CSA Newsletter -- Week 4

Greetings All! I hope you guys had a great 4th of July weekend celebration, 250 years is a big deal!!! I wish I got more photos with our cute outfits but we were too busy playing at the lake, kids were fishing, tubing and swimming all day! I couldn't even slow them down for a single posed-photo!! So all the ones I have are half-running, smiling kids... life is good!!

The Peppers are LOVING the heat!!! Remember when I said a couple weeks ago that our melons and peppers need more heat to thrive? Well, the weather certainly delivered this time!! Also to be noted- we've gotten 3.5 inches of rain in the 5 days!! Farmer Ben has been cultivating like crazy to work up the little weeds between the rows and help aerate the soil so it's not so waterlogged. We want these plants to dry out a little bit. It's not good to be super wet all the time, but the plants are still looking great around here!

Sweet corn will not be ready for Monday's CSAs unfortunately. I'm so bummed! I know we chatted about it last week and we were really hoping it would be ready for this week's shares, but it's not there yet. Ready or not, we're opening the stand on Friday the 17th! If we don't have sweet corn, we'll still have a big variety of fresh produce along with a TON of Heritage Hog pork products, and of course our pastured poultry as well!!!

FARM STAND INFO: Officially opening July 17th! Location: Hudson's Hardware Hank in Zimmerman

Hours: Fridays 9-6, Saturdays 9-6 and Sundays 9-5.

So this week for CSAs (July 13th-15th) we won't have it, but we have some really fun veggies for you this week!! Then starting next week, July 20th-22nd, we will FOR SURE have it in your CSA Shares!! It's so close, it's infuriating!! We've been waiting since last fall for this fresh sweet corn!

ADD-ONS Many of you know about and have already ordered your Add-ons for this Fall! We are still accepting orders for our Honey Shares, Fall Shares & Apple Shares on the website and you're welcome to jump on and order those anytime. HONEY orders close on July 31st. The Fall & Apple Shares will be available until the end of August.

The Honey Shares have a big variety of fun products and some even have the honeycomb included, which is a delicacy! The picture above is the "Honey Enthusiast" Package, but we have a smaller package which is a 1lb squeeze bottle and a 1# creamed honey tub, something for everyone!

The Apple Shares are boxes full of Honey Crisp Apples that we get from the orchard. We buy so many apples for our CSA Shares that they give us a great price on them and then we offer that deal to our Members. You literally couldn't go there and PICK YOUR OWN for this price. Remember that you'll get apples in your CSA Shares either way- so you don't have to get the Apple Share. This is for folks who want to preserve some, keep some in the fridge for the fall, give some to Grandma for apple cobbler, etc!

The Fall Shares are a great variety of our fall root crops and squashes that will hold well into the fall without a ton of attention.. This is for folks who don't necessarily want to can or freeze produce. It comes with a storage guide that explains how to keep these nice (a cool dark basement is a great place!). There are tips on processing if you choose to do that, too! The Fall Share is a bushel box for each of the last 2 weeks of the season, for a total of 2 bushels of fall root crops and squash, I would guess the boxes are about 50# each.

SIGN UP | Brown Family Farm This is where you can select from the Add-ons (for our CSA Members only).

WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT IN YOUR CSAs THIS WEEK: Jumbo & Family Shares: Cauliflower, Broccoli, Green Beans, Summer Squash, Cucumbers/pickles and Kale! Single Shares: Cauliflower, Broccoli, Zucchini, Cucumbers/pickles and Kale!

Cucumbers & Pickles! WE ARE SO EXCITED FOR THESE!!! We just started harvesting these this past week and were able to pull off a few bushels. This week we're going to start our rotation of pickles and slicers, which means if you're getting pickles this week, you'll get slicers next week and vice versa. I keep track of these things so everyone gets an even split of each variety, to the best of our ability! If we come up short, we'll do our best to alternate it the next week. The great news is that they're mostly interchangeable.

If you ever thought I was a veggie geek before just wait for this, haha! I'm excited to share more about the differences between these- with this helpful photo from last season that shows them next to each other:

Pickles and slicing cucumbers are different. Slicing cucumbers are longer and darker green with a thicker (waxy) skin and a wider seed cavity. Pickles are a lighter green color, with a smaller seed cavity and thinner skins so we don't peel pickles before we eat them. Just bite off the end and start munching. Slicing cucumbers have a higher water content than pickles do, that's why we use them for creamy cucumber salad because they make a bit more of their own juices. Pickles hold their shape better and retain brine better because they're a little drier than the slicing cucumbers. ALL THAT TO SAY: You can absolutely just peel and eat them exactly the same way. If you're just slicing them to top a salad, who cares! If you're pickling cucumbers though, I wouldn't use the slicing cucumbers. When I make refrigerator pickles I almost always use pickles but I have used slicers in the past. I peel them, slice them to the width I like and then salt them and let them sit on the counter. I pour off all the excess water and then rinse them a few times to make sure they're not retaining any of that excess salt. Then I make my refrigerator pickles like normal.

