Lots of tomatoes and peppers went in the ground this week! Summer is going to rock.
Pick-up times are:
Wednesday: 3-6 p.m. On Farm
Thursday: 4-6 p.m. Phillip Merrill Center in Annapolis
Saturday: 1-4 p.m. On Farm
This Week’s Share:
Mixed Lettuce Heads
Green Garlic
Hakurei Salad Turnips
Arugula or Spicy Mix
Cucumbers
Spinach or Loose Lettuce or Tatsoi Heads
Seedlings
Announcements:
Before the mid-90 degree days and rain predicted next week we are enjoying this moment of great warm weather and light showers. Rain really helps us focus on planting, weeding, or harvesting, instead of moving around irrigation. Saturday we managed to plant half an acre of tomatoes and sweet Italian frying peppers, plus two colors of bell peppers, lots of assorted cherry tomatoes and tomatillos in the ground. This nice moisture will help them on their way.
Reminder to new and old customers about u-picking! The herb and flower field at the pick-up area, and behind the side parking lot are for everyone to use. Feel free to walk around and bring your kids through to enjoy the sights and smells. The whiteboard will say each week what is available for picking. If it is not listed please do not pick it, even if you see it and think it’s ready. We are likely waiting for it to grow big enough to be shared by everyone. Please be mindful that this space is shared with 250+ farm shareholders, so do no overharvest. When the garden is abundant there is plenty for everyone and the shared herbs and flowers are a huge source of joy and culinary inspiration! If you need some help identifying the herbs, ask a staff and they’ll be happy to wax poetic.
While friends and family are welcome to join you at the farm while you get your share, please do not bring your dog. If you picnic at the shared tables take your trash with you, and do not go into any animal fields, or vegetable fields that are not labelled for u-picking.
Recipe:
Hakurei and Arugula Salad
This is a really versatile salad! Arugula, baby tatsoi, spicy mix, spinach, or lettuce heads would all work great as a salad base. The turnips in this recipe are lightly roasted in an air fryer, but can definitely be eaten raw if you want more crunch. Cucumbers of course would fit right in.
And of course the turnip greens are edible too! If you aren’t wanting them in the salad raw, they are great sauteed with green garlic or mixed in a frittata or black bean dish.
Farm Notes:
We are pretty excited with the early cucumbers hitting the bench this week. They don’t grow well in cold air and soil, so timing their planting in the tunnels has been pretty hard this spring. The very hot early temperatures accelerated their growth, causing them to vine out and flower quickly, and then many of the 1/4 inch new cucumber fruits got burned by frost in the one cold night 3 weeks ago. Luckily the older fruit set survived undamaged, and we are happy to be picking the first crop of big beautiful tasty slicers in mid-May. The magic of tunnel growing is pretty awesome, though it can’t totally offset extreme weather fluctuation. We will likely experience a break in cucumbers later this month when we would have been expecting to harvest the second and third fruit sets. All things considered, we escaped that frost event pretty unscathed considering other farmers in our region lost tons of time and money in killed strawberries, wine grapes, and more. Thanks for being here to buy-in to everything this season has to offer- good, bad, and surprising! Farming is a roller coaster of abundance and losses, and it means a lot to have a committed group ready to cook and eat it all every week.
Spotlight on fun rotational grazing this week:
As you come in the farm from Ritchie Marlboro you may get to see the sheep grazing lush winter cover crop in the very first vegetable field on the left through the gate. We love to do this when Alex’s rotational grazing schedule lines up with an available field of cover crop. The grasses and legumes provide great nutrients for the animals, and in return their manure builds the soil after composting in place. This field is resting for the whole year, so won’t have any crops planted there until the winter at the earliest. At this time of year the crimson clover is blooming for pollinators, the hairy vetch has fixed nitrogen in the soil with it’s root nodules, and the rye has held onto our topsoil all winter while making a great amount of biomass to incorporate back into the earth. Before it all goes to seed the sheep are getting to forage, and the cows are doing the same in another paddock up the hill near the beehives. Wave hi to them and celebrate this small win with us!