Abbe Hills Farm CSA

Greetings shareholders,

This week, we'll have lettuce, spring daikon radish, onions, the last of the garlic scapes, shell peas and snap peas, broccoli, cabbage (maybe), kale and collards, the last kohlrabi, and  a little bit of cilantro.  Monday people, you pick up Monday afternoon, regular time, 4:30 until 7:00.  (I've heard of summer holidays, just never really experienced one.)

This is the last week for lettuce until it comes back again in October.  I was going to try to grow it for you all summer, but we just couldn't get the beds ready as fast as we needed to, so we'll have to make our salads out of something else for a couple of months.  Daikon radish are the big white ones.  The spring daikon are neither as big nor as mild as the fall daikon.  You might like them chopped up in a salad, stir fried, or marinated in a little vinegar and sugar.  They'll probably be more mild if you peel them.  Pretty soon, we'll start digging the real garlic, just as soon as the tops dry down a little more.  Maybe next week.  The second planting of peas will be with us for just a week, I think.  Peas change fast when it's so hot.  And we have a very short row of cilantro that we planted early, so everybody can have a small taste this week.  But it's so much better than that tasteless HyVee cilantro, it only takes a little bit to satisfy the cilantro lovers for a week.

Good news!  Next week, we'll have new potatoes. 

We got a lot of planting and weeding done last week, I think maybe the second longest dry stretch we've had all season.  Saturday we put in the last 165 tomato plants, plus watermelons and okra.  It's pretty late for those crops, but if they get started growing this week, and if we have a normal frost, we should be OK with them.  But what we need now is a little rain.  I hate to say anything since the last time I asked for rain, it didn't stop for three weeks.  My buddy Schnackenberg says our best chance is Tuesday night.  I hope he's right.  We could use as much as an inch.

Remember movie night is this Wednesday night.  Garden tour at 7:30, movie about 9:00.  It's not going to be too hot - a great night to take a walk around the gardens and check out what we do here.  And there's about nothing more goofy than sitting on the ground watching a movie on the side of a shed.  You should come just for the experience. 

Mark Bittman had a great column about the importance of cooking in Saturday's New York Times.  You can read it by clicking here. 

See you this week,

Laura