Category: 2012 Newsletters

It’s a busy harvest week for us, with plenty of new and exciting produce to enjoy as we move into the bounty of mid-August.  The crew has been racing to keep up with all of the harvesting demands. We used to be able to set aside half-days for transplanting or weeding but in this busy time we are struggling to fit in these other tasks as well.  In August we harvest many of our crops every other day to keep up with their growth.  Summer squash and cukes explode so quickly that we pick them almost too small to keep them from turning into baseball bats 48 hours later.   This year with the unusually hot days and absurdly warm nights have made keeping us fast growing crops a tough row to hoe

Tomatoes make their first appearance this week  and the one or two in your share is just a teaser. The plants are just getting going and there is quite a bit of green fruit for the month ahead.  The basil in your shares for a second week will go well any way you can imagine combining it with the tomatoes.

Beans Gone Wild

Speaking of harvesting madness…the next planting of snap beans is cranking in the UPIC field. Come ready to pick this week.

Green Garlic

Also new this week is green garlic. These heads are uncured and are meant to be used right away. Green garlic has a bright sweet flavor compared with the cured or dried heads you find in in the grocery store or locally later in the fall. Try adding some to salad dressings or sautéing a minced clove along with eggplant or summer squash. This garlic comes from Little Ridge Farm in Sabattus by way of a produce “swap” we are doing with them this season. We will offer them some of our potatoes and winter squash this fall in trade. Hope you enjoy.

Hot Weather and Hot Crops

Look for cantaloupe and jalapeños in your share this week. Both of these crops are heat lovers but generally do well in our normally less than hot environs.  The jalapeños are very good this year so use them cautiously but please try them.  Food that makes you sweat a bit is good in this weather.  While the jalapeños are hot this year the melon is not.  We usually grow sweet cantaloupe, but this crop we’re not so sure. The fragrance and flavor is good but it lacks sweetness. We questioned whether to share the melons with you at all and decided you can be the judge of its value in your menu.  We recommend refrigerating them and trying to eat them earlier as opposed to later.

More Eggplant and Zucchini?

Here’s a couple of recipes shared from a CSA member to get you inspired again. Zucchini Fritters and Eggplant Fritters  Delicious!

One more week to order Blueberries

Next week will be our last for blueberry deliveries so reserve your quarts this week for delivery next Tuesday (the  21st) and Friday (the 24th). Talk to us at pick-up for details.

What’s in UPIC

Flowers

Herbs

Snap Beans

What’s in the share?

Broccoli

Lettuce

Asian Greens

Arugula

Cukes

Summer squash

Eggplant

Jalapeños

Carrots

Onions or Leeks

Green garlic

Tomatoes

Cantalopes

Another beautiful week ahead for all of us.

In need of some fresh ideas for the kitchen once you bring the harvest home?

Pork for your freezer.

We are taking orders starting this week for custom pork . This is a great way to put quality local meat in your freezer.  These are our own pigs raised here at the farm and processed however you like at a USDA inspected butcher. This is a great deal for high quality pork for your freezer this winter. Bacon, ham, sausage and ribs all processed and packed as you like. Neighbors and families can split halves or quarters. Whole pigs are $3.50/lb. hanging weight and halves are $3.75. Talk to us at pick-up for more details.

 Blueberries Are Good.

Weeding is Wonderful

What’s Coming Around the Bend…

What’s in Upic:

Flowers

Herbs

What’s in the share with week:

Basil

Fennel

Kohlrabi

Eggplant

Sweet Onions

Cukes

Green Peppers

Leeks

Carrots

Chard

We have three great vegetables  in your share this week that really work well together: eggplant, sweet onions and fennel. These three will get you ready for tomatoes and peppers that are coming right around the bend.

We started harvesting eggplant last week and this vegetable goes with almost anything you can roast, grill, fry, or bake. The skinnier Asian varieties have thin skin and don’t need to be peeled.  Our favorite way to enjoy these is split with liberal amounts of olive oil brushed on before almost blackened on the grill.  Mark Bitman, NYT food writer has a great article on everything that can be done with grilled eggplant here.

