August Fifteenth

I have discovered that making dinner is my meditation. It clears my mind. It is the ritual that resets my brain, comforts me and brings me ‘home’ again. I’ve always been too much of a busy-body to deeply delve into meditation. I’m not against it, just wired in a way where I can’t sit for too long. I’m too pragmatic, too busy, too hungry! Some people run, some people read, some people watch TV, some people maybe even smoke or drink or sleep. I cook.   And I don’t mind spending hours doing it.

I find that it also calms the children. They love it when I stay in one place for while. After a day of everyone running around the farm and people going in and out the front door and the farm truck and tractors going up and down the road and the phone ringing and the chores calling, we settle it all down with the smell of onions and garlic sautéing in a pan with oil (probably the most amazing smell in the world). The kids are magically soothed to the sound of veggies being chopped on the cutting board, to the sound of something sizzling in the cast iron pan, and to the clinking and clanking of pans and dishes being rustled around on the stove and countertop. When mom is in the kitchen cooking, life feels good and safe and predictable.

I wouldn’t say that I’m an awesome cook. I’m learning, progressing and certainly logging in the practice hours. The kids like to ‘help’ too. Well, I shouldn’t say they like to help me, they like to make their own dishes. We make fantastic messes that might stress out the average mom, but I have fully surrendered to the messes with three small children. The mess is a sacrifice I have been willing to make for the sake of fostering a love for cooking and vegetables in these little people.

I don’t get a CSA box of #1 produce each week, but I do have access to the piles of ‘seconds’, as we call them. In an effort to use up these bins of veggies culled out at harvest or in the pack shed, I process more veggies than one might normally process in one meals preparation time. It sometimes takes longer to cut around the blemishes and curves of the mis-shapen and imperfect veggies, but I don’t mind because I feel rich with the bounty.

My senses are fully alive in the kitchen. I smell the fresh basil as I mince it and revel in the aroma. I feel the heat from the stove and the weight of the pot. I move swiftly and surely from one countertop to the sink to the stove and then back to the countertop in my familiar comfort zone. I hear that the pan is starting to sizzle and pop. I know the veggies need stirring. I take it slow and stir. Just stirring and watching and breathing. I taste the soup to know if it needs salt or more herbs or more time to cook.

When the food is ready to eat, the meditative practice doesn’t have to end. Finally I get to sit down after everyone has food on their plate, silverware, drinks, napkins and has come to the table. We share our simple blessing and words of gratitude and the meal feels intentional, purposeful and wholesome. Slowly, we fill our bellies and our hearts with the warmth that comes from being fed a meal made with love. I breathe again and feel full.

Sooooo....What's in the Box????

Broccoli/Pepper/Eggplant-   One head of broccoli per member or 1-2 peppers (depending on size) or 1 eggplant. We’re expecting sweet pepper production to pick up in the next few weeks. There will be a lul in broccoli and cauliflower for a little while until Fall Plantings come on and eggplants will likely be a low production crop this summer.

Sweet Corn- 6 Ears of Sweet corn per member this week.   This is the final sweet corn giving. Sweet corn is best eaten as soon as possible once harvested from the plant. If you must keep it for a few days, be sure to keep it in the refrigerator and keep it cold to preserve it’s sweetness and crispiness. The ears aren’t huge, but for the most part they look good and the flavor is excellent! We’re still keeping the coons out of the patch pretty well!

Eggplant or Cherry Tomatoes or Sweet Bell Pepper- Because eggplant plants don’t necessarily crank out eggplants, we supplemented with cherry tomatoes or a sweet bell pepper. It’s a bit of the luck of the draw on this one. The cherry tomatoes are the sun gold variety of you got these and they ripen orange. Don’t wait for them to turn red because they won’t! We love this cherry tomato variety because of how wonderfully sweet they are!   The remainder of members received a sweet bell pepper.

Green Beans- .64lbs of green beans per member this week. Beans are best eaten fresh! Don’t try to keep them long!

