CSA Newsletter #3 - June 26, 2021

photo by Keegen taken at the market last week

 

We "heart" strawberries and basil! And hopefully you do too, as they are slated to be in your share this week. But then we never really know for sure, do we? :-) It will be the last of the berries, but the first of the basil, as we turn the corner on spring crops and head into midsummer magic and madness!

In addition to Strawberries and Sweet Basil, you will find:

One head of lettuce, most likely Romaine

An excellent salad dressing is in last week's newsletter!

Chard - we grow Rainbow Chard but sometimes the leaves look downright neon!

photo on the farm by Donya Kiana

Broccoli - a generous harvest led to the broccoli surprise in your share last week. 

Kale - you know the old saying: A Kale a day keeps the doctor away! 😉

Scallions - new this week and not for long. Another spring, day-length sensitive crop.

Kali thought there was something interesting on the counter but she was quickly removed and didn't care when she found out it was only scallions!

RECIPES FROM THE SHARE:

CSA member Dorothyann C. shared this enticing photo of a recent share-inspired breakfast. Fresh raw kohlrabi slices with hummus to dip and cooked beets - straight or with hummus. Some protein down the middle and, on the side,  sauerkraut from our area master fermenters, and good friends, The Brinery.

So you don't always need a recipe: just look in the box, mix textures and colors, cooked or raw, embellish according to your palate - and savor a classic, seasonal, locally-produced repast! Thanks Dorothyann for the inspo! We welcome members' experiences and/or photos with their share veggies. Feel free to email or text to: 517-414-3269.

And sometimes a recipe is just what we need to learn a new twist for an old friend, or learn to make a friend of a new veggie. CSA member Sharon W.  shared this recipe for a Chard and Egg Bake. Although she hasn't tried it yet, we think it looks like a good way to have your greens for breakfast or brunch, dinner or lunch! The post has other ideas for cooking chard (and broccoli!) and it's from a food blog with lots of inspiration called Healthy Seasonal Eating. Thanks Sharon for the tip!

This week on the farm we made a big batch of Pesto and added a dollop to stir-fried veggies for instant summer. We also used it as a flavorful layer in Tempeh Reuben sandwiches. Delish! The link takes you to a page in the Healthy Seasonal Eating blog with lots of pesto information and possibilities, including vegan pesto, which is a thing and does work! 

NOTES FROM THE FARM: 

Well, the rain is mainly the name of our game

And about that we rarely do complain

But if the forecast comes true, it will be a pain

And the reason for our strawberries on the wane.

But those rain clouds carry a silver lining

They help grow the veggies for your excellent dining!

And they also send a warning that we must heed:

From every raindrop sprouts a happy little weed!

(And that's what we'll be doing next week)

Above, the Brothers K in the strawberry patch - very likely the last picking. They are focused and can't look up right now, but do wish you all a very good week!

CSA Newsletter - June 19, 2012 - Week #2

photo by Donya Kiana

What is wrong with this picture?? The rainbow isn't wrong - and it's even a double one if you look closely. And the rainbow means we got some rain so that is definitely not wrong. The rainbow is arching over our front gardens and framing Freya, the Maremma farm pup. That's not wrong! And there's a cute little goat loose in the background - wait, that is definitely wrong! 

Our two farm goats, the coyote tricksters of the animal world, happened to escape their pen right in the middle of last Friday's storm, when we were trying to finish the harvest, load the truck, stash the seedlings, and close windows. The goats made a beeline for the house where they proceeded to nose around on the porch, climb on shelves, and generally cause chaos. We took them back to their paddock on the hill and there haven't been any escapes since then.

WHAT'S IN YOUR SHARE: Or maybe it should be "what might be in your share." How do you like how the Chard and Beets we mentioned in the newsletter turned into Strawberries last week? No one relinquished their berries to exchange for Chard, so it was probably okay. :-) And the Curly Kale somehow morphed into Tuscan Kale - also called Dinosaur Kale. That's the adventure of a CSA - thanks for your willingness to go with the flow!

So this week we're almost positive you will find two beautiful heads of lettuce in your share - possibly Romaine and Red Bibb.

You will receive a bunch of Kale - either Curly or Tuscan.

