Abbe Hills Farm CSA

Greetings shareholders,

I said I wouldn't send another email, but I'm back in your inbox for at least another week by popular demand.  This week, we'll have broccoli, peas, kale, swiss chard, cabbage, kohlrabi, radishes, lettuce, bok choi, and cilantro.  The heat last week caused everything in the garden to grow and mature rapidly.  I have about one-half mile of peas in the early garden, of several different maturities, with the plan that they would mature over a two or three week period.  Nope.  They are all ready now.  We'll harvest them as fast as we can.  The Monday people will definitely get sugar snap peas.  The Thursday people might get some combination of snaps, snow peas, and/or shell peas, depending on which ones are still nice by then.  Broccoli may not last until Thursday, or we may be able to start harvesting the little "broccoliets" that grow after we pick the main head.

Swiss chard is another leafy green, closely related to beets, that is good stir fried or sauteed.  Here's a link to an article about chard from the NY Times.  http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/series/recipes_for_health/chard/index.html 

The walk-in cooler should be fully repaired by the time you come here this week.  It will be great to get rid of the central air conditioning unit (!) that's been keeping your food cool for the last two weeks.  The new compressor should allow us to keep the vegetables in even better condition, and help them to keep longer in your refrigerator (although you should be eating them instead of worrying about how many days they will store successfully).

Some people have mentioned having trouble finding the Abbe Hills weekly newsletter on the LocalHarvest website.  LocalHarvest is a website that serves local food producers all over the country, including farmer's markets, grocery stores, and CSAs.  They provide a blog for us, which is where I post the weekly newsletter.  At the LocalHarvest home page http://www.localharvest.org/ , you can type any zip code into the "where" box, and you'll get hits on all the local food sites near that zip code.  To find the Abbe Hills blog, type Abbe Hills into the "name/description/product" box, and the Abbe Hills entry should pop right up.  From there, you can read the main farm entry, find out specifics about the CSA, or read the blog.  To get to the blog, click on the orange box with the "B" in it. 

I make an entry into the blog every Sunday evening.  That's where you should go if you want to find out the latest farm news, or to find out what veggies we will have each week.  At the bottom of the blog, there is a little orange box that says "Right-click, copy link and paste into your newsfeed reader".  For some people, just clicking on that little box will cause the blog to be automatically sent to you as an email as soon as I post it.  Apparently, this trick doesn't work for everybody.  I cannot get the blog sent to me, maybe because I don't have a "newsfeed reader".  I'm still trying to figure it out for myself.  But, even if it won't be automatically sent to you, remember that all you have to do is check out the LocalHarvest site anytime after Monday morning to find out what is going on that week.

You can also get to the LocalHarvest site and the blog by using a link on the Abbe Hills home page.  www.abbehills.com

Remember, too, that if you have questions about Abbe Hills, the section on the website called "Frequently Asked Questions" might have the answer.  If it doesn't let me know.

If you don't have access to a computer or to the Web, or if none of this works, tell me and I'll see what I can do to make the newsletter available to you.  My printing and copying capacity is minimal, and the time I can spend on the newsletter is limited, but I'll try to find a way to keep you informed. 

The next movie night is Wednesday, July 8.  The movie is "Babe", showing about 8:30 in front of the shed.  Come a little early to take a garden tour.  Bring a friend.

It looks like it's going to be a great week.  We're making headway on the weeds, and hope to have them mostly under control and have all 500 tomato plants mulched and caged by the end of this week.  Thanks to the half-dozen volunteers who came out and worked away with us in the heat last week.  They really made us feel better, and they killed a lot of weeds. 

See you this week,

Laura