• flea beetles are officially my nemesis
• we are never planting bok choy or tatsoi again
• organic vegetable farming is endlessly challenging, puzzling and entertaining
• ladybugs make my day
• sugar snap peas and strawberries are some of the best parts of May
• the amount of vegetables that have to be planted in a timely manner in May is overwhelming and astounding and I’m still not sure how we manage to pull it off every year. I should probably bite my tongue as we are nowhere near coasting toward summer yet
• water is life
• people power!
• carrying around a notebook in my pocket to write down every farm observation is super important, but I still don’t do it consistently
• Organizing the farm to-do list is still best accomplished with a pen, notebook and calendar. 
• working with your husband is pretty great when you don’t fight, aren’t stressed and he sends you sweet texts while harvesting rapini
• May is just downright zany and overwhelming! Tonight, we made a list of everything that had to be planted in the next 3 – 4 weeks and I count 30 crops, multiple varieties of each. Timing is crucial for some of them, i.e parsnips, winter squash to name a few. If they don’t get a full season to mature, they don’t mature, so it is a must that they go in on time! 
• Possibly planting a field this year without deer fencing. Not sure whether we are going to regret this or not.
• Weeds grow fast in May.
• The day was just downright gorgeous. Thankful for the place we call home.

For market tomorrow:

• Broccoli raab
• French Breakfast radishes
• Arugula
• Kale
• Chard
• Spinach
• Salad Greens
• Collards
• Escarole
• Mustard greens
• Sorrel
• Parsley

Soon–peas, strawberries and sweet onions!

This week at the Ashland Farmers’ Market:

• Overwintering CAULIFLOWER!!!! – So yum! Had it for dinner. A nice spring treat.
• Spinach – New crop. Tender and sweet.
• French Breakfast Radishes
• Baby Rainbow Chard
• Mixed Loose Kales
• Bunched Fordhook Giant White Chard
• Rapini – Mixed florets of turnip, cabbage and collards.
• Broccolini – From overwintered broccoli. So yum!
• Arugula
• Green Wave Mustard Greens
• Red Giant Mustard Greens
• Collards
• Salad Greens
• Burdock
• Scallions
• Shallots
• Cabbage – Some of the last of the overwintering.

Hope to see you there!

This next week, we will plant out all 3 high tunnels with greens, radishes, peas and other spring vegetables. We will be experimenting a bit in these this spring to see what other season extension boundaries we can push this year. Josh is also putting the finishing touches on our second propagation house with new end walls, doors and new tables. A long time coming. Major seed starting begins as well — brassicas, onions, salad, herbs, etc. etc. It is also the time of year that we get ourselves organized with calendars, work plan lists, logs and other recordkeeping so that it is all underway when the madness of spring hits. I can sometimes feel frenzied at this time of year with all that is floating around in my brain – the list of things to do is long – so it helps to get everything on paper and in calendars so we don’t overstress ourselves. Ah spring!

As this is the last CSA box for the winter season, we wanted to let you know there are a number of ways you can continue purchasing Barking Moon vegetables.

• Purchase a market share and shop with us at the Saturday Grants Pass market, Saturday Ashland market and the Tuesday Ashland market. We start up on Tuesday, March 13th. You can start using your card then. Purchasing a market share card early in the season helps us fund employees and seeds and fertilizer at a time when there is not an early cash flow. It also allows you to receive abundant season discounts.
• If market shopping isn’t possible for you and you enjoy the CSA model, think about joining the Siskiyou Sustainable Cooperative CSA. We have a new website (soon to be launched…check in the next couple of days): www.siskiyoucoop.com. The CSA doesn’t start until June, so you can combine a Barking Moon market share card with your CSA membership. Find out more about the CSA at the website.
• We will start selling produce to the Ashland Food Cooperative and Medford Food Cooperative as soon as we have enough quantity to supply the stores. This is usually around April.