We do have Beets for you this week - and last week we encouraged you to cook the greens as well - they are loaded with nutrients. Here's a nice simple recipe for cooking your beets and greens. Roasting beets, as this recipe suggests, seems to concentrate the flavor and the sweetness. We also sometimes simmer the beets and greens in orange juice. And Feta Cheese is a natural beet pairing - especially with a cool beet salad. This Beet Salad with Feta looks delicious, but we are shaking our finger at the suggestion to discard the greens! Remember to remove the greens from the beets and store separately if you're going to keep them for a while.

Garlic Scapes make another appearance. Garlic Scape Pesto  is a popular way to beat the basil season and still have the flavorful, creamy sauce known as "pesto". If you make it, be sure to chop the scapes first before going in your food processor.

Oh yes, and Strawberries! No recipes needed!

But here is an excellent recipe from the farm cook Donya for dressing that beautiful lettuce:

Vegan Caesar Salad Dressing

3/4 cup Bragg nutritional yeast (can use Parmesan instead to make vegetarian)

3 large cloves of garlic

1/2 cup red wine vinegar

1 cup olive oil

1/2 cup water

3 tablespoons sugar

2 tsp salt

2 tsp yellow mustard

1/2 tsp black pepper

1 tablespoon ume plum vinegar (can be omitted, but highly recommend!)


Optional: Half a fresh lemon, juiced


Put all ingredients into a large mason jar and blend with an immersion blender (if you don’t have one, then make sure you finally chop the garlic, and shake dressing thoroughly. - or - use a regular blender)

This delicious dressing is a farm staple, but it makes a lot1 You can reduce the measurements or just keep it in the fridge until you have used it up!

Enjoy your "salad days"

Have a great week everyone and thanks for bringing your boxes back!

Frog Holler Farm CSA - First Newsletter 2021!

 

Greetings from the King family! l. to r. - Kenny, Cathy, Edwin, Billy. Missing- Emily Foley. Photo from last fall taken by farm resident, Donya Kiana.

Welcome to our first share - and welcome back to many of you! And in this first week we welcome you all to the adventure of eating seasonally and locally - because we don't exactly know what will be in the share until we finish the harvest! The heat has made the cool weather crops a bit sulky and a little hard to predict. With more heat and not that much moisture on the horizon, we need to get these crops out of the field to make room for the happy summer campers. 

So some, but not all, of the following veggies will be in your share. And if not this week, certainly in following weeks! Here's the scoop:

Lettuce - one or two heads - either Red or Green Leaf, Red or Green Bibb or Oakleaf

All good!

Kohlrabi - alien looking veggie but so delicious! Peel the tough outer skin and find a tender, crunchy inside, perfect for slicing into "dippers" for hummus. Also good in stir-fries or roasted. Grate fresh kohlrabi with radishes and dressing of choice for a "kohl" slaw. When fresh, tastes like a cross between apple and cauliflower. Definitely in share.

Curly Kale - very tender at the start of the season. Enjoy in stir-fries or Kale Salad.

 Definitely in share.

Beet greens with baby beets. Beet greens are loaded with iron, calcium and magnesium, so be sure to include them when you cook up a mess of greens! Maybe in share.

A traditional spring treat - in salad or stir-fry. Maybe in share.

"Rainbow Chard" - use like spinach - steamed, in stir-fry, or salad. Stems are tender too, just cook a little longer. Or use as a celery substitute for crunch in potato or veggie salads.  Maybe in share.

Radishes - a classic salad addition for crunch and color. This week we made Roasted Radishes
Roasting takes the bite out of radishes and transforms them into a rich, mellow side dish. The radishes are the sulkiest in this weather, but there is still a lot of radish goodness in the bunch. 

Garlic Scapes - a rather new addition to American cuisine but a longstanding Asian traditional food. Garlic Scapes are tender seed stalks of garlic plants, removed so that growing energy can be concentrated in the bulb. Chop and add to salads, dressings, or stir-fries for a fresh garlic flavor. Definitely in share.

STORAGE: Give the greens a quick rinse, dry and store in plastic or veggie-keeper bag. Roots such as kohlrabi, beets and radishes store best if separated from their greens. They will stay firm for a week or two if separated from their greens. Treat garlic scapes the same as greens. Kept in a plastic or storage bag, scapes will also keep a long time. You can freeze them as well.

NOTES FROM THE FARM: As you know, it has been an up and down spring, in terms of wide temperature vacillations. It's funny to talk about the heat now, when not that long ago...

