The warm temperatures this week are making things grow fast after all the stormy weather we’ve been having. The cauliflower is not maturing uniformly, so we’ll give half of you cauliflower this week and the other half next week. This is our first spinach and cilantro of the season and we’re harvesting off a new planting of kale. We’ll be getting head lettuce in probably by next week, but for now enjoy the salad mix. The baby lettuces for salad mix grow quickly but take a lot of labor to weed, harvest and wash. So we reserve salad mix mainly for these early boxes when we’re still waiting for the slower growing head lettuces to mature. We’re bringing in some more of the good root vegetables, including black spanish radishes, which may be new to some of you. These root vegetables aren’t pretty on the outside but they are good for you and delicious. Some ripe fruit is appearing on the strawberry plants. Finally! Berries will be trickling into the boxes at first as a ‘mystery’ item, but once they’re in full swing we should have plenty for everybody.
I should probably explain the ‘mystery’ items for those of you who may be new to our CSA. We sometimes don’t know what item will be in the box by the time the newsletter goes out, so we call it a ‘mystery’ item. This doesn’t mean that some vegetable grew on the farm but we don’t know what it is! It’s usually that we’re not certain how much of an item we will be able to get until we actually harvest it, or that we’ll be putting in one of a large number of possible items to fill that spot and don’t want to confuse things by listing them all. If we are 90% sure we know what an item we’ll be, we put it on the list so you can know what to expect, but please bear with us that 10% of the time when we actually get less usable product than we expect at harvest time (sometimes mother nature and her cohorts take more than their share of the crop). We occasionally need to substitute something else–we try to make it something just as good!–for some subscribers. (For instance, some of you got braising mix instead of arugula last week.) Please use the weekly list as a guide and understand that last minute substitutions are simply a result of getting produce that is picked fresh after the newsletter goes out.
The spring has brought new life to our farm in other ways this year– our latest stray cat showed up loaded and promptly had five kittens. Our current farm cats are trying to get used to the interlopers, but they are pretty irresistible to us humans.
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