In Your Boxes:

• 1.5# Braising Mix
• 1/2# Salad Mix
• Beets
• 5# Carrots
• 1# Leeks
• 1# Shallots
• 1# Yellow Onions
• 3/4# Spinach
• 1 Daedon Cabbage — This is a hardy winter cabbage — a beautiful red savoy with green interior leaves. Sweet and delicious.
• 2# Mixed Potatoes
• 1 bu Mustard Greens or Arugula Rapini — We love this time of year as brassicas go to flower and it is time to harvest the flowering brassicas for what is called “rapini” or “raab.” If you haven’t ever cooked with rapini or raab, you are in for a treat! Don’t be confused that we put in a flowering leafy green in your box! It really is a most delicious vegetable and treat. As spring markets begin, you’ll find a lot of different types of rapini on our table – collard rapini, cabbage rapini and kale spring flowers. You simply have to heat up a small amount of olive oil in a pan, chop up the leaves and the flowers and saute until wilted with a little salt and pepper. So so good! Here’s a link about rapini: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapini. Also check out this blog post from our fellow farmer friends, Casey & Katie Kulla at Oakhill Organics all about rapini: http://www.oakhillorganics.org/?p=910.

Thank you again for your membership and support this winter season. It has been quite an adventure supplying all of you with winter vegetables. We have enjoyed it immensely. We have so many ideas for new crops to grow this season for our winter CSA. As well, stay tuned for a CSA survey to come your way in the next few weeks. See you all again soon!

Recipes: CSARecipes

Best to you,

M, J, E & A

This is one of last year's hoophouses planted with radishes and peas. This is us just dreaming for this year....

The new hoophouse.

Purchase a Large Market Share by April 1st and receive $75 worth of free vegetables for the entire farmers’ market season. 

Check out our registration form and Market Share brochure here: Market.Share.

Please call or email with any questions you have!

In Your Boxes:

• 1# Yellow Onions
• 1# Shallots
• 1.5# Braising Mix
• 5# Carrots
• 1 Cabbage
• 2# Mixed Potatoes
• 1/2# Salad Mix
• Winter Squash – Sugar Dumpling or Acorn
• 1# Burdock — Burdock (also known as Gobo) is really, really, really good for you. It is considered a medicinal (blood tonic) and we decided to grow it this year. Josh has said he won’t plant it again only because the roots grows so deep into the ground, it is nearly impossible to dig up by hand. I hope I can convince him otherwise. Check out recipes for how to use this as food. You can also use it in teas, etc. It has an earthy flavor, mildly sweet. It is very popular in Asian cuisine still. Check out this You Tube video on how to cook with it. I was entertained by her! She was very informative. Key thing to remember: All the nutrients are in the skin, so just scrape a bit on the outer part of the root and don’t completely peel.
• 3/4# Spinach
• 1 Bundle Painted Mountain Flour Corn — This is a flour corn that you can take off the stalk and grind into flour for cornbread, polenta, tortillas or any other of the myriad uses for flour corn. Dave Christensen in Montana bred this particular variety for colder climates. Check out his website here if you want more of the story. The corn can also be hung decoratively as well until you are ready to use! You can also plant it in your garden if so desired. Enjoy this beauty!
• 1 Rutabaga — Lots of recipes this week for what to do with our giant rutabaga!

RECIPES:csarecipesFeb2nd

Have a great week and see many of you at the brunch on Sunday! -M, J, E & A

Flour corn drying in the barn this past fall.

Things are moving along nicely on the farm.The greenhouse is filing up. Crop planning is happening and we will be ordering our seed for the 2012 season soon. We’re finishing putting up our 3rd hoop house and even got some tractor work done in all that dry weather! And having lots of downtime too and slow mornings. Soaking up the wintertime before it gets too busy again.

In your boxes this week:

