Greetings!   

    We frequently get requests from subscribers to include "next week's box list" in the newsletter each week.  Believe me, we would love to be able to accurately predict next week's box a full seven days in advance -- "Crystal Ball" is the top item on our Christmas wish list every year.  Unfortunately, despite
almost twenty years in the CSA business and hundreds of hours of annual planning, we are frequently outsmarted by the crops and the weather.   I have learned from years of experience not to make statements in the newsletter like"You will get tomatoes next week" (for example), lest a freak tornado or hailstorm wipe out the crop.

  There is a secret decoder embedded in each week's newsletter, though, one which often gives major hints as to the contents of the following week's Small and Medium boxes:  The contents of the Large box.

   If you've ever grown vegetables or fruit, you know that plants do not erupt into abundance overnight.  Rather, they begin with a trickle, whether it's a strawberry plant where a single berry ripens a week or two before any of the others, or a kale plant with just one leaf big enough to harvest.  On our farm these crops often don't even justify harvesting, except by myself or Paul Holmes as we are walking the fields.  Finding and eating the first handful of strawberries or tomatoes of the year is one of the great pleasures of our jobs.

   One of the trickiest parts of growing produce, whether in your backyard or on thousands of acres, is getting the amount right.  We size our fields so that when they are at full production, we have the right amount for all our CSA boxes.  Then we add ten or fifteen percent, Mother Nature's "cut".  But somewhere in between the first basket/pound/bunch and the many hundreds that we need to provide for our subscribers, there is an awkward stage.  More than we can eat ourselves, but not enough for everyone.

   Thankfully, we have our Large box subscribers.  Despite our continuing efforts to encourage our customers to "size up", Large boxers remain a small minority.  Thus, when we have 100 ripe watermelons this week in a field that will likely  produce 1000 melons next week, we have a home for them.

   In this way, the Large box list may often serve as a "coming attractions" column for the other boxes.  This is not always the case, though, since crops tend to tail off gradually.  When they do, the Large boxes may receive them for a week or two longer than other boxes.  Other times, we may have an almost-total crop failure -- like in our apricots this year -- and still have enough to send to the Large boxes once or twice.

     There are two clues in this week's Large box list hinting at future items in the rest of the boxes.  No special tool is needed to identify them:  all the information you need to decode them are contained in the last six paragraphs.  Good luck and good eating. 

Pablito