(CSA Newsletter: Week 7)
Meet this week’s vegetables:
Happy Spring everyone! In honor of the changing season, we had a highly productive week out here on the farm.
After last week’s CSA harvest and pick-up, on Wednesday morning we headed south to Minto Island Growers in Salem, where we harvested hundreds of willow cuttings from their diverse productive stoolbeds. They sell the willow cuttings commercially for restoration projects, but we used our cuttings to once again try and start a hedge along our property.
For those of you who haven’t yet visited the farm, our property is long and is bordered on one side by a county road. It’s a quiet county road, but we still enjoy the idea of having more privacy in our fields someday. Plus, we’d like to have a hedge that could act as a further buffer between us and our conventional farmer neighbors (we already leave plenty of space, but it never hurts to place a living ‘wall’ between us and their sprays as well).
If you’ve been reading our newsletters and blog regularly for several years, you’ll probably say: “Hey, wait! Haven’t they planted a hedge before?”
Yes, we have. Twice before. Once in 2007, when we took cuttings from wild plants and stuck them in the ground. We realize now that our cuttings were much too small, and we didn’t have enough water that year to irrigate them during the dry summer. We planted an English Laurel hedge in 2008, which suffered a similar fate of no irrigation.
So, third time’s the charm, right? This time around, our cuttings are significantly larger and more robust, and we plan to irrigate them as needed over the next year or two. We’re very excited about this potential new hedge. Willows are gorgeous in the winter and summer, and we cut from several different varieties, each with a slightly different color bark (ranging from bright yellow to deep brown orange). As they become established and grow, we will ‘copice’ them to keep them short and encourage branching.
But the excitement didn’t end there! Thanks to an extended warm and dry spell, Casey was able to begin serious ground prep work. On Thursday, he mowed the cover crop on several sections of our 2010 vegetable fields. On Friday, he worked that same ground with our chisel plow and then our new disc. On Saturday, he followed up with our final tillage device: a Lely Roterra (similar to a tiller but works in a horizontal rather than vertical circular motion). Late on Saturday, he ‘marked’ the rows for planting.
And, in an attempt to beat the rain, on Sunday, Casey planted. And planted. And planted. It was the biggest planting session that he’s ever done solo—19 beds—and he was grateful as ever for all the efficiencies we’ve built into our planting system (especially the Drangen self-propelled planting platform!!!!).
So, thanks to Casey’s diligence, we now have lots of yummy stuff in the ground: peas, fava beans, lettuce, cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, and more! This is the most ground we’ve had planted this early in the season, and we are very excited about getting you spring vegetables in a few weeks! Of course, the plants still have lots of growing to do, but some crops such as radishes grow lickety-split.
In the meantime, we still have lots of delicious winter veggies to eat, including this week’s wide array of different rapinis — eat them raw; chop and sauté; or toss with oil and roast whole in the oven. Whatever way you prepare them, enjoy this week’s vegetables!
Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla
