Abbe Hills Farm CSA

Greetings shareholders,

This week, we have potatoes, sweet summer onions, beets, green beans, cucumbers, summer squash, basil, cilantro, kale, collards, kohlrabi, cabbage, garlic, and broccoli.  We had pretty perfect rain over the weekend (unlike about everybody else in Iowa) and things are growing very rapidly as a result.  We're doing our best to keep up and looking forward to a couple of days - at least - with not too much mud.  

The potatoes are gorgeous and are making me very happy.  (No so much for the workers who are spending a great deal of their time digging potatoes.)  A few of the sauce tomatoes have turned red, so I expect we will be picking the earliest tomatoes in about two weeks.  Bell peppers and chili peppers are getting fatter and might be ready by next week.  The onions are making about one-third of what we expected them to yield, likely due to the leaf diseases they suffered with all the rain.  Luckily, we planted too many, so we'll probably have plenty of onions anyway.

I haven't had time to hike out to look at the sweet corn, but I think we should have some in the next two weeks.  My dad - final authority on sweet corn maturity - will have to figure it out.  Unfortunately, I already know that there won't be the avalanche of sweet corn that I like to give you each summer about now.  With all the rain and mud in late May and most of June, I had a very tough time getting the sweet corn planted and the weeds cultivated.  But worse than that, the 150-or-so Canada geese that claim this farm as their birthplace and hang out here discovered the field and ate more than half of the seedling sweet corn plants.  I think we lost at least 1500, maybe up to 2000 dozen plants.  They also ate at least two acres of my field corn.  It has been awful!!!!  At $4 per dozen for sweet corn and about $2500 per acre in seed sales, it's been a pretty expensive experience.  I am looking for some serious goose hunters for fall, so please keep me in mind if you know any.  I'm not sure how I will solve the goose problem if hunting isn't successful, but I've got to think of something because they are WAAAAAY too much trouble when there are so many of them.

Many of you know that most of my eggs this summer are unexpectedly being needed by the Lincoln Cafe.  I'm not sure when I'll have eggs for you again, so in the meantime, here's another nearby source.  Carlena Minor also raises chickens and told me last week that she has eggs available now.  Her cell number is 558-7749. 

Many of you know that I'm not so great with growing carrots.  Every year I try, and most of the time I fail to get a decent crop.  They are just so unbelievably hard to get to germinate, and I don't spend the time agonizing over them that they require to make a good crop. For the first time in several years, I actually do have some carrots in the field right now - enough to give everybody about two carrots - maybe even three - sometime soon!  Yippee.  Another garden miracle.  I was feeling optimistic, so I planted a second crop in the hoophouse, which actually looks like it might make a few more carrots, and a third planting on July 2 in the small garden east of the shed, enough to give everybody a pound or two.  Please take a look at it when you come for your vegetables this week.  I want you to see just how pathetic they look after three and a half weeks of growth.  There are four rows.  If you put on your bifocals and get out the magnifying glass, you might be able to spot a few skinny baby carrots in there, and I think you'll have an idea of why field grown carrots in Iowa are SO hard to find.  Maybe they will make something for us for October.  We'll have to wait and see.

Local Harvest CSA in Solon will be butchering very well raised ducks this week.  If you would like to know more about the way they were raised, prices, and pick-up times, contact Danny Jutz at (507) 766-3671 or email him at j_danny21@hotmail.com .  Danny's ducks are much smarter and meatier than the silly running ducks that you see around here. 

Remember the open house and farm tour next Sunday, August 1.  Field corn workshop is at 2:00 (mostly for farmers, but anybody is welcome if you want to learn about improving heirloom corn).  Garden tour from 4:00 until 6:00.  One guest will be the Iowa State graduate student studying our pollinators this summer.  She'll explain her project and talk about pollinators and habitat.  I'll highlight the pest problems we've encountered this summer, and show some of the practices we use manage rainfall and runoff.  At 6:00, we'll serve a light dinner from the garden.  Everyone is welcome.  Please come and bring a neighbor.  Hopefully, it will be as nice as it is tonight.

