Welcome to winter!

(CSA Newsletter: Early Season Week 1)

Meet this week’s vegetables:

Hello again friends! Thank you for joining us in our first-ever ‘early season,’ a true adventure in seasonal eating. We think that winter has some tasty treats in store for you this year, but you may also find yourself challenged at times by the reality of eating in season.

Why? By eating seasonally, you intimately experience the world you live in, including the weather’s fluctuations. This season you will experience — through vegetables — every cold snap, rainy spell and the warmth of early spring.

To make eating in this difficult season possible at all, we have selected to grow only the hardiest (and tastiest) vegetable varieties: cabbages, leeks, potatoes, kale, and more. Most of these vegetables we sowed or planted months ago — the leeks in this week’s share were sown a year ago this month. While they live valiantly through the cold and rain, winter vegetables simply endure more months of exposure than summer plants — to weather, rodents, disease, and more. Field mice nibble innocuously at carrot greens (& sometimes carrot shoulders) and wind whips through Brussels sprout stalks. Over time, these minor attacks add up to cosmetically imperfect vegetables.

As always, in this season and beyond, we will strive to deliver only the highest quality vegetables to you and your family. But in winter, our definition of quality must accommodate the season itself. Thus, we hope that you will embrace the place you live and its seasons by welcoming minor blemishes.

For best enjoyment, we recommend that you give all your veggies a ‘once over’ before use. Often we will approve an otherwise large beautiful winter squash, Brussels sprout stalk, or cabbage if it is 90% perfect — but you will want to be aware of the imperfect part and remove it before use. As always, we also recommend washing produce again before use, as our goal is to simply remove the majority of field dirt from items rather than prepare them for consumption.

So that you know what to expect in terms of types of vegetables, we have a lot of delicious looking cabbages, potatoes, leeks, Brussels sprouts, onions and garlic in the fields and storage right now. You will probably receive some of those vegetables almost every week until they are finished. We also have plenty of cooking greens, root vegetables (turnips, beets, celeriac & more) and some other potential surprises we hope will develop as the days lengthen & warmth returns.

Right now many items are still recovering from the freezing spell we experienced two weeks ago. The kale and chard incurred some damage but are valiantly putting on new growth even today. Other items were wiped out, including our over-wintering peas that had survived the rest of winter with gusto. Oh well. As we’ve said before, the winter CSA is still in the experimental stage for us. We planted a wide range of items, hoping that enough would survive to get us all through to spring.

So far, we think we will have more than enough food for the upcoming months. The time that looks most uncertain is March and early April, when we expect to be finished with the over-wintered items and hopefully moving onto spring planted veggies … if spring progresses as normal, we should be enjoying radishes and fresh greens then. But spring is about as uncertain as winter. Sometimes winter lingers into March, bringing snow or freezing spells into spring. And here on Grand Island we must always consider that melting spring snow pack could trigger a spring flood. So, we’ll continue to work towards spring and see.

We hope that none of this ‘winter is hard’ talk is daunting or dispiriting. We simply want people to be prepared for the season ahead. In the last two years as a CSA we’ve striven to cushion our CSA members from the fluctuations of the season by planting abundantly and placing the CSA first in line for produce. And we will continue to do so this season and beyond, but winter itself forces us to recognize the real truth in ‘community supported’ agriculture — you have joined us in the risks of growing and eating winter grown vegetables.

We hope you find much delight in the season: locally grown food, snowy mornings, hot cups of tea, migrating birds … and let us also rejoice in the fact that winter affects us only mildly compared to so much of the world, where this is in fact a very hungry season indeed. Fill you bellies and be glad. We are looking forward to journeying with you over these next months. Enjoy this week’s vegetables!

Your farmers,

Katie & Casey Kulla
Oakhill Organics

Note to CSA blog readers: if you plan to read the newsletter exclusively on the blog, please sign up on the sheet at pick-up so that we won’t print a paper copy for you each week. For those of you who prefer the paper version, we are only going to use white paper this year. Folks have commented on the difficulty of recycling the ‘technicolor’ papers we used in years past. Good point. Thus only white paper this year.

Dates for your calendar

Remember! There will be no CSA harvest or delivery on February 26. (You were not charged for this week in the season price.) We are attending a farming retreat that week and will not be able to harvest (but we will be better farmers for going!).

Also, a reminder about the four on-farm CSA events we’ve planned for this year: May 17, June 22, Aug. 23, and Oct. 26. Basic event details are on your confirmation letter, and we’ll provide more information as the first date approaches. We hope you can make it to at least one or two gatherings this year!

And last, but certainly not least, we want to give a HUGE thank you to YCAP for sharing their space with us again this season for pick-up!!!!!!!