by milecreekfarm

CSA WEEK 1

This Week’s Harvest 

Garlic Scapes are the flowering stalk of garlic. They get all curly Q’ed before we harvest them.

Welcome to Mile Creek’s Community Supported Agriculture program- 20 weeks of seasonal Montgomery county grown produce. Returning members – congratulations you survived winter, and new members, welcome! We hope you have a great experience. One way to have a great experience is to familiarize yourself with our blog. You’ll notice on the harvest list above some of the vegetables will link you to an additional veggie info page. We also will also go over news from the farm that will hopefully allow you to connect with your food in a new way. After farm news, we will provide a couple recipes that utilize a few of the box ingredients. Finally, we will list what we think will be in the box the following week.

Farm News

So far this season can be summarized in one word: irrigation. I’m sure you all have noticed how dry it is. This is the driest spring we can ever remember experiencing since starting Mile Creek Farm. On the one hand, it is nice to be able to plant whenever we want and not worry about flooded fields. On the other hand, we are running irrigation 24/7 and finding that we have to go back just a few days later and hit the same crops with with more water. We are even having to water fields before any plants are even in the ground to help field prep and bed making go smoothly!

Water Reel getting lots of action this season
One of 2 over head sprinklers. Ben spends a ton of time getting the sprinklers in place for back to back to back to back runs……

The good news is we have multiple ways to get water onto the crops through our years of acquiring equipment and a well that was installed in 2017 with high capabilities. It’s a little worrisome, however, as we get deeper into the season, having more to water with every additional thing we plant.  At the same time as we continue to add things that need to be watered the CSA harvest has just begun so there’s nothing that doesn’t need water anymore. In other words, pretty soon we’re not going to be able to keep up with everything that needs to be watered and plants will start to suffer, so we are really hoping for some rain before we hit that point!

Watering the sweet potato slips in as soon as we plant them with our “meganet” system
The kids and I got caught in a down pour at Possum Creek MetroPark over the weekend but back home, Ben just sadly watched the rain miss us entirely while the wind picked up to make irrigating pointless!

Recipes

Spring Salad with Garlic Scape Croutons

Bok Choi Coconut Curry

Creamy Spinach and Dill

Pasta with Bacon and Spigarello (can also use chard, spinach for the greens or all three! Also we use the tender stem portion of Spigarello)

Coming up next week ( our best guess… ) kohlrabi , salad mix, kale, sugar snap peas, carrots, garlic scapes, cilantro, head lettuce, bok choy