Our first early season ends

(CSA Newsletter: Early Season Week 15)

Meet this week’s vegetables:

  • Radishes — Harvested from our later spring plantings, these radishes far exceed the first round we gave out a few weeks ago. Enjoy their sweet flavor on a salad or try the recipe in this week’s newsletter. The lush greens are also edible. We recommend preparing them as you would mustards: sauteed with onions or garlic.
  • Salad mix
  • Russian kale leaves & rapini — The final picking from our over-wintered kale: bunches of mixed leaves and rapini. Immediately after we harvested these bunches on Monday, Casey finally mowed down our tall stands of flowering over-wintered ‘brassicas.’ It was a momentous occasion, worthy of photos and all. We’d been clinging to those over-wintered vegetables like a comfort blanket during this cool spring. They’ve been very good to us (and good to eat!) — after picking from these kale plants for eight months (!), they feel like old friends. But, when they started reaching six and seven feet tall, a seed company representative stopped by to ask about our ‘arugula seed crop’ … so we figured it was time. We don’t want our blooming plants to disrupt any of our neighbor’s seed crops (via unintentional cross pollination)!
  • Chard — Your choice between rainbow or green chard this week. Both over-wintered.
  • Baby carrots
  • Garlic
  • Onions
  • This week marks the end of our first ‘Early’ CSA season. Next week, we’ll begin the ‘Main’ season (running 20 weeks, from June 27 through October 7), and many changes occur in the transition to the new season.

    For one thing, pick-up moves to the First Baptist Church parking lot, at the corner of 1st St. and Cowls St. The pick-up will remain on Tuesdays, from 3:30 – 6:30 pm, but we’ll enjoy being outdoors during the nice part of the year. A few more folks will be joining us for the main season, even as some of you will be leaving us temporarily this season in favor of your home gardens or the farmers market.

    Alas, some of you will be leaving us permanently, as a few of our beloved CSA members move on to Portland, Eugene, Texas, and Utah. One of our CSA members is even leaving us after this season because she has been busy starting her own farm this spring and will soon be eating her own delicious vegetables instead of ours! Congratulations, Florence, and Happy Growing! (Check out Florence’s new farm’s website: www.artisanorganics.net)

    As we end our first early CSA season, we’ve been reflecting on how it went. As we’ve stated many times, growing and harvesting in the winter was a big experiment for us. We knew that ‘technically’ it could be done, but not many people endeavor to do so. We certainly aren’t the first farmers to have an almost year-round CSA, but it does put us in a small minority.

    Although there were some challenging moments, overall we feel great about the early season. Actually, now that we’re fully in a wild and crazy spring, we feel like winter farming was easier and more predictable than our current season. (Who would have guessed?) We loved being able to provide locally grown produce to you, our community of eaters, during a season generally barren of local options. Plus, for us, harvesting for the CSA provided some nice routine for our winter workweeks. (Vast weeks of unstructured ‘work’ time reminds us too much of graduate school. We like some schedules and routines.) We’re definitely hooked on winter farming, as we expected to be.

    Of course, there are things we’ll do differently now that we have a better idea of the season. For one thing, this year our goal was primarily to have enough food every week — secondarily, to have a diverse selection. Now that we feel more confident about what to expect and how different vegetables perform in winter, we hope to offer even more diversity from week to week next year. Yes, you can still expect a fair amount of cabbage, onions and leeks (it is winter, after all), but we hope to have enough variety to mix it up even more than we did this year.

    We were especially pleased with Asian greens’ performance in winter (their general challenge is in spring and summer), so we hope to offer more of those: bok choy, tatsoi, and such. We also hope to have more winter storage roots: parsnips, beets, salsify, etc.

    We’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on the early season too, if you have any. We’ll offer our usual end of season evaluation later this summer for general CSA commentary, but if you any early season specific feedback, please drop us a note or an email (farm(at)oakhillorganics.org). If it helps for you to have guiding questions, here are a few:

  • What was especially positive for you and your family during the CSA early season?
  • Were there any particular challenges for you in the early season shares?
  • Keeping in mind the nature of the season, do you have any suggestions that might overall improve the early season?
  • Any wonderful surprises worth noting?
  • Although the transition to our next season is exciting, it’s also been looming ahead on the calendar scarily this spring. Since it’s been so cold, the growth of everything has been slower than we expected. This week that changed.

    We try to avoid falling into the easy ‘complain about all weather’ farmer mode, but this week we felt sucker punched by the onset of record hot weather after weeks of mild, cool temperatures. Friday was especially difficult as the temperature here was just shy of 100° in the shade.

    For one thing, we weren’t personally prepared for the rapid shift. Our bodies just hadn’t acclimated to warm weather yet, and we were knocked out by the sun and heat. We ended up holing up in our garage for the afternoon, reading and drinking water (we would have sat under the walnut tree, but it isn’t even in leaf yet!).

    But, more discouragingly, the plants weren’t ready for the heat either. Normally, most of our plants are a little more established in the ground before we receive such dry, windy hot weather. And, I think we also made some tactical errors — we were led astray by the mildness of the spring (again, not being prepared for summer’s onslaught). Consequently, we may have lost our entire planting of celeriac. We planted it out only on Wednesday (it was gorgeous), but we hadn’t sufficiently ‘hardened off’ the plants, and we didn’t think to water them again immediately after watering them in Wednesday evening. By Friday afternoon, they were shrunken and shriveled. They haven’t really recovered, despite ample irrigation. Lesson learned. And, we’ve sowed some more celeriac already.

    Apparently, you all realized the importance of staying cool during the heat as well — we had an almost no show for our planned farm event on Saturday. We were actually relieved that no one came to the work party since it was above 95° at the scheduled time — smart, smart people. A few folks came for the potluck, and we all enjoyed sharing a quiet meal in the shade.

    On the bright side, thanks to our new irrigation set-up, we were able to keep on top of watering almost everything (besides the celeriac), so the heat brought a welcome boost for most crops. Our over-wintered sweet onions are starting to bulb, and the peas have doubled in height and are just beginning to bloom!

    It seems like summer might be here to stay (with, I’m sure, a few dips and drizzles in June). Despite the sweat, sunburned arms and first mosquito bites of the year, we say, ‘hip hip hooray!’

    If you are one of those moving on after this week, thank you for joining us this season! And, to the rest of you, we’ll see you next week at First Baptist Church! Enjoy the vegetables!

    Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla

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