Welcome to the Spring 2022 CSA! We are grateful for the opportunity to be your farmers this season, and excited for that we hope will be our best year yet. Veteran CSA members and farmers market shoppers know that spring starts out with lots of GREENS. Greens are the fastest maturing crops, so early spring tends to be heavy on the greens. Full shares, don’t forget about your kohlrabi greens! Even the radish greens are edible.
Oh boy, bok choy!
Not sure what to do with bok choy? Cooper prefers his raw. It is one of his favorites. The juicy, mild flavored stems are great with a dip like hummus, for example. I like to saute chopped bok choy with butter and garlic. The other night I made a bok choy slaw dressed with soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, honey, toasted sesame oil, orange juice and zest, and grated ginger. I did not use a recipe, but this one looks like a tasty alternative to my kitchen freestyling.
Stick to the facts
When we think about farming, we often think about hard physical work. Toiling in the fields in the heat of summer, working through cold and wind and rain in the winter. And it is hard physical work. And it can be long hours. But it is also hard mental work.
Spring is a wonderful time on the farm. It is also a remarkably stressful time. The field is still too wet to prepare beds for all the tomatoes I have in the greenhouse, quickly becoming overgrown. The squash isn’t far behind, and it too has nowhere to go. It is easy for my anxieties to run away with me. So I have been practicing separating “the facts” from “my thoughts about the facts”. If those thoughts lead to negative outcomes (like increased anxiety and self-doubt) I replace them with more productive thoughts.
So here is a fact: the field is too wet to prepare beds. Fact. We are never going to get the tomatoes and squash planted and we are already falling so far behind that we will never catch up and I wont have anything to put in the CSA in June. Those are my thoughts about the facts. As you can see, those thoughts don’t help the field dry out any faster, they just make me feel like garbage. Not helpful! I try to nip those thoughts in the bud when they crop up. Instead I think, “the field will dry out when it dries out, just like it does every year.” And those other problems? While it is good to be prepared for a variety of situations, there is no use inventing potential future problems to stress out about. Stick to the facts, Josephine!
I wish I had discovered this mental exercise years and years ago, when my identity as a farmer was tied up in the success or failure of every crop. I still take things too personally, but crop failures don’t make me feel like a failure anymore. Most of the time.
Small Shares
- Bok Choy
- Spring Salad Mix (arugula, lettuce and Asian greens)
- Elegance Braising Greens
- Red Russian Kale
- Crunchy King Radishes
Full Shares
- Bok Choy
- Spring Salad Mix (arugula, lettuce and Asian greens)
- Elegance Braising Greens
- Red Russian Kale
- Crunchy King Radishes
- Rainbow Chard
- Purple Kohlrabi
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