Share Notes – May 15th, 2025

It’s is SALAD SEASON.

One of my favorite tips to share from a long-standing CSA member is to keep a standing plan that Thursday/Friday night’s dinner menu will always feature huge salads to help kick off your box and use up your haul.

Our favorite salads lately:

1. Strawberry, snow pea, pecan, and goat cheese, with a sweet and creamy balsamic. Top with sliced chicken for a full dinner.
2. Mediterranean meatballs on a huge bed of romaine with onion, feta, cherry tomatoes and a home made tzaziki.
3. TexMex salad with spicy radishes, charred corn, black beans, tortilla chips, pepitas, etc (again, grilled chicken, or perhaps fajita beef are great here) a cilantro/lime or a sour cream/salsa dressing is in order.
4. Asian salad with hakurei turnips, radishes, snow peas, onions and a honey, sesame, ginger dressing, or perhaps a garlic scape dressing, along with some miso paste. Yummy. Seared tofu or chicken is excellent on this, and so are almonds, cashews, or peanuts.

So take it as a challenge to try and use up (or share!) every leaf of your salad greens this week!

And now that the rain blessed us for 3 weeks, we’re getting covered up in weeds! If any of you wants to grab your sun hat and come spend a beautiful day hand pulling weeds, let us know. We’ve got a row with your name on it. Bring a buddy, or an audio book, and zone out int he sunshine!

Here’s your vegetable line-up:

• Garlic Scapes – Just a few left! These are great used up in a stir fry, but they also can become a fantastic salad dressing, as suggested by @Nourishthelittles on Instagram last week. Actual heads of garlic won’t be far away now, maybe 2 more weeks.
• Snow Peas – With this week’s heat, these little cuties are likely done-for. Only enough for a small helping for the Large shares this week. Note: Enjoy our harvests while they last! Some crops are very fleeting!
• Lettuce – So much lettuce, you guys!  Do your very best to eat this all up, cause there is more coming.  Lettuce can’t stand heat, so we’re cutting it as fast as possible to get in into your kitchens before heat-waves ruin it in the field.  Plan on sharing some with friends and neighbors if you’re struggling to use it up. Beautiful, huge heads of lettuce for each share. Large shares received 4 heads, Regular 3, and Mini 2.  This week’s varieties we had ready were Fusion, Cherokee, Muir, and Magenta.
• Spring Mix – for Large shares. A super flavorful blend of Asian greens filled with an array of colors and textures. Excellent as a salad, also wonderful braised or sauteed.
• Radishes – Red Rover radishes for Regular and Mini shares. Did you know they’re excellent roasted? Really mellows them out, if you dislike the spicy bite of radishes. Our next round of radishes will be ready in a couple more weeks.
• Turnips – White Hakurei for the Reguar shares.  Hakurei are a Japanese salad turnip, and you eat them raw. They’re so wonderful! If you think you dislike turnips, you gotta try them. Fantastic on a sald or sandwich, great dipped in hummus or guac.
• Kale/Collard – Bunched Curly kale for the Large shares, Collard or Lacinato kale for the regular shares, and my favorite: Red Russian kale for the Mini shares.  These bunching greens are getting a round of organic fertilizer applied to them this week, so hopefully we’ll have lots more for you soon.  If you’re not sick of salads yet, I love to make a good Massaged kale salad, wherein you rub the greens with salt and olive oil till silky and the cellulose is broken down. Super delicious.
• Chard – Bunches for the Large shares this week. As mentioned before, this was fantastic in a frittata.
• Spring onions – a few young white onions. They can also be cooked at this age. They have not cured, so their shelf-life isn’t very long. Store them in your fridge.
• Sweet Potatoes – For the regular and mini shares. These were grown by our friend and neighbor Tony Phillips, right up the road about 5 miles from the farm. He does such a fantastic job growing sweet potatoes, so we don’t have to.  Please enjoy!

Veggie Storage tips:

• Everything wants to be washed well before cooking, but keep the dirt on till then, to prevent faster spoilage.
• Everything in this week’s harvest wants to be stored in your fridge except for sweet potatoes. Seal all your leafy greens up in a bag or container to retain moisture for longest storage life.
• Roots will store best when severed from their tops, and stored separately (remember the tops of all these roots are edible, too!)

We’d love to hear stories and recipes of your culinary adventures this week. Tag us on Instagram or Facebook, showing us how you’ve used your CSA share.

Your farmers, Jess & Justin

 

Regular Share

 

Regular Share – top row left to right: 3 heads of lettuce, Fusion, Magenta, and Muir, Lacinato kale (or collards) (2nd row) onions, scapes, Hakurei turnips, and sweet potatoes.

 

Large Share

 

Large shares – top row left to right: 4 heads of lettuce, Fusion, Magenta, Muir, and Cherokee, curly kale  (2nd row) Spicy spring mix, snow peas, radishes, scapes, and chard, and onions across the bottom.

 

Mini Share

 

Mini shares – top row left to right: 2 heads of lettuce, Fusion and Magenta, radishes, and Red Russian kale (2nd row) onions, scapes, and sweet potatoes.

 

Flower Shares!

The bouquets are just gorgeous this week! And I have lots more flowers coming.

This week everyone received bouquets that are loaded with Nigella, Queen Annes Lace, and Didiscus. I had a little bit of Strawflower, yarrow, and cosmos, (more of all of these coming!) and just a very few larkspur, statice, and veronica left (these are just about done). For greenery we’ve got the lovely wild baptisia and nearing the last of my Buplurum. I had a little Verbena and Blue sage to mix in, along with my very first few Zinnias that are now starting to mature. Loads of these on the way.  Each bouquet also had 1-2 stems of beautiful Foxglove.