• 2# Red & Yellow Onions
• 5# Carrots – We are giving you more this week — everyone seems to love them and can’t get enough!
• 2# Potatoes
• 2# Parsnips — Yum! I love parsnips. We had quite a bit of gopher damage on our parsnip crop. This is the first year we’ve actually successfully grown them. We’ve had trouble getting them to germinate the last couple of years. They can take up to 21 days to germinate in the field and you must keep them watered and wet that entire time. Tricky, but we pulled it off this year, but the gophers took out about 1/2 the crop, so we’ve pulled all that we had for you this week. Try using them as a topping for Shepherd’s Pie. Check out our recipe.
• 2# Beets — There have been requests for more beets, so here you go!
• 1# Leeks
• 2 Stalks of Brussels Sprouts — We thought you’d appreciate more of these. Man, we want to grow an acre of these next year. We love them!
• 1/2# Spinach — A new crop coming out of our hoop houses.
• 1 Green Cabbage
• 1/2# Salad — A mix of asian greens. lettuces and arugula.
• 1 Delicata — Not a lot of winter squash this week. We had some damage on the delicata and had to throw out 1/2 of the squash. We have an insulated room, but we think it got too cold in there and some of the squash rotted as a result.
• 2 Kohlrabi — I know these look weird and big, but they are tasty and delicious. These are a large storage variety of kohlrabi called Kossack. Try out our roasted kohlrabi recipe. You’ll be a forever convert! I’ve also included some kohlrabi cooking tips if you are just mystified by this vegetable.
• 1.5# Braising Mix – The italian kales have been taken over by aphids, so the mix is now just redbor and winterbor kale, napa cabbage and chard.

And recipes for the week: January19CSARecipes

Have a happy week! -M, E, A, & J

My perfect meal the other night.

Our newly purchased Allis Chamers G cultivating tractor.

We are so excited to try this bad boy out.

Stay tuned for information about our winter brunch for the CSA on Sunday, February 5th. It is going to be a lot of fun for the whole family! Farm tour, music, good food and community!

Here’s information about your boxes this week.

• 1.5# Mixed kales, chard and napa cabbage — I don’t know about you, but we eat this mix at least twice a day — usually breakfast AND dinner. Kales this time of year are just so tasty! Great for soups too. Check out a recipe that CSA member and awesome fellow farmer, Glenda Ponder, sent over. Thanks Glenda!
• 2# Mixed yellow and red onions — Remember, alliums are so good for you! If you have too many, think about caramelizing a whole pan and putting it on top of meat or other vegetables. Heidi, a fellow CSA member, recently did this and topped her roast. Yum!
• 4# Carrots — We just started digging from a new bed that has smaller carrots. So sweet! Try a shredded carrot/raisin salad for something different.
• 1# Beets — Sweet, red and yummy!
• 2# Russet Potatoes — I love russets because they are the best for making oven baked fries. Mashed potatoes too. Every year, I make Josh plant these just because I love them for the above two reasons.
• 1/2# Salad Mix — A mix of red lettuce, mustard greens and arugula.
• 1# Black Beans — Yes, we grew these as an experiment this year. We are trying to expand our winter CSA offerings by providing other portions of your diet in the boxes (like the popcorn). In general, the beans were pretty low maintenance in the field. We harvested them into the back of our Ford truck and then threshed them on tarps. We did not clean the bag of beans, but here are some suggestions for cleaning out chaff, seeds and rocks. Rinse them in a bowl of water to float the light woody stuff and separate those out. Then, you might want to spread the beans on a plate to pick out stones, pebbles and bad beans. We’ve given you about two cups, so after they are soaked and cooked, it should expand to about 5 – 6 cups. Just enough for burritos, enchiladas or other yummy dishes!
• 1 Green Cabbage — Sweet and delicious!
• 1.5# Golden Turnips
• 3 Stalks Brussels Sprouts — Probably the best treat in the box and the best thing we’ve grown this winter! So so good. We’ve given you the brussels sprouts on stalks. These are easy to prepare for eating. Just pinch off the sprout from the stalk and peel outer leaves. Trim end and toss with olive oil, salt & pepper and roast at 350. So delicious and so good for you.
• 1 Spaghetti Squash
• 1 Rutabaga — We grow ALOT of rutabaga. We love it so much. We hope you do too. You must try the rutabaga fries recipe! Yum, yum! By the way, these rutabaga are gigantic. Don’t think you need to eat the whole thing in one sitting. I chop off one rutabaga for awhile. Just store it in a plastic bag and keep using it in your soups and mashed potatoes!

And here are your recipes for the week: CSARecipesJanuary5th

Have a great one!

M, J, E & A

Here's our son harvesting spaghetti squash this past October. Now, you are eating it!

