Week 4 and 5 CSA Newsletter

Greetings from Dancing Hen Farm!  Welcome to Weeks 4 and 5 of our 2017 CSA.  We hope everyone enjoyed their Week 4 boxes.  Week 5 is and egg week and week 5 is also a chicken share week. 

And welcome to a beautiful Sunday morning.  Last week's rain and humidity has given way to a wonderfully cooler and sunny Sunday morning.  The farm is quiet and peaceful this morning.  Sun is filtering through the trees, the dogs are sleeping peacefully at my feet and the wrens in our back porch bird box are chirping noisily as they work to tend their nest.  I feel so lucky to be able to enjoy this peace, this beauty!

I have to confess, it is now Sunday night, dusk has settled in and I am just now getting around to sending out the newsletter!  Where does the time go?

The farm, however, is still a flurry of activity.  We are continuing with our rotational plantings, harvesting and of course, trying to stay ahead of the weeds.  Cucumbers and zucchini continue to produce well.  Farmer Don feels we harvested close to 200 pounds of cucumbers on Friday!  We are starting to see some disease in these crops, so our harvest amounts may be falling off soon.  We will harvest our first tomatillos this week, with larger harvests to follow as the plants continue to produce.  We finished staking tomatoes this week.  The tomatoes are looking good, with flowers and fruit plentiful.  Warm weather will help to ripen these.  Greens continue to look good and snap beans should be ready for harvest soon.  The heat has gotten the best of our peas, with very little harvest going forward.  Peppers and eggplant are in the ground and starting to set fruit.

Animals on farm are doing well.  Last week's heat has slowed our egg production at bit, so look for extra half dozens of eggs to be leaving the weekly availability list.  Right now, we are officially sold out of chicken, at least for a few weeks.  Our chicken share has been very popular this season, leaving us very little chicken to sell on our buying club or at market.  We have upped our chicken production a bit, but it will be number of weeks before this will impact our availability.  This seasons pigs are growing nicely and developing personalities.  They run in circles and squeal when we give them a shower and still have not figured out that the produce we give them is something they should eat, preferring instead to roll cucumbers around with their noses and root and wallow in the greens.

Farm dogs, as always are loving summer.  They love the extra attention they get from workers and visitors.  At 5, Rosie, our border collie, is starting to settle a bit.  She now only attempts to jump over your head 4 or 5 times when you first arrive on farm!  Shady, our older dog, is still Shady.  Barking for attention and loving her daily travels around the farm on our Kubota buggy.  This week, during cucumber harvest, we discovered that next to riding on the buggy, Shady's new love is cucumbers!  That's right cucumbers!  When we harvest, we work in teams.  Several people cut fruit from the vine, stacking the harvested cucumbers in the isle for someone else to come along with a bucket.  Shady was doing her best to get to the harvested piles first, so she could get her choice of cucumbers.  Farmer Don actually had to send her out of the field, as she was starting to have an impact on our harvest yield.

In the kitchen, Farmer Don has been chef recently.  That means meat and zucchini on the grill!  And, of course, some kind of salad.  I am so thankful to have a husband who is as comfortable in the kitchen as he is in the fields!  We also use quite a bit of sausage this time of year.   Sausage pairs will with summer squash or greens.  A quick easy meal - Braise the ingredients together and put the mixture on top of pasta, rice or polenta.  With all the cucumbers coming on, pickles may be in order.  I am thinking some simple freezer pickles this year!  Here is a recipe:  http://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/freezer-cucumber-pickles  This recipe uses quite a bit of sugar!  You can safely reduce the amount of sugar.  

Thank you to everyone who has been treating our share boxes with care and returning them for re-use.  These boxes cost the farm one to two dollars each, so our ability to re-use them helps keep our farm costs in order.  We also re-use egg cartons, pint and quart berry boxes and of course, coolers.  Re-usable items can be left at your drop site for us to pick up. 

So, it is getting late in the morning and my laptop is running out of juice.  Time to get moving!  Take care and I hope you enjoyed your Sunday!