We often call the pickles "chubs" because we don't pick them when they're 3 inches long and super skinny, we wait for them to get 4-5 inches long and a little... well... chubbier, haha. That way you get more pickle for your money. If we harvested them when they were 2-3 inches, it would take a lot of energy out of the plants and it takes a while for them to rebound because harvesting all the small ones takes basically all of the flowers (i.e. pickles) at once and really drains the plants of productivity in the long run. We don't sell baby pickles either, that's one thing that Ben won't budge on regardless of my attempts. I even make pickles to sell at our stand and I can't get him to pick me any baby pickles!! However, I've learned that's for the best anyways... When I make pickles I always cut the chubs into spears because I can fit more in each jar that way, i.e. a better value for the folks buying my pickles. If I used baby pickles in my pint jars, you'd get about 10 pickles for the same price, which would not be a great value for our customers.

CAULIFLOWER!! This is so exciting. It's such a fun variety to bring into your kitchen and I am pumped to say we are going to be harvesting some of these this week!!!!

We grow white AND purple cauliflower, the plan is that they will be flip-flopped this week and next. If you recall, I mentioned earlier this season that every purple variety grows slower than their white/normal counterparts. That's true with cabbage, cauliflower, onions, etc! So the majority of folks will see white this week because that's what is mostly ready to harvest. We do have a handful of purples that are ready too- so don't be alarmed if you find one in your CSA Box!

Cauliflower and Broccoli do NOT like super hot weather, so hopefully they hold out through the heat wave and don't bolt on us. That has happened before; where the weather pushes them to go to seed. When they go to seed the heads get very loose and open up as flowers. This won't be a problem for this week, I'm just worried about next week's cauliflower.

**Because it's obvious that I run out of room here pretty often, I want to remind you that if you're looking for info on storage, there is a whole Farm to Table Storage Guide available just for our CSA Members. When you're done reading here, you can go back to the email I sent and scroll down to the very bottom where you'll see the link for the PDF for the Farm to Table Storage Guide!! :) WRAPPING IT UP

This week is just as busy as every other week, hahaha! This morning Kelsi, our youngest, got picked up from camp by my sister, Auntie Jenny. That was super fun for Kelsi because Jenny was working from home and told Kelsi she had to keep an eye on her kids, who are now 6 & 4. They're old enough to not need a ton of help but also old enough to get into trouble, haha! So we'll see how she does. She's the youngest so naturally she doesn't babysit much but I'm thinking that'll be changing soon, she is so good with the little ones!

I'm taking Karli up to Jenny & Bryan's in Nisswa today after I send this newsletter. Spending the night there and then tomorrow morning I leave with Kelsi to come back to the farm to get back to work, and Karli gets to stay and play with them this weekend on the boat. Then Karli gets dropped off at camp on Sunday night, and since it's really close to Jenny's house in Nisswa, but 1.5 hrs from our house here in Oak Park, Jenny's offered to take her over to camp on Sunday night. Plus, we have Kelsi's softball tournament in St. Cloud on Sunday which is an all-day-event depending on how many games the team wins/looses. Plus, William's baseball practice on Sunday evening, then his last game on Monday night with a tournament next weekend. We're not busy, at all haha!! Karli is going solo to camp- none of her friends could go to this camp with her. But she's a social butterfly and I'm sure she'll have a whole new crew of besties by the end of the weekend. She's 12, so it's a hard age of trying to push boundaries but she still has so many sweet moments where we're reminded she's softer than she lets on most of the time, she's only 12, but she's just as tall as me!! Uncle Josiah showed up to help us take down a huge tree that was leaning over the house this weekend. He's a foreman on a crew here locally and man- he knows his way around trees! I'll have an "after" photo for you next week but here is the before:

Yeah, this is an enormous tree!! Basically twice as tall as our 1933 farmhouse..

We also had Mom & Dad stop by on the way up to Jenny's house, Dad wanted to check on the bees and they were doing so good! It's a good thing that he stopped by too because he had to add more supers to some of the colonies.

The supers are the shorter boxes next to the brooder boxes (which is the bottom box). This pic is old but it still shows what I'm talking about below. I didn't make it out there today to get a new photo because I was helping with the tree.

The bottom boxes are brooder boxes, that's where the queen lays eggs and while they do store honey there, nothing is ever harvested from the bottom boxes because there is no way to tell which capped honeycomb is honey or brood (eggs!). So we put a queen excluder above that box, between that and the supers. It's basically like a metal grate that the queen can't fit through. I.e. no eggs in the honey that we harvest. This is a standard practice for any beekeeper. When you notice their supers being filled, you need to get them more supers right away. Which is basically just another box with a bunch of frames in there for them to fill with nectar and honey. If the bees run out of room, they swarm!!! If you're on FB you've probably seen lots of photos of bee swarms on trees locally (because they're literally everywhere) and that's what happens when they outgrow their homes. Half the colony leaves to go find more suitable arrangements, which is not ideal if you're a beekeeper. That's why my Dad comes to check on them so often, so that he's able to keep ahead of their production and make sure they have plenty of space for more honey!!! :D

Have a fantastic week and remember to drink a lot of water, this week is going to be another HOT one!!! XO

~The Farmer's Wife