stir fry for our farm lunch tomorrow. You could definitely chop up your kohlrabi and throw in the sugar snap peas to the mix too. Maybe something a bit like this: The beets are also looking quite fabulous this week. One benefit of the dry weather is that the beet greens are looking very healthy. If you like greens, these are excellent for cooking and taste very similar to swiss chard. We often eat our beets roasted and then added to a grain bowl with lots of onion, nuts, and feta cheese (your parsley could be a good addition here too) or used to top a salad. If you want to prepare your beets with their greens in a simple and tasty way, this recipe looks perfect: We'd love to hear what you are making with your share items this week. If you feel inspired, leave a link for us in the recipes section of the forum! Happy cooking and have a great week!

In the share this week: 2 lbs scarlet turnips (pictured first) 2 lbs rutabaga (pictured second) 2 kohlrabi bulbs 1 fennel bulb 6 oz bag baby kale 5 oz bag spinach Thoughts from Farmer Anna: We've made it through another season! We've been growing and you've been eating these veggies for 26 weeks. That's half a year! I think we can all feel a bit proud of this accomplishment. Even though we've been growing for nearly 10 years now and many of you have been CSA members for a few years or more, it still feels like a big deal to make it through a season successfully. I bet you've tried some new veggies and cooked a few new recipes this year. One of the beautiful aspects of CSA is that it encourages you to step out of your food comfort zone just a bit. I still find it a bit thrilling to find a new way to enjoy a vegetable that I haven't particularly liked before. The more different kinds of veggies we eat, the healthier we are. And health is a huge driving force behind what we do here. Healthy individuals build healthy connections with other people and the environment and that helps our communities become healthier places to live. As our farm continues to grow, we are excited to not only share the best food we can grow, but also to become a gathering place to strengthen community bonds, and of course to have some good old fashioned fun! Root vegetables are a staple of the late fall garden. In the share this week you have rutabagas, scarlet turnips and kohlrabi bulbs. All of these root veggies will keep for awhile in your fridge if you don't want to use them right away. Rutabaga in particular has a reputation for being a rather homely vegetable. Don't let its appearance fool you though! The flavor and texture of this veggie is wonderful in many soups and stews. We often use ours for a rutabaga gratin on the Thanksgiving table. I also love the idea of making it into a simple soup like the recipe below. Pureed soups are so comforting this time of year! If you find yourself need something fresh tasting amongst all the rich foods of fall and winter, you could make a vinegary slaw with your kohlrabi and turnips. This would be a good addition to a Thanksgiving meal, as so many of the traditional foods lack any sort of acidity to balance the richness. The fresh bright flavors might just bring a little sunshine back into these darker days. Well, that is all for now. We can't thank you enough for your support of the farm this year. We hope it was a good experience for you and we'd like to hear from you about how it went. Stay tuned for an end of the season survey and for farm updates throughout the winter! Hope you all have a wonderful holiday season and winter!

In the share this week: 2 lbs sweet potatoes 4 oz fresh ginger (pictured) 1 bag carrots 1 bunch salad turnips 1 green pepper 1 bag salad mix 1 bag spicy salad mix Thoughts from Farmer Anna: I really love harvesting fresh ginger in the last few weeks of our CSA season. Mostly, it just smells so amazing as we dig it up. Fresh ginger is also really pretty and of course adds such a fresh, bright flavor to dishes. You'll want to keep your ginger in the refrigerator if you plan to use it within a couple of weeks, or freeze it for longer storage. We've found that the fresh ginger doesn't keep as long as the cured variety that you may be used to at the store. Looking over the contents of this week's share and considering the cooler temps today, I'm thinking that a gingery sweet potato soup would really hit the spot. Here's a recipe for an idea: Alrightly, I think I need to include an ode to the salad turnips in this week's newsletter. Geez, we love these turnips at our house. I'm actually somewhat surprised by how many folks with customizable shares remove these beauties from their shares. I'm curious if you have tried them? I know we give them a lot when they are in season, so maybe it's just too much. And maybe you have given them an honest try and really don't like them - that's totally reasonable. But if you are taking them out of your shares and haven't ever tried them because you think you don't like turnips (or have had purple top turnips in the past and didn't like those), do yourself a favor and give them a go. They are incredibly sweet and tender and really versatile! If you want to keep it simple, try grating your turnips into your salads this week for crunch and sweetness. Or you could make some kick-butt veggie fritters to go along with the sweet potato soup (see recipe below). I put some into a veggie minestrone type soup for our farm lunch today and they were delightful. We also commonly roast them with oil and salt as a side dish and my kids like them sliced raw with a little cajun seasoning (because everything is better with cajun seasoning in their opinions right now). The pace of our farm work feels really comfortable in these last weeks of the season. We turned over the tomato and pepper hoophouses and I planted some spinach and kale in one of them yesterday. Later this week we'll be planting out of overwintering onions and early next week the garlic will go in as well. I feel such a calm satisfaction as we clean up the farm and get the last few remaining crops planted. It's the feeling of tucking your children into bed and watching them drift peacefully off to sleep. I love the transition in weather and work in the fall as well. I feel like I still have one foot in this season, while I'm busy thinking and planning for stepping into the next one. I'd love to hear how this season as a CSA member went for you too. I know it can be both a joy and a challenge. We'll be thinking about some more open-ended survey questions for you this year, because I really want to understand what the experience is like for you and I find that simple survey questions don't always get at that kind of information. We always appreciate your feedback as it helps us become better farmers each year. Keep an eye out for a survey once the season has concluded in November. Hope you all have a great week!