Summer Squash and Zucchini- 1-2 squash per member. Summer Squash are the yellow ones and zucchini are the green ones. Zucchini and summer squash actually keep best at 50 degrees. Some people will set them out at room temp and some will keep them in their fridge since most of us don't have the luxury of a 50 degree storage area. We may decide to quit picking zucchini and summer squash soon as they are starting to fizzle out fast. Thank you Sqash plants for all of your amazing gifts!

Celery- Smaller bunches of celery again this week. Local celery usually has a stronger celery flavor that what we’re all used to-California celery grown in more mild temperatures with high water inputs. With the diversity of crops we are growing on this farm, this is about the best celery we can offer. Celery is great in soups, egg salad, or even cold summer pasta dishes.

Cucumbers- 7 Cucumbers per member! Cucumbers are finally slowing down. We will be lucky if we are able to give one or two cucumbers next week, so enjoy them while they are lasting as they are quickly going out of season! It’s time to try out your favorite cucumber recipes that use a few of them. Think cucumber soup, tzatziki sauce, refrigerator pickles, cucumber salad….. My kids eat one for a snack almost every day!

White Onion- One nice and big white onion for everyone. Will keep just fine on your countertop.

Collards- Collards are in the same family as Kale and Cabbage and Brussels Sprouts. Don’t feel intimidated by the Collards. Find a classic southern collards recipe (you can’t go wrong with bacon;) or just sautee them with and eat them with eggs in the morning and you’ll never know they aren’t kale!

Tomatoes- 8 lbs. We grow a wide variety of tomatoes each year. About 12-15 different varieties. Some are romas (the longer more pear-shaped varieties with less water that are good for making sauce), yellow slicers, red slicers, tie-dye slicers, and the infamous herilooms that are slowly coming into season. Heirlooms usually ripen a little later in the season since they are a larger tomatoes and are not hybridized for early production. You are likely to receive a very wide selection of tomatoes over the tomato-growing season with a wide variety of colors. We recommend leaving tomatoes out at room temperature to ripen naturally. Remove them from their plastic bag and set them out on your counter or windowsill so they don’t get funky in the plastic bag and mold or rot on you. We pick tomatoes with a ‘blush’. This means that we pick anything that has any early signs of red or pink or color. Once a tomato begins to blush it will ripen fully off the vine and this still qualifies as a vine-ripened tomato. Their flavor will be much better if you just let them sit on the counter to ripen. We do not recommend putting tomatoes in the refrigerator at all, ever, unless they are nearly over-ripe and you need to buy yourself some time before you get a chance to use them up before they go bad. Refrigerators seem to suck flavor out of tomatoes as well. For the full experience, let them ripen on the counter!

Sungold Cherry Tomatoes- One pint of cherry tomatoes per member this week. Remember that these guys ripen orange, so please don’t wait for them to turn red. These are the best tasting tomato on earth. Check out our recipe for the cherry tomato tart below! It’s to DIE for and will be served at our Farm Dinner in a couple weeks! Wow your friends and family with this recipe!

Beets- Three large beets per member this week! Beets will keep very well for months in a plastic bag in the fridge. But I’m sure you can find a fun summer dish to use them up in!

Melon- You may have received a yellow watermelon, an orange cantelope or a green honeydew. We tried to give everyone a cantelope, but they weren’t all ready yet. We will have a melon for everyone again next week, but it’s hard to say which varieties will be ready. Watermelons will not ripen off the vine, so there is no need to wait to see if it is ready. The cantelopes and honeydews will ripen off the vine, so if you know they are ready, keep them in your fridge until you get a chance to use them up. If they are not ready, leave them on your countertop to ripen. You will know that a cantelope or honeydew is ready when they have a strong melon smell.

Hungarian Hot Wax Pepper- These were tucked inside your tomato bags. Hungarian Hot wax are amongst the most mild of hot peppers, but they may surprise you!