Sweet onions are a summer treat. They don’t store like the ones you find in the produce aisle and really do best raw or with minimal cooking. The have a low sulfur content (that make you cry onion scent) and blend well with light summer produce like summer squash, cukes, and eggplant.

Fennel, like eggplant, really shines on the grill. Halve or quarter this bulb and slather with olive oil before hitting the grill. Cook until it starts to brown and is tender when pierced with a knife.  Roasting in the oven with eggplant is also great. Toss with some summer onions and you are in business.

What’s in Upic:

Flowers

Herbs

What’s in the share with week:

Fennel

Kohlrabi

Eggplant

Sweet Onions

Cukes

Zucchini

Lettuce

Chickories

Arugula

Chard

Life is tough for leafy greens this year. Many of you have surely noticed that the diversity and amounts of leafy greens we’ve had so far have been less this year. This is not because we think you need fewer greens or that we have devoted the time we used to spend on these crops to some other hobby, we quite simply have been struggling with them this season. Stress from heat, wet and pests have pushed several plantings to bolt before they were of size to harvest. Notable losses have tatsoi, boy choi, arugula and most painfully, kale.

We plant these crops in multiple successions over the season and hope to harvest one and seamlessly move into the next, providing a relatively constant supply. For example, we sow tatsoi nine times, kale ten and arugula eight between April and August. There is always the expectation that we will lose or have poor yield from a planting or two during the average summer. This summer has not been average. We have several good looking plantings in various stages of growth and hope that our greens supply will become more regular as we move into August and beyond. As always, we’ll continue to do our best to bring you the best produce each season will allow. Your support of the farm and our family makes all we do here possible. Thanks.

Praise the Weeding Crew!

Thanks to a group of almost twenty folks this past Saturday and another ten on Sunday we were able to clean up the weeds from the lettuce and bok choi you see this weekend get a good start on the parsnips. Everyone was hung ho and we flew through over a thousand bed feet of crops! Many hands…

Weeding Wednesdays 11-1 -meet us at the CSA barn.

What’s in Upic?

Beans…the last week for this planting

Flowers

Herbs

What’s in the share?

Kohlrabi

Arugula

Baby Bok Choi

Lettuce

Carrots

Beets

Scallions

I grew up in the great state of Missouri where July is hot. Thinking back, I  have memories (not necessarily fond ones) of sleeping with my family on the floor of the living room under our one ceiling fan (no ac in 1977) and sweating so much that there was real concern of dehydration before the sunrise. This week has been hot, but not Missouri hot. That said, my blood has thinned in the twenty plus years since I lived in the midwest and I’m looking forward to some moderation.

Who loves the heat? Most of our crops have been soaking it up. Tomatoes, sweet potatoes and melons especially have been flourishing to the point that I can almost watch them grow. With all the heat irrigation has been a constant, running our watering systems at night to cut down on loss from evaporation and deliver water to the plants that has not been super heated by the sun first. The inch of rain we had last night (sunday) was a blessing as it meant we can take a break from running water for a few days at least.

Wheat Harvest

A few of us spent Sunday afternoon harvesting our trial wheat crop with great success. We have been growing out three wheat varieties supplied by researchers at UMaine Orono with the hope of adding a bit of grain into our rotation here. As this crop matured we had hoped to find someone local who could harvest this 1/4 acre crop mechanically but had no luck. We contacted our friend Jim Cornish of Harpswell and he managed to round up a few folks with scythes and in a couple of hours we had the whole crop cut, tied and loaded on the trailer waiting for the threshing machine to be fired up next weekend.

Weeding Wednesdays Are On

Come join the crew on Wednesdays from 11 to 1pm as week tackle weeds (which love heat) on the farm. Meet us at the CSA building and we’ll go down to the fields together. Thanks to Otey and Paul for their help last week.

What’s Orange, Crunchy and Sweet?

Carrots make their first appearance this week and we hope to have a pretty steady supply most weeks for the rest of the season. We are harvesting these sweet roots this week with the help of our farm camp kids and they did a great job today helping up pull over 300 lbs. in about 25 minutes.