In the share this week: 1 bunch carrots 1 bunch french breakfast radishes (pictured) 1 bunch green onions 2-3 green peppers 1 bag salad mix 1 bag spicy salad mix 1 bag arugula Thoughts from Farmer Anna: It's a mega salad share this week! Lots of greens came on at the same time and I wanted to make sure to get them out to you before the temps get too cold. Luckily, so far we haven't had below freezing temperatures, but it looks fairly likely tonight. All of these greens are tucked in under row cover and should be fine. I'm really excited about the arugula because it's really looking nice. We've had some fungal disease that attacks the roots of the plant when conditions are too wet, so this dry fall has actually been beneficial for it. I love the spicy, nutty flavor of arugula and since it's chilly outside I was thinking a warm arugula salad sounded good. You can also mix in your spicy salad mix (baby mustard greens) for more color, flavor and texture: The french breakfast radishes are also looking fabulous this week and have benefited from the drier weather. I'm thinking that a roasted root medley would be an awesome side dish to make this week. You can include carrots, radishes, and some turnips and sweet potatoes if you have some left from last week: We are saying a final goodbye to the tomatoes and peppers this week and will be working on pulling them out of the last two hoophouses tomorrow. Our winter greens plantings will be scaled back this year, but we are planning to plant spinach and kale in one or two hoophouses. We need to do some repair work on the two smaller hoophouses and I need to make time to work on the house this winter as well. It's tough not to fully plant up the houses, because I know many of you would love to have greens all winter. I'm thinking it will be a good opportunity to rest the soil for a while and wait to get some early spring plantings going instead. Hope you all have a great week!

In the share this week: 1 head napa cabbage 1 head bok choy 1 medium garlic 1 bunch salad turnips 1 bag baby kale 1 bunch swiss chard 1 butternut squash Thoughts from Farmer Anna: This week's share is full of greens! I want to give you a few different ideas for how to cook down some of your greens so you don't get too overwhelmed with them. We are always making curries at our house, and curries that include some kind of cabbage are my absolute favorite. Napa cabbage, especially, just melts down into the sauce. The turnips and greens would be awesome in a curry as well, maybe you could use both if you are making a big batch. Here is an idea for a cabbage curry: https://thebrookcook.wordpress.com/2013/11/07/napa-cabbage-curry/ Another fun thing to try with napa cabbage is to make kimchi. We were watching some foodie shows recently that featured Korean families making traditional kimchi. I was surprised to see that they used whole cabbage leaves and rubbed them with their spice mixture before packing into jars to ferment. I haven't tried this method myself, so I'm not sure how difficult it is. This site looks great because it has links to several different types of kimchi recipes if you want to try a simpler one: Bok choy is a perfect stir-fry vegetable and can be combined with the turnips, garlic and/or onion and some type of protein and served over rice for a hearty meal. My 12 year old son has been getting really into cooking lately and made a delicious stir fry with tons of farm veggies a couple of weeks ago. The sauce for his recipe was pretty simple, combining four ingredients (tamari, maple syrup, rice vinegar and toasted sesame oil). We served that dish over buckwheat soba noodles. Here's an idea for a side dish with bok choy and turnips: The baby kale is a small red russian kale with tender leaves and stems that is great for eating raw in a salad, and also amenable to cooking or using in a green smoothie. We love this variety! Hope you all have a great week!

