CSA Week 8

This Week’s Harvest

• Cucumbers
• Zucchini
• Salad Mix
• Red Leaf Lettuce (last head lettuce until fall)
• Beets
• Tendersweet Cabbage
• Shishito Peppers
• Bell Peppers
• Red Long of Tropea onions
• Sweet Corn

Farm News
A couple years ago our cooperative, Great River Organics, was invited by Whole Foods to participate in a local supplier summit. The summit took place in Washington, DC , and since I have an aunt in the area I thought I would go and get a visit in with family at the same time.

Pre-conference instructions suggested that participants bring a sample of their product for a photo shoot opportunity with a professional photographer. The conference was in March so we didn’t actually have any of our beautiful fresh produce to showcase. However, we did have some purple daikon storage radishes still kicking around in our cooler so I decided I would bring the daikon radishes with me for the product photo opportunity.

I went to the summit with our co-op’s manager, Jaime, and our main objective was to further develop our relationship with Whole Foods. The conference took place at The Nationals’ baseball stadium. So there I am at a fancy conference at a fancy venue with a bunch of purple daikon hanging out in my purse. The conference speakers included employees of Whole Foods as well as vendors whose products were on Whole Foods shelves. We meet the regional buyer of produce for Whole Foods, ate delicious food and meet other small business owners.

When I first arrived and checked in, I set up a time for the photo shoot with my product. 1 o’clock rolls around and I take my purse with my daikon and head to the photo shoot area. There I find a table with a pristine white tablecloth and I was told by the photographer to place my product on the table. I lifted my purse and dumped out the radishes. I felt a little awkward with my obscure vegetable whereas most people had an identifiable item but the photographer genuinely seemed very excited about the produce. He took some photos of just the daikons and then instructed me to hold them and took pictures of me. I was also told to come up with a quote about my product so I frantically texted Jaime. She responded with a few excellent quotes, I picked one of them and wrote it on a card.

I honestly had forgotten about it and wouldn’t have even brought up but last week a friend tagged me in a Facebook post and said I was famous. She was shopping in the Mason Whole Foods and snapped a picture of a picture of me and my daikons. I am pleased that the poster is properly placed right in front of our zucchini spread.

So far this season we have sold over 5000 pounds of our summer squash to Whole Foods through our co-op. You can also find our cabbage, kale, scallions, head lettuce and parsley in the Dayton and Cincinnati area Whole Foods. The co-op has been a very important piece of our farm’s success. Small vegetable farms can take on many shapes and sizes and there are different options for selling. We have found that direct sales to our customers through CSA and market alone would not provide an adequate income so we added a wholesale piece, which has enabled us to make investments in the farm, increase our employees pay, and focus the farm structure to maximize efficiency.

Recipes

Braised Cabbage and Onion

Beet and Zucchini Fritters

Beet and Sweet Corn Salad

Coming Up Next Week (our best guess….) Tomatoes, sweet corn, poblano peppers, tomatillos, golden beets, shishito peppers, basil, sweet onions and more!

This Week’s Harvest

• Cucumbers
• Zucchini
• Basil
• Sweet Corn
• Scallions
• Green Bell Peppers
• Eggplant
• Swiss Chard
• Salad Mix

Farm News

Last week I spoke about the long hours we’ve been putting in and this week was no different. I realized I took a few pictures around sunset so this week’s blog is a series of late evening pictures. The kids are spending time with cousins for a couple of weeks so both Ben and I keep working well after the crew has left for the day. It’s good to get a lot done but we do miss the kids–and the balance of life they provide!

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Recipes

Corn, Scallions and Squash Flat Bread Pizza

Grilled Zucchini Lasagna

Chard and Sweet Corn Tacos

Coming Up Next Week (our best guess…) Sweet corn, cabbage, sweet onions, poblano peppers, beets, salad mix, fennel and more!

This Week’s Harvest

• Broccoli
• Eggplant
• Red Butter Lettuce
• Cilantro or Parsley
• Cucumbers
• Zucchini
• Kale
• Kohlrabi
• Basil

Farm News

There are not enough hours in the day or days in the week! We had a to do list for Sunday and at the end of the day, when only half the list was crossed off, I thought I should share it as a snippet of what farming is really like– a series of to-do lists that we never ever get to fully check off.

