Drumroll please....

Spinach looking tasty
photo: Ann Antonellis

The farm crew and I have spent the last few weeks planting up a storm! Out in the field and inside our greenhouse, we have green growing things popping up everywhere. The weather around here over the past month has been...an interesting ride. From early April's still-snowy fields, to a strangely hot early May, and a bone-dry few weeks (up until today's much-needed rain), Mother Nature's been keeping us guessing. The good news is that even though we had a cold, late start to the spring, the warmer weeks in early May have worked to bring us  almost back to where we should be this time of year. That means that CSA pickups can start on schedule on the first week of June! Our first week might be a little lighter than we hoped for, but we'll see how things progress in the field over the next two weeks. 

Calendula flowers in the greenhouse
photo: Ann Antonellis

As always, CSA pickups are Tuesday and Thursday afternoons from 2-6pm. Which day should I pick up, you ask? On your chosen pickup day, of course (same day every week throughout the season, please!). To sign up for your day, please follow this link to become a Tuesday person or a Thursday person (deadline for choosing your pickup day is Saturday, May 23rd). If you are flexible and are equally willing to become either a Tuesday or a Thursday person, there's a choice for that too! I'll assign flexible people to balance out the numbers and I'll email you to let you know which day you've been assigned. 

If on a given week you can't make it to the farm on your chosen pickup day, please email me (rodwyer@ttor.org) by Monday at 5pm so that I can adjust our harvest counts for the week. This is important so that we harvest your veggies on the right day and they're as fresh as can be!

Red lettuce sparkling in the sunshine!
photo: Ann Antonellis

Where is CSA pickup? At the Yellow House at 140 Turkey Hill Lane in Hingham. Please park in the parking lot across the street, come in through the front door and enjoy the beautiful view as you pick out your veggies. We love it when members bring their reusable grocery bags! 

If you're splitting your share with a share partner and you'd like them to receive these (soon to be weekly) emails too, have them sign up here on the blog homepage at the 'Follow by Email' box on the right side of the page. 

If you paid the $325 deposit when you originally signed up, second payments are now due. You can pay by credit card here--please use the original shareholder name with your payment so we can match your payments up. Thank you!

Tomatoes getting ready to be planted out in the field
photo: Ann Antonellis

Farm Fresh Yoga with CSA member and local yoga teacher Maureen St. Croix is back again this year! We'll kick off the season on Saturday, May 30th with yoga at 11am, followed by a BYOPicnic lunch in the field. Meet at the Yellow House, bring your mat and maybe a towel or sheet if you don't want to get grass on your mat. We're still finalizing the rest of the schedule for the season, but I'll post it here soon. FREE for CSA members and sliding scale donation for friends, family, and neighbors. 

Thanks to our awesome volunteer, Ann Antonellis, for her great photos this week!

See you all soon!

Newly planted tomatoes
photo: Ann Antonellis

Lambie pics from this week

As promised, some more baby lamb pics! If you'd like to come meet them in person, we're having a Sheep Shearing Day and spring festival next Saturday, May 2nd from 10-2. Stop by to pet the lambs, watch a sheep shearing demonstration, learn how raw wool is made into yarn, plant a seed to bring home and more. See you there!

First lambs to be born this season

Love the spot around this one's eye

I think the one in the foreground looks like a tiny black & white cow.

Not a lambie pic, but here our spinach starts are looking good in the sunshine.

Tomatillo seedling!

My favorite picture of the week--our beautiful magnolia tree!

Spring has sprung

Lots buzzing around the farm lately, but first the big news: the first lambs of spring were born overnight! Mumma and babies are doing great and we're expecting the other 6 ewes to birth their lambs over the next few days. Check our facebook page over the next few days for more lamb pics. Soon we'll have a stable full of these cuties!