Next Week's Best Guess: beets, cucumbers, summer squash and zucchini, tomatoes, onion, celery, swiss chard, melons, sweet peppers, Hungarian hot wax pepper, red cabbage?

Recipes

Tomato Tart!

Marinated Celery Salad with Chickpeas and Parmesan

Chunky Celery Soup with Wild Rice

August Eighth

Perhaps one of the most beautiful things about the farm is the people. We package up these colorful, cute and tasty little boxes that are lovingly and quite strategically tucked together with care.   And when they are finally delivered, all you get to see and experience are merely the vegetables themselves lying naked and alone in the box. But what you don’t know, or have possibly forgotten, is that there are faces on this food. There are stories in their cell walls.

The production of vegetables is inherently social because of the impressive amount of labor hours that go into bringing them into fruition. Without the dozens of people who bring their two hands to the farm to pick the cherry tomatoes, green beans, carrots, basil, cucumbers, zucchini, tomatoes, ect, we wouldn’t be able to manage the bounty any other way. The hours and hours spent doing this kind of work alongside friends builds a kind of relationship, sort of like a community, slowly but definitely. Steadily, these people become our friends and we become theirs. We share our stories with one another while we’re out there. We express to each other our dreams and reflections and ponderings while pitchforking garlic or harvesting kale bunches or weeding carrots. It feels comfortable and natural and casual.

While working on the farm, we literally wear our worst clothing-quite opposite to ‘town’ attire. Everyone out there is wearing their jeans with holes, their old thread-bare t-shirts or retired flannels with frayed cuffs and missing buttons. We’re in our muck boots, sun hats and work gloves. We look and unconsciously feel like we’re tough. It brings out a kind of crudeness in a person to dress in this way. One feels raw yet humble in nature to be crawling on the ground to weed or squatting to harvest or bending low to hunt for cucumbers. Conversation and movement pair so well together that it feels almost like dancing. Talking feels easy and when you have the rest of the day ahead of you, there is always time to tell the long version of your story.

Some people come here because they crave this kind of work. I know I did. I find it interesting how many people come to help on the farm from the world of academia. The heady and educated and worldly are drawn in. The people who have spent much of their lives inside buildings or behind books or screens or using pencils and computers as their primary tools are the ones who come running to the farm. The farm feels like a retreat to some, even if it is for just one morning a week.

And who isn’t comforted to be surrounded by so much bounty? It’s like a Festival of Food, week after week! It’s a Harvest Parade! It is a social gathering around food that feels so ancient and primal. We are a bit of a motley crew, but we pull it together for the sake of supper. We go home tired and dirty and we prepare our dinners with memories from the fields.

CSA originated in Japan in the 1960s. The Japanese word for CSA is Teikei which translates to “food with the farmer’s face on it”. Teikei also means “cooperation”, “linking up”, or “joint business”.   But I love how the word embodies community. Our faces and stories are inside these vegetables as much as anything else. Can you see them? Can you hear them?

Sooooo....What's in the Box????

Broccoli-   Some of the nicest looking broccoli that we have grown yet this year. Many of the heads were nice and large this week. A lucky few received a cauliflower as well if the broccoli was small.

Sweet Corn- 6 Ears of Sweet corn per member this week.   Sweet corn is best eaten as soon as possible once harvested from the plant. If you must keep it for a few days, be sure to keep it in the refrigerator and keep it cold to preserve it’s sweetness and crispiness. The ears aren’t huge, but for the most part they look good and the flavor is excellent! We’re still keeping the coons out of the patch pretty well!

Eggplant or Cherry Tomatoes or Sweet Bell Pepper- Because eggplant plants don’t necessarily crank out eggplants, we supplemented with cherry tomatoes or a sweet bell pepper. It’s a bit of the luck of the draw on this one. The cherry tomatoes are the sun gold variety of you got these and they ripen orange. Don’t wait for them to turn red because they won’t! We love this cherry tomato variety because of how wonderfully sweet they are!   The remainder of members received a sweet bell pepper.

