C.S.A. Week 1

Here we are at the first week of the C.S.A. The garden has made the transformation from empty brown dirt and flattened cover crop to rows and rows of green. There is a magical moment when the energy of the farm shifts, when plants have graduated from their fragile stage and entered the period of explosive growth and production. I look forward to this point in the year when we can trust the plants and our job is to more simply support them in their growing. We give them little tweaks here and there; a trellis, water, weeding, but they no longer need us to hover, catering to their every tiny need. The tomatoes are growing about twelve inches a week now, and I spend an hour or two in the greenhouse every seven days or so pruning suckers and clipping them to their vertical support strings. By late July they will have reached the cross beams in the tunnel, and I’ll give up on taming them and their fruit heavy tops will start to lean back down towards the ground. Soon the first round of broccoli will start heading, we will harvest them and turn their stalks back into the ground. Tiny carrots are getting bigger by the day, the most tedious initial rounds of weeding are behind us. We’ve cruised through almost all the plants now at least once, our hands brushing up against them as we pull competing crab grass and purslane, giving them that encouragement towards growth.

In the share

Please take 8 items (there will be more choice as more food comes in over the next few weeks)!

• Baby summer squash and zucchini mix

• Baby beets

• Curly Kale

• Romaine Lettuce

• Butter head Lettuce

• Yellow Scallions

• Purple Kohlrabi

• Garlic Scapes (From Mountain Heartbeet Farm)

• Swiss Chard

• Bok Choi