What’s in Upic…

Flowers

Herbs

Snap Beans

Whats in the share?

Lettuce

Chard

Carrots

Summer Squash

Cucumbers

July is our plateau. We have planted all of our major crops. We are starting to spend more time harvesting crops than caring for them. The days are getting shorter. The farm crew is halfway through their season with us. All of these things are happening this week and I can’t find the tomato stake driver.

Amongst the straight rows, uniform crops, and closely timed succession plantings, agriculture does very well to mimic nature and all of her chaos, especially on this farm in July. When we stop to look around at what we do for a living here we’re either amazed, horrified or a bit both. I could wax poetically about the successions of the seasons, the wondrous cycles of life and death we witness, or the nobility of a days work, but in reality farming is about taking a whole year to make a mess and then clean it up.

We are growing twelve acres of vegetables this season. On those twelve acres we have 48 different crops and within those crops over 120 different varieties. Each crop and many of the varieties require their own specific treatment (spacing, trellising, watering weed control, etc) and most treatment has some special tool. Over the course of a season, try as we will to stay organized, all of this stuff that we need gets spread all over the place. Imagine hammers, lawn staples, wooden stakes, plastic tubing, rope, wire hoops, irrigation pipe and thousands of square feet of white row cover spread over twelve acres. Now most things are stacked or collected in buckets which helps them from “going back to the earth” but that doesn’t make it any easier to find the one bucket of staples when you can’t remember in which 4000 square foot tomato house you left them.  Thankfully much like the big bang/big crunch formation theory of the universe, July signals a stop to our outward momentum and we now begin the slow process of coalescing back into a tighter, more dense pattern i.e. our mess is hidden in the barn for the winter.

Weeding Wednesdays

Come join the farm crew from 11:00 am until 1:00 pm Wednesdays in July to help tackle some of our weeds and chit chat while we work. It’s a great way to get into the fields and see what’s going on with your food as well as to get to know some of the folks that work hard to bring it in each week.  Meet at the CSA barn at 11:00 each Wednesday and we’ll go down to the fields together.

What’s in Upic

Peas (waning, they don’t like the heat)

Herbs

Flowers (just a few to start)

What’s in the Share

Broccoli

Beets

Lettuce heads

Cucumbers

Zuchinni

Coming next week…carrots!

Each Monday the farm crew and I take a field walk to look over all the crops and make a list of tasks, ideas, and problems to solve for the week ahead.  Yesterday I felt like Ed Sullivan as everywhere we went I was introducing the beetles. We have been invaded by this pest family, and while it happens every year at some point, this year they seem to have all gotten off the boat at the same time. In the potatoes we have colorado potato beetles which eat the leaves of the plants almost as quickly as they can reproduce.  In the zucchini, cukes, melons and winter squash the cucumber beetle has moved in they eat everything, leaves, flowers and fruit.  And in the Brassica family (cabbage, broccoli, arugula, bok choi, etc.) we have the flea beetle.  Small and fast these guy take many small bites out or each leaf, leaving what looks like shotgun damage.

It appears the warm spring has left us a healthy overwintering population of these guys. We hope that our crop rotation, some well-timed organic controls and our friendly on-farm army of beneficial insects will keep John, Paul, George, and Ringo from taking over the whole place.

Sweet Goodbyes

Goodbye to strawberries and hello to cabbage! While we sometimes wish strawberries would last all summer, they wouldn’t taste as good and we couldn’t savor that June excitement if they kept going and going.  Cabbage on the other hand, that’s a crop to build some solid, long-term enthusiasm about. These “one-meal”  heads have become a mainstay for us the past few years. They’re tender and mild, great for cole slaw, stir fry or braising. Look on the website for some good starter recipes if you are coming up blank… Don’t fall behind with the cabbage, we have savoy heads coming right along as well! And as with all the produce please let us know if you’d like additional ideas and recipes!

