Blog

Today marks our very first CSA delivery! I’m not calling this Week 1 since you’re only getting asparagus, but I think that freshly harvested asparagus is a pretty good way to kick off the season. From now on, the format of my newsletters will change a little bit to focus more on what you’re getting each week and will include a recipe or two to give you some ideas about how you might prepare your produce. I’ll also include some storage tips in case you can’t get to cooking your veggies right away and a mention of what’s going on at the farm each week. Let’s get started!

This past week I spent a whole bunch of time weeding. In some ways, I rather enjoy this task. I can put on some music or a good podcast or I can just listen to the birdsong. Weeding can also be a bit meditative under the right circumstances. It’s a nice time to let my mind wander, and I often come up with solutions to various problems while doing it.

On our farm, it just isn’t spring until the asparagus starts to grow. This finally happened last week and we are already harvesting many, many pounds worth each day. Asparagus is a long-lived perennial crop. We first planted ours a year after moving here, in 2014. Erik’s Uncle Jerry came for a long weekend and helped us dig thirteen long trenches into which we carefully laid 1,300 asparagus crowns. Like most perennial crops, you can’t harvest newly planted asparagus for two to three years, but, as with the strawberries, it was worth the wait and now we typically celebrate asparagus season with a good week or two of near nightly asparagus-themed meals. Our favorite this past week was a creamy linguine with asparagus, peas, and morel mushrooms which we were thrilled to find yesterday while walking in the woods!

Two weeks have passed since my last newsletter, and I have to confess that not a whole lot has happened on the farm since then. The soil temperature has stubbornly stayed around 60 to 65 degrees for weeks on end which means that many of the seeds that were supposed to already be planted out are still tucked up warm and cozy inside of their seed packets. Still, I did manage to get a few crops into the ground last week: beets and lettuce were seeded as well as arugula which can germinate at just 40 degrees!