2018 CSA Week 5

Greetings from Dancing Hen Farm!

Welcome to Week 5 of our CSA.  Ordering is now open for Week 5 and will close, Sunday at 6 pm.  Week 5 is an egg week and a chicken delivery week.  If you ordered a chicken share, your chicken will be at your drop site in a cooler.  Please leave the cooler at your drop site.

On farm, we are considering Week 5 a transition week.  We are transitioning from spring greens into summer fruiting crops.  Our greens were really hit hard by the recent heat waves and hence their availability is very limited this week.  We do have more heat tolerant greens coming on, including cooking and salad greens.  Summer squash and cucumbers are loving the hot weather and are really producing.  The plants look good, so we should see several more weeks of nice harvest.  One of our Amish neighbors had a few cherry tomatoes ready for harvest which we were able to offer this week.  These are certified organic.  Our tomatoes are looking good, but not quite ready for picking.  We anticipate sungold cherries will be our first tomato to ripen. We have several planting of beans which are flowering and starting to produce tiny beans, so we should be harvesting beans soon.

The saga of nuisance wildlife on farm continues.  Farmer Don is again doing battle with the raccoons.  This year we have lost some meat birds to the coon family, a first for our farm.  We are fighting back with electric!  Our meat birds are now enclosed in their own electric pen.  A hot wire, close to the ground, seems to be have stumped the coons, at least for now.  Raccoons are crafty, so I will not be surprised if they don't figure out how to get around the fence.  We also have our yearly deer with babies in our orchard.  This year we seem to have one doe and one fawn.  Soon Mommy deer will be bringing baby down to our production fields to teach it where to find nutrient dense organic veggies!  We are hoping our insect row covers will also keep the deer out!

In the kitchen, zucchini on the grill and cucumber salad is still the norm for us.  And we aren't complaining.  Summer squash and cucumbers are something we usually only eat, fresh, in season.  We are starting to harvest some larger zucchini, so I will need to get my zucchini bread recipe out.  I make the bread into muffins which I freeze.  I find these muffins really convenient for breakfast, as they allow me to defrost just the number we need for breakfast.
  

A quick reminder to please return the wax share boxes for us to reuse.  We also reuse egg cartons and cardboard berry boxes.  Please leave these items at your drop site.

Until next week!

As always, thank you for your continued support!