The strawberries are finally here! Welcome new and old CSA members, we’re glad to have you along for season. It’s already been interesting one, really different from last year. If you remember, the strawberries started in late April, about three weeks earlier than this season. It’s was a really cold winter, then went right into summer these last couple of weeks, though it looks like it’s going to cool off by this weeks end.
As you’ve heard in the last newsletter, we’ve been busy doing all sorts of planting and sowing. We gearing up for another big push to plant all the field tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, basil, first round of sweet corn, sometime next week. As usual we’re dealing with broken machinery, hurt body parts (though I’m typing with two hands now!), and fickle weather. But we’ve got some great assets as well. Our crew this year consists of April from Arkansas, Drea from Seattle, Susanna from New York, and our old intern Dianna (many of you might remember her). Vanessa is working overtime keeping everything in order, and I’m trying to make contributions to the farm where my shoulder will allow.
From left to right, Drea, Susanna, & Vanessa harvest flowers in the old high tunnel.
The boxes we use for the CSA shares are waxed and are not recyclable, but we do reuse them. So PLEASE remember to BRING THEM BACK next week.
Ideas for Cooking
So there’s a lot of greens your boxes this week, a whole pound of spinach, amongst all the rest! One of my favorite dishes to make with spinach is a spinach feta pie with filo dough. It’s really not that hard to deal with, the filo, and you can’t go wrong with the end result. So in a pyrex dish lay out layers of filo with some melted butter or oilve oil in between layers. Go with 5 or more layers on the bottom. Scramble up some eggs, 4-6 depending on the size of the dish, add some salt and pepper to taste. Crumble in some feta, up to a 1/2 # and them add a large hand full of spinach. Pour it all in the dish and add more layers of the filo dough. Bake at 350 for about 30 minutes or until the top is nice and brown.
If you’re finding that all these greens to be a bit much, you can blanche the some of the spinach and then freeze it, to use another day when greens are more scarce.
We grilled some of the onions last night and they were delicious, really tasty.
Enjoy