Inside the greenhouse we have lots of tiny seedlings growing their hearts out. The tables are filling up with flats of onions, tomatoes, peppers, leeks, chard, kale, herbs of all kinds, beets,

 spinach, lettuce and salad mix, some flowers, fennel, and some eggplant. Over the past week and a half we've been constructing a germination box--an insulated, enclosed set of shelves with a warming

 element where we can stack our germinating trays and crank up the temperature hotter than we could ever get the greenhouse this time of year. It's very energy efficient and looks like a Sub-Zero fridge from the future,

but cost us under $500 to build! Inside the warm, humid environment our seeds are germinating much faster and more uniformly and getting us closer to having the first farm food of the season!

Returning farm crew members Sophie and Casey have a lot more seeding work ahead next week, as well as getting our cold frame (the outdoor, unprotected step between the greenhouse and the field) going. Our

other apprentice from last year, Joe, has been hired as an Assistant Grower at Colchester Community Farm in Plympton and we hope to see a lot of him this season. 
Lastly, if you're doing any home gardening this year, McSweeney's has a helpful article on getting to know some common veggies you can grow--enjoy!

Dreaming of summer..

lilac scabiosa-flowered zinnia, Zinderella variety 

Last week I finished up the flower seed order and I'm excited about growing some new kinds of flowers for the Pick Your Own section this year. I tracked down seed for a super cool type of zinnia that I'd seen around some of the flower blogs I follow. They're called scabiosa-flowered zinnias, but to me they look like a cross between a gerber daisy and a cornflower. I got two colors to try this year: peach and lilac. That's the lilac one in the picture.

Along with those fluffy looking zinnas, I got seed for a pastel mix called Art Deco, a wild and spikey orange one called Inca, and some small-flowered ones in pink and apricot. 

Echinacea, Cheyenne Spirit variety

I found a gorgeous mix of echinacea flowers in dramatic sunset colors and some soft and delicate cosmos in lots of shades of pink. I think they'll pair well with the ethereal cleomes that we had

Cosmos

last year, the fuzzy, bright blue ageratum, and the new filler flower I found, matricaria. The matricaria has lots of little puffballs of white with yellow/green centers--sounds weird but looks cool.

ageratum

matricaria

There are still Extra Flower Shares available for this season--more flowers for more weeks! Last season Extra Flower sharers got hundreds of extra stems and had flowers on their kitchen tables for months and months. Email me if you're interested! I'll leave you with a little extra eye candy while we dream about warm summer evenings picking flowers...

cleome

nigella, my favorite!

a rainbow of snapdragons

another new zinnia variety, Orange Profusion

SUNFLOWERS!!

Renewing members signup deadline is coming up!

photo: Ann Antonellis

A quick reminder to 2014 CSA members who would like to renew your CSA membership for 2015, your deadline is fast approaching! Please head over to our signup page here to reserve your share before Monday, March 2nd. We still have Extra Flower Shares available for this season, so if you'd like more flowers in your life, this is an easy way to do it!  

This winter's record snowfall has been a challenge

photo: Ann Antonellis

here at the farm, but our farm animals don't seem to mind a bit. Our superstar farm volunteer, Ann Antonellis, has been here every week to help us take care of them and shoot some fabulous pictures of the winter beauty as well. All photos in this post are hers! Check down at the bottom for some of my recent favorites. 


We've recently teamed up with the Weymouth Food Pantry and agreed to supply them with some fresh, delicious produce this summer. Starting in June, we'll be using some of the donations to the Food Access Fund to support a new program at the Food Pantry. Under this new model the Food Pantry Manager will be specifically ordering produce from Weir River in quantities that ensure that there's enough produce for

Our new farmers--barn cats John
and Precious
photo: Ann Antonellis

every Food Pantry bag. And she'll be able to choose produce that complements other items in the bag that week. While we'll still be donating leftovers, extras, and orphaned CSA shares to Father Bill's/Mainspring and the Greater Boston Food Bank, this new aspect of the Food Access Fund will allow for some planned, sufficient, and reliable donations for the Weymouth Food Pantry. If you like to support this work, you can donate to the Food Access Fund on the CSA share signup page--Thank you!


Keep warm and remember that spring will be here soon!