I'm still selling raffle tickets for the Southeast Linn Community Center fundraiser.  I'd be happy to sell you some.

See you this week,

Laura

Greetings shareholders,

This week, we'll have leeks, Ailsa Craig onions, fresh garlic, basil, cilantro, new red potatoes, green beans, summer squash, kale, cabbage, collards, broccoli, kohlrabi, and a few cucumbers.  We finished digging garlic last week and it is fabulous.  I need to save enough back to plant more for next year, but I'll be giving the rest to you over the next 3 or 4 weeks.  To finish curing it at home, just leave it out on the counter until you need it.  The flavor is simply wonderful.  You'll be spoiled for grocery store garlic after you use the home grown.  I've enjoyed it so much that I plan to grow an even bigger patch of it for next year.

New potatoes are also a summer treat.  "New" means "freshly dug", not "small" as you might think when you see them in the store. (Those small ones in the store are just rejects from the main potato packing line.  Good marketing makes you think they are something special.)  Freshly dug potatoes are only available this time or year.  The skins taste great and really should be left on the potatoes for you to fully enjoy them.  Our new potatoes this week are the Red Norland variety, and maybe a few Yukon Golds.  They are pretty large for so early in the season, and the plants are still alive and making the potatoes even bigger.  All this rain was at least good for something.  Expect more good potatoes for the rest of the season.

The plants in the Brassica family - kale, broccoli, cabbage, collards, kohlrabi - are suffering quite a lot from the rain and humidity.  Many of them are dying from very serious leaf diseases, although we've found some varieties seem to be able to resist disease better than do others.  People can't catch plant diseases from eating diseased plants, but we sure do notice the poorer quality of the produce.  I cut up three cabbages this weekend.  Two of them were great, but the third was yucky, and the yuck wasn't visible from the outside.  If you got some of those unexpectedly yucky brassicas last week, please let me know and we'll see if we can't give you a little more this week to replace them.

Onions also are suffering from lots of leaf disease.  I'm pretty disappointed in the onion yield, but there's not much we can do about it without using the very dangerous synthetic fungus-killing products (fungicides).  Once again, variety matters.  Unfortunately, the Ailsa Craig onions, which should be bigger than softballs, died young and mostly didn't get much bigger than tennis balls.   Too bad, because they have great flavor.  I planted lots of onions, so we will have plenty, but not the abundance that I know you like.  Maybe next year.

We will be going after the first green beans and first cucumbers Monday morning.  I don't think there will be millions of either, but enough to get a good taste.  Yields of cucumbers and summer squash should be high as long as it stays so warm.  We were delayed in planting beans this spring, so there we might not have them every week, but if we can continue to get a few seeds in the ground each week, we should have them until it frosts.  Almost nothing is better than fresh green beans in the late summer.

I have more raffle tickets this week, so please remember to buy a few.  Ticket sales keep the Southeast Linn Community Center operating.  We appreciate your support.

The farm open house and field day is coming up fast.  Sunday, August 1 is the big day.  From 2:00 until 4:00 will be an open-pollinated corn workshop for farmers from Iowa and surrounding states who are interested in breeding their own field corn and saving seed.  The field corn I grow and that you can see behind the neighbor's house as you leave the farm driveway is an heirloom variety that has been on this farm since 1903.  I've been breeding and improving it for the last several years and am looking forward to showing my work to other farmers so they can learn to do the same thing on their farms.  This part of the open house will mostly be farmers, but you are certainly welcome to attend if you are interested in learning more about how corn is bred and improved.

The main part of the open house is for shareholders and the public to come look at the gardens and farm to see what we are up to.  This part of the open house starts at 4:00.  We'll tour the gardens and you'll see what we are growing and learn something about why and how we do what we do here.  We're going to have a show-and-tell from the ISU researcher who is studying native pollinators in squash and melons.  I'll talk a little about the conservation practices in place to encourage the rain that falls on this farm to infiltrate rather than running off.  We'll learn something about bugs and plant diseases, and learn how we manage the farm as an ecosystem that produces food for us.  There will be a light dinner from 6:00 until 7:00.  Everyone is invited to attend the field day.  There will likely be visitors here from all over the state since the event is being promoted and co-hosted by Practical Farmers of Iowa.  I hope you can come.  I think you will enjoy it.