In the share this week: 1 head napa cabbage 1 bok choy 1 medium garlic 2 lbs green tomatoes 1 bag salad mix 1 butternut squash 1 bunch sage Thoughts from Farmer Anna: Fall is officially here and the weather has sure taken notice! We are soaking in these wonderfully cool mornings and picture perfect days. I was a little concerned we might get an early frost this week with temperatures as low as 41 predicted, but those got revised up a little and we should be in the clear for awhile longer yet. Nearly all of our fall crops can handle a light frost without any covering, but some of them like a little added protection in the form of row cover. Around here our first frost typically happens during the second half of October, but it's been as late as the first week of November. You can see the crops responding to the cooler weather after the heat wave of last week. The purples in the lettuces and spicy salad mix are deepening, baby spinach leaves are growing bigger, kale is starting to rebound, and the summer crops are tired and browning and look ready to be done. We pulled out the first tomatoes plants on Monday, which is why the green tomatoes are appearing in the share this week. Lots of folks enjoy the classic breaded and fried green tomatoes, but there are plenty of other things to do with green tomatoes. One of our family's favorites is green tomato relish. It's basically the whole fall garden chopped and blended up with vinegar, sugar and spices. This relish is quite delicious with crackers and cheese, or on a burger or brat. While the standard recipe calls for regular cabbage, you could definitely sub in your napa cabbage if you want to give this a try. You might have to alter quantities a bit depending on how many cups of tomato you have from the 2 lbs in your share. The exact proportion of veggies isn't so critical here anyway :) This isn't our family recipe, but it's pretty darn close since I don't have it at hand right now: Butternut squash is here this week! This hearty winter squash is really versatile and we have so many ways we like to use it. I made one of our classic recipes, Inner warmth peanut stew, last week, but one of my very favorite butternut recipes also uses the sage that you have in this week's share. Brown butter sage sauce over ravioli stuffed with butternut is absolutely divine. It takes a bit of preparation, but definitely worth it! I'll share some recipes for bok choy and napa cabbage next week, but with these cooler temperatures, I think that a stir-fry or curry featuring one or both of these would be awesome! Hope you all have a great week.

In the share this week: 1 head celeriac 1 bunch radishes 2 bell peppers 1 lb onions 1 bunch dill 1 bag spicy salad mix 1 pie pumpkin Thoughts from Farmer Anna: It's been a little while since I've updated you on our straw bale house building progress. We are nearly finished with the first coat of lime plaster. We ran out of lime before finishing the last bedroom and we're waiting on a new shipment. Though we need to put two more coats of plaster on the straw walls before we're finished, we are getting a better idea of how the house will look once complete. Plastering is labor intensive, but it has been really rewarding to do this first coat ourselves. We are hoping to hire out the next two coats but have had some difficulty getting plaster contractors to respond or get back to us. It sounds like this is a common experience, as there really just aren't enough tradespeople to go around these days. Thankfully, we had a couple of plasterers stop out just yesterday to take a look at the project. These guys are the real deal. They both grew up and were trained in England and one has even had experience plastering a straw bale house. Hopefully they come back to us with a reasonable quote, because we really need their experienced crew if we have a chance of getting these next two coats of plaster on before it gets too cold. The share this week is nearly identical to last week's share, except we have a fresh crop of radishes on instead of the swiss chard. I still wanted to pass along a swiss chard recipe that could also incorporate your spicy salad mix as well since it pairs very nicely with eggs: I'm so happy with these little pie pumpkins this year! We do love to make pumpkin pie with fresh pumpkin and yours should keep for a month or two if you'd like to save it for Thanksgiving time. If you'd like to try something a little different, winter squashes are an awesome risotto ingredient. Here's an idea to try and I think it would be delicious with your dill swapped in for the rosemary in this recipe: It's been super dry on the farm the last two weeks and now pretty darn hot the last few days. The veggies could really use some rain, but we've been irrigating them to keep them happy. The plants and humans will definitely appreciate the cooler temperatures on the way. We have lots of delicious fall things on the way!

