The first pickup is so exciting! Woo! Here on the farm, the excitement for the first CSA drop comes with a healthy dose of trepidation and anxiety: there is the organizing the membership for the season (there’s a lot of you), making a massive excel sheet to keep track of who is picking up where, separate sheets for each location, mailchimp/email accounts, etc, etc, all of which creates a certain stress level in the office. BUT, to be honest, the planning Glenn, your farmer, puts in to ensuring wonderful produce week in and week out, picking and packing the bags, loading up the trucks, lists on lists – it’s a lot more complicated than what I do in the office! And, of course, there is the constant worry about the weather, which is 100% out of our control, yet we worry none-the-less.
Yes, it’s a lot, but we love it! Not the stress and worry, but the growing and sharing of great fruits and vegetables with you and also the challenge of growing the perfect head of lettuce, harvesting early potatoes, hearing from you how amazing the such and such was… I think it is important to try to understand some of the things that go on behind the scenes so you might be more empathetic when something doesn’t go quite as planned or when we cannot accommodate a special request. Shortened version: we are still merely humans 🙂
Now that we’ve got that out of the way…
It is so hard to know from week to week what will be in the box. For planning purposes, it is best to treat your CSA bag/box like a grab bag and be delightfully surprised when you unpack it and THEN mastermind your your menu for the week. There will never be any bananas or avocados, no worries about whether you should add them to your shopping list or not 😉
The first few weeks are generally light in weight and offerings, but you will find everything so new in the season that you should delight in the freshness and flavor of the greens. Some of you already know about the greens because you been eating them already from the Spring CSA. Every week I will try to let you know what you MAY have in your bag, but there are no guarantees. Too many times I find the harvest has split the week which means whatever I have written about might not be relevant. For example, the mustard greens may not have been ready when I wrote the letter, but a little hot weather and suddenly there are bunches going into the CSA! Sometimes I don’t even hear about this until after the fact, so I end up writing about it the following week. To remedy this a little, we have a beautiful online reference with pictures and recipes; if you get something you do not recognize, feel free to reach out right away, email or any social media is perfect, and/or you can check out this page.
This week you MAY have strawberries, PEAS (most likely English shell) lettuce, garlic scapes, spinach or mesclun, zucchini summer squash?!
Use garlic scapes in anything you would like to add the fresh flavor of garlic to. The whole thing is edible, though you may find the end where we snapped it off the plant is a tough like the base of asparagus.
We grow a lot of lettuce: Believe it or not, we seed about 5000 lettuce plants every 10 days to ensure a summer long supply for CSA and markets. We also grow hydroponic lettuce to ensure a supply over the winter and early Spring. Over the course of the season, you may see Boston (aka Butterhead), Romaine (classic smooth oval leaves with crunchy rib), Red Romaine (dark burgundy), New Red Fire (very frilly red leaf), Oakleaf, French Batavia (a wonderful red tinged summer-crisp), Simpson (light green, very tender wavy leaf) and a frilly green leaf called Tropicana. In general, you can count on lettuce most every week, though even with that, there’s bound to be a week or two when there is a gap (back to that unpredictable weather thingy). Pro tip: Wash your lettuce when you get it, pack loosely with toweling in a plastic bag and store in fridge…if it is ready to go when you are, you will use it up every week.
Recipes
Disclaimer: I cook with The Force. Many of my personal “recipes” are ideas to run with, not carefully measured out. I will endeavor to persevere and try to actually write down what I did for those who are less confident with “whipping something up”. Hey all you foodies out there, please send me your recipes to share!
There are lots of recipes and ideas right here on this blog; you can do a search by name; ie: cucumber, beet, salad, etc.,.by clicking on the magnifying glass in the top menu or in the blog “archives”.
Do you have your own food blog? Let me know so we can link you.
The initial purpose of the weekly letter (23 or more years ago) was to include a recipe or idea for what’s in the box. Those recipes appeared on a half of an 8.5×11 🙂 Clearly this concept has expanded to include more, BUT, the purpose of the recipe section remains: EAT WELL BY USING WHAT’S IN THE BOX! My goal is to keep it simple so you do just that.
Simple dressing for greens:
2 Tb vinegar (your choice), s & p, and 1 tsp Dijon whisked together or shaken in your cruet; then whisk in 6 Tb olive oil (or shake until well mixed). Alter to fit your mood. If you are new to our farm, you will realize that our greens have flavor and are interesting without heavy dressing. By all means, use your favorite dressing – I’ve got at least one Ranch loving grandchild and a couple who put Caesar on everything, it’s all good!
Faith and Glenn Stillman…Who is YOUR farmer?
Farm Dirt
Farm Dirt is the section I try to include a little bit about what is going on at the farm. This is also where wildlife sightings and other musings appear. If you are new to the Stillman’s family: Glenn is your farmer, I am the desk jockey/writer of this letter/farmer’s wife, daughter Kate, the farmer at Stillman Quality Meats, and her two boys Trace and Jaide who might be anywhere, son Curtis and wife Halley, the farmers at Still Life Farm and their son Kipling, youngest son Reid and his fiancé Kirsten who have both just graduated from college and are working on the farm this year, and youngest daughter Faith, now a junior in high school keeps busy with school, piano, collecting amphibians, working a few markets, sports…. We all work together to have one of the best CSA and market offerings in Massachusetts!
We are cutting garlic scapes, those freaky curled green things in your bag It is part of the garlic growing protocol to take off the scape – the blooming part of the garlic so the energy goes into growing the bulb. The strawberry crop looks okay this season…but ours is a short season, so I won’t know until next week if you will see them a second time.
Wildlife: It’s about the birds! As always, Glenn is super excited about all the barn-swallows in the barn and now carriage shed. He grew up with them at his father’s dairy and loves their flying skill and striking appearance. The first Bluebird nestlings have fledged and the second nesting us underway. There is hardly a place on the farm where you won’t hear their cheerful chortling. Unlike the gorgeous Cedar Waxwings which seem to know where to plague the choicest fruit, in the summer Bluebirds are mainly insectivores. In the Fall, they eat a lot of fruit and I am sure many of you have seen the pictures I post of them eating the Ilex Winterberry right outside the kitchen door. Last year the Catbirds were new to eating the suet in the feeder – this year we have 2 pair of Baltimore Orioles, MANY Red Breasted Grossbeaks, and the Mockingbirds feeding there 🙂 It’s not news that the woodpeckers and other creepers are at the suet 😉
We encourage you to become part of the farm and be connected to your food and farmer; visit, check out the crops, sample in the field, picnic, watch the birds, amphibians, and insects!
Eat well, Geneviève Stillman
Next week: strawberries?, lettuces, peas, chard or kale, maybe beets or radishes
Members love visiting the farm – check out the garlic post-scape