Monday people:  Sounds like it might be another wet and interesting afternoon.  You're having really bad luck this year.  If we have tornado or high wind warnings, Andrea and I won't be in the shed.  We will have run up the hill and will be sitting it out in my underground house.  Please don't drive out here until the storm passes.   There's no good place to keep you safe if it gets real bad.  So stay home and come here later.  I'll stay open a little later if we have weather problems. 

Here's a link to an interesting article by Wes Jackson, an agriculture thinker who I have appreciated for many years.  He's a little wild (that's why I like him), but I think he might be right.  Knowing that farm policy is the driver of most farmer decisions, he believes that we need to start now making policy with more long-term perspective if we ever hope to improve the environmental sustainability of food production in the US.  His big idea is perennial grain crops.  It's wild, but it might work. 

See you this week,

Laura

Greetings shareholders,

This week, we have spring onions, leaf lettuce, garlic scapes, hot radishes, leafy Chinese cabbage, red and white spring turnips, kohlrabi, yukina bok choi, a little bit of cilantro, and three kinds of kale.

While we had lots of rainy days this spring, it might surprise you to learn that we didn't really have very much rain.  Until now, that is.  We've had trouble getting seeds to germinate and plants to take off ever since mid May.  All together, up to last Tuesday, I don't think we had had an inch of moisture in the entire growing season.  Since Tuesday, however, we've have plenty more than that.  I'd sure like it to stop.  Warm and moist are the perfect conditions for weeds and plant diseases to thrive.  The first thing I've noticed showing disease stress is the leaf lettuce.  I had hoped it would last a little later into the month, but maybe not.  You might notice more blemishes on the lettuce this week.  We've got head lettuce to replace it starting next week, but the momma deer has been teaching her babies how to eat just the heads and leave the pesky outer leaves for the people.  Hopefully, they'll save some for us for the next few weeks. 

Garlic scapes are the stems with the flower buds at the tops of the plants.  We pull them out so the plants will put all their energy into making bulbs, rather than spending some of it on flowers.  Scapes are wonderfully mild and tender, and can be used anyplace where garlic would be good, which is just about everywhere.  Some people chop them into salads.  I prefer to saute them with leafy greens, or roast with meat or vegetables.

The radishes are hot.  They would have been great in May.  Now you have to use them in something, rather than trying to eat them plain.  Grated or sliced, in sandwiches, or slaw, or pickled, or stirred into cream cheese and spread on crackers.  Yum.  The little turnips are tasty and don't have to be peeled.  They also can be sauteed with greens of all sorts.  Last week, we gave you some smallish Red Russian kale.  We'll have Red Russian, plus regular curly kale and toscano (aka lacinato and dinosaur) kale this week.  I noticed that the Red Russian from last week stored very poorly in our walk-in.  I'm sorry if you had trouble with it.  I don't really know why it would lose its spunk so quickly; we cut it the morning of the day that you picked it up.  We're moving to the main kale crop this week, and I expect that you won't have any problem with it.  Of course, you're not supposed to store it; you're supposed to eat it!!! 

Next week and the weeks after, expect peas, cabbages, broccoli, nice Chinese cabbage in heads, head lettuce, small daikon radishes, and spinach (at least once more.  It's a garden miracle!!!).  Perhaps the Thursday people will be lucky this week and get the first picking of sugar snap peas.    Peas won't last too long, just one or two weeks.  I had hoped to have more for you, but the long dry period prevented the second planting from germinating until last week.  My experienced pea-growing friends all say that it's too late for peas, that they will be bitter when we pick them 50 days from now, so I'm going to plow them down as soon as we can get back in the field and use the space for winter squash and watermelons instead.  Have to try for more peas next year. 

Check out this blog http://foodymommy.blogspot.com/2010/06/abbe-hills-farm-csa.html . A new shareholder, Elizabeth Porter, visited the farm last week and made a little video of her visit.  I'm so glad she did.  I love it that young moms want to know more about the food they feed to their families, about how it is grown, and where.  That's what my work is all about - growing good food sustainably and responsibly for my community.  It's a reason to get going in the morning, even if it did rain an inch over night!

