CSA, Veggies, Weekly Farm News

Weekly news from the farm!

Posted on by mhoadmin
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Greetings Everyone,

We’re incredibly sorry, that for the foreseeable future we won’t be allowing Spring Creek shareholders to grab their share out of the cooler due to COVID-19. In helping to prevent the spread of the virus, we are trying to limit physical contact with the cooler, so we’ve had to implement pick-up times that is both inconvenient for you and us. Currently, those times are either Wednesday between 3 until 5 OR Fridays between 4 and 5.

We’d like to decrease the Wednesday pick-up window from 2 hours to 1 hour just so we are able to get more field work done. Would it be convenient for you to pick up Wednesdays between 4 and 5? Please provide us with guidance by either clicking  YES: Pick-up between 4 and 5 is good or click NO: I prefer to pick-up between 3 and 5.

The reason we have pick-up times, is because it is inefficient for us to stop our task to meet folks at the cooler at any given notice. Many times we’re working in the fields, and the stopping/starting tasks will cause us not to finish our daily “to do” list.

If you have information that suggests it’s safe for us to resume the self-serve pickup that we’ve had in the past, please share that with us! We’re looking forward to once again implementing our self service style pick-ups because it’s so much easier for everyone. 

Here is a link to the online store to place your order.

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!  All orders are due by 8 AM on Tuesday.  Pick-ups in Spring Creek are Wednesday from 3 – 5 OR Friday from 4 – 5. 
What is new or abundant this week!

CUCUMBERS….  Any day now we expect this crop to peter out. In the meantime, CSA Shareholder Dick Ott has recommended that perhaps everyone would be interested in refrigerator pickles. For those into fermentation, these fermented cucumber pickles are another great way for preserving them and they’ll provide your gut bacteria with a boost of Probiotics.

We’re highlighting Bok Choi again!  Why, you might ask? This vegetable is amazing and doesn’t grow well during the summer, so we’ll only have this available for the next few weeks.  So we hope you, like us, will do all your meal planing around this wonderful vegetable.  

Garlic Scapes are here for a short time only!   These are the flower bud of our hardneck garlic, harvested before it opens, that combines the flavor of both garlic and scallions into one delicious herb. They can be used like cloves of garlic but will have a milder flavor. You will use the portion, minced, using the flower and the stalk until the stalk is too tough. Puree in salad dressings or mince and season cooking oil in a skillet. Here is a pesto recipe for you! Check this web page out from Serious Eats, 7 things to do with garlic scapes, so be sure to stock up on these because they are very seasonal and only available at the tail end of Spring!
This Weeks Farmer’s Choice!

Above is Bibimbap made with the following veggies: onions, radishes, zucchini, bok choi, turnips and kale.  It can easily be made vegan by omitting the egg (not pictured) that we put on top of the bowl. Super DELICIOUS AND HEALTHY.  Our version isn’t as beautiful as that made by Jess and Brian when they were on the farm.

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. )

The following are included only in the veggie share:

The following are included only in the meat share
What’s happening on the farm!

What is a perfect season for a farmer?

In our wildest dreams, every crop we planted would grow and thrive!  However, that is not the case, and we can only think of a handful of seasons over our farming career when that has been the case. This Spring, we’ve experienced a cool and wet spring, thankfully we covered the potatoes before the last frost, because they are now growing out of their hills and look beautiful.  We’re hopeful for a great potato season!  These storage crops nourish our CSA Shareolders for over half the season and the farmers all winter long.

The onions didn’t fare so well!

We’re sad to have lost quite a few onions to dampening off which is caused by the fungus Fusarium oxysporum. This fungus grows and thrives in cool and wet conditions, so this season was perfect for fusarium.  While the above picture may look like a lot of onions are growing, once the ragweed is removed, we’ve found many of the plants have died. We must count our blessings that we’ve had a good crop the past few years, but losing this crop is definitely hard on us financially because they are about a 1/8 of our farming income. We had a few extra plants and so were able to fill in some of the places where plants died. However, onions are day length sensitive and since we’re planting these extra late we don’t think they will size up, but time will tell if they survive.  We’d love some suggestions from you for crops we should try as a substitution for our loss from our onions?

Look at those sad sugar snap peas growing along the trellis!

For the past 15 years, the last few weeks of May we’d be earning a good portion of our market sales from delicious sugar snap peas. However, we think that our seed was infected with a strain of Fusarium so we lost this crop. We have a field crop planted, a different variety, so we’re still hoping we’ll be able to enjoy this spring delicacy!

The shelling peas may soon be ready!

Above are our shelling peas planted in the same space as our sugar snap peas, so far the plants look healthy!  That is why we believe our sugar snap seed was infected, because if the fusarium was in the soil, these plants would also be infected.

Fingers crossed we’ll be eating French Filet Beans next week!

Above are French Filet beans planted in the same space as our sugar snap peas, so far the plants look healthy and there is a lot of fruit set!  We’re hopeful these wonderful and tasty beans will be available for your shares next week!

CSA Members Spud (the Pyrenees) and Ruby (the border collie mix) enjoying their bok choy stems!  
,
mhoadmin

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