“Seed beans” is the most frustrating item on the list. We still have not seeded any beans for this year! First we had the dry spell and since we couldn’t keep up with irrigating, we weren’t adding anything new that would also need to be watered. On Father’s Day, we finally we got rain (yay!) and were able to think about seeding beans. So it was on an earlier to do list and Ben was literally in the barn getting the seeds and planter ready when we got hit with nearly 2 inches of rain in 30 minutes from a thunderstorm cell that just happened to develop right over us. Beans would have to wait. Bringing us to Sunday when they made it back on the list. But first, beds would have to be made- that was the item that did get done – “prep corn beds”. But we ran out of time to seed the beans (by the way, running out of time means it was 11 pm and we were still working through the list!). The reason behind the push to get it done was that we were planning to plant corn on Monday and wanted to water the freshly planted corn and bean beds at the same time. Well we managed to get the corn planted Monday and Ben was planning to seed the beans in the evening and then run the irrigation all night. I don’t even remember at this point what on Monday’s to-do list was ahead of beans (probably fix the irrigation water reel which had broken?!) , but we ended up running out of time again!

Sadly I can’t report yet that beans have been seeded. We have 3 more weeks to seed them before it’s actually too late to get a crop in. This is enough time and I am not too worried. We’ll have beans at some point. The wait will make us appreciate them all the more as soon as they do make it in the weekly shares!

Recipes

• Kohlrabi and broccoli cheese soup
• Zucchini noodles with avocado pesto
• Spicy grilled eggplant and zucchini

Coming Up Next Week (our best guess….) Sweet corn, eggplant, peppers, salad mix, swiss chard, sweet onions, basil and more!)

This Week’s Harvest

• Purple Scallions
• Flat Leaf Parsley OR Cilantro
• Cabbage
• Zucchini
• Cucumbers
• Green Leaf Lettuce
• Broccoli
• Fennel
• Salad Mix
• Kohlrabi

Farm News

The most exciting farm news from the past week is that we have a new way of harvesting summer squash. Summer squash is one of the crops we grow for our co-op, Great River Organics. So we grow a lot of it! After a couple years of schlepping 30 lb zucchini bins down 400 foot beds, we are excited to kiss that practice good-bye. We got a harvest conveyor which is really like a giant ladder with a moving belt that stretches across 5 beds. We harvest the squash and place it on the belt and the belt moves it down to our harvest wagon where someone is waiting to bin it all up.

We are starting to use it for other crops too. The video above is of a kohlrabi harvest. We pulled the entire bed, which was around 1500 pounds, and used the conveyor to bring it all in. It’ll be a great way to bring in our storage cabbage! The crew is really excited that we get to save our backs for the next 3 months of squash harvest! And we are excited we have added another improvement to the farm!

Recipes

• Mushroom and Fennel Pizza
• Cabbage and Fennel Slaw
• Zucchini and Kohlrabi Fritters
• Quick Pickles

Coming Up Next Week (our best guess….) kale, broccoli, summer squash, cucumbers, salad mix, scallions and more!

This Week’s Harvest

• Swiss Chard
• Golden Beets
• Purple Scallions
• Zucchini and Summer Squash
• Escarole
• Green Oakleaf Head Lettuce
• Fennel
• Cucumbers
• Bok Choi
• Dill
• Salad Mix

Farm News

The big news on the farm this week is relief. We had not had significant rain since May 20th and had been scrambling to keep the farm well watered. It was actually impossible to water everything and our potatoes were left to fend for themselves and other crops just given the bare minimum to survive. Simply put, our crops were not thriving (the fennel in this week’s box is a good example–it’s perfectly fine but the bulbs are definitely smaller than they could be).

We are also still in the thick of planting season and planting into crumbly dust is difficult and prepping bone-dry fields is impossible. Not to mention the more we plant, the more crops that then need to be watered! We actually held off on planting and ended up a little behind on that front. On Thursday and Friday last week we finally got caught up on planting and then on Sunday it rained!! We are so relieved. Our potatoes will be happy, our sweet potatoes finally have some real saturation to take off, the corn and salad mix will thrive, Ben doesn’t have to devote 70% of his time to irrigation set up (at least for a few days!), and the ground will be a good moisture level to start prepping our cover crop fields and fall production fields! So all in all very good news for the farm and farmers!

Recipes

• Shaved Fennel and Beet Salad
• Cucumber and Dill Egg Salad
• Escarole and Pasta Soup
• Swiss Chard and Zucchini Pizza

Coming Up Next Week (our best guess……) Cucumbers, Parsley, Zucchini, Cabbage, Kohlrabi, Fennel, Salad Mix, Scallions and more!