Rain is predicted for much of the upcoming week.  If it is raining at 4:30 on the day you are supposed to pick up your vegetables, please delay your trip until it stops.  It's a mess around here when it is storming.  If bad weather is coming, I usually make a note of it on the first page of the website www.abbehills.com   .  If possible, look there for any last minute details.  If it already has rained that day, wear your mud shoes and some clothes that could get dirty without ruining your day.  There's about no way to avoid mud around here.  Parking went well last week.  Keep it up.  Remember, people who can't walk can park near the buildings; everybody else should go out the driveway (beyond the mud!!!) and angle park in the mowed grass.  Thanks for your cooperation.

See you this week.

Laura

June 6, 2010

Greetings shareholders,

The CSA season is starting this week.The first vegetable pickup nights will be Monday, June 7, and Thursday, June 10, 4:30 until 7:00 both nights. (I told you wrong in the last email I sent.Only been doing it 13 years; you’d think I could remember the times.)

We’ll have lots of very nice leaf lettuce, a little spinach (a garden miracle), braising greens like Red Russian kale and bok choi, hot radishes, hotter arugula, small onions, and likely a stir-fry kit with more leafy greens.Lots of leaves this week, so what you lack in weight, you’ll get in volume.I can’t believe that we have some spinach.It is soooo hard to get germinated.I don’t even know what I did this time that make it grow, so I’m not sure I’ll ever repeat the miracle.You’ll get a small taste, but hopefully enough to hold you over until the real spinach harvest in the fall.The radishes are hot, but I’ve been using them on sandwiches and in slaw and they add a nice bite.The arugula is not for sissies this time of year.It’s HOT.A small bit added to a lettuce salad will spice it up plenty.

Bring bags to carry your vegetables home.If it’s been raining, wear some mud shoes because no matter how hard I try, I am never going to get rid of all the mud around here.The vegetables will be in the big shed.Come around to the front door (the back door is where I store all my junk, so you can’t look there.Too embarrassing.And a very bad place for children.)There will be a small table where you can check in, pick up any flyers, see any special notices.Please check in.It helps me with my record-keeping to have a reliable idea of how many people and how much food passes through here each week.

 Please enter the farm through the farm driveway (the west driveway, not the drive that goes to the house).We have a one-way street on Mondays and Thursdays – in through the farm driveway and out through the house driveway.Drive the wrong way and you’ll get us all messed up.You’ll see me jumping up and down and you if you accidently go the wrong direction.

 It is very important that all cars are parked on the farm property, and never on the road.Any barrier to travel could attract the attention of county authorities, which is a prospect I want to avoid very, very much.So, pull into the farm driveway and find a place to park, but not right at the gate.Keep going.If you have difficulty walking, there are about 4 spaces between the two sheds that you can use that are close to the front door.If you are young, healthy, and able-bodied (which is about 95% of you), please keep driving and park in the area I have mowed that is away from the buildings and along the house driveway.

 Some people think I am compulsive about the parking around here.They are right.We’ve got to move quite a lot of cars, and occasionally, some farm machinery, through here in only a couple of hours, and we can do it if everybody follows the same plan.My goals are to minimize the congestion around the buildings, protect the kids who will be running around, reduce the probability that somebody’s car will get sideswiped, keep my insurance man happy, and prevent the formation of any new mudholes along the driveway. 

So, I’ve mowed an area on the right side of the driveway where you can park, and I think if you angle park, quite a few cars will fit in the space.(A good farm rule = never drive in a place that hasn’t been mowed.Big, pointy pieces of steel can be lurking under the tall grass.Not that I’ve booby-trapped the place if you do get off the trail!But once, one of my workers ruined a perfectly good $150 tire by driving over a mower that was slightly off the beaten path and covered with grass.)It will be a bit of a walk to carry your vegetables back to your car, but think of it as a bonus – you get both good food AND exercise.