In the share this week: 1 celeriac/celery head (pictured below) 1 bag spicy salad mix 1 bunch swiss chard 1 lb red onions 1 pie pumpkin 2 sweet italian peppers 1 bunch dill Thoughts from Farmer Anna: Fall is really creeping up on us this week! These last two mornings have been cool enough that it feels good to wear a jacket for a bit before the sun warms us up. It's been harder to get out of bed in the morning since it's so dark. For the record, I'm on team standard time if we have to give up the time change, but honestly I appreciate it and think that a few days of pain in the spring is better than some really dark and brutal mornings for several months in late fall and winter. Seems like I might be in the minority though :) I'm excited about all of the fall crops showing up in the share this week too! Pie pumpkins are always fun and typically keep on the counter for several months, so you can use yours as decoration for awhile before you cook it up. I'll post some recipe ideas for them next week. The swiss chard is finally looking pretty good this fall! We've been dealing with some fungal disease that has affected our chard crops the last few years and trying to fight off the goldfinches (which have learned to nibble on these greens - who knew?!). I'm planning to make a bean soup featuring some swiss chard for our farm lunch tomorrow. I'll share a recipe idea for that next week too. Our spicy salad mix is looking fabulous, so you'll get that this week and next. Don't be intimidated by the 'spicy' moniker, these greens aren't so hot but they are baby mustard greens so they have slighty nutty and mildly spicy similar to a radish. We love these greens fresh in a salad, or cooked in something like a frittata (maybe combined with your chard?). The craziest veggie in your share this week is the celeriac, although it may actually be regular celery that has grown a bigger root. Celeriac is celery root that has been selected for larger root size. Honestly, we thought we were planting a regular celery variety this year, but it has grown some fairly big roots so we're not totally sure which one it was supposed to be. The bonus for you is that each of your roots has a pretty nice amount of celery attached to it. Garden celery is always a bit more fibrous that what you are used to in the store, but it is also much more flavorful so we like to chop it small before cooking it into soups, etc. The root portion of the vegetable is also great for soups and I love the idea of combining your dill with it: You could also use some or all of your celeriac along with other veggie (or scraps) to make a really delicious vegetable stock: Finally, if you don't want to use your dill in the soup above, it is pretty great paired with fish. This is a quick weeknight dinner using your dill and sweet peppers: Hope you all have a great week!

In the share this week: 2 lbs tomatoes 1 bunch cilantro 2 eggplant or 2 summer squash 1 lb green beans 1 bunch green onions 1 pint peppers (jalapenos, aji rico, or mix) 2 bell peppers Thoughts from Farmer Anna: We got away for a couple of days this weekend to go camping with the kids and my parents and to attend the Nowhere Else music festival (http://www.nowhereelsefestival.com/) that was originally scheduled for May of 2020. It often feels difficult to do the planning and packing necessary to get away, but it sure is worth it. Camping forces all of us to slow down to human speed, focusing only on the basic necessities and relaxing. This trip was even better since we got to listen to some amazing music while we relaxed. The kids did admirably well at the music festival, even though it did get boring for them at times and we forgot to pack stuff to keep them occupied. And at the campground, our youngest took off on her bike for the first time and didn't want to stop. I think they'll have fond memories of seeing awesome live music at a farm in the middle of nowhere :) As we enter September, we have the last hurrah of some of the summer veggies in the share this week - green beans and eggplant. One of our members told me that she loves to make eggplant lasagna, which does sound like an awesome way to use this veggie! You could also cook up your tomatoes, peppers and green onions into a pasta sauce to use with the lasagna. Here's a recipe for some ideas: The rain this weekend, while very good for the farm, is also accelerating the demise of some crops that are susceptible to fungal disease late in the year. Many of the tomato plants are looking tough, our second planting of zucchini and summer squash has just barely come on and now the plants are starting to wilt and die. This is all to be expected at this time of year and it comes with a mix of sadness and relief. The slow down is coming and the fall crops that I love so much will be here soon. In fact, next week we'll have a big shift in the share veggies as we turn again to more greens and our winter squash, along with some other special once-a-season crops. If you have too much cilantro this week, remember that you can freeze it for later. We like to blend it up with olive oil and freeze flat in a zip top bag. You could also make this cilantro sauce that would keep in your fridge for a couple of weeks. It's delicious drizzled on lots of dishes! Have a great week everyone!