Green Beans- This was the first green bean harvest and it was smaller. The first picking usually yields tender and crispy beans. We can look forward to more beans in the coming weeks. .4 lbs per member.

Summer Squash and Zucchini- 3-4 squash per member. Summer Squash are the yellow ones and zucchini are the green ones. Zucchini and summer squash actually keep best at 50 degrees. Some people will set them out at room temp and some will keep them in their fridge since most of us don't have the luxury of a 50 degree storage area. Wherever you decide to keep them, don't try to keep them long, because if zucchini is known for anything, it is its generosity! Squash harvest will go for another month or so, so I hope you’re finding ways to use it up!

Lettuce- Red leaf lettuce heads. Lettuce this time of year is tricky to grow, so we’re happy to have these to share! Keeps best in a plastic bag in the fridge.

Cucumbers- 7-8 Cucumbers per member! Woah! Cucumbers are still hitting with a bang. It’s time to try out your favorite cucumber recipes that use a few of them. Think cucumber soup, tzatziki sauce, pickles….. My kids eat one for a snack!

White Onion- One nice and big white onion for everyone. Will keep just fine on your countertop.

Curly Red Kale- This is the most kale we have ever given in one CSA season. Lots of kale this year! But the members we talk to have told us that they love the kale and they don’t have trouble using it up. Let us know if you’re feeling overwhelmed with kale!

Tomatoes- 4.5 lbs. We grow a wide variety of tomatoes each year. About 12-15 different varieties. Some are romas (the longer more pear-shaped varieties with less water that are good for making sauce), yellow slicers, red slicers, tie-dye slicers, and the infamous herilooms that are slowly coming into season. Heirlooms usually ripen a little later in the season since they are a larger tomatoes and are not hybridized for early production. You are likely to receive a very wide selection of tomatoes over the tomato-growing season with a wide variety of colors. We recommend leaving tomatoes out at room temperature to ripen naturally. Remove them from their plastic bag and set them out on your counter or windowsill so they don’t get funky in the plastic bag and mold or rot on you. We pick tomatoes with a ‘blush’. This means that we pick anything that has any early signs of red or pink or color. Once a tomato begins to blush it will ripen fully off the vine and this still qualifies as a vine-ripened tomato. Their flavor will be much better if you just let them sit on the counter to ripen. We do not recommend putting tomatoes in the refrigerator at all, ever, unless they are nearly over-ripe and you need to buy yourself some time before you get a chance to use them up before they go bad. Refrigerators seem to suck flavor out of tomatoes as well. For the full experience, let them ripen on the counter!

Basil- Gorgeous bunches of basil this week. It is still so tender and delicious this time of year and pairs well with the tomatoes and eggplants that are finally in season. Tomato basil soup? Caprice salad? BLT’s with basil?

Carrots- One pound of the famous Small Family Farm carrots per member this week. They are so sweet and so fresh their hearts are still beating! They keep best in a plastic bag in the fridge.

Garlic- A delicious, fresh garlic blub that is not fully cured. Notice that there is a thick membrane around the cloves of garlic that is usually paper-thin. This is because the garlic is still very fresh and is not fully cured. This garlic will keep for months if left out on the counter, but I’ll bet you’re planning to use it up sooner than that!

Next Week's Best Guess: broccoli, sweet corn, beets, cucumbers, summer squash and zucchini, tomatoes, onions, celery, collards, melons, sweet peppers, Hungarian hot wax pepper, red cabbage?

August First

The electric fence Farmer Adam put up around the sweet corn is a success. It has been successfully keeping the raccoons out so far. Although there is (quite mysteriously) a very small amount of damage each night. Perhaps there is a very sneaky little baby raccoon, maybe the runt of the littler who is just small enough to skinney underneat or just light enough to jump over or just hungry enough to make the dive through. Whatever the case, our losses are minimal so far.

