CSA Week Six

This is the letter we distributed this week to all our CSA members:

Hello, Mud Puddle CSA Members!

Some really fantastic things are happening. We have (a few) red tomatoes! Not enough for everyone yet but, hopefully by next week there will be enough for people to have some color in their bags. Also, we’re falling in love with a lettuce that is doing amazingly well for us; a cultivar called Nevada. It’s a French Crisp type, for those of you interested in the lettuce lingo, which means it has a strong heart and an iceberg-type head shape. It also has a nutty flavor that is pretty nice from a head lettuce. Finding a lettuce that does well in the heat is key this time of year. Last year we were up to our ears in super bitter, beyond tangy greens that were only edible drenched with a creamy dressing.

But really quick, can we have a heart to heart? It’s about zucchini (or courgette). A lot of people have strong feelings about zucchini and we thought we could illuminate the vegetable and hopefully give it some interest (or at least some of your empathy). Nutritionally the zucchini is very low in calories and, according to Wikipedia.org, contains “very useful amounts” of folate, potassium, and Vitamin A; ½ cup of zucchini also contains 19% of the recommended amount of manganese, which is very good for the liver, kidneys and brain. In Mexico, the flower is more popular than the fruit, and is used in soups and quesadillas while in England it is the country’s 10th favorite vegetable of all time. The younger zucchini (which we are slaving to harvest) is the best; we try and pick it when it’s under 8 inches long. The really young ones will have a nice orange blossom that is also edible. If you want to try a squash blossom, or a fruit with a flower still attached, let us know. We will do our best to get one to you.

Also, we’ve moved the baby ducks and chickens (more like… teenagers? How do you figure poultry years?) down to the big house in the field. The ducks have made the adjustment very well, defending their flockmates, the baby chickens, from the big chickens. It’s pretty cute. We had to pry ourselves away from the animal behavior study a few times in order to get things done for harvest. Our flock, as it currently stands, is 54 birds strong! Now if only they would all start laying. We’ve noticed however that in the heat the Aracaunas are doing very well (they lay the blue-green eggs). Not something we’d read or heard about, but nice none-the-less.

Lastly, the garlic in your bags is really nice. Don’t feel like you have to cook it. Try it chopped up raw in Gabrielle’s vinaigrette recipe, or just toss it in your salad and stand back for the spicy kick. It’s very good for you. And if you eat enough raw, it will keep the annoying neighbors away.

Happy Eating!
Mud Puddle Farm

Included in your basket this week (week 6):

Carrots
Scallions
Summer squash
Head lettuce—Nevada (a French Crisp/ Batavia Style Lettuce)
Salad mix
Onions
Garlic
Herbs (parsley)

End of Peas.

There are lots of items taking the pea’s place.  The change will be gradual, maybe sad, but pea’s substitutes are acceptable.

We started all our fall crops in this little aluminum greenhouse last week.  It fell down yesterday taking most of our starts with it.  The greenhouse was quickly rebuilt out of wood, and all the starts of lettuce, celery root, cauliflower, broccoli, and cabbage were replanted.  It makes a wonderful addition to our shanty town that is taking form in the middle of our field.  Next to our shanty town there is some raised beds of yellow raspberries, and then a non-celestially aligned wooden representation of Stonehenge that was here when we got here.

On Monday we planted about 50 tomatillo plants.  We are attempting to seed save for FedCo this year for a little extra loot.

Garlic! What’s not to love.

A bucket of chicken heads from our chicken killing sessions last week.

There is an overhead picture of our tomatoes that are trellised on barbed wire, and inter-planted with buckwheat.  There will be a glorious haul of tomatoes this year.

New Equipment!

One of the first things we said we wanted for the farm over a year ago was portable electric fencing (PEF) for the chickens. This more easily allows the whole pasturing thing to occur. Well, a few weeks ago, we invested in it, and today it finally arrived!

Chickens need to be free, yet their movement needs to be restricted.  PEF is the perfect compromise.

Ben and Tim installed it with ease; beer aided them.   Our chickens were scared into their newly electrified range.   Now we observe.   We have lots of hawks, and we will be watching them as well.

Week 2, Peas are the best

Both shelling and snap varieties are coming off the vine in abundance.  Both are equally sweet and delicious, and provide an awesome snack when working in the field.  Now they provide us with energy to swing our new chainsaw;  for fire prevention, firewood, and just general property maintenance.