In the share this week: 1 lb mixed tomatoes 1 bunch green onions 1 bunch cilantro 1 medium head garlic 2 summer squash 1 lb green beans 1 pint aji rico, poblano, or jalapeno peppers 1 sweet italian pepper Thoughts from Farmer Anna: It's salsa time! We have the rare convergence of tomatoes and peppers with cilantro in the share this week. Add garlic and onions from previous weeks and you'll have a seriously tasty salsa in the works. We love to make a roasted salsa around here and it would be great with your tomatoes, sweet pepper, some amount of the hotter peppers, onion and garlic, with cilantro stirred in after blending. Here's a recipe idea for inspiration: The aji rico peppers are new this year and I'm impressed by their production and flavor. We only planted about 20 ft of these little guys, but they have put off lots of fruits! The Tuesday and Thursday shares are getting these this week and we should be able to give them to Wednesday/Saturday shares next week. These peppers taste similar to a bell pepper with a good kick of heat (about half as much as a jalapeno). They would be an excellent addition to your roasted salsa, just add as many as you think you can handle. They would also be great blistered like shishitos or stuffed with cheese like a jalapeno popper. Or you could preserve them in vinegar and make this Puerto Rican style hot sauce: We're on week 3 of green beans, and it's possible they'll still be on next week before they are done for the season, so if you are tired of cooking them you could make dilly beans with this week's batch. Actually, we may have dill in next week's share so maybe you should hold off until then. Or just start pickling the beans this week and add the dill in when you get it. I'm going to leave you this week with a view of our happy little sunflower field. Our summer cover crop mix included sunflowers and they are peaking this week. These flowers lift our spirits every time we glance over that direction and I'm going to be sad to have to mow them down later this week, but we need to make sure the other crops in the mix don't go to seed. All of the awesome biomass from these cover crops will be returned to the soil and mixed in before we plant our overwintering onions in late October. Have a great week everyone!

In the share this week: 1 lb mixed tomatoes 1 lb yellow onions 1 bag carrots 1 lb green beans 1 small garlic 2 bell peppers 2 italian long sweet peppers Thoughts from Farmer Anna: It's hard to believe that August is already half over. These last few weeks have whizzed by with really full days on the farm and working on getting the exterior bales of our house plastered. The kiddos are getting ready to head back to school tomorrow morning and we are welcoming the structure that will bring back to our days. On the farm, we are still getting lots of fall crops planted this week and will probably harvest our little pumpkins to cure in the greenhouse. Our yellow storage onions are cured and looking pretty beautiful, so we've been working on cleaning those up and getting them out of the greenhouse to make way for the pumpkins :) We are loving this milder weather this week! It's nice for all of our little veggie transplants too. The cooler mornings have me dreaming of the slow down that comes with fall. We have more delicious sweet peppers this week! I really love these sweet long italian peppers that are in your shares this week. My plan for our Wednesday farm lunch is to make a fritatta with peppers and onions and tomato. Something a bit like this: We have a new variety of beans in the shares this week. They are something between a traditional green bean and a bigger roma bean. The variety is called Magnum and they are pretty similar to Kentucky Wonder beans if you are familiar with that variety. They look beautiful and are supposed to have a wonderful flavor (we just started picking them so I haven't had a chance to taste them yet!). Maybe a simple preparation like this one below would be good this week. Let us know what you think of them! I'm going to keep it short and sweet this week, since we've got so much going on. I hope you all are enjoying this glorious weather!

In the share this week: 1 bunch beets 1 bunch carrots 1 pint cherry tomatoes 2 eggplant 2 bell peppers 1 bunch sweet basil Specialty pepper mix (banana, poblano and jalapeno peppers) Thoughts from Farmer Anna: It's pepper time this week! The bell peppers are coming on strong and starting to ripen quickly with the hot weather. We've been harvesting the green, red and yellow peppers pictured above and have some purple bells coming as well (although they are a bit smaller generally). I really love sweet peppers and we use them in so many things. They are frequently sauteed with onions for burrito or taco toppings, and they also find their way into lots of soups, curries, stir-fries and vegetable fritters. Oh and pasta sauce! This seems like a great way to use both your peppers and your eggplant this week: The specialty peppers in your share this week include a mix of banana, poblano and jalapeno peppers. If you want to jazz up the pasta sauce above you could throw in the banana peppers and maybe one of the jalapenos. Alternatively, we love to pickle the banana and jalapeno peppers and then eat them on tacos (did I mention that we love tacos here?) or sandwiches or nachos. We do a simple quick pickle like this: I would just slice both your banana and jalapeno peppers and combine them in the pickling liquid. The heat of the jalapenos is really dampened by pickling and the flavor combo of having those together is quite tasty! If you are sauteeing your bell peppers for tacos, you could slice up the poblano and add that in as well. Poblanos have a mild heat and a nice thin skin. They are also great roasted or blistered and would probably be quite good in that pasta sauce too. This new planting of carrots is looking awesome so far! These are some big beefy carrots for mid-summer. With all of the rain we've had over the past few weeks they have really sized up. We spent a lot of hours in early June hand-weeding these babies so I'm happy to see that our hard work paid off :) Carrots and beets are a natural pairing and if you want to keep it simple, maybe you could roast them together on one of these rainy days: Cherry tomatoes are still producing like crazy this week, while the big tomatoes are slowing down just a bit. We'll definitely have many more weeks of tomatoes, so don't worry about that! We just had lots of other awesome veggies this week. On the farm we are busy getting lots of fall crops planted - carrots, napa cabbage, radicchio, rutabaga, sugar snap peas, and more! It's our last big push of planting for the year and it always feels good in mid-September when we can relax just a bit :) Hope you all have a great week!

