CSA Week 16!
Dear friends!
First off! We will be gone the weekend of October 29th and 30th. Jesse is the best man in a wedding and we won't have enough help to run the market at the time. Saturday CSA members, we hope that you will be understanding and be okay with postponing that weeks share to the following week. You will still get the same number of weeks, just add on a week to the CSA. Please let us know if that will be a problem.
We're excited to welcome our newest WWOOFer, Katie, to the farm. She's been traveling around for the past several months working on farms and she's jumped right on in and been incredibly helpful! We have a pretty solid team this month. Jesse, myself, Devan and Katie. Tony's in Ireland for a few weeks and he will be joining us again in mid September on Mondays and Fridays.
Thanks for your patience the past couple of weeks as I have been way behind on the emails! Since I arrived home from my trip I am working on my work/life balance. I haven't quite found where this email falls into the week now that I am trying to set boundaries with work. But I am going to aim for thursday afternoon this week.
Farming can be all consuming if we let it. And having a few days off helped me realize that I am a lot healthier when I create more balance in my life! Also things are slowing down and you can feel the season changing. Fall is definitely in the air. The earth is tilting and the light is different. Days are noticeably shorter. The weather this year, as it is almost every year nowadays, has been very strange and unpredictable. Last year we had a wet and unusually cool spring and early summer and a drought in late summer and fall. This year, we had July temperatures in may and June and now an unusual rainy streak. We have had rain every day or every other day for a few weeks now. This has first of all mostly ruined the tomatoes. This morning will be our very last harvest of them. Which means we will have green tomatoes for the CSA starting NEXT week. We have heard that almost all of our farm friends have lost their tomatoes even earlier than us. We have been lucky to have them this long.
On that note, I am expecting some slim pickins for the CSA over the coming weeks as we wait for our fall stuff to come in. We new this time would come (end of tomato season) so we gave y'all about $40-$45 a week during the peak season. Been trying to keep it that way as long as we could. We may source some things from other farmers. But as I said a few emails ago, we will do our best to keep our CSA at the level it has been but during the seasonal transition, and with all the rain, there's only so much we can provide. Our fall planting has been delayed by the rain. As I said we have been getting SOOOOO much rain and we can't plant into wet soil. Thanks for bearing with us over the next 3-4 weeks. I will be getting creative and trying to put some interesting things in the CSA until the fall crops come in.
Please enjoy these photos! Yesterday we stopped at Rolf and Daughters for a drink at the bar and an appetizer. For those of you who don't know, they use our food almost every week in their restaurant. They were so sweet and treated us to a plate of heirloom and our cherry tomatoes with lemon thyme and burrata that knocked our socks off (see photo below)! We love it when chefs bring out the best in our food! They are very supportive of us and other local farms and we appreciate it! We picked the pears off of our pear tree! The tree is adorable and scrawny but yielded SOOOO many pears! They will be in WEEK 17 's CSA. Also we celebrated Nico's 7th birthday! She's been talking about her birthday since she got here last January! I'm not sure a week or even a day went by when she didn't express her excitement! It was a blast and we all wore party hats made by the birthday girl herself!
We are hosting 2 farmhouse concerts in September:
September 9th, 7pm-11pm Dubb Nubb (Missouri), Curt Oren and Nora Petran (Iowa), Karen Meat (Iowa)
https://www.facebook.com/events/1164038180327155/
September 25th 5-8pm, Weeping Willows (Australia), Todd Henkin (Nashville), Ed Masuga (Nashville)
https://www.facebook.com/events/1649624825351850/
Here's your Week 16 CSA!
1 bunch sweet potato greens
1 bunch shiso
0.6-1 pound okra
1-1.5 pounds mostly cukes maybe some squash
up to 6 chili peppers
2 onions
1-2 pounds tomatoes
1 pint cherry tomatoes
2+ eggplant
2+ peppers
1 bunch basil
1 bunch holy basil
SHISO!
We have sauteed it down but we have found that it is best when roasted like kale chips. Here is a kale chip recipe that can be applied to the shiso. Substitute the shiso for the kale. Shiso pesto is a great option as well.
Thanks everyone for your support! Keep us posted on what you like and don't like! We want this experience to be wonderful for you.
Love, your farmers,
Lizzie, Jesse, Tony, Devan, Nico, Katie, Winnie, Stormy, Ducks, Sheep, Cows