A Whole New World

Week 5 of Veggies & Flowers during COVID-19

This week’s Disaster Preparedness Veggies include:

  • Overwintered cauliflower (from our friends at Working Hands Farm)

  • Chard OR spinach

  • Green garlic

  • Purple sprouting broccoli OR Rapini

  • Salad mix

  • Radishes

  • Pea shoots OR Arugula microgreens

Bouquets for the Good of the Realm include:

Farmer Approved Recipes!

Here are some farmer-approved recipes for this week’s veggies!

Green Garlic

  • How to use green garlic: Chop it and use it as you would normal garlic in any recipe! You can use the entire thing, stem and all of the leaves. Green garlic is milder than mature garlic bulbs, so don’t be shy when making a dish with it!

  • Green Garlic Vinaigrette. Perfect for using for all of your tasty greens!

Chard/Spinach

  • How to use chard & spinach: These two veggies are in the same family & are interchangeable in nearly all recipes! Chard will take just slightly longer to cook than spinach. Their flavor is also very similar!

  • Chard Agrodulce. So simple, perfect for chard or spinach with an addictive sweet dressing.

  • Chard (or spinach!) Gratin. Real comfort food plus greens!

Purple Sprouting Broccoli/Rapini

  • How to use PSB & rapini: These delicious spring treats are super easy to enjoy: simply chop into bite size pieces (stems and all), and sauté butter with green garlic. You can drizzle in a little balsamic vinegar at the end to add a bit of a sweet glaze. So, so good.

Notes from the Field

“And we pray, not

for new earth or heaven

but to be

quiet in heart, and in eye,

clear. What we need is here.”

—Wendell Berry

Helloooooo everyone! First newsletter I have had time to write in a while since we’ve been scrambling to revamp our entire business in the midst of a public health crisis and global pandemic. We have been utterly overwhelmed by the sudden increase in demand for our veggies since COVID-19 arrived. First of all, thank you. It’s really staggering to us how many of you want to support our little farm, and to eat good food during this time. It gives us so much hope! However: for us, this is also super stressful. It’s exciting! And we are grateful! And we are pushing down almost daily panic, as we strive to help as many people as we can in the safest way possible, all during the lowest production time of our entire year. Please know that it isn’t our goal to sell out in 13 minutes. Our goal is to serve as many of you as possible, and we are striving to do that every single day.

You will notice this week’s box includes lots of “this OR that” items. That is because we are really stretching to make the most of our harvest right now and feed as many households as possible during this crisis! We are getting scrappy with it because we know so many of you are looking for a better option than the grocery store, and we really want to rise to meet that challenge. There are a few specific, seasonal difficulties we are facing right now that mean, despite our best efforts, our boxes & bouquets are selling out absurdly fast.

April historically is the month that we have the least food available on the farm. Overwintered crops are exhausted, and many have already gone to flower. Alllllll of the crops that we planted in our many tunnels for early spring have already been harvested for our weekly boxes, and those tunnels are now mostly empty. They will be planted to summer crops any day now, which is exciting but also means we won’t be harvesting out of them for at least another 5-6 weeks. We have been planting like mad in the field, but things grow sooooo slow this time of year. We’ve also had almost nightly frosts up until early this week (which is a later than normal). Thankfully our overnight temps seem to finally be warming up, which will make a big difference for all of the baby crops in the field. With just a few warmer nights we are already seeing a leap forward in growth (thank goodness). BUT, the reality is that we are at least 2-3 weeks away from having a true abundance of veggies available again.

So, in this lean time of year, we ask for your patience. There will be more food soon. If your household doesn’t need veggies this week, perhaps skip ordering to let someone else get a chance to get their order through. We are all in this together! And abundance is coming, we are working all day, every day to make sure it does.

L to R, Top to Bottom: Maddie taking a sun nap in our garlic patch this week. Radishes, the cutest of spring veggies. Irrigation flowing in the middle of April—crazy. And a stack of boxes that almost reaches the ceiling.

Lastly, it feels important to address our new reality. We have all, the entire world, been thrown thoroughly off our axis and out of our routine. Nothing is the same as it was before, and it is likely to never be the same again. I know that sounds dire (and it is), but I keep swinging between fear and massive hope. Fear about the endless, endless unknowns. Hope that the work we are all doing now—staying home to take care of the collective, cooking meals, baking bread, spending more time in our homes than we probably have in years, working in our yards, starting gardens, playing with our kids—I have so much hope that all of this can help us consider (and create!) the world we really want to live in after this is over. It is easy to forget in the high pitch whine and crazy pace of modern life, how these simple things are so so good for us. Not easy. Not simple. Not magically perfect. Not able to erase all of the bad. But these things are good. Being together in this (even though we are physically apart) is good. Spring arriving is good. Working hard on the farm is good. We are all just trying to keep moving forward.

And rest assured your farmers are working hard and with great purpose right now to create new ways for our community to access good food, to take care of our employees, to help out friends who are facing hardships, and to keep planting for a abundant future. While we have no idea what the months to come hold, we do know that there will be vegetables. And by the looks of it, there will be lots of folks looking to buy and cook with them. Thank you for coming along with us on this journey!

Your farmers,

Beth, Erik, the crew & Maddie the farm dog too