In the share this week: 1 pint cherry tomatoes 1 lb slicer tomatoes 1 lb mixed onions 1 bag salsa verde mix 1 bunch beets 2 bell peppers Thoughts from Farmer Anna: We survived as amazingly intense and wonderful week getting the straw bale walls installed in our new home. The people who attend straw bale building workshops are incredibly interesting and it was a joy to get to know each of them. It was 8 really full days from Saturday 7/23 - 7/30. Our primary job was to feed the 37 workshop participants 3 meals each day (no small feat!), while the workshop lead (Andrew Morrison from www.strawbale.com), instructed and led folks in the building of the straw bale walls. While each day was physically exhausting, we were filled up by the shared work and the new friendships we were fostering with these amazing people. We fed them lots and lots of farm veggies during the week and folks really seemed to appreciate the care and effort we put into the meals each day. It was empowering to find that we were able to pull off these meals for a large gathering. Now we are dreaming up future farm gatherings on the hilltop in the amazing space we are creating between the farm and this house. There is so much more to say about the week and I'm honestly still processing much of it, but I'll leave it at this: our parents are absolutely amazing. All four of them worked with us throughout the week to help prepare meals, wash dishes, keep the meal areas cleaned, keep our kids fed and shuttled to and from art camp, work on key parts of the build, and pretty much taking care of every little detail that came up. This week was a huge community effort in every sense :) I'm happy to be back working on the farm this week. We are in the process of turning over a lot of beds in preparation for fall crops. Most of these crops will get planted over the next few weeks. It's a busy and exciting time on the farm as it starts to look a bit like spring again. We are also still in maintenance mode for our long term crops like tomatoes and peppers. Speaking of peppers, the first of the bell peppers are in the share this week. We are constantly using peppers and onions in burritos and tacos. If you want to try a nice side dish or a topping for a pasta dish, you can saute your peppers and onions with your cherry tomatoes and a few other ingredients in this classic italian peperonata: We have some really beautiful beets for you this week! If you still haven't found a way that you like beets, give this chocolate cake recipe a try. I wouldn't say it's a health food dessert (there is a lot of butter and sugar involved), but the earthy, sweet beets do give it a rich flavor and a very moist texture. It's a winner in our house! This is probably the last big week for the salsa verde bags. Remember you roast all of these ingredients together and then blend them into a salsa. It should keep in your fridge for about a week. It would be tasty with your tacos if you decide to use your peppers and onions that way :) Have a great week everyone!

In the share this week: 2 lbs tomatoes 1 lb rainbow carrots 1 lb green beans 2 eggplant 1 salsa verde mix bag and 1 bunch green onions or 1 head garlic and 1 bag salad mix/1 quart pickling cucumbers Thoughts from Farmer Anna: Green beans are finally here this week! It's a bit late for our first picking of green beans because we were trying something a little different this year. As our first succession of bean plantings, I planted pole beans for the first time to see if we could get some smaller, more consistently weekly harvests. Well they've only been putting out a few beans here and there until this week. Luckily, our first bush bean planting is also ready to go this week, so we have plenty of beans for CSA. Since we are harvesting from two different varieties you may notice some really long beans in your bags (those are the pole bean variety) and some shorter beans (the bush beans). All of these beans are stringless and quite tasty. There were just a few random roma beans in with the pole beans too, so you may see a larger flat type bean as well. If you've never tried roasting green beans, they are pretty delicious. I found this side dish recipe with roasted green beans and carrots that would be absolutely beautiful with the rainbow carrots: We decided to bag the rainbow carrots this week instead of bunching because their tops were getting weak. Most of you probably don't use the tops anyway, so that works :) The rain we had Sunday and Monday is a nice recharge for the farm, but I'm noticing that some of the fungal disease that had been held at bay by the dry weather is quickly taking hold. Much of this is expected. Our first zucchini and cucumber plantings never last through July before succumbing to disease. We do have a last cucumber planting that is starting to flower and will hopefully produce a few more cukes in August and we put in a fresh zucchini planting last week, but I'm afraid the plants got fried before they were able to establish. We just started another round of seeds just in case. Our eggplants are chugging away putting off so much gorgeous fruit. I know this can be a tough veggie for people to use, so I wanted to share my favorite way to prepare it - Baba Ganoush! If you like hummus, this is a silkier, smokier version. It really is best made with grilled eggplant for max roasty flavor. The tomatoes are producing really well and the cherry tomatoes are starting to come on pretty strong too, so we should have enough of those for all of the shares after we return from our one-week break. We've been enjoying them on some BLTs, in salads, and just straight up eating them with a touch of salt. Yum! Hope you all have a great week!

