Meet this week’s vegetables:
- Red romaine lettuce — If you haven’t noticed yet, it’s spring spring spring in our CSA shares these days! And for vegetables spring means greens! This is an especially beautiful lettuce that has the classic tall romaine shape but with a deep purple/magenta color (and a slight iridescent sheen).
- Red leaf lettuce — We’ve been loving this sweet simple red leaf lettuce for our salads lately. Such an easy base for so many filling toppings! We like adding more substantial toppings to our salads to make them the center of our meal (especially at lunch). Some of our recent favorite toppings: garbanzo beans, tuna, dried cherries, salad turnips, cheddar cheese, and cooked barley (not necessary all at once however!).
- Rapini (mixed) — So much rapini this week! You’ll have the choice between many different kinds and have the option of taking up to four bunches this week.
- Broccoli — I’m pretty sure we ate roasted broccoli every day this week. When it’s roasted on a sheet pan with oil and salt, the leaves turn crisp while the stalk gets soft and tender. In spite of what else we might cook and serve with the same meal, the broccoli always gets eaten first. Rusty loves it too.
- Radishes OR turnips — Your choice between these two great salad topping roots.
- Potatoes — The potatoes we’ve been giving out lately have been freshly dug this spring, which is why they have such moist, smooth texture and sweet flavor.
- Leeks
- Garlic
This week marks a momentous occasion — we officially own more land on Grand Island! That’s right, we finally closed on the sale of the adjacent 31 acres.
Whew! It’s been a long process getting to this point and we just wrote a really big check last week (making things a little tight for the next few weeks around here), but we’re so excited about the opportunities presented by this land base expansion.
The land purchase also provides a lot to share with you all, so I’m going to talk about the new land over the next couple newsletters. This week I want to write about the thought process that went into this decision (next week we’ll talk more about the land itself and what we plan to do there) …
As I said, the purchasing process has gone on a long time, in part because it took longer than expected to secure a loan. We started officially working on this process just after the New Year. Since then, there has been lots of paperwork and then waiting and then more paperwork and then phone calls and questions and then more paperwork.
It’s all gone on long enough to provide many opportunities for us to second guess ourselves and question WHY ARE WE DOING THIS?
We already owned 17.5 acres (about 13 that are cultivatable), and we’ve been able to make our family’s living off of this small acreage since we first bought it. Our farm has been profitable since the beginning (it helped that we had some savings to start of course), and we haven’t had off farm income since we first put seeds in the ground back in 2006.
In the last couple years, as our infrastructure development has slowed way down, we’ve even started having enough money to feel comfortable (albeit on a relatively modest income) and think about saving for the future in ways other than investing in the farm itself. We were also on track to be completely debt-free by 2017 (no mortgage even!).
So, we were meeting our financial goals already — why mess with success and add more land, thus requiring a significant revisioning of our farm????
The answer to that lies in why we started farming to begin with. As I’m sure you could have guessed, we did not start our farm to get rich (although we did always plan to at least provide for our own income!). Money is important to a successful farm in that we need it to develop the farm’s potential and to keep our own family afloat. But unlike in other jobs and professions, the money is definitely not the primary motivator.
The reality is: we like farming. We like the work we do. We love being outside, working together, working at home. We love plants and enjoy watching them grow. We enjoy the challenge of daily problem solving (how do we best irrigate this field? in what order should we work up the ground? where should we plant the lettuce next? what’s wrong with the tractor?). Even though there are stressful moments, we have a lot of fun farming and love that our work keeps our bodies and our minds in good shape.
And, ultimately, we love feeding people good quality food and knowing that our work produces vegetables that are so utterly good — good at nourishing our bodies, good for satisfying our hunger and desire for tasty things, a good financial deal for our customers, good for the soil and environment, and good for building community and connections.
We love our work so much that when the opportunity arose to buy the land next-door and thus expand our farm in new ways, we really couldn’t resist. We did take time to think it over and talk through all the possibilities of staying small or getting bigger.
Our farm is going to change forever, in some significant ways. Never again will it be small enough for Casey and me to manage completely on our own. And, we will have increased costs (some of them quite fixed) for many years to come.
But, we also have room to plant new and different things, increase the time each bit of ground is in fallow or cover crop, provide job opportunities for awesome local folks, and have a never ending supply of daily problems needing to be solved (yay!).
From a bigger picture view, we’re also glad that our purchase represents 31 more acres of organic ground on Grand Island (and needless to say, it is also ground that will never become a gravel quarry). The parcel on the other side (54 acres) also recently sold and will be put into organic production as well. The air, soil and water are getting a little bit cleaner around here thanks to these sales. Yay!
Next week: more about the land and our plans!!! In the meantime, enjoy this week’s vegetables!
Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla
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New!!!! Extra veggies sales after 6:30!
Things have changed since we started offering the Medium share this year — namely, we are harvesting way more total veggies than we know people will take in the goal of keeping all our veggies available even though two-thirds of you will only be taking five items each week (but we never know in what combination!). We’re still trying to work out the best strategy for planning, but it seems that to make the Medium share work we will always have to harvest extra.
Which means that suddenly we have a lot of leftovers by the end of CSA pick-up at 6:30 pm — way more than we used to have when we harvested just the right amount. Back then, we’d figure everything had already been paid for one, so we donated any leftovers to the food bank. But now our leftovers are in a different category — they are truly extra veggies.
We often have people ask if they can buy extra of favorite items (even beyond the choice offered by the Medium share!), and now we do have extras every time, but we won’t ever know which until 6:30 pm.
So, we’re going to try a new thing where we stick around after 6:30 pm for an extra 15-30 minutes to allow people to buy veggies! If you know you’ll want more, you can come toward the end, although many of you seem to live close by enough that you might come twice?
We’ll start this week and try it for a while to see how it works. Bring cash or checks to pay for your purchases!