The kale is ready to cut finally.  In the picture in a Rogue brand hoe.  My god, this hoe is amazing.  Great construction.  Anyway, this spring the curly and red kale varieties seemed to grow a lot faster than the flat leaf green varieties.   There is no good explanation, they just grew better, and we have to role with it.

The potatoes are interplanted with bush beans.  There are wax, green, dragon tongue, garbanzo, and tiger eye beans planted between our potato rows.  The potatoes all have names too.  Robert Paulsen?

Crimson clover tints the whole field red, and feeds the soil with nitrogen.  We are just letting go to seed, and have undersown buckwheat with other crops.

CSA Week One

This is the first week of our CSA! It is so exciting! We are including the following in this week’s basket:

peas, strawberries, escarole, head lettuce, spring mix, turnips, broccoli, garlic scapes, and spring onions. We will also have a bundle of various fresh herbs.

This will all be available at our market stand Saturday at Grants Pass Growers’ Market, so if you aren’t a CSA member, come on by!

If you would like to join our email list and get our weekly CSA newsletter and recipes, email us at mudpuddlefarm@gmail.com

This is what our field looks like currently:

Straw helps to keep the weeds down. We got started late with the mulching.

Yeah, we know we have a lot of weeds. It happens.

These foxglove flowers are taller than Gabrielle

Economic Woes Striking Close to Home

We take a lot of classes at the OSU Extension in Josephine and Jackson Counties. And we bug the 2 women (Hi, Melissa and Maud!) who teach and organize those classes a lot with questions about bugs, and irrigation, and seeds, and mulch, and water rights, and farm insurance, and greenhouse erection, and farmers market rules, and all sorts of stuff.

We found out this week that there is a threat of all non-tenured OSU Extension staff being cut due to budgetary blah blah blah. The bottom line is that Southern Oregon might lose the Small Farms Program we have down here.

All I have to say is that if they weren’t here, we probably would have given up last year. We certainly wouldn’t have expanded our cultivated area, upped our number of potential CSA customers, have market stands at two area growers’ markets, and have a contract with a national seed company.

PLEASE write to the OR state legislature and tell them how vital this program is to our area. Rep. Peter Buckley is the Ways & Means Co-Chair. rep.peterbuckley@state.or.us

Kindles, or, A Post for Sean.

I have an app on my iPhone for Sadie about baby animals. It is narrated by an Australian girl, which makes it even cuter than it should be. She gets to the rabbits, and says, “A baby rabbit is called a kin-dle. But I call it a bunny.” Even cuter than that are the kindles themselves:

Don’t get too attached though. Chad is calling them “stew” and “pate”.

Calculated Risk

Get those tomatoes in the ground. It might be early, but it sure is warm. There are peppers that have volunteered from last year, and there have been some tomatoes that have been planted out for two weeks now that are thriving. Our CSA members, like last year, will be getting boat loads of food.

First Day of Market

Today was our first experience participating in the Grants Pass Growers’ Market. After some nervousness that none of us wanted to admit to, and harvesting at 5:30 in the morning, we got there on time, had the booth set-up in record time, and were ready to move some eggs and produce!

We settled into a nice routine of pass the baby, and take turns answering questions about our CSA. We had a great level of interest in us thanks to an awesome article about us that appeared in the local paper on Thursday night. And before anyone else asks: No, Chad and I did not get married and not tell you. I think the paper put us down as married to help us appeal to a wider range of people in the area. It is still a bit conservative here…

Anyway, we had a great time at market. We didn’t completely sell out of our stuff, but I think it was ideal for us to reinforce our community standing in person on the heels of the article. Hopefully from here on out, we have enough to be there every week!

This week we had:
Baby Bok Choy of a variety called Joi Choi
French Breakfast Radishes (these flew off our table. No one had ever seen anything like them before and were really intrigued to try them out!)
Mustard Greens
Oregano
Eggs
Yellow Raspberry starts
Tomato starts (Thai Pink Egg varietal, and Orange Pixie)

This is Sadie enjoying some Watermelon Lemonade with Kirby. She was drinking out of the end of the straw, eye-dropper style. Like she was a little baby bird!

Post May Day

We have two more CSA members bringing the grand total now to six.
We made our first sale of the year besides subscriptions. Summer Jo’s bought some broccoli raab.
The greenhouse, after a year is in full operation. It is glorious.
We planted then it rained. Mother nature has finally backed us up. It is green like freakin Ireland with clover to boot.
Why do We love farming? Dogs running around with machetes
The flower pictured here is butterfly weed. It smells great and attracts butterflies too