Meet this week’s vegetables:
- Winter salad mix — A mix of hardy winter fresh eating greens: arugula, ruby streaks mustard, magma mustard, komatsuna, scarlet ohno greens, casteflranco chicory, treviso chicory, wirosa cabbage, palla rossa chicory, golden giant escarole, and deadon cabbage. These greens make a delicious and beautiful salad. Because they are rugged winter greens, we recommend chopping and tossing with a dressing before serving (to let wilt just slightly).
- Brussels sprouts — These are the last of this season’s Brussels sprouts! The season is moving on!
- Sweet potatoes — Remember to store your sweet potatoes in a warmer space. An open basket in your pantry is perfect. Do not put them in the fridge, or they will turn hard. (They are a semi-tropical vegetable after all and prefer temperatures above 55°!)
- Sunchokes — Try the simple sunchoke recipe in this week’s newsletter.
- Butternut winter squash — This is also the last of this year’s Butternut!
- Popcorn — To pop your corn, begin by removing the kernels from the cob. Start at one end and push the kernels with your thumbs toward the end of the cob. Once the first few are off, it gets easier to pry off the others. Sometimes they fly off, so we usually do this over a large bowl. For fun, you can also try dropping the cob from a height into a hard bowl (metal or ceramic) — usually many of the kernels will pop off each time you drop it (Rusty really likes doing this, so we have corn all over our house). Once the kernels are free, pop as you would any bulk popcorn — on the stove or in a popcorn popper!
- Leeks
- Garlic
As we explained last week, we’re moving ahead with our unexpected but exciting expansion plans.
We signed the purchase agreement to buy the adjacent 31 acres last Wednesday. We still need to get financing lined up and then close, which could take another few weeks or months. But it’s movement forward!
As you’ll see in the Newberg announcement in this week’s newsletter, we’re working hard to fine tune our plans for the future — what the expansion will look like, how we’ll approach it, and on what timeline. Fortunately, winter is a great time to plan. Casey and I have spent many mornings lingering over coffee, talking and talking about crop rotations, new enterprises, and budgets (while Rusty wandered around the living room, placing blocks on shelves and bugging the cats).
As part of our movement forward, I finally took the time to fully update our farm website — including the big step of switching completely over to WordPress software. For those of you who don’t know, WordPress is a blog software that is flexible enough to serve as the platform for an entire website (but with easy access to pages for updating). The website looks different, and you may need to update your links to the blog (it’s now: www.oakhillorganics.org/blog — no .html at the end). Check it out!
This week, we also interviewed several applicants who would like to work with us this year (and hopefully for several more years after that). We walked around our farm a lot, talking about our plans and hearing other people’s stories. Of course, it was a gorgeous week for walking around the farm — the sun even came out this weekend, making it a perfect time for Rusty to practice his outdoor walking skills.
It’s supposed to get cold again this week, but now that we’re in February spring feels imminent. We’ll begin our spring sowing very soon, and the season will begin picking up its pace!
Enjoy this week’s vegetables!
Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla
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Attention Newberg & Dundee folks!
It’s official — we are adding a CSA drop in Newberg this year!
We’re still working out the full details, but so far we know it will be a traditional box-style share; the season will probably run from June through November; and pick-up will be on Thursday afternoons.
The packed box-style will help us add the additional harvest and drop in a streamlined fashion (we may transition to a similar pick-up style in future years, depending on how this goes). And, the later start will give us time to get things planted this spring before harvesting more veggies for more people.
If you’re currently participating in our McMinnville-based CSA, you can switch over if you’d like. We’ll prorate and adjust your total season price since the two shares will end up being slightly different in price. Once we have a final price, we’ll let you know how this would work.
We’re going to get final price and season length details together ASAP, but we have some work for you to do too! We still need a place for the drop site! We figured that you all know your town better than we do, so we’re looking for ideas. Ideally, we’re looking for a sheltered area (shade and rain protection) with easily accessible parking that isn’t in a super quiet residential neighborhood (mostly we don’t want to bother anyone!).
This year, we’re aiming to have at least 40 Newberg CSA members, so there needs to be room for 40 of our bins (which would stack to fill an area about 5.5’ wide, 4’ deep, and 4’ tall), plus people and an a-frame signboard. This area could easily fit in the back of an empty garage or carport, on a deep porch or in another kind of covered area. If a CSA member has a suitable place, we would love to compensate you with a free share (plus you’d have your pick of the leftovers).
We’ve received a few suggestions, but some have slipped our mind and could use reminders. If you can email or call us, that would be ideal (CSA pick-up can get kind of crazy and we don’t usually have time to write things down). We’ll do a scouting field trip to Newberg sometime in the next few weeks to check out the options.
Anyhow, we are very excited about this expansion of our CSA! If you’ve had friends who were interested, this is their opportunity!
