This Week’s Harvest
Easter egg radishes
Salad mix
Green leaf head lettuce
Swiss chard
Kohlrabi
Spinach
Mustard greens
Baby bok choi
Basil plant
Welcome to the 2014 CSA!
For those of you who are new, thanks for joining! For returning members, we appreciate your continued support!
Please use this blog to make the most of your CSA box. If you click on the highlighted vegetables in the above list, you’ll be directed to a page devoted to that veggie- with descriptions and recipe ideas. On this main page I will provide additional recipes, all including 2 or more vegetables from the week.
I will also provide some pictures and news from the week on the farm! We hope that you enjoy this adventure in seasonal, incredibly fresh and delicious produce!
Farm Notes
As you may know, we are a certified organic vegetable farm so we need to deal with pests in a natural way. We try to have the healthiest crops possible as bugs tend to target the weakest ones. But we have struggled year after year with pests on our potatoes and beans. In addition to damage from eating the crops, certain insects can be a vector for disease. Leaf hoppers are one that spread disease and seem to be everywhere on our farm! This year we are trying a new way to control them– introducing beneficial insect eggs to the farm! Each week we receive 5,000 lacewing eggs in the mail and sprinkle them on the potatoes and bean crops.
The instructions tell us that the larvae are too small to see, so don’t bother looking. We’ll know it’s working when we don’t see any damage to our crops!
We’ve always enjoyed several species of beneficials that exist on our farm naturally from praying mantises that hang out on our flowers to braconid wasps that lay eggs on tomato hornworms and are happy to release more onto our 8 acres! Can you spot the baby praying mantis on the bells of Ireland?
Recipe Notes
Curried lentil and cous cous with kohlrabi and spinach
Barley risotto with Swiss chard and radishes (time saver note: Trader Joes sells packets of quick cooking barley)
Kohlrabi grilled cheese (add head lettuce or spinach after the grill)