(CSA Newsletter: Early Season Week 9)
Meet this week’s vegetables:
As you’ll remember, we held last week’s CSA pick-up outdoors to celebrate the beautiful sunny warm weather we hoped would last longer than a few days. As we all know by now, that dry window of spring weather was cut short on Friday by more cold rain.
Sigh.
Even the non-farmers among us are probably feeling the affect of a colder than average spring. The real start to warm weather keeps eluding us, and here at the farm we are still in late winter’s holding patterns: building fires in the woodstove, drinking coffee, sowing seeds into flats, planning, visiting other farms. These are all good things, but we’re getting antsy to be in the fields planting. The beginning of the CSA main season and farmers market is only six weeks away …
Fortunately, we did manage to plant twelve beds last Thursday. We hope the plants do well despite our rough ground prep job, but I suppose that’s all we can do right now.
Our only real news since last week is that we tried out riding a Drängen, the tracked harvesting/planting vehicle we mentioned last week. I posted some pictures if you want to see what this odd-sounding tool looks like — check out my Sunday blog entry.
I’ve included several recipes on the blog with this week’s newsletter to help you try new variations on some of the veggies we’ve been eating for awhile now. If anyone else has other serving suggestions or great recipes, please pass them on!
Enjoy this week’s vegetables!
Your farmers,
Katie & Casey Kulla
Oakhill Organics
Rainy day reading
I’m just finishing reading a great book: Little House on a Small Planet: Simple Homes, Cozy Retreats, and Energy Efficient Possibilities (2006). In addition to being your farmer, I (Katie) have had a lifelong love of small houses. Last winter, Casey and I built our own cozy little house (500 sq ft) that I designed.
The size and efficiency of our dwellings is at least as significant in determining our ecological footprint as what we eat. What I love about this book (unlike few I’ve read before) is that Shay Salomon takes a holistic, diverse approach to the question of ‘how should we live?’ She addresses scale, materials, lifestyle, family structure, and more. It’s very well done, packs a powerful undiluted message, and offers many diverse real world examples. Highly recommended.
