Our next CSA distribution will be Monday May 14 and Thursday May 17. This will be the best share yet, with the diversity of items continuing to increase, including spring turnips and garlic scapes this week. Some of you may still want to invest in a bigger, or a second, cooler as we could barely fit last week’s share in some. Coming up this weekend is our cheese-making demonstration event, which will present lots of ways to use fresh milk at home. If you forgot this was coming, remember to check the member event schedule to put anything of interest on your calendar ahead of time. Read on below for more on this week’s produce, the cheese/milk event, and other on-farm news. Continue reading
Customizing CSA shares: Radish example
Our CSA offers limited share customization using LimeSurvey, an open-source online survey software that we’ve adapted to our needs. Members have the weekly option to request extras of any given item, a standard share amount, or none at all; the software helps us generate custom packing lists that make bagging individual shares easy. This allows our farm to use products more efficiently, by not forcing certain items on members who don’t want them, and by allowing extras/seconds to be sent to members who want more produce. The “extras” are otherwise unsellable but edible seconds (slightly damaged or overgrown), or items not desired by other members, or just overproduction of an item that did really well that week. Thus produce which might otherwise end up on the compost heap (or which we’d have to put extra work into selling through another outlet like a farmers market), finds a useful and efficient home while making everyone happier. We could (and will) write a lot more on how and why we do this, but in this post we’ll just illustrate the way this system works and why we like it, using this spring’s abundant radish harvests. Continue reading
Veggie to-do list, early May
Gears shift in May. Cool-weather crops are in the ground and growing or being harvested. These need maintenance: weeding, mulching, and/or watering, depending on conditions. But the hot-weather crops begin to take center stage in terms of attention. The greenhouse is packed with tomato and pepper transplants that have grown remarkably fast this year. We’re still prone to get frost in our valley through mid-May; we’ve had light frosts at that time for about the last three years. Various questions include: Are we done with frost? And will that next round of storms in the forecast bring hail? Is it better to procrastinate and put incrementally more stress on already big transplants to get safely through one more storm, or is it better to get them in the ground just a bit earlier where they’ll be happier so long as they don’t immediately get pounded by torrential rain or pummeled by hail? How many plants can we protect with sheets if we do end up with a frost threat? We spend a lot of time looking at weather forecasts & long-range models, especially at this time of year. A couple days ago, the National Weather Service was showing 6-10 day and 8-14 day outlooks that showed a high probability of warm. As I initially wrote this on Apr. 30, that forecast window started to trend towards chilly. Sigh. Update: We decided to put the first planting of tomatoes out on May 1 & 2, hopefully for the best. A partial to-do list for early May follows. Continue reading
CSA distribution #6 & newsletter
Our next CSA distribution will be Monday May 7 and Thursday May 10. New items will start to appear more regularly now. Growing conditions are continuing April’s trend of being quite nice overall, and our employees/workers are doing a great job helping to keep us sane (we’ll be writing more about them soon). Read on for produce details, photos & ideas for product use, farm updates, and more. Continue reading
Bird list & natural events, April 2012
April was a glorious month. The weather was seasonal and stable, with appropriate temperatures and generally the right amount and timing of rain with no severe weather (other than the bit-too-much heavy rain right at the end, but we still needed a good soaking). The only real blot on its record was March, which had so many crops & natural plants ahead of themselves that the expected April frosts and freezes did some damage (such as all our young pecan tree losing their leaves). We had to do a lot of work to cover crops like strawberries night after night, but made it through with no damage and what looks like a heavy crop. It was the kind of month where we love working outdoors every day and being so immersed in the rapid changes and developments in the natural world on this farm. Continue reading
Home yogurt making
As non-fans of drinking milk on its own, we love making fresh yogurt as an alternative. It’s quite versatile in the kitchen, usable for everything from breakfast to dessert, and we easily go through 2 quarts a week or more. Before we established our own year-round milk supply, we found that we could make a batch of yogurt from local organic milk for about half the price of buying the equivalent volume of organic plain yogurt, with what we considered superior flavor and not shipped in from far away. Whether with our goat’s milk or your own preferred source, learning to make yogurt at home can be a really rewarding and cost-efficient process if you have a little time to spare. Continue reading
Homemade whole-milk ricotta
Whole-milk ricotta is the easiest fresh cheese to make at home, requiring fairly standard kitchen equipment and a minimum of steps. It doesn’t take very long and produces a very tasty and versatile product which we think tastes much better than the ricotta that’s readily available in stores. By some definitions, whole-milk ricotta is not really a cheese (because there’s no culture or rennet), and it’s technically not true ricotta (which is made from reheating whey of hard cheese but produces miniscule quantities of curd). However, we consider the simple process and tasty results to be a good first step into home cheese-making. Continue reading
CSA distribution #5 & newsletter
Our next CSA distribution will be Monday April 30 and Thursday May 3. Below we’ll give more information on upcoming shares, events on and around the farm, and more ideas for using share contents. This week’s theme is “coming soon”, as it will likely be the last thin share for a while, with many more produce items getting very close to ready. However, milk & egg production are both quite high and we’d love to have people give these a try. We’ll also be hosting a last-minute birding/nature walk for CSA members Saturday morning, as conditions are perfect with lots of species arriving and active (see below for details). Continue reading
Using (raw) milk as an ingredient
We ran a survey of our CSA members this week, assessing interest in receiving deliveries of raw goat’s milk from the farm under the condition that it’s not to be consumed raw (read more about this here and here). Quite a few people expressed theoretical interest tempered with some version of “I like the idea but I don’t know what to do with it if I can’t drink it”. This is thoroughly understandable, given the very Western/American cultural view of milk primarily as a pure drink, quite different from many other cultures’ uses of the product. In this and further posts, we’re going to discuss various other ways to use and handle milk in the home to create lots of fresh and tasty foods. Even for folks not interested in our goat’s milk (or for non-CSA members), there’s a lot to learn here about diverse ways to use good milk to make new foods and often save money. (If nothing else, many of these recipes/techniques are the base of versatile ways to use vegetables.) Non-organic goat’s milk is currently selling at a local grocery chain for over $5/quart, as compared to our price of $6/half-gallon, and the equivalent yogurts and cheeses you can make are even pricier. Continue reading
Using mint in beverages
One of our favorite ways to use mint is to infuse its flavor into various beverages. Most of these involve heating the liquid, then tossing in a few sprigs of mint. To maximize the mint flavor, we’ve found that it is best to add the mint when the liquid is a bit below the boiling point of water. Here are a few recipes for using mint in diverse beverages including tea, mojitos, and chocolate milk. Continue reading