Spring CSA Week 1

Footprint Farm
CSA Newsletter, Spring Week 1

This week on the farm
Welcome back everyone! We’re so excited to be bringing you fresh greens this Spring. As you all know, this early season CSA share is a new thing for us, and Jake and I are feeling equally excited and terrified about it. Luckily you are all former CSA members, so we don’t feel too pressured to impress you. JUST KIDDING. You all are going to flip out when you see these greens, and we are so proud to be able to give you some truly amazing vegetables this early in the year. I don’t think that we would be so excited about how fabulous they look this week if we were growing food for faceless folks in a grocery store or restaurant. Since we have the pleasure of knowing you all, we spent the morning trying to guess which of you would be more excited about spinach versus zesty mix, or what kinds of meals each of your families would be making this weekend. Moments like that are cheesy, sure, but boy do they make our job fun and rewarding. It also means we really really want to grow great food for you, which brings me to the terrifying part of this new CSA share.

You may have learned, or guessed, that it’s tricky to grow vibrant greens when the world outside is a drab mixture of brown, white, and mud. This week’s spinach and kale plants, for example, were planted way back in October, and we’ve been keeping them alive all winter long. The zesty mix is a bit younger, but we seeded it in mid February when outside temperatures were still dipping below zero at night. This means that a whole lot of things had to go right over a long period of time in order to be able to feed 45 families in April. We have been so nervous about growing greens in the early season that we spent an entire year building infrastructure (remember those two new high tunnels we frantically built last December?), recording crop timing and yields, practicing with new tools, and planning planning planning before we were confident enough to try it. Jake turned to me this morning and asked if I was more or less nervous about the spring CSA now that this first week’s harvest turned out ok. We agreed that it definitely went too smoothly and we are both just waiting for the other shoe to drop. After more reflection, however, I’m wondering if there might be fewer shoes to drop as we go forward, or if perhaps the number hasn’t changed, but we are better equipped to roll with said shoes. I think it must be the latter, because we’ve already had a burst water line, needed emergency repairs on our oldest high tunnel, and somehow neglected to seed an entire planting of lettuce. Each of those would have felt catastrophic in years past, but now they are just another thing to add to the to-do list. I suppose that six years of trial and error and fixing of errors has made me comfortable in the knowledge that there will be hiccups along the way, but that we will probably find a way through them.

I’m glad to have you all on board for this new venture into the unknown, and I hope for the sake of all of us that the hiccups are few and far between, that the greens are plentiful, and that we can all roll into Spring with a few less worries and many more fresh salads.

Have a wonderful week,

Taylor

​
This week’s share

Spinach
Use cut into strips for salads, chopped and cooked, or whole in smoothies.
Keep in twist tied plastic bag in the refrigerator.

Zesty Mix
A mix of mustard greens that can be used in a salad or cooked. If cooking, toss in right at the end of your cooking time.
Keep in twist tied plastic bag in the refrigerator.

Kale
Curly kale. Great for salads (not tough at all this time of year), or cooked.
Keep in twist tied plastic bag in the refrigerator.

Kale Rabe
Flowering kale stalks. Cook like asparagus.
Keep in loosely closed plastic bag in the refrigerator. If floppy, re-cut ends and place in a glass of water to revive.


This Week’s Recipe
Oven Roasted Kale Rabe
New York Times Cooking, adapted from asparagus recipe

INGREDIENTS
1 bunch kale rabe
Olive oil
Salt
Pepper

INSTRUCTIONS

Here’s a very simple method for roasting that just requires olive oil, salt and pepper, but you can add other spices as well: cayenne, red pepper flakes or smoked salt. Or try chopped walnuts, a sprinkle of grated Parmesan and a drizzle of balsamic vinegar.

Heat your oven to 425 degrees, and dress rabe lightly with olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Spread them on a baking sheet or in a roasting pan in one layer and roast until lightly browned and sizzling, and just firm-tender. If you are roasting on a baking sheet, that should take 10 to 12 minutes, or about 15 minutes in a heavy-bottomed roasting pan. The trick here is getting the stalks nicely colored without overcooking them, and you should always err on the undercooked side — rabe will continue to cook off the heat and it’s nice to have some cunch!

​