It is interesting to me how each season brings it’s own challenges with pests or diseases or wildlife. There is no perfect season for all crops-it is only the degree to which there are losses. This season has been notably light with insect pressure. We’re seeing remarkably low cucumber beetle and squash bug pressure so far. Even the relentless flea beetles are mysteriously absent. The cabbage moth and potatoe beetles are present but minimal. But we have a new pest that we have somehow gotten lucky with in the last 12 years that has finally discovered our delicious vegetables- deer!

The deer are favoring our sweet potatoe plants, the beets and our green beans and edamame. There was deer pressure in the snap peas this spring and a few carrot tops here and there, but they are returning night after night for the sweet potato leaves. Because this is a new problem for our farm, we don’t have any systems in place for keeping them at bay. We’re trying to keep our lazy ol farm dog, Mugzie, sleeping outside at night (rather than on the couch in our house-ugh!). But Mugzie might have poor eyesight or he just isn’t roused by the deer, because we don’t see him chasing them off ever.

Our farm sits atop an open ridge with very little woods for wildlife to creep out of. The deer and the raccoons must make a bit of a trek and be in a very brave mood to want to stand out in our open fields. But they tend to get up quite a bit earlier in the morning than we do, so I guess their tactics are working.

While keeping wildlife at bay is part of the battle on the farm, we are also starting to need rain. Our clay soils are beginning to harden into a rock-like consistency that usually just melts into a fluffy loam after an inch of rain. Irrigation is always the back-up plan but garlic harvest and onion harvest have been keeping the farmers and the crews running at top speed to get everything done before the windows close.

Encouragingly, melon harvest is looking promising. The watermelons and musk melons on the farm have never looked so good! We’re hoping that when we start harvesting they taste and hold as good as they look from the end of the row. Tomato harvesting is picking up, the bean plants are covered in flowers and I even spied an early ripe sweet pepper.

Nobody ever told me that farming was going to be easy. But with all of you CSA members at our backs we can handle the curve balls a little better!  Help us pray for a little rain this week.  (But don't pray too hard!)

Sooooo....What's in the Box????

Cauliflower- Organic cauliflower in the heat of the summer can be a tricky one to grow. These aren’t the largest or the most beautiful we’ve ever grown. They varied in size quite a bit. Some were large and some were small and we tried to make sure everyone got either one large or one small and one broccoli. I love how cauliflower has become all the rage in the gluten-free world. It’s such a versatile vegetable!

Sweet Corn- 5 Ears of Sweet corn per member this week.   Sweet corn is best eaten as soon as possible once harvested from the plant. If you must keep it for a few days, be sure to keep it in the refrigerator and keep it cold to preserve it’s sweetness and crispiness. The ears aren’t huge, but for the most part they look good and the flavor is excellent! So far we’re keeping the coons out of the patch pretty well!

Eggplant or Cherry Tomatoes or Sweet Bell Pepper- Because eggplant plants don’t necessarily crank out eggplants, we supplemented with cherry tomatoes or a sweet bell pepper. It’s a bit of the luck of the draw on this one. The cherry tomatoes are the sun gold variety of you got these and they ripen orange. Don’t wait for them to turn red because they won’t! We love this cherry tomato variety because of how wonderfully sweet they are!   The remainder of members received a sweet bell pepper.

Celery- This has been a tough year for the celery field. Very few local farms even try to grow celery because it is a very tricky crop to grow. It has very high water needs and prefers a silty-loam soil and high calcium. We don’t always have the perfect soil conditions for it depending on which field it gets planted into with our rotation from year to year. This year we’re starting to take them small like this because many of them are showing signs of some kind of disease. We decided to start giving them small, rather than leaving them out there longer to just go bad. Hopefully three more weeks of celery givings.

Summer Squash and Zucchini- 3 squash per member. Summer Squash are the yellow ones and zucchini are the green ones. Zucchini and summer squash actually keep best at 50 degrees. Some people will set them out at room temp and some will keep them in their fridge since most of us don't have the luxury of a 50 degree storage area. Wherever you decide to keep them, don't try to keep them long, because if zucchini is known for anything, it is its generosity! Squash harvest will go for another month or so, so I hope you’re finding ways to use it up!