This Week’s Harvest

Beets with greens
Scallions
Spigarello
Kale
Red butter lettuce
Salad mix
Red round Radishes
Cilantro
Sugar snap peas

Farm News

Not all farm news is good news and we do have crop failures from time to time. Sugar snap peas are a CSA member favorite but they can be tricky. For years we had issues of seed corn maggot eating our snap pea seeds when we direct seeded. About 3 years ago we switched to transplanting pea plants. This has definitely worked. This year we wanted to spread out the pea harvest over a longer period of time in hopes that peas would be in the CSA share more than once. We decided to sow 2 varieties of peas on the same day whose maturation date varies by 10 days. So sowing and transplanting would happen at the same time but harvesting would be a week apart.

Well this week’s box features the later maturing variety which worked great with good yields and yummy fruit. Unfortunately peas were supposed to be in last week’s box too but the other variety was a crop failure. I am not sure if it was the 27 degree night that set it back beyond repair or the 90 degree days in May and June, or maybe the variety just doesn’t transplant well. In any case the difference between the 2 varieties is about 100 pounds. Next year we will stick with the variety that produced well and do 2 plantings 1 week apart. Now we’ll just have to hope the weather works out for us to be able to plant both sowings! It is nice to be able to have solutions to crop failures but such a bummer to have to wait an entire year to implement them.

Recipes

https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/food-recipes/healthy/a27255965/seared-coconut-lime-chicken-with-snap-pea-slaw-recipe

https://food52.com/recipes/13241-broccoli-rabe-sausage-and-cannellini-beans (use spigarello in place of rabe)

https://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/roasted-and-marinated-beets-with-burrata-charred-kale-and-hazelnut-vinaigrette

Coming Up Next Week (our best guess….) Beets, Swiss chard, Cilantro, Bok Choi, Salad Mix, Purple Scallions, Summer Squash and more!

This Week’s Harvest

• Watermelon Radish
• Carrots
• Oakleaf Head Lettuce
• Arugula
• Braising Mix
• Salad Mix
• Spinach
• Dill
• Kale

Farm News

You may have noticed your share is full of greens. This is greens season! Greens like the cooler weather of spring and early summer so we grow lots of them this time of year. Several greens are then absent during the warm months of July and August, but return to the harvest list in the fall. This will likely be the last week for arugula, spinach and braising greens until the fall. While we have several more plantings of head lettuce to enjoy, it is unlikely the heads will be as glorious as they are in the month of June and then again in October.

We do try to have a consistent supply of salad mix all season long. To do this we start a round every 2 to 3 weeks for about 20 weeks! One day last week I took a picture of all the plantings of salad mix we had going at once.

The third round of salad is giving us a run for our money. We planted it last Wednesday since the forecast was calling for a 90 % chance of rain on Thursday. Well after it rained everywhere else but on us, we dragged 4 hoses out to water it by hand on Thursday. I then decided to water it by hand again on Saturday night. We are using the overhead sprinkler to water everything else on the farm, field by field, and these 2 beds of salad have to wait in line for the sprinkler. They were looking really sad in the 90 degree heat and their turn for the overhead sprinkler isn’t until Tuesday night. So I gave them a little more water to hold them over. The things we do for fresh salad mix!!

Recipes

Spanakoptia with mixed greens

Watermelon Radish and Arugula Salad (you can use any nuts. My go to salad “nuts” are toasted sunflower seeds)

Carrot soup with collard greens (use kale or braising greens place of collards)

Coming Up Next Week (our best guess…….) Kale, Salad Mix, Radishes, Snap Peas, Beets, Scallions, Red Butter Lettuce, Leaf Broccoli

This Week’s Harvest

Arugula

Braising Mix

Red Round Radishes

Watermelon Radishes

Salad Mix

Spinach

Oakleaf Lettuce

Carrots

Dill

Basil Plant

FARM NEWS

Welcome to week one of our 2020 harvest!

We’ve approached the time when all aspects of the farm operation are in full swing- aka Go Time. We’ve got weekly seeding in the greenhouse, planting in the field, weeding in the beds, a seemingly never ending list of tractor work and now we are adding harvest and delivery into the mix. Hooray! That’s the best part- the culmination of all this hard work. We hope this food satisfies your taste buds, gets creative juices flowing in the kitchen, and maybe even gives you peace of mind.