Harvest Celebration! Potluck and Yoga this Thursday

Our final week's Kitchen Sink Share showcased the full palette of the fall harvest

Come celebrate a successful CSA season with us! Thursday, October 30th we're toasting the good harvest and enjoy each other's good company. We'll start the evening with some yoga upstairs with Maureen St. Croix at 5:30, then potlucking in the CSA room at 6:30. Come to either or both!
What to bring: for yoga, bring a mat and wear comfortable clothes. For potluck, bring a soup, salad, or appetizer if your last name is in the first half of the alphabet, and an entree or dessert if you're in the second half.
Hope to see you there!

Kitchen Sink Share!

Our last share of the season is a big one! We've got all the good stuff in here--classic fall root veggies, long-holding storage crops, another winter squash, plus a big mess of greens, including some we haven't seen since the spring. The last of the Weir River veggies will hold you over for quite a while!

Now that the temperature's been dropping into the 40's (and lower!) at night, our carrots, beets, and leafy greens are starting to sweeten up. Veggies do this cool trick of increasing the sugar content of their cells in order to prevent being frozen during cold nights. It protects them AND benefits us!

Don't forget our CSA Harvest Celebration: Yoga and Potluck Feast next Thursday, Oct. 30th: 5:30 for yoga, 6:30 for potluck at the Yellow House. Come to either or both, no RSVP necessary. We'll be upstairs in the Yellow House for yoga class and down in the CSA room for the potluck. If your last name is in the first half of the alphabet, please bring a salad, soup, or appetizer; names in the last half of the alphabet, please bring an entree dish or dessert. We'll toast the harvest and say goodbye to our fabulous farm apprentices, Joe and Sophie, who are on to new adventures at the end of the month.

Joe and Sophie planting spinach back in April

Our great CSA season this year wouldn't have been possible without the help and hard work of so many, starting with our vital soil microbial community. Our soil food web is the base that supports and nourishes our crops as they industriously convert sunshine into food day in and day out. Our crops support and are served by our honey bees and many native pollinator species, and our insect defense force of parasitic wasps and predatory beetles and nematodes. Our fabulous field crew worked tirelessly no matter what the weather to bring out the best in our crops in the field and bring in the best of our crops for harvest. The diverse talents and cheerful work of so many of our CSA members and volunteers made me so grateful to be a part of the ecology of this beautiful place. I hope you're as proud of it as I am. Thank you.

In your share this week: Brussels sprouts!!, carrots, watermelon radishes, leeks, beets, onions, garlic, lettuce, kale, spinach, chard, bok choy, potatoes from Moraine Farm, and butternut squash from Langwater Farm, plus a Pick Your Own herb bonanza: parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme (and chives even though they got no love from Simon & Garfunkel). See you next season!

Recipe of the Week

Wondering what to do with the watermelon radishes? I usually cut them into wedges and add to them to my roasted root medley along with beets and carrots and onions and maybe a winter squash. You can also roast them on their own--wedge them, drizzle and toss with olive oil, sprinkle with sea salt, spread on a metal cookie sheet and roast at 375F, turning every 15-20 minutes. They roast in 30-60 minutes, depending on how fat the wedges are.
Roasting is also my favorite way to serve Brussels sprouts-- Ina Garten aka the Barefoot Contessa has a simple recipe here.
Several years ago I did some WWOOFing for a woman whose previous career had been camp cook for an African safari company. She taught me this kale recipe that she had picked up working there. It's easy and a nice twist on the standard sauteed kale that I make so often.

Peanut Butter Kale

Olive oil
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 small onion, chopped
1/2 cup peanut butter
1-2 Tbs Braggs amino acids
1/4 tsp cayenne or chili powder (more if you like spicy)
1 bunch kale, washed, rib removed, and leaves torn roughly
salt to taste

In a large saute pan, saute the onions and garlic until translucent. In a small bowl, make the peanut butter sauce. Add hot water (start with 1/4 cup) until the peanut butter has a consistency slightly thicker than cake batter. Stir in the Braggs and the cayenne/chili powder and set aside.
Add the kale to the saute pan and cover the pan for a few minutes to help wilt the kale. Once the greens have wilted, stir in the peanut butter sauce and adjust seasonings to taste. Serve immediately.