Farm Walk this week!

Hello all!

Well that strawberry patch got a work out this weekend! Thanks to everyone who came out and picked - that patch looks clean. There are some green and pink berries that will continue to ripen over the next week or so.

We are hosting a FARM WALK here this Wednesday at 6pm. Meet us in front of the distribution barn at 6 if you are interested. We'll walk around the farm and talk about how we grow things, and a little about how we run the CSA. We love questions too. Although we've given lots of farm tours to different education and farm groups, we've never hosted a farm walk for the CSA and are very excited to do so. Come find out what going on here!

Veggie Forecast:

head lettuce, kale, chard, salad mix, escarole, spinach, celeriac, parsnips, garlic scapes, komatsuna, mustard, pac choi, hakurei turnips, and beet greens

u-pick:

unlimited: strawberries, sugar snap peas, bachelor buttons, CHARD

Many of you probably know this, but I thought I'd tell you a bit about why and how we have roots in the share at this time of year. All of the roots that we've been giving out so far were picked last November and stored all winter in the big walk in cooler in the distribution shed . We've gone to a lot of effort to create top notch storage conditions for that winter produce. Of course most of the stored food goes to the winter CSA, but we reserve about 10 pallet bins for the beginning of the summer CSA. Naturally the planning goes further than this - the year before we plan how much produce to reserve for the next summer's CSA and make sure we grow it and pick it at the right time. We like having the roots for the first 4 or so weeks of the summer CSA because it really tides members over all those greens! Before we had the walk in cooler there was no way that we could have had the luxury of storing all that food for so long (7-8 months!).

As the summer CSA progresses the over-wintered roots get distributed and then we all have to wait for the spring planted root crops to mature. We'll start having this year's beets around the middle of July (we are already giving out beet greens, a byproduct of thinning the beet patch), and carrots will follow beets by 3 weeks or so. We won't dig potatoes until late August, and rutabagas, parsnips, and celeriac won't come on the scene again until late fall.

As of today we still have parsnips and celeriac, all the other roots we started out with are in your fridges and tummys.

OK, See you around the farm,

Evangeline