Between the busy farm season, kids suddenly at home all the time, COVID concerns, and protests across the country it is a very physically and mentally taxing time. The history of farming certainly has a role to play in the current unrest. I will link to a Reveal podcast, Losing Ground, that we found important and eye-opening that investigates systemic discrimination within the USDA.

https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLnJldmVhbHJhZGlvLm9yZy9yZXZlYWxwb2RjYXN0&ep=14&episode=cHJ4XzE0OV8zZmNhZDc3Yi1kNjAyLTQ3MTYtYjUzMS1hOTUzMzQ2NDdiNmQ

So if you happen to have an interest and an hour, give it a listen. Stay safe and be well!

Recipes

Pasta with brown butter and wilted greens (Your share is full of greens this would work for-arugula, braising mix, spinach. Try a mix!)

Provencal Soup with Greens (Your share is full of greens this would work for-arugula, braising mix, spinach. Try a mix!)

Roasted Radishes with Green Goddess Dressing (use both types of radish. half the red round radishes and cut the watermelon radish in 4ths or 8ths)

Coming Up Next Week (our best guess…..) spinach, dill, braising greens, red butter lettuce, carrots, watermelon radish, salad mix, parsley

**   PRESENTING OUR 2019 CSA SHARES   **

 

Well, technically, presenting just 18 of our 28 deliveries. Oops, I missed photographing 10 whole weeks of deliveries! That tells me we were very busy last season. Seeding weekly from mid-February through July, planting weekly from mid-April though August, harvesting almost daily from late May through November, delivering four days a week June through November, and staffing 35 weeks of farmer’s market can do that to you! Oh, and did I mention daily washing, packing, weeding, fixing and communicating? So, no hammock time – but that’s ok!

Our goal is to grow the most delicious and nutritious food we can for our customers, and to grow our customer base so the farm can provide a viable income for both Ben and me and provide our staff a good wage. We also hope that there’s money left to invest in the farm and to purchase equipment to improve our efficiency,  which in turn leads to better quality of life – whether more reasonable hours for us or wage increases for our employees. Thanks to an experienced, caring and hard-working crew we’ve been able to grow the most flavorful and wholesome food we can. And thanks to increases in both CSA membership and wholesale sales over the past three years, we’ve been able to reinvest in the farm.

The 2019 season brought planned improvements to our packing facility. We concreted the entire floor of the packing barn, installed lighting, bought a rinse conveyer for washing efficiency and added a 60-foot insulated shipping container for more vegetable storage space.

 

The 2019 season also brought unexpected expenses. For 10 years, our 1950 Allis Chalmers G cultivating tractor was reliable to complete all of the cultivating work. This year, though, we seemed to push it a bit too hard. Our expanded production area, together with the naturally heavy soil, meant we ran G in a higher gear then we think it maybe likes. In short, it expired.  Being without a cultivating tractor during peak cultivating season meant we had no time to spare to get another cultivating tractor. Ultimately, we ended up going through two more G engines, which would require a whole other blog post to explain. Fortunately we had enough in the business bank account to meet these unexpected expenses, and now we know we need to look for a cultivating tractor upgrade for 2020! Also fortunately, there are lots of options for cultivating tractors with larger engines and more capabilities. Ben has been surfing the tractor classifieds and has a few tractors in mind that he will check out next week.

 

We’re enthusiastic about building on our 2019 improvements both in terms of equipment upgrades and production knowledge. In 2020 we hope to continue to serve our market customers incomparably delicious veggies, grow our 260-member CSA a little bit, and refine our wholesale accounts in a way that allows us to maximize efficiency. I’d also like to grow some quality of life improvements in 2020: being more present with the kids, more on top of laundry, maybe a little less stressed. I think it can happen! And if I manage to take a picture of EVERY SINGLE CSA share this coming season, you’ll be the first to know. By the way, 2020 CSA info found here and online sign up happens here! Very excited to bring the 2020 season on!

 

What better way to celebrate Valentine’s Day than to go down memory lane and revisit the life you’ve steadily been building with your partner? From our days as newlyweds at a Hawaii goat dairy farm to the start of Mile Creek Farm to bringing kids into the fold, enjoy these pictures of the last 13 years!

 

I’m really looking forward to the next 13 years and excited to experience all that they have in store for Mile Creek Farm and my family! Happy Valentine’s Day!