September 20th, 2023
What’s in your share?
Salad Mix
Romaine Lettuce
Cherry Tomatoes
Shishito Peppers
Poblano Peppers
Sweet Peppers
Italian Eggplant
Red Onions
Ali’s stoked to harvest this romaine!
Last night we had a tour group come through our farm, organized by the UW-Extension. The audience was a pretty diverse group of growers, ranging from folks who are looking to start their own farm and are inspired by our scale and methods, to long time farmers who farm on a difference scale who just wanted to see a different way of farming. I always assume that what people are going to want to talk about is soil, bed prep, and farm set-up, but one overwhelmingly popular discussion topic is PLANNING.
Weekly brassica check! Because we keep the brassicas covered at all times, it’s hard to know what’s going on under there. Every week we like to do a walk-through, taking all the row cover off to inspect the plants. Birds have begun flying under our row cover and eating leaves :) always an adventure! Pictured here is broccolini and Japanese salad turnips.
One person asked “what factors do we consider when it comes to choosing crops?” It’s a great question, honestly, and I’m sure as our CSA members, perhaps, you have the same question. There are various factors we consider. When we first started growing, we wanted to keep it simple and grow what we knew we were good at and had the resources to grow well. We opted not to grow tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, eggplant, or potatoes our first season. This is because we didn’t have any infrastructure such as a propagation house to start seeds (we used an old chicken coop that was falling apart on our land when we first moved here), we had no field tunnels to trellis tomatoes, and we also knew that our soil was probably lacking the nutritive qualities that such plants required. That said, we chose to grow the easier stuff with a quicker turnaround such as, radishes, lettuce, carrots, and only a few long term crops, like onions. This is how we made it through our first season at the farmers market. We became known at the salad mix, radish, and carrot people, and along with our “cute beginner vibes” we developed our first customers that would eventually join our first CSA season the following year.
Fall cabbage
We took what we learned from the farmers market and added it to our crop plan for the next season. We noticed that our customers LOVED lettuce, carrots, salad mix, and spinach, which also happened to be crops that we didn’t really see other farmers growing at the markets we were at. Those crops are easy to do on our scale, and we happened to find a niche that larger farms didn’t focus on. As we added more field tunnels and the health of our soil improved, we opened up our capacity to grow more of the long term, heavy feeding crops like tomatoes, potatoes, cucumbers, peppers, winter squash, eggplants, broccoli, and kale.
We do grow some specialty/uncommon items like fennel, endive, radicchio, kohlrabi, but we find that those are the crops that our members “could do without”, so we don’t like to grow a ton of them. And for the radicchio freaks (we know who you are) we do grow one bed of it so the people who like it get a chance to have it in their box. Committing to CSA is no joke - and we don’t want to alienate people who are less familiar with certain crops. We know its a whole ordeal just getting dinner on the table after work, let alone trying to learn about a vegetable you’ve never seen before. We’ve learned to prioritize being good at growing the basics.
Broccoli and peppers in the background
rECIPES TO TRY
Mediterranean Roast Chicken (Even though it may sound weird, I think that eggplant and poblano is an excellent combination - we do it all the time! That said, adding poblanos to this recipe is a great idea. I especially like cooking eggplant with a whole chicken because the eggplant soaks up the juices that run from the chicken and make it so flavorful. Make sure to follow the instructions for adding the veggies; they are staggered to avoid soggy peppers and overcooked potatoes.)
Poblano Coconut Milk Corn Chowder