 Please feel free to look around.You can see some of the gardens on the hill in front of my house.There are several more gardens on the back side of the hill.We’ve got a small children’s garden started east of the shed, although it doesn’t look like much right now.There are chickens in a number of spaces, kittens at the shed, tractors to pretend drive, a giant hoophouse, the stupidest ducks I’ve ever seen, and a wetland on the west side of the farm.You can look at anything you want, ask me anything, take as much time as you want.I’d love for you to make yourself and your children familiar and comfortable with the farm.

 Remember to check the farm website, www.abbehills.com , to get the latest word on what’s going on around here.I update it frequently, so the information on the first page is usually current.Please call me if you have any questions that aren’t answered there.

See you this week,
Laura

For some silly reason, I thought that this winter I would have time to rest, clean my office, improve my website, organize my papers, read all the publications I threw on the coffee table over the summer, paint the living room, get the farm machinery serviced, shop for cultivation equipment, study some new seed catalogs, sell the seed corn we grew last year, give a few talks, prepare the hoophouse for spring, and sew some drapes.  And I thought all those things would be done by about February 1 and I would devote the rest of my time to communicating with you.I must have been crazy.

I'm getting lots of calls from new people who want to join the CSA this year.  I am planning for 200 shares, so I think there should be plenty of room for all of you and also all of them, but it wouldn't hurt for you to get registered as soon as you can.  The registration form is attached.  If you can't open it, you can also access it from the website, www.abbehills.com .  Click on "sign up" and it will take you directly to the 2010 registration form.  Please print it and mail to me - hopefully with a check of some sort - and you'll be registered.  You can pay me in installments if that works better for you, although I would like to have at least $100 to start if possible.  Spring bills, like for seed and equipment, are starting to accumulate around here.

I've made a few changes in the CSA.  I've decided to simply my life this year and only offer regular size shares.  This is the size that almost all of you have, so most of you won’t notice any change.  (For those who had large shares in the past, they were really just two regulars, and the bookkeeping is easier if I call them that.If you sign up for two regulars, you can have a 5% discount in price, which is how I normally priced the large size shares.)In a regular share, I try to include enough vegetables for a week, with enough of some items to make a standard recipe using that thing as the base.  It works out to about 10 pounds per week, although there is much less than 10 pounds in the spring, and much more than 10 pounds in the fall. 

We found out with some pretty comprehensive data collection in 2009 that this is about the amount of food that most CSAs in Iowa think is enough for a family of two adults and two kids for a week.  I know some of you think it is too much and that you need someone to share, but I urge you to consider using an entire share for your family this summer, and maybe only sharing one or two things a week with grandma or the neighbor. You’ll eat more vegetables, you’ll learn about the less famous vegetables, and you’ll get the full dose of the CSA experience.It will be fun!

OK, but, what if you have to eat out a couple of times one week?Or if there really are too many vegetables?One strategy that many people use successfully to keep up every week is to cook all of a vegetable at one time, for example, steam all of the green beans at once, and then eat whatever your family wants at that meal, and either save the extras for leftovers, or immediately put the leftovers in the freezer for use in the winter.  Some families find that they eat more vegetables when there are more vegetables on the table, and even busy moms with infants have told me that it is pretty easy to throw the extras in the freezer, and they are happy to have them later on. 

So, I’m not saying that you can’t share a share with someone; I know that is the best arrangement for many of you, and I’m happy to have you do it that way if it works for you. But, if you have a regular size family of regular vegetable eating kids, I urge you to release your inner CSA, and commit to eating a regular size share every week.

Which brings me to the really big change this year – the price.Regular shares in 2010 are going to be $400, or $20 per week.Twenty dollars per week is completely reasonable for a generous bag of top notch produce, but it’s a lot higher than the prices of the past and might be a little shocking when you see it on the registration form. I have been thinking for about a year that my price has not been high enough to support the CSA (and the CSA farmer) adequately, so I felt better when I saw the results of that data collection exercise I told you about.At $400, Abbe Hills will be about in the middle of CSAs in Iowa on share price. And, $400 is a fair price that pretty closely represents the true cost of the veggies in the bag. Actually, we’re still a little cheap compared to the others, but we can be because you do all the weighing and bagging, which cuts costs considerably.Also, you pick up at the farm, which saves me delivery time and expense, which saves quite a lot on the share price.And, I think both of those responsibilities actually make it more fun to belong to Abbe Hills than to other CSAs where all you get is a box of vegetables from a pickup in the Hy-Vee parking lot.So, you are actually getting a bonus by paying me more and still doing all your own work!Who knew!?!

