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~ In the Box ~

Winter Week 6

Tuesday, March 26
 

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Frozen Berries
Raspberries / Sm
Strawberries / Med & Lg

32oz jar / Sm & Lg only
 

   ~ Recipes ~    
 
spinach, winter

Running out of ideas for your spinach? (Hard to imagine, as you can always just pick it up and eat it raw.) The Kitchn offers Five Ways to Eat Spinach that might just give you a new idea or two. Whatever else you do with it, don't cut off and discard the stems--they hold the highest concentration of sugars.
 
If all else fails, you can always use a larger leaf as a face mask!

spinach as a face mask
 

Questions? 
 
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Robin (in Chicago)
708-370-8017
or
Chris (farmer/owner)
608-712-1585 
 
   
 
 
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The light at the end of the tunnel that leads to spring is in sight. Sunshine and 40 to 50 degree temps are in the forecast, and mud season is in full swing at the farm. The ground is totally saturated after one of the wettest winters we've had in years. We're just hoping for a few nights above freezing toward the end of the week when daytime highs are supposed to get above 50 with some warm rain. This combo of warm air andwater often does the trick of melting frost out of the ground, which is frozen a few feet down after the last few months of very cold weather we've had.

The last 6 hoop houses of spinach we planted last fall are doing well and yielding very nice sweet spinach with all the cold weather we've had. All things considered, this cold spring is actually much better for growing than last year's hot spring. Hoop houses are great in cooler weather, and though our spring plantings of lettuce, chard, kale, sweet salad turnips, washing spinach and bok choi are a little behind what we'd like, things are much better overall than they were this time last year, when everything was moving along so fast and we actually had to try to cool things down in the hoops. Of our 22 hoops, 6 still have spinach as mentioned above, 13 have been planted to the spring crops mentioned, and the last 3 will be planted this week. Because of how cool it's been, the 6 late planted spinach hoops will last and produce longer than expected--until the first week of the spring share in mid-April when we'll harvest them for the last time before tilling them in. We're still working out the kinks of our year-round planting schedule, seeing how many crops we can fit in when, and where.

Washing the spinach was a bit tough this time around as it was a little dirtier than normal from recent irrigations, which splash dirt on the plants. It was a cold, raw day yesterday for washing and packing, and everyone's hands were quite cold, even with rubber gloves on. For those of you who are new to our CSA, we generally try to wash greens minimally as more washing incurs more bruising and less shelf life. As always, be sure give things an extra rinse before using. We try to get off 95% of the dirt. To get off all the dirt, we'd have to handle the produce twice as much, and that would beat it up more than we'd like.

Also in this final box of the winter share are turnips, carrots, and frozen berries. We didn't have enough strawberries from last June for everyone, so we used some of our stash of frozen raspberries to make up the difference. It's nice to have things like jarred tomatoes and frozen products in reserve to insure that we'll always have enough product--and nice variety--over the season to fill the boxes. Adding frozen products to our CSA lineup is front and center as we move on, with more frozen winter squash, and new items including frozen sweet peppers and blanched broccoli, on tap for next fall/winter.

It's a fun challenge, working with nature and all its interrelated parts, learning to maximize the amount of food we grow on our small farm, finding different ways to provide a diversity of locally produced foods year round. We're getting pretty sophisticated about the whole thing and are seeing how we could ultimately serve up to 1,000 CSA customers on our 10+ acres of productive land. Our field planning is getting better organized and more precise each year. We're working to find a nice mix of 200 varieties of 50 vegetables and herbs that can be delivered throughout the year. With the goal of fresh greens year round, fantastic tomatoes and warm season crops in summer, top notch carrots and root crops in fall/winter, and a few more frozen items in the winter, we can offer a generous variety of produce 12 months of the year. We're also likely to add dried herbs to our winter lineup next year.

Thanks for supporting our first winter CSA season. We hope you were happy with the quality and variety we were able to provide in this first effort. There will be a few weeks between now and the start of our spring share on April 16. We'll start off with a nice mix of greens from our recently planted hoops, the last of our sweet carrots from last fall, and possibly more frozen raspberries if the current cold weather pattern persists and we don't have enough greens for the first box or two. Either way, we've got plenty of good food growing, or in storage, to make nice boxes with great quality and variety. Hope to see you again in spring!

Chris Covelli
for Tomato Mountain Farm  
 

Our Spring Season will start up on April 16. If you haven't yet signed up, you can update your membership to include the Spring Season or any of our remaining seasons.  
 
Tomato Mountain Farm  |  N7720 Sandy Hook Rd  |  Brooklyn, WI  53521