5/1/24 Happy Beltane, Happy May Day! Welcome New CSA Members
Today, May 1st, is Beltane or May Day. A celebration of the peak of spring and certainly fertility! Technically it’s half way between Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice. We are feeling it on the farm. The days are already long and everything is growing at a tremendous speed! Put a flower in your hair, dance around a May Pole or just enjoy the sound of the buzzing pollinators and the bright green fresh growth on life around you.
Welcome New CSA Members
We’re excited to welcome round 2 of new CSA Members for 2024! We have a total of 40 new members joining us this year in three rounds and 130 members continuing from last year (or many years). With all this new energy, we’ll focus on some basics in the newsletters this time of year.
Those of you who are new this week should have all received a welcome email with logistics last Friday. But always please look to our FAQs and Policies on the CSAware website. CSAware is the billing software that we use. You can navigate back and forth between our main website and the CSAware website but will always have to enter your credentials when going into the latter. Also, don’t hesitate to reach out with questions. Reaching out, try email if non-urgent to Charlie the Llama. Charlie has unfortunately passed away a few years ago but we decided to keep this fun email address.
Rotations (today is the 1st this year with a rotation!)
A rotation in our CSA happens for a few different reasons: 1) Sometimes, like today with Broccoli, we have crops at different levels of maturity and we want to harvest at peak maturity for you. If our planning required us to have exactly 140 heads of a Brassica like Cabbage, Cauliflower or Broccoli on a single date, then we would have to plant well over 500 Brassica plants since some come ripe early, some late and some get hit by gophers. We tend to aim for growing around 250 to 300 heads of Broccoli (or Cauliflower, or Cabbage, etc) for our CSA. With this lower total quantity, we rarely can get enough ripe all at once, and so spreading out the harvest over two CSAs allows us to grow larger, more flavorful Brassicas for each of you… with the remainder of the heads going to our Farmers’ Markets.
2) Another reason we rotate is that sometimes we just don’t have enough of a certain crop at maturity. This will be the case with Strawberries as they start coming on. Early on we only have 10 pints, we might then have 30 pints the second week, and maybe 70 pints by the four or fifth week. Therefore, we give out strawberries on a rotation starting at the top of our list. We note where we ended on the list so that the following week we can begin at that point on the list for giving out the next wave of ripe strawberries.
3) Lastly, some crops we plan a rotation, like Summer Squash. We have to harvest our Summer Squash and Cucumbers 3 times a week but we know that you don’t want Summer Squash every week of the summer so we do about every other week.
Color coding helps us and hopefully you too. We have about equal amount of members picking up in Santa Rosa (SR) verses West County (WC) so that is the break with the former in blue and latter in green.
Back to today’s box specifically, all Santa Rosa boxes received Broccoli and all West County received Summer Squash. Next week you can anticipate the opposite.
Produce Notes & Recipes!
This Week’s Box
Panisse & Little Gem Lettuces
Toscano Kale
Hakurei Turnips
Broccoli (Santa Rosa) OR Summer Squash (West County)
White Quinoa (Wild Rose Farm)
Family Boxes: Frisée & Mint
It is Spring and that means light greens season! As such we have a double lettuce share for you, enjoy some salads this week. We are excited to have some of our first Panisse of the season. It is the light green oak leaf lettuce. These leaves are softer and buttery than butter lettuce in our opinion. As such, I personally recommend doing a very light dressing with them so you don’t smother the flavor of the lettuce. It would pare amazingly with thinly sliced Hakurei on a mandolin and the lightest of lemon dressing (in our family we often do no dressing).
Everyone also has two Little Gems (one red and one green). Little Gems are a mini romaine and as such very crunchy. We love them in salad but you can also use them as little boats for yummy treats or even dipped in hummus or other dip.