So why do I need to raise the price so much?Well, as you know, the cost of nearly everything has increased considerably in the last year.Property taxes, seed, machinery, farm insurance, health insurance and medical expenses, repairs, garden supplies – all shockingly more expensive.I know you are seeing the same thing at your house. By the time I get done with the payroll and regular expenses, there isn’t much left.And while I have enough to live comfortably and modestly, the two things that concern me most about my financial condition are the need to have some money available to reinvest back into the farm every year, and the need for me to have a rainy day fund.In order to work efficiently and to provide good quality (and to prepare to meet potentially costly new food safety standards that are looming larger every year), we need some new equipment.Right now, I’m coveting a potato washer and a couple of specialized pieces of cultivating equipment.And for the rainy day, I’d like to have a little money put away in case I break my leg or something similarly inconvenient happens.Not that I intend to, but emergencies happen, and I’d like to be a bit more prepared.I’m feeling a little naked without some money in the savings account.At $400 per share, I think both the reinvestment and the rainy day accounts can begin to happen.

Which brings me back around to the full CSA experience I mentioned earlier.Community Supported Agriculture is about a whole lot more than reasonably priced, good food.It’s about rebuilding our local food system, recognizing the true cost of good food, eating seasonally and abundantly and enjoying it.  About building community food security, and about valuing more that comes from the farm than just the food.  By being a member, you are part of a pretty big movement that is rocking this country, where people are realizing that it does matter where their food comes from!And it does matter that everyone in the food system is treated equitably.  And that the land is tended carefully.  And that if we want to have good quality and sufficient quantity of the foods we want, we have to support the farmers who are doing the kind of agriculture we want.I hope I am being that kind of farmer.Your support of the CSA – whether it is being a member, or helping to weed in a pinch, or delivering to the food pantry, or coming to movie night, or just being nice to the farmer – all make it possible for this farm to be here for you.Plus, our community has a place where second graders and college sophomores can taste red peppers for the first time, where the native pollinators have habitat to survive, where the water running into Abbe Creek is really, really clean, where there is art on the machine shed, and where people can get an idea about another way to think about food and farming.So, I’m happy for your support and I want you to realize that you are deep into something very, very good.Once again, cool before it was cool!!!

The CSA in 2010 will operate very much like it did in 2009.Pickups will be Mondays and Thursdays, 4:30 until 7:00.I’m planning to start the week of June 7, unless some miracle happens and I am able to grow something worth coming here for earlier.We’ll change to Saturday pickups in October.Our last day will probably be October 23.Like last year, if you want to do some volunteer work, send me a volunteer form.And if you want to donate to the fund to support families who can’t afford the full price of a share, there is a place at the bottom of the registration form where you can add a little extra to your share.Half-summer shares are available for those of you who plan to come home just in time for the really good garden stuff.

I’m going to work hard on spinach, carrots, and watermelons this year.Let’s hope we have some warmer days and less rain than we had in 2009.I’ve got three great returning student workers, two returning cats, and one new white rooster.It’s going to be a great year.I hope I get to grow some food for you.

Laura

PS:If you made it this far, you’ll keep reading, I think.The Linn Soil and Water Conservation District (of which I am an elected commissioner) is in the middle of our annual tree and wildflower sale.Lovely trees, shrubs, and native plants, very reasonably priced.We use the profits to support our educational work.Trees come in bundles of 5-10.For more info, call our secretary, Mary Hepker, and she’ll send you the information.377-5960, ext 3.The deadline is approaching, so don’t dally.

Also, do you have an apartment/room that one of my workers could rent for the summer?Know of one?If so, please contact him directly at jharrity12@cornellcollege.edu.