06-13-2009 Farm Message

STAR HOLLOW FARM NEWS

For the week preceding Saturday, June 13^th, 2009

General news & info

Hello all!

Produce: new (or back) this week are..

• Greens: Lacinato kale, collards, baby arugula.

• Veggies: Organic asparagus, broccoli, shell and snow peas, new red potatoes, gold squash.

• Mushrooms: Star Hollow shiitakes

• Cheese: Keswick Creamery's cheddar, feta, dragon's breath, ricotta. Pipe Dream's goat ash log and demi-sec.

• Berries: Strawberries

• Herbs: a dozen kinds of herbs total, this week with larger basil, cilantro, dill, tarragon, summer savory.

On the farm: I just looked back over the message I wrote last year on this week. We had just begun planting potatoes because it had been so wet. Onions were just going in also. So, even though the wetness has held us back this spring, we did have some dry earlier that we didn't have last year, and we're actually well ahead of planting over last year. Our 5 varieties of winter squash are all ready to go out into the fields whenever it's dry enough. I had about 4 hours on Monday afternoon that the ground was dry enough to work, but I chose to hill and cultivate the potatoes that were already a foot tall and pretty weedy over planting squash. Always tradeoffs. It rained again during the night, and so we're waiting for dry ground again.

Shiitake mushrooms: We're tickled that our shiitake mushrooms are starting to produce. We go up each morning and harvest the mushrooms that look ready from the soaked logs on the fruiting stand and then start soaking more logs for the next batch. Within a day or two the mushrooms start popping out of the logs. We've also soaked the oyster mushroom logs, but aren't seeing any action there yet. We've reduced the portion size on the shiitakes to just a quarter pound, so that they're not so expensive. (Shiitakes are typically the most expensive of the commonly available fresh mushrooms around, and the log-grown versions are notably more flavorful and more highly regarded than the house-grown ones.)

What does LOCAL mean? And why should we care? Local food has been touted lately as being better for the environment, more nutritious, better tasting, and good for local communities. We're always reading the ag press and seeing what they have to say on the subject. We got the "Local Harvest" e-newsletter last week, and it contained their definition, which I'll include. "Local food is grown near here, on a human scale, by people who care deeply about the land and make thoughtful, conscientious choices for its stewardship. It is nutritionally intact and fantastic tasting (!)... Its history is knowable and unsullied... In other words, local goes way beyond geography. It is food we know in our bellies we can trust... Real food." A bit pretentious and self-serving, but we agree!

PASA gathering: We had about 40 or so folks over last Sunday afternoon for a tour and potluck, people from our south-central region that are members of the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture. It's PASA's winter conference that we take a week off to attend, and then tell you about afterwards, when we're all “charged up.” It was fun, and we had a beautiful afternoon / evening to enjoy it. I hope that we are as lucky with our CSA open farms, starting next month!

Open-farm dates: The first “open farm” is less than a month away. Below are the dates we've set aside for our open-farm get-togethers.

• July 4^th and 5^th, August 1^st and 2^nd, September 5^th and 6th

Star Hollow CSA blog: (http://starhollowfarmcsa.blogspot.com/) Email Michele (smcasto@gmail.com) if you want to become a “contributor.”

CSA-Specific News

Planned CSA produce for this week:

This week the plan is for a pint of strawberries, a bunch of Lacinato kale (aka Dyno, Black, or Tuscan), a small bag of lambsquarters (wild spinach), a pint of snow peas, a pound of new red potatoes – the first of the season, a head of bibb lettuce and a few radishes to go on top, along with some onions. Enjoy!

CSA box values. Someone asked a week or so ago about why the dollar value of the CSA boxes isn't always $15.00, as it was last year. Since we had said the box would be $15 originally, we felt locked into that amount. Then, about this time last year, it occurred to me that the way our bookkeeping works there was not really any reason why it had to come out to exactly $15, which was often a challenge for us. So we did a survey and asked for any comments about having a “roughly” $15 box, but variable from week to week. Every person who responded said fine. It's only been since we've gotten under way this year that we've actually enacted that, and so now perhaps you're seeing it for the first time, depending on whether you've been ordering all along or not.

Adams Morgan CSA volunteers. Thanks to Barbara & Chuckie and Lily & Tyler for their help handing out orders last weekend.

Thanks for your support!

Randy, Chris and all at Star Hollow Farm