Plan your summer

Sugar snap peas growing and growing!

Sugar snap pea vines growing and growing! Much to look forward to this spring!

This week on the farm seemed to bring more of the same good stuff we’ve been seeing all spring: good work weeding, planting, sowing. Warm sunny days punctuated by little squalls and drizzles. Growth all around.

Perhaps you’d like to come and see some of this goodness firsthand? Our CSA Potato Planting Party is next week! We’ve decided that it would helpful for us to know how many people to expect for this event, so Please RSVP if you are coming! To make RSVP’ing easy, I’ll have an RSVP sign-up sheet at pick-up the next two weeks that you can just write your name and number of people on. The planting will happen Friday, May 1. We’ll gather at 3 pm to plant and then eat a potluck meal at 5 pm (or earlier if the planting goes quickly enough! We’ve already been planting some of the seed, so this will be the last of it!).

Directions to the farm: Take HWY-18 to the Dayton exit. Drive straight through Dayton and keep heading south on Wallace Rd/HWY-221. In about seven miles, turn LEFT onto Grand Island Rd. After the bridge, turn RIGHT onto SE Upper Island Rd. Our driveway is immediately on your LEFT. Please park somewhere on the right side of the driveway or in the back by the white pole barn. We will be out in the field to the south, past our greenhouses and house (ours is the 2-story wood house on the back right of the driveway). If you get lost or have questions, you can call me: 503-474-7661. Remember to let us know to expect you! Thank you!

Can’t make it this time? No problem! This is mostly just for the fun of it — the potatoes will get planted either way, but we love including you in the farm. We’ll have two more CSA farm events this season as well:

  • Saturday, August 15, 5 pm — CSA dinner (with farm tours before)
  • Sunday, October 25, 2-4 pm — CSA pumpkin patch open house

The pumpkin patch event is always super fun — we have a tradition of having live music at the event, and we often even get good weather! More details on those events to come as we get closer. We’re curious what your thoughts might be for the dinner. Would people be willing to pay to come to a catered event? We did that once upon a time, and it was exhausting but amazing (that time we didn’t charge, but realistically we’d need to!). Or we could just do a friendly potluck! If you have thoughts on that, share them with us! We hope you can join us for one event this year! We love being able to share this beautiful place with our community of eaters.

And, while you’re planning for summer, we’ve been asked to share our thoughts for home gardeners. Yes, many of our CSA member also keep a garden! What things would be good to plant this year to complement your CSA options?

As usual, we are planting a wide range of items — loads of annual vegetables, of course. You can expect to see regular supplies of all the veggies we consider staples: greens, roots, summer fruits (zucchini, beans, etc.), onion-y things, etc. All year-long we’ll have a diverse range of offerings available, just as we do now (what’s available will just shift with the seasons). We’ll also have seasonal fruits available: strawberries, cherries, raspberries, melons, plums, apples, pears, etc. For those of you who like to can and freeze, we aim to have extra quantities of the classic “putting up” foods available for you to purchase (tomatoes, basil, cucumbers, beans, berries, etc.). We’re also growing flowers and will have bouquets for sale at pick-up during the summer!

So, where does that leave you? I say, grow what you love to grow! And certainly grow staples that your family just loves. There are also a few small fruited items that we either aren’t growing at all this year (such as cherry tomatoes) or that people just seem to want more than we can ever seem to grow or pick (peas! broccoli!). So I always recommend those for home gardens too. If there’s something specific you’re wondering about, feel free to ask us at pick-up. Hopefully that helps you get started!

Enjoy this week’s vegetables!

Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla

~ ~ ~

Meet this week’s vegetables:

  • Salad turnips — Smooth, sweet flavor for crunchy snacks or salad toppings! I always make sure to save the greens too. I love adding them to other cooked greens dishes. They cook super fast, so I generally add them toward the end.
  • Fennel bulb — This is probably the #1 confusing vegetable for people. I think we get the most questions about how to use it of anything. Makes sense, because it doesn’t obviously fit into any clear cooking category — it’s not clearly a root or a green. It’s a vegetable! Generally speaking, I just add the fennel bulb to whatever cooked greens we’re eating. I trim the butt and chop it fine up through the stalks and add to the butter with my onions/leeks/garlic. Let me tell you, folks — that smell is going to knock your socks off. For me, the smell of fennel sautéing is a powerful trigger for physical memories of past seasons. I.Love.It. The fennel addition will change the flavor of your whole dish — fennel pairs well with tomatoes, fish, white wine, pepper, lemon (you don’t need to do all of those at once! I just want to help you “place” it “culinarily”). The leafy fronds are the part that looks more familiar to many people. We enjoy these too, but they have a strong flavor (they are more akin to the herb fennel), so I recommend using them sparingly in salad dressings or on meat or mixed into cooked greens. Adjust your volume to your taste preference.
  • Chard
  • Stinging nettles
  • Kale
  • Parsley
  • Carrots
  • Kohlrabi
  • Beets
  • Potatoes
  • Leeks — Here on the farm, we’ve all been experimenting with “full leek usage.” Jasper, Casey, and I all agree — leeks greens are delicious! Yep! How awesome to discover that the entire leek can be used in a meal. Here’s how: first, I clean and chop the base of the leek like normal (split and chop into half moons). Then I carefully clean and finely chop the greens (removing any yellowed bits) and put them in with the other leeks to cook. In the final resulting food, the leek greens have a texture like any other cooked green, but they impart more of that delicious leek flavor to it all! (Meanwhile, the base of your leek will likely have all but disappeared into your food — they are so good at cooking away their texture!)
  • Garlic
  • Corn flour — Wanted to try our corn flour but haven’t had a chance yet? Here’s your opportunity! We love this stuff. We grew it on our farm (of course), from organic non-GMO seed stock. We grind it ourselves too. Our favorite applications for eating is to make pancakes, but it’s useful in any kind of “quick bread” recipe (muffins, etc.).
  • Eggs

And this week’s extra goodies from the farm: Remember to bring containers when appropriate! Especially for eggs!

  • Corn flour  — $5 lb
  • Oat flour — $5 lb
  • Walnuts — $5 lb
  • Fermented garlic paste! — Back again, by popular demand! This is some potent stuff. Spread it on a slice of fresh baguette. Put it in salad dressing. Each it by the spoonful. So amazing. $9 / half pint (it will already be in jars).
  • Eggs — $4 dozen
  • Pork cuts — We’ve got chops, ground pork, pork belly, and lots of roasts! Prices vary.
  • Pork fat & skin — $3 lb
  • Lamb — We’ve got one lamb shoulder and one deboned leg of lamb left (and organs! Lamb organs are the best!). We’ll take some more lambs to the butcher soon, but for now the lamb lovers better act fast!
  • Ground beef — $7 for 1 lb package
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