In the share this week: 1 lb mixed tomatoes 1 bunch rainbow carrots 1+ lb sweet onions 2 eggplant (pictured below) 2 zucchini or squash 1 cucumber 1 salsa verde mix bag or 1 small garlic and 1 bag salad mix Thoughts from Farmer Anna: This is a colorful share this week and there are so many items that I'm excited about! Our eggplants are the healthiest plants we've ever grown and are producing fruit earlier than usual. We are growing three varieties this year, the standard black italian globe shaped, a stripy purple and white italian variety, and a long thin asian type. All of these are producing like crazy right now! It's hard to know exactly why some years are better than others for certain crops. It could be that these plants loved the early hot weather and weren't too bothered about it being a bit dry. It could be that our transplants were extra healthy and got them off to a good start. Thanks, by the way, to our homeschooler group that planted all of these on a Thursday morning back in May :) In any case, we'll enjoy the lovely crop this year and make all of the eggplant things. The second of the beautiful, colorful crops this week are the rainbow carrots! These are a mix of purple, orange, red and yellow carrots and this is another crop that looks like our best ever. The bed these are growing in was recently plowed up to make it deeper and ammended with some soil mix that we had been getting from a local microgreens grower. Often times, the colored varieties are carrots do not fill out as well as orange varieties and just are overall a bit weirder. These varieties haven't had as much breeding and selected as the orange types, so they are just more wild. However, it seems like given perfect growing conditions, they will do pretty well too. So we are very excited to give you some extra lovely rainbow carrots this week. There should be enough to give in shares next week too! The third item I'm excited about this week is less colorful but lots of fun - salsa verde mix bags! We aren't quite picking enough tomatillos for everyone in a week, so the Tuesday and Wednesday shares will be getting these this week and next week it will be the Thursday and Saturday shares. These salsa verde bags were something that Steve and I received as CSA members ourselves while in grad school. In your bag you will find a pound of tomatillos, 1 clove of garlic, 1 jalapeno, 1 banana pepper, and 1 small onion. I really love to make a roasted salsa, so you could generally follow the recipe in the link below, or you can just roast all of these items together at 350 for about 30 minutes before blending them together in a food processor or blender. Unfortunately, the spring cilantro is long bolted so we don't have any of that to add to the bags currently. However, I'm seeding a new round this week and I'm hoping the crop will last into late summer when we may be able to add cilantro into the bags too. If you happened to freeze any from our spring crop, you could definitely add that. Or if you don't like cilantro this salsa is still delicious without it. We have so many awesome crops this week, I haven't even mentioned the tomatoes yet. They are starting to come on strong, so we have lots of extras available in the store to add or swap in your shares. This week is such a classic summer veggie week, so I'm thinking a ratatouille would be a perfect way to use your eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes and sweet onions! Hopefully you aren't getting sick of the onions by the way. We use so many in our house that I assume other people do too! I really love these sweet onions. This will be the last week we'll have them fresh. We are drying some that will be available in a couple of weeks though. Our garlic is now dry and cured and our two beds of storage onions will soon be harvested and headed for curing as well. All of the sudden, this summer seems like it is just speeding by us! Hope you all have a great week!

