Beginning again!

(CSA Newsletter: Spring Week 1)

Meet this week’s vegetables

Hoorah! The Oakhill Organics’s CSA eating adventure begins again! A hearty welcome to everyone joining us for the first time this year—we hope that the experience brings new joys to your life. And a joyous welcome back to all of you joining us again for a second time—we are grateful to have you with us.

We are so excited about this season that it’s hard to even know where to begin with our first newsletter. We have much to tell you after several months apart (although we’ve kept up to date on the farm blog: http://www.oakhillorganics.org/blog.html). Although this is our second season as Oakhill Organics, we are in some ways beginning all over again on our new land this year.

The winter and spring have exceeded our expectations, however, in terms of what we were able to accomplish out here—both on the farm end of things, but also in terms of our domesticity. In addition to moving the farm business to the new location, we also managed to build ourselves a small house! Needless to say, it was a productive and crazy winter. Starting up the summer routine again actually sounds like a relief after months of building and moving our infrastructure!

But we’ll share more about the farm and our activities out here in future newsletters. Since this is our first week, our primary goal is to orient (or reorient) you to the CSA: both what to expect this year and how to best enjoy the experience.

First of all, expect good quantities of some amazing fresh seasonal veggies. The stuff in our fields is looking more gorgeous than ever, and we hope to deliver some of the most beautiful, nutritious and tasty vegetables around. As those of you with us last year will remember, we had a few moments with bug problems, fertility issues and such—all natural, continuing challenges of chemical-free gardening. This year, however, we’re on some great land with a plentiful supply of water, and we can already see a marked difference in the size and quality of the veggies (and it’s still early!). Some items will still have a few cosmetic dings—perfection is different than quality and we tolerate small flaws in exchange for a healthier product—but overall we think you will be pleased with the flavor, texture, and appearance of our product.

And, as we did last year, we have planted a diverse range of vegetables for you to try over the season. Although each season will have a natural tendency towards greens, fruits or roots, within each period we hope to expose you to a variety of vegetables to experiment with—sometimes even within one type (for example, we grow four different beets!). Our hope is that the variety will keep you interested in your veggies and allow you try tasty new things (and hopefully enjoy them!).

Which leads us to the sometimes challenging part of the CSA concept: because we harvest what is fresh and most delicious from the fields each week, you don’t get to choose which veggies you take home. At first this may seem like a daunting way to plan your weekly meals, but we hope you will embrace the creative opportunity seasonality presents you. In reality, eating this way most accurately reflects eating from the garden—you eat what comes into season when it is freshest rather than when you decide you want to.

It’s a shift in how we think about eating and cooking for sure, one that we here at Oakhill Organics discovered only a few years ago when we first worked on a farm. However different it may have been at first, we found seasonal eating actually increased our eating pleasure, due to the addition of unexpected and delightful flavors.

But we acknowledge that this way of eating is a marked shift from the standard American diet, so we will help you out along the way by providing recipes, serving suggestions, and other tips on how to best appreciate a seasonal veggie rich diet. We also offer the Asparagus to Zucchini cookbook we advertised in the brochure—check with us about available copies. Other CSA members are also a resource for new ideas, and we encourage you to check in with other folks at the pick-up site about how they are preparing their veggies.

In addition to gathering new recipes, we encourage you to read the newsletter each week for updates on the farm. We love being able to keep you connected to what we’re doing in the fields: sharing in the joys and the trials equally as a community. We also post mid-week photos and stories on our blog, and we post each week’s newsletter there as well (within 24 hours of the Tuesday pick-up). If you’d like to help us save paper, consider becoming a ‘web newsletter only’ member—sign up at the pick-up site and we will reduce our newsletter copies by one!

… to even more directly connect you to the farm, we’re hoping to have some open houses out here. Unfortunately with our busy winter and spring, we have yet to pin down dates—but we promise to do that soon so that you can put them on your rapidly filling calendars! Until next week, thank you again for joining us in this local eating adventure. Enjoy the vegetables!

Your farmers,

Katie & Casey Kulla
Oakhill Organics

Vegetable storage tips

Keeping your veggies fresh is crucial to enjoying their full nutritional & taste potential. Since we harvest all of our CSA items less than 24 hours before your pick them up, they should keep longer than their store equivalent—if stored properly immediately after you return home. We recommend storing all green vegetables (leafy greens, broccoli, cabbage) in the fridge, stored loosely (not packed tight) in a sealed plastic bag. Fresh root crops—such as radishes, beets and turnips—also keep best in a sealed bag in the fridge. Colored fruits—such as summer squash, tomatoes, & eggplant—prefer a cool room temperature, out of direct sunlight. Dry storage veggies—winter squash, potatoes, dry onions—also like a dry, cool place with good air circulation, such as an open paper bag or box in a cool pantry.