Lettuce- You may have received 1 red leaf or one green leaf lettuce this week. We harvested some red leaf lettuce and some green leaf lettuce. You may have received either variety. Keeps best in a plastic bag in the fridge.

Cucumbers- 6 Cucumbers per member! Woah! Cucumbers are still hitting with a bang. It’s time to try out your favorite cucumber recipes that use a few of them. Think cucumber soup, tzatziki sauce, pickles….. My kids eat one for a snack!

White Onion- One nice and big white onion for everyone. Will keep just fine on your countertop.

Curly Green Kale- We wanted to give swiss chard this week but the plants are slow to regenerate after damaged leaves from a previous storm. We’re hoping to give swiss chard next week.

Hungarian Hot Wax Pepper- These are probably the most mild hot pepper of all the hot pepper varieties. For a whimp like me, they are still plenty hot. Although they’re a little funny, because I have also eaten some that had almost no heat at all. They are also called banana peppers by some. These are the lime green, small pepper in your box. Later in the season they ‘ripen’ more orange and red in color, but for now they are still lime green;)

Carrots- One pound of the famous Small Family Farm carrots per member this week. They are so sweet and so fresh their hearts are still beating! Looking forward to more carrots coming-probably next week!

Next Week's Best Guess: broccoli, sweet corn, carrots, cucumbers, summer squash and zucchini, tomatoes, garlic, onions, celery, lettuce, basil, melons, swiss chard

July Twenty-Fifth

When I was a girl, my mother used to tell me I was her favorite child after I had just done something that pleased her. She would do this with a wink, and even in front of my other siblings at times. I remember feeling I had just eaten the mushroom in Mario Brothers and I would stand tall and feel proud. But I knew that she would do the same thing to my sister and my brother and tell them that they were her favorite, with a wink of course, in front of me. None of us ever felt jealous, for we were all well-loved and appreciated by our mother. Her praise would encourage good behavior and we each knew that we all got our turn in the limelight.

When asked what my favorite vegetable is, I would have to say it is the freshest and newest and prettiest vegetable on the farm. It is the root I have just pulled out of the ground with a ‘pluck’ whose heart is still beating with life. The one that looks alive and appeals to my sensory that day. It is the one that has just stricken me with its beauty and valor. It is the one that I have just sunk my teeth into and has made me go ‘mmmmmmmmm’.   The one that made me realize how much I had missed it while it was out of season. It changes, you see.

I love them all. As a mother loves all of her children, as we are capable of loving more than one place or one person or one color. I used to tell people that I didn’t like eggplant, for I had convinced myself that I didn’t. But the truth was, I hadn’t learned to love and appreciate it yet. It hadn’t captured me yet. I hadn’t prepared it in a way that I was happy with yet. No one else had cooked it for me yet in a way that made it taste good. But I was still an amateur cook and cooking with eggplant might be a ‘level 2’ vegetable- or at least it was for me.

When you’re in the fields harvesting eggplant on a sunny day, the eggplant come off the vine shining their sexy, sleek, black skin at you. They feel light, yet heavy in your hands and they’re so round and full and smooth and perfect looking. They suddenly appeal to you, and anyone might want to try and cook one. All vegetables have a freshness to them at the time of harvest that seems to slowly fade by the day (or even the hour depending on the temperature they’re stored at) after they have been picked. It’s sad to see it happen, but a reminder none the less, of the perishability of fresh produce.

One of the beautiful parts of belonging to a CSA farm is how incredibly fresh this produce is. It doesn’t taste like a supermarket. It doesn’t have stickers on it. It isn’t wrapped in plastic or coated in wax. The CSA box also forces you, in a way, to try new vegetables. You get to experience each vegetable in its season-in its limelight. The cucumbers taste so good to me now, but their quality will decline a bit and they’ll be old news in a few weeks and we will all have fallen in love with some other new and fancy vegetable coming into season like sweet peppers or melons or something.

