Weekly news from the farm!

Greetings Everyone,

Many of you may have noticed that you didn’t receive our eNewsletter last week, which is because we only distributed it to our Fall CSA Shareholders, so sorry for any confusion we may have caused. 

Strawberry Plants have arrived!!! That means the farmers are busy preparing the fields because getting these plants in the ground is time sensitive.  They need to be planted so that they grow and establish a deep root system before winter sets in.  We are hopeful to have these planted before next week; however, THANKFULLY this weekend we have guests scheduled for both the glamping site and the barn loft, which means we will be prioritizing cleaning over planting.

You will probably need to white list our email to receive correspondence from us because we have changed our email from farmer@MountainHarvestOrganic.com to Farmer@MountainHarvestOrganics.com (our email is organics plural).

Your Farmers (and cleaning staff),
Carl and Julie

NOTE: Your’re receiving this eNewsletter because you’ve either been a subscriber to MHO in the past OR if you’ve registered for our newsletters from our website.   Feel free to unsubscribe if you no longer wish to receive this eNewsletter!

CSA Shareholders: You can access our online store using this link, if using a desktop you will log in by clicking the icon of the person in the top right hand side of the web page, if you are using a phone click on the menu icon and choose the login option. All orders need to be placed by Thursday at 8 AM so that we will know what to harvest for your share! Please return your boxes because we re-use them. All orders need to be placed by Thursday at 8 AM so that we will know what to harvest for your share!   Please return your boxes because we re-use them.

Maybe you don’t want to go the extra step to wrap some julienned vegetables into a wrapper, then perhaps you’d be interested in this Spring Roll Salad.  Occasionally we even will use raw butternut squash, prepared into very thin strips (normally using a thick peeler), and use that in our salads or spring rolls.

This week’s Farmer’s Choice Share includes: (share contents are subject to change based on our actual harvest.)

We’re offering both a Farmer’s Choice Veggie and Farmers’ Choice Veggie & Meat Share.  Items common in both shares are listed first, followed by items specific to the veggie share the finally the veggie/meat share. The Farmer’s Choice Veggie & Meat share normally has smaller portions of vegetables. )

• Lettuce:  Salad Mix! We don’t offer this in our CSA Shares too often, mostly because it is a lot of labor to  process, but we absolutely love the convenience if dumping a bag of lettuce into a salad bowl!!! All this lettuce needs is some salad dressing and croutons and we call it a meal.
• Tomatoes: Cherry Tomatoes and Slicing Tomatoes. We can’t imagine salad mix without a few cherry tomatoes to toss into the greens so you’ll find a mix of red and yellow pear tomatoes. Also included in your share are a few slicing tomatoes.
• Peppers: Sweet Bells. These are smaller but still SWEET.  You will notice that as the season progresses, the plants will no longer produce fruits that were as large and beautiful as when the plants were young.  The plants are like the farmers, as they age, they peter out.
• Radishes: Red Round or Daikon.  Perfect sliced for salads or buttered for a snack.  If the red round are still in good quality, these will be included, otherwise we’re going to begin harvesting the daikon radishes.
• Turnips: Hakurei: These salad turnips are delicious raw in salads or easily roasted.
• Onions: Mix of Candy and red bulb onions for your salads.  These onions have just been gathered from the curing racks so are extremely sweet so you may want to eat these like an apple!  We may provide you with some without skins so store in your refrigerator until you use them.
• Basil: We are including small bunches for Thai Basil just in case you want to make spring rolls.

The following are included only in the veggie share:

• Greens: Napa Cabbage. Super tender and great for salads or spring rolls.  We had a huge snail infestation so we stripped off a lot of leaves that were eaten.
• Butternut Squash :   Great sliced and grilled or roasted.  This season the groundhog ate most of the large squash but left a few for us. I guess we’ll take what we can get. Store in a dark place like your pantry. You will not want to put this in the refrigerator.

The following are included only in the meat share

• Ground Beef: Great for stuffing peppers. 

Last week our guests cancelled so we are extremely thankful for our CSA Shareholders because they once again paid our bills!!! When we are in between guests, we get a little nervous about our transition into agri-tourism, so are thankful that Barbara chose to stay on the farm this week. Julie was scheduled to spread manure on our strawberry and garlic beds Friday while Carl was delivering shares; however, the tractor was broken so Julie had the luxury of providing Barbara with an extensive tour of the farm. It could be that Barbara’s most recent job was directing the eCommerce for NPR so she loves history, but during her tour she loved the stories of the farm and all the old cars and parts that are disposed in the holler. She thinks as part of the “farm experience”, we should be offering guided hikes and telling these stories. Barbara made us believe that we do have a unique and fun experience to offer here at MHO, so if we can just find the time to begin developing experiences for guests, rather than spending our time farming, we may be able to succeed in agri-tourism.

We tend to read a lot of articles about farming, so a lot of articles related to agriculture pop into our news feed.  We in WNC are fortunate to only have had the outer edges of hurricane Florence pass through our region.  We at MHO often complain about crop loss from the critters who are eating our food.  The past couple weeks we’re feeling especially blessed that we are still able to eat fresh meals from the farm and feed our CSA Shareholders.  Many of the farms in the eastern part of the state have completely lost everything.  We know first hand, being a small farm we are never paid for the crop loss from pests and disease, so imagine if we lost everything? If we didn’t have accommodations, that may mean selling the farm 

We found this NPR story especially interesting, so if you have the time you may be interested in listening, but this quote especially hits home; “If your’re doing something specialty,  and increasingly consumers are looking for local or specialty-raised crops that have a much higher value. So the farmer’s are going to invest more in producing it, and then that product is going to have a higher value in the marketplace. Well, for those farmers, the prices that are set in the insurance policies aren’t going to come anywhere near the value of their product in the marketplace. The value of that product can be two or three times.

What we’ve seen over the last few years, especially in North Carolina with the reduction of tobacco production, is farmers moving into very high-value, often direct-market sales to restaurants, sales to high-value grocery stores. Those are the exact farmers who are going to have the most difficulty recovering, because the disaster programs are just not geared for that type of production, for that value, to really address those kinds of losses. “

The types of farms that the story is referring to are farms like what we have in abundance here in WNC, the small CSA farm or the small organic farm that is selling direct to the grocery stores and restaurants. We certainly feel for those farmers. If anyone knows how to help these type of farms, please let us know!!!

Are you tired of us including photographs of Kaiser and Argus?  After all, they are our kids, and just look at how cute they are in this photo?  Kaiser simply lets Argus rough house with him.  We have started feeding Kaiser puppy chow, because livestock guardians require a high protein diet, and Kaiser keeps wanting to eat Argus’ food.  We figure that if Kaiser wants puppy chow, he has earned his right to eat puppy chow, so that’s what we are feeding him.