Bitter and Sweet

In addition to some lovely lettuce heads we also have three additional greens to toss into your next salad. Radicchio, endive and escarole are all members of the chicory family and can offer some new texture and a bit of bitter richness to the standard tossed salad. They do well with stronger dressings (balsamic vinaigrette) that are tossed together with all of your ingredients. My favorite is radicchio. I love the color!

Upic Field Opens this week!

This is the official opening week of our Upic field with snow and snap peas as well as a few herbs. We are asking that you limit your pea picking to 1 pint this week to ensure that everyone can enjoy this crop. We will have pint boxes in the field. If you are new to the CSA and the upic field here’s how it works…

Here’s the skinny on how Upic works. We prepare, plant, and weed this ½ acres plot just for you, the members of the farm. Growing there you will find green beans, herbs, flowers, and most notably this week, peas. These are crops that are particularly rewarding to harvest and can add a lot of value to your share as they often are great accompaniments to the “field crops” we harvest and wash for you each week.

The important thing to understand about this field is that it belongs to everyone who has a share in the farm. There are 250 shares this year and we try very hard to plan each planting so that everyone will be able to enjoy every crop. The idea is that all of these crops are compliments to the field crops and not necessarily staples in and of themselves. While we would love to be able to plant enough Upic basil for everyone to make pesto for the winter or sow enough beans to share with your neighbors, it’s just not possible in the space we have to work with. Those of you that split shares, we ask that you be particularly aware of your picking quantities.

With the exception of these first couple weeks we will not suggest amounts for you to take from the upic field. The idea is that we all take our share and consciously leave behind enough for everyone else. The upic field has always been our grand experiment in community spirit and in thirteen years of CSA growing all over the Northeast we have never been disappointed.

What’s in the share this week…

Broccoli

Cabbage

Lettuce

Chickories

Cucumbers

Summer Squash

Happy Eating,

Seth & Maura

This past week was hot. Really hot. Quite hot for stacking a thousand hay bales in the barn, picking over 600 pints of strawberries, planting half an acre of winter squash, harvesting 250 lbs of lettuce and an endless list of smaller tasks in between. Here we are a few days later, wet and cold, and that heat seems a bit like a dream.

No matter the weather the great trick on the farm is the constant jockeying of tasks, one after the other, to get everything done before its too late. I have often said the best farmers multitask in their sleep but I think what they really do to make a season successful is more like trying to walk fast, without running. Each task we do on the farm requires our full attention. Whether it’s stacking hay straight and square on a pile that is over 30 feet high, cutting 150 lettuce heads that are just the right size from a bed of 1200 or running a tractor in a straight line at .35 miles per hours while your friends transplant squash off the rear, you can’t daydream. Like walking fast these tasks require us to focus and move quickly but if we try to run and get to the next project we miss all the details that make the job worth doing in the first place. There is still the problem of whether to look at our feet or stare straight ahead when walking fast…but generally we get where we’re going in one piece.

Farm Camp.

Farm Camp is in full swing with the second session running this week. In one day our young farmers have picked over a ton of rocks out of two 200 foot beds, pulled old lettuce and asian greens out of a greenhouse getting ready for our summer basil crop and moved the lambs from pasture to pasture. All in a days work.

We’ll open up the field strawberries again this week. The rain has not done them any good but there are still quite a few down there. Talk to us at pick-up for more details.

 What’s in this week’s share?

Broccoli

Kohlrabi

Purple scallions

Lettuce heads

Chard

Upic strawberries

See you at the farm.

When the weather is good almost everything falls into place at the farm. This stretch we have had since the deluge of 2012 (you remember right?) has been extra special with 70ish clear sunny days and cool but not cold nights. The vegetables have been responding and bouncing back from being underwater with new growth and vigor. The two big stories on the farm the past few days have been hay and strawberries.