Greens Preparation and Substitution
Your greens are almost always harvested fresh Wednesday mornings. We may rinse some, but do NOT wash your greens. We have found that washing often holds more peril than profit for them as they spoil more quickly. We recommend you take some time Wednesday evenings to process some of your produce (especially the greens). This will keep them fresh throughout the week. If you have greens in paper bag (not this week but last week for instance) please prioritize these. We use paper bags because they’re compostable when possible but it is not ideal for greens long term. Submerge your greens in a sink/bowl of cold water and leave them a little bit if they are wilting (this even works for roots such as carrots). This will help revive them, especially on a hot Wednesday. After a few minutes soaking, drain and add enough water to cover again. Do this until all the soil and bugs (if any) have washed away (this may take only once for some items and more repetitions for others), dry (invest in a salad spinner is especially useful) and store your greens in your crisper, or in the bottom of your refrigerator in a large greens or tupperware-type container (or plastic bag) with towels on the bottom. This will ensure the longest life possible for your greens plus you will have washed and prepared greens ready at your finger tips all week long. We find this makes it easy to grab a handful of greens to add to whatever you're cooking for dinner or a quick lunch and you end up eating more of them!
Substitutions: We have many members asking for ways to understand and use Greens. The recipes we give are for specific greens, based on what’s in the box. That said, we consider all greens substitutable most of the time but keep the following in mind. We think of greens on a spectrum from delicate to very hardy. We might order them like this: Fava Greens, Arugula, Mustard Greens, most Lettuce Greens, Bok Choi, Frisée, Escarole, Napa Cabbage, Tat Soi, Spinach, Chard, Kale, Collards, Brussels Greens, Hard Cabbages. Then we just adjust cooking time (delicate greens just need a touch of heat and hardy ones a few minutes). For seasoning, we consider the flavor as well, there are the stronger or spicier Arugula, Escarole, Mustard Greens and the milder Lettuce, Bok Choi, and Cabbages. We find these rules especially useful because you will find very few recipes for some of them like Fava Greens, Tat Soi or Brussels Greens but there are a plentitude for Spinach or Kale, so we look for recipes for greens of similar heft/flavor and substitute away. We hope this helps. Have fun and good luck!
We have a second round of Hakurei Salad Turnips this week. They are slightly like a radish, albeit more sweet and buttery. We primarily eat them fresh. They are amazing roasted too, it brings out even more sweetness but we prefer raw. Remember the greens can be used similar to Arugula.
In today’s box you’re finding a bag of White Quinoa from Wild Rose Farm. In the early spring we have a lot of light greens and we find that that is overwhelming to most CSA Members and we want to provide a rounded box of goods. We have found that adding in something from a local grower that we know and trust can be fun. We will always tell you when something is not from us, who grew it and a little about them.
We don’t work with Wild Rose directly, but we have a close relationship with Farmer Rachel of the Mendocino Grain Project. She is amazing and her passion is to bring grain production back to Northern California. She herself grows primarily wheat and she took on the project from Farmer Doug Mosel who had a hard time finding small scale milling and so built his own. Other farmers reach out for help and thus was born the Mendocino Grain Project. We carry many of their products and I just put in an order so hopefully by next CSA we’ll be able to have a full stock of wheat, oats, beans and quinoa for you to add onto your CSA box if and when you desire. All of these products have been amazing (in fact a few of us on the farm put in bulk orders for ourselves). Locally produced and fresh grains are amazing, as a society we’ve gotten used to some pretty bland grains.
Back to the Quinoa in this week’s box. We think the grains of this quinoa are wonderfully fat with an excellent mouthfeel. This quinoa performs like couscous- use it to great effect in tabouli, as a pairing with tagine and roasted vegetables or as a protein rich, textural addition to salad.
The quinoa in this bag has been grown by Farmer Wild Rose Farm in Blue Lake, CA since 1992! This quinoa is grown to a high standard of ecological awareness, utilizing conscientious small scale growing practices, without the use of artificial fertilizer, herbicides or pesticides. There is a 13 min Youtube video on Farmer Blake Richard growing Quinoa from a few years ago… check it out if you have a moment.
Note: Rinse your Quinoa! This quinoa has been washed but we still recommend a cool water rinse before cooking for best flavor. Quinoa naturally has bitter saponins and by washing you will wash that off so it will be milder.