It might even work this way with my mom still. She loves me most after a bit of a break. I am the most palatable when I’m fresh and perky and colorful. It’s okay with me, because I know that all things have their season and my siblings deserve their turn. I’ll be making eggplant parmesan this week. And thank you to mom for being such a great cook and making the first pan of eggplant parmesan that helped me learn to love it.

Sooooo....What's in the Box????

Green or Red Cabbage- The cabbages have to come out the field when they’re ready to come out. There was barely room in the box for them this week, but somehow we squeezed them in!

Cauliflower x 2- Organic cauliflower in the heat of the summer can be a tricky one to grow. These aren’t the largest or the most beautiful we’ve ever grown. They varied in size quite a bit. Some were large and some were small and we tried to make sure everyone got either one large and one small or two more medium sized heads. I love how cauliflower has become all the rage in the gluten-free world. It’s such a versatile vegetable!

Sweet Corn- 4-5 Ears of Sweet corn per member this week.   We started taking some of the corn a few days earlier than we wanted to harvest them because we’re already seeing raccoon damage in the sweet corn! Even though we have four wires of electric fence all the way around, somehow they bust their way in! Hopefully we can keep them out long enough that we still get a few more weeks of harvest! Keep your sweet corn very cold until you plan to eat it. Sweet corn looses its sweetness by the minute after it has been picked. We recommend eating it up as soon as possibly for the best flavor!

Eggplant- Very nice eggplants this week. Many people received a standard eggplant. If you did not receive a standard eggplant, you may have received an Asian eggplant. The Asian eggplant are long and skinney. They are loved because of their ease of just slicing them up and for stir fry pieces and because they have fewer seeds. Eggplant prefer 50 degree storage as well!

Celery- This has been a tough year for the celery field. Very few local farms even try to grow celery because it is a very tricky crop to grow. It has very high water needs and prefers a silty-loam soil and high calcium. We don’t always have the perfect soil conditions for it depending on which field it gets planted into with our rotation from year to year. This year we’re starting to take them small like this because many of them are showing signs of some kind of disease. We decided to start giving them small, rather than leaving them out there longer to just go bad. Hopefully four more weeks of celery givings.

Summer Squash and Zucchini- 4 squash per member. Summer Squash are the yellow ones and zucchini are the green ones. Zucchini and summer squash actually keep best at 50 degrees. Some people will set them out at room temp and some will keep them in their fridge since most of us don't have the luxury of a 50 degree storage area. Wherever you decide to keep them, don't try to keep them long, because if zucchini is known for anything, it is its generosity! Squash harvest will go for another month or so, so I hope you’re finding ways to use it up!

Lettuce- You may have received 1 or 2 heads of lettuce this week. We harvested some red leaf lettuce and some green leaf lettuce. You may have received either variety.

Cucumbers- 7 Cucumbers per member! Woah! Cucumbers are still hitting with a bang. It’s time to try out your favorite cucumber recipes that use a few of them. Think cucumber soup, tzatziki sauce, pickles….. My kids eat one for a snack!

Bunching Onions- This is the final week of bunching onions! Starting next week we will begin giving standard, white onions for everyone!

Lacinato Kale- The Lacinato is the most trendy variety of kale these days. It has a smoother leaf and darker green color than the green curly kale. My children love kale that is cooked in a cast iron pan with lots of coconut oil. I cook it until it is crispy and then toss it with soy sauce or tamari. Look for a fun Kale Chip recipe if you’re new to using Kale!

Mint- Mint is a very easy herb to grow and has been a hit in our household! It will come in handy making tzatziki if you haven’t made that yet! Mint is wonderful paired with cucumbers. It also makes a nice tea. You could even dehydrate it if you wanted to dry it and make tea with it later! A cold mint infusion for mint-water is also an idea.

Next Week's Best Guess: cauliflower or broccoli, sweet corn, carrots, cucumbers, summer squash and zucchini, tomatoes, garlic, onions, celery, lettuce, thyme?