In the share this week: 1 lb heritage tomatoes or cherry tomatoes 1 bunch carrots 2 cucumbers 1 fennel bulb 1 cabbage head 1 bunch sweet onions 1 bunch sweet basil Thoughts from Farmer Anna: The tomatoes are finally coming on this week! It always feels like a long wait for those beautiful orbs to start ripening. They look so big and so green for so long. And I'm always hopeful we'll start picking in late June, but realistically it's the first week of July. Every time. Since they are just getting going, you'll either get a pound of our big tomatoes (and some of them are 1 lb fruits) or a pint of cherry tomatoes. We have four different varieties of heritage tomatoes - marnero (dark purplish, pink - pictured right), margold (yellow with red striping), abigail (dark pink beefsteak - pictured left), and enroza (smaller dark pink). These varieties are delicious hybrids generally created by breeding heirloom tomatoes together to increase disease resistance while maintaining excellent flavor. We also have four varieties of cherry tomatoes this year - cherry bomb (red), sungold (orange/yellow), black cherry (purplish), and sunrise bumblebee (yellow with red striping). We will typically mix these different varieties of cherries in the same pint, but as we start to harvest more we'll have pints of just red cherry tomatoes available too. Our classic red and orange slicing tomatoes come from determinate varieties and those should be coming on in the next week too. Another new item in the share this week is basil. This herb is a classic pairing with tomatoes and would be good sliced on top of this tomato and fennel salad: I like to give lots of recipe ideas for fennel since it seems to be a vegetable that folks have trouble using and getting to like. The key with fennel is to slice it thinly if eating raw and give it enough cook time is sliced thicker. We also have the last of the spring cabbage this week - either a red cabbage or green. We love sauteed cabbage and onions around here and fennel would be a great addition to this mix. I like the idea of doing a spiced version of this side dish as well, so here's an idea for an indian spiced cabbage and fennel dish: We are in the last three weeks before our strawbale workshop and the timeline is tight to get everything finished. Our slab is getting poured this week as long as the rain timing cooperates. It's a weird spot for me, because the farm definitely needs some rain but I'm also hoping for no rain so we can stay on our timeline. Our Wednesday Ft. Thomas market has really been badly affected by weather this season and it looks potentially bad again tomorrow. I'll be sending a separate email out to those of you who pick up shares in Ft. Thomas with a weather contingency plan. Send your good weather vibes our way! Have a good week everyone!

In the share this week: 1 bunch carrots 1 bunch red long onions (pictured) 1 fennel bulb 1 cucumber 1 bunch dill 2 summer squash or zucchini 1 bag salad mix 1 bunch kale Thoughts from Farmer Anna: We are starting to turn over more beds on the farm from the earliest spring crops and overwintered crops. Believe it or not, we have a good number of beds that will get three crops during the farm season and some are already in their second crop. Nearly all beds get at least two crops each season. Quick bed turnover is one of the reasons that we can grow so much food on less than 2 acres. This week we are planting cucumbers and beans into our early spinach beds and green onions and some trial leeks into the beds that were home to our overwintered spring onions from a month ago. We also completed our first big once-a-season crop harvest yesterday - garlic! Overall, the heads looked pretty good, decent size with very little disease evident. The last couple of weeks without much rain have probably been good for that. Now the heads will cure for a few weeks before they are ready to go out in shares. In house-building news, Steve and Cole (our previous farm hand who is now working on his own property, but is awesome about coming to help us when needed) drove up to a wheat farm a bit southeast of Indianapolis yesterday to get half of the straw bales that we'll need to our house. Today they are back at it getting the other half. We need about 500 total bales for the walls and we were happy to find some relatively close. The first half is taking up most of the space in our farm pack shed and the other half should just fit under the shed roof off the front of the pack shed. Materials logistics feels like one of the hardest parts of building a house (also true of farming to some extent). Luckily, Steve has been able to take a good amount of time off work to brute force many of our logistical challenges! Today the concrete gets poured in the foundation walls, and hopefully we'll have a first floor slab in another week so that the framing crew can get started. We are really down to crunch time trying to be ready for our straw bale wall workshop at the end of July! I'm very excited about the long red onions that are new in your shares this week. They are a fancy italian variety and best for fresh eating. We use tons of onions in our house, and these will probably go in a kale, bean and sausage soup this week. I'm also excited to be digging up the first carrots of the season! We typically have some trouble getting good germination on our first carrot plantings, but these are coming out of one of the hoophouses, so germination was a bit better. You never know how nice or ugly a planting will be until you start digging them, and I have to say that these carrots are pretty decent. To be clear, homegrown carrots always taste amazing. It's just that some plantings have more crazy carrots than others (multiple legs, crazy shapes, etc). We like to include at least one slightly weird carrot in our bunches as proof of authenticity :) These sweeties are delicious raw for snacking, or you could combine some of them with cucumber and onion in this fresh salad: More summer squash and zucchini this week! I might make veggie fritters for our farm lunch tomorrow with zucchini and kohlrabi. I was also reminded of a delicious casserole combo that uses fennel along with zucchini. Fennel has a light anise flavor and pairs really well with sausage since most sausages contain fennel seeds as part of their flavor. If you haven't found a way to use fennel that you liked, please give something like this recipe a try! It has a wonderful flavor and texture combo. Have a great week everyone!