Make Hay When the Sun Shines

Bright sunny days with low humidity and a good breeze are great for more than just enjoying the outdoors, they are also perfect weather for drying hay. We generally make between 2500 and 3000 bales of hay each year to feed sheep in the winter  time. The process for making hay involves cutting mature (but not too mature) grasses in the farm fields and drying it in the sun over the course of 2 or 3 days. During this process we turn the cut grass several times, exposing it to sun and wind and trying to bring it down to about 20% moisture from 85% when it is green. The battle the past few years has been trying to find a stretch of 2-3 days to get a batch of hay (300-500 bales) dried and baled. We have been cutting and baling for most of the past week putting up over a thousand bales of hay and another 250 of straw. The farm crew that has been stacking it all in the barns is less enthused!

Strawberries and Optional Upic!

Warm and dry is also great for strawberries and this years crop has been the best we have ever had here at Crystal Spring. The last few Junes we have had cold, wet or foggy conditions during strawberry harvest and these conditions cause ripe fruit to go by and rot quickly starting a domino effect of mold and rot that shorten both the yield and the number of weeks we can pick. This year we can’t keep up. The two pints we picked for you last week (over 800 pints picked total) are  there again this week and we are having trouble finding the time to get them all in. With this in mind we are going to open the strawberries to upic for CSA member during pick-up hours on Tuesday and Friday. Here’s how it will work. If you can Upic your berries on Tuesday or Friday when you come for your share you can pick 2 pints. If you are busy, don’t have time or for whatever reason can’t pick you can take one pint that we have picked for you. There will be directions on how and where to pick in the CSA room and a farmer in the field helping with details. We will provide pints to pick into and ask that you come only on pick-up days/hours and only one day during the week. We hope this will help keep up with the picking and allow us to harvest the crop for that much longer (and let us give attention to all the other crops going in the fields!) Viva Strawberries!

Kohlrabi.

What is it and does NASA import it? No kohlrabi is not from another world, it is from heaven! Try this close relative to cabbage and broccoli sliced, shredded or julienned into your next salad or stir fry. We love this fresh, rich vegetable and  encourage you to try it too. To prepare, peel the purple skin and jump right in. There are four recipes on the webside in the right sidebar, or just follow this link.

What’s in the share?

Lettuce (mix or heads)

Kohlrabi

Kohlrabi leaves (think kale)

Strawberries

Next week look for zucchini, broccoli and more…

The days are long here at the farm.  Starting the first week of June the sun rises and shines brightly into our mostly north facing bedroom window.  If I haven’t made it up by 5am the light makes sure I won’t be asleep any later. For someone working swing shift this little bit of architectural orientation would be annoying but for a farmer its just about perfect.

The second week of June is the annual tipping point at this farm. The point of the season when all of the preparation and early planting that began back in the dark of winter hits the halfway mark and we begin spending more time harvesting crops than planting and caring for them.  This week we will begin setting out our last big crop of the season, winter squash. Once this acre is in the ground we will have weekly rounds of greens like lettuce, chard, etc. to transplant through August but more than 10 of the 12 acres we will plant this year will be in, slowly coming to maturity week after week between here and October. This week we begin picking strawberries daily. It takes about 2 hours for the whole crew to work through all two thousand row feet of plants. Soon will come zuchinni and cucumbers which we will pick every other day and then there’s the greens that we spend most of the morning 2 days a week cutting and washing. The transplant/seeding list gets smaller and we struggle to find time for these  tasks that used to take up our whole day in the spring.

I love the transitions of the farm season and of the many reasons I find to do this work it is probably  the constant change with the calendar that I value most. Hopefully, you will appreciate this change too as you take home and prepare our harvest this season.

What’s in the share this week?

Strawberries

Scallions

Kale

Chard

Lettuce Mix

We had hoped to have radishes and salad turnips as well but the heat and rain of the past few weeks has made these crops unharvestable. Look for zucchini, kohlrabi, broccoli in your shares soon!

Maine fish with your produce.

Port Clyde Community Supported Fishery (CSF) delivers fresh Maine landed seafood to the farm each friday starting next week. If you love high quality fish this is a great deal and supports a group of fisherman in getting the most for thier catch. For more info or to sign up email Port Clyde at info@portclydefreshcatch.com or call  (207) 372-1055.