All is well on the farm. Besides harvesting carrots and veggies every week for CSA and wholesale deliveries, we’re spending time cleaning up the farm as well as putting up our 3rd hoop house! We also purchased a very nice refurbished Allis Chamers G cultivating tractor. We’re excited about adding this tractor to the season next year. It should really help reduce our weeding costs as well as speed up the time we spend on cultivation. Between projects and harvesting, we’ve also been sleeping a lot and hanging with our kids during this dark time of year!

So, onto your boxes. Here’s what is in there this week with accompanying notes:

• 4# Carrots
• 1 Bu Arugula
• 1# Leeks
• 3# Pie Pumpkins — I’ve been making pumpkin cookies with the flesh. Yum!
• 3# Savoy Cabbage — These should be especially flavorful with all the cold weather!
• 2# Yellow Onions
• 1 Green Kabocha Winter Squash
• 1# Beets
• 1.5# Purple Top Turnips — We’ve noticed that while cutting into some of these, there is a browning occurring in the middle. While we throw a lot of turnips into the compost and to our chickens, it is sometimes hard to tell which turnips might not be good without cutting into all of them. The turnips with brown in the middle can still be eaten — just cut that part out. If you receive any really bad or rotting turnip, let us know! It can be hard for us to identify bad turnips.
• 1.5# Braising Mix — A mix of kales, chard and napa cabbage. You may find a yellow flowering leaf/stem in the braising mix. This is called Hon Tsai Tai – an asian green. We planted this in the hoop houses and unfortunately, it went to flower before we could bunch them for you. But we harvested what we could and tossed it into the braising and salad mix this week. Just throw the whole stem and flower into your pan. So sweet and delicious!
• 1/2# Spinach
• 1/2# Salad Mix — This week, a mix of red lettuce, mustard greens and Hon Tsai Tai. Our green lettuce is kaput unfortunately. We’ll be looking for tougher green lettuce varieties for next year that can withstand the low temperatures, if that is at all possible. It has been stressful and a bummer to lose so much lettuce, but we hope that with the light returning and possibly some warmer weather, our lettuce crop will start re-growing in the next few weeks. We haven’t even been able to irrigate our hoop houses because the irrigation pump and pond are frozen and haven’t thawed out in weeks! We’re ready for some rain and warmer nights, hopefully. We’ll continue putting as much salad into your boxes as we can, but it has been the biggest challenge for us so far. A fellow farmer mentioned to us that he thinks with climate change occurring that this may be the standard for our winters — really low temps with dry weather. Interesting to think about how this will affect farming in the future.
• 3# Potatoes — Yukon Gold this week.
• 1# Popcorn — Yes, we did grow this! It is an heirloom variety called Tom Thumb’s Popcorn. We popped it yesterday while packing CSA boxes. It pops small kernels and takes a couple of ears of the corn to get a nice snacking bowl. We popped in a combination of olive oil and coconut oil, but I think this popcorn would do well in an air popper. Don’t miss out on eating this. Such a special treat. You can take the kernels off the ear in a couple of minutes with your fingers. My 4 year-0ld had a great time doing this yesterday.

And here are this week’s recipes:December22nd.Recipes

Happy hanukkah! Merry solstice! Happy Christmas! Happy New Year!

M, J, E & A

Gregorio packing carrots.

Packing the boxes full of food.

A view of our home farm over the hoophouse.

Icy spider web in the field.

View inside the frosty hoophouse.

A couple of interesting farm tidbits from this week:

• The salad spinner (our washing machine) had filled up with rainwater after the end of market season and then froze and we didn’t realize this until yesterday morning when we went to spin our chard/kale braising mix. It took all day of toting 5-gallon buckets of hot water from the house to the barn and pouring it in the washer for it finally to defrost at 5pm. We spent some of our time yesterday spinning braising mix by hand in mesh washer bags. Yes, that’s right, over our heads in a spinning motion — over 100 lbs. Needless to say, we were pretty happy when the salad spinner started working again.
• Gregorio, our awesome right hand man, harvested spinach yesterday, which had been covered with our durable row cover to keep it warm during these frosty nights. The row cover had been wet and he had put it into a ball while he was harvesting. Well, the sun went down, he finished harvesting spinach and when he went to put the row cover back on, it had frozen into a ball and was unusable!
• Josh and I went to harvest salad greens in one of our hoop houses. We have two and we planted a lot of greens in both to make sure we had enough during the winter for the CSA. Plants don’t grow very much during the winter with less light and cold, so we have to overcompensate with more plants. Well, even with row cover under plastic cover, half of our lettuce crop froze and we can’t harvest it. We are able to handle this with grace, I think, because we know we can just cut all of it back and it will grow back again for future harvests and luckily, we planted enough lettuce that we were able to scrounge together a fine and undamaged mix that we could provide for you all this week. That said, it isn’t as much salad greens as we’d like to provide. We’ll have more on the next round of boxes.
• We were on vacation in California when the really cold, frosty weather came along. We called Gregorio to put row cover on the broccoli to save it. We had big beautiful heads that we wanted to harvest into your CSA boxes. I’m glad I was checking the weather on the farm every day as we covered the crop just in the nick of time and we were able to save it. That said, check out the picture below of the icy broccoli….we had to pitch quite a bit because some had rotted.
• We had a lot of fun putting these boxes together this week– the three of us — Josh, Gregorio and Melissa — listen to a lot of loud music and get excited about packing so much food for families even while braving the cold!

So, those are just a few of our interesting stories from this week. Check out some of the pictures from the farm below.

Winter farming isn’t really straightforward like the main season, which is why you don’t see many farmers attempting it. There are so many places that things can go wrong and the risk of cold weather destroying crops is immense. Again, that’s where diversity is beautiful and we grow enough on our farm to make up for any losses and to share with you! That brings me to my next topic. Storage! Because we are providing you with so much food, we want to make sure you know how to store it so it doesn’t go bad before you can eat it.

We store our winter squash and onions in an insulated room in our barn. The temperature fluctuates, but pretty much stays at about 40 degrees during the winter. Even with steady storage temperatures, we still have issues with rotting squash and sprouting onions. We want to make sure that you don’t store your onions and squash in your main house with temperatures of 60 – 70 degrees and then see some sprouting or rotting. Here’s some storage tips:

• Winter squash–From Illinois Extension: “For long-term squash storage, choose a well-ventilated, cool place, such as an open basement area, which has a consistent temperature of around 50 degrees. Chilling damage and flavor loss can occur at temperatures below 45 degrees, and it encourages decay. At temperatures above 60 degrees, moisture loss and stringy flesh occurs. Try to avoid sites in which temperatures fluctuate, causing condensation. Also avoid outdoor pits and cellars which have high humidity, low temperatures and poor air movement.”
• Onions–They like it cool and dry. Keep in a cool, dry, dark spot. Allow for ventilation. In a dark pantry with plenty of air circulation will be good.
• Potatoes–The potatoes have been stored in our cooler at 33 degrees. They like cool, dark and slightly humid environments. We’ve had success storing potatoes for a long time in plastic bags in our refrigerator. Experiment, but we would recommend keeping them in your refrigerator.
• All other vegetables should go in your refrigerator in plastic bags. If we have provided too many greens for you to eat, try freezing or putting them in daily smoothies. A great way to get greens into your kids. I try to do it every day.

Again, we strive to provide you with the highest possible quality of vegetables. Please do let us know if something is not up to quality – or somehow, you received a rotting squash, sprouting onion, etc. We will always replace these!

So, onto your boxes. Here’s what is in there this week:

• 4# Carrots — These are so sweet. I couldn’t stop eating them yesterday!
• 2# Broccoli
• 3# Yellow Onions
• 1 Scarlet Kabocha and/or 1 Red Kuri Squash
• 1# Beets
• 1# Pink Salad Turnips
• 1.5# Braising Mix — Italian Kale, Red Russian Kale, Redbor Kale, Winterbor Kale and Rainbow Chard
• 1# Spinach
• 2 – 3# Napa Cabbage
• 1 Romanesco Cauliflower
• 3# Potatoes — Purple Mountain Majesty (high in antioxidants)
• 1/2# Salad Greens

Frozen carrots.

Packing the boxes.

Potatoes drying in the greenhouse for packing.

Ice on broccoli.