When faced with a rather dire forecast of snow and ice, we knew we had to protect our early plantings. Here's what it looked like on April 20 as the snow started to accumulate after we spent the afternoon setting up row covers.

And here's what it looked like as we started to harvest the lettuce in your share. The row covers worked!

We hope that your "row cover" gave you good protection this winter and you are meeting the spring feeling as healthy and robust as our lettuce patch! Thank you again for joining us this season and we'll let our newest farm resident, Kali, say goodbye.

Have a good week everyone!

Lettuce have salad! - Nov. 10, 2020

Freya with a whole lotta lettuce

You may recall that this lettuce patch started out here on September 15:

From the CSA newsletter: We also planted 875 lettuce seedlings this week. Will they make it before freezing temps? Well, we really don't know. Gardening in general is part faith and part folly - the weather will decide which prevails. But if they make it, what a glorious colorful frilly celebration of salad!

Well, we did get some freezing temps, so we did this on Oct. 10:

From the newsletter: It takes a lot of digging and scooping, but hopefully we'll have salad mix in November!

Okay, here it is November 10 and we have lettuce!

The row covers protected them and this week of Indian Summer brought them home! Many varieties and colors, shapes and sizes - all tender and delicious and we have been reveling in fresh local field-grown salad. We hope you will too!

And now for something completely different - Nov. 10:

Come on in - the water's f-r-r-r-e-e-zing!

But it sure felt great afterward! Stay safe everyone - warm, dry (if you want) and healthy!

 

Newsletter - Oct. 17, 2020 - extra edition

 

Fall greetings from the King family! l. to r. - Kenny, Cathy, Edwin, Billy
(photo by Donya)

Here's a little update on what the King family has been doing and will be doing as we wind up this season and head to 2021.

First, news from Nomadland, the film co-produced by Emily Foley, of team Frog Holler (when she isn't going Hollywood. :-)

Nomadland had several concurrent premieres in September - Telluride(at the Rose Bowl and attended by Frog Hollerites Emily, Edwin and Freya), Venice (where it won the Golden Lion award), Toronto and New York. In Toronto it won the People's Choice Award, which is often considered "Oscar-predictive". So the big question is: Will Freya be walking the Red Carpet?

The word must already be out that Freya is a star. She went along on a service call at Dunning Toyota and ended up on their Facebook page!

Many of you enjoyed the feature on the lovely ladies of Frog Holler. Well, they go through their winter rhythms as well and a number of them are starting to molt. When chickens molt, they lose their feathers and look quite scrawny. But molting is a natural process, triggered by decreasing day length, that enables the hens to refresh their feathers before the winter. 

It looks like Butterscotch can't shake her tail feathers for a while!

Here's Phoenix, getting ready to rise from the ashes.

Her "pin feathers" are showing! (developing feathers)

She'll look like this soon!

Now Simone and Tommy want some page space! Simone (named after Simone Biles) and Tommy (named after Tom Brady, the G.O.A.T - yes we have a Patriots fan in our midst) are our two Nigerian Dwarf goats and you see them photographed inside a fence because they are ba-a-a-a-d! 

Simone and Tommy, partners in crime :-)

What did they do to merit being in the pen? Really just being goats is quite enough. Although they are terribly cute and their acrobatic antics are always entertaining, they can quickly destroy a vegetable patch, the exterior paint of a car that they try to climb, or a roof's shingles. We usually keep them in a large enclosure where they can munch to their heart's delight, but lately they have been repeatedly breaking out. Until we can secure them, they are in the chicken pen, and you can certainly assume that the ladies are not thrilled! But aren't they cute?

We went back to a Daikon Radish patch that we thought we were finished harvesting and found this monster, displayed by Kenny King:

Aren't you glad you didn't find this in your share box?

This is a terribly amateurish clip of the farm's new drone, purchased used from a neighbor who can be seen giving instructions. Please forgive the sideways section of the footage - adds to the dizzying effect of this strange technology. And it shows you what the dogs think of this new farm critter! Unmute to hear the obnoxious hum.

We aren't exactly sure how we will use the drone - maybe next year all of the CSA newsletters will be filled with drone footage! :-) We do hope the drone will give helpful footage of the farm fields, the Holler Fest layout, and most likely for more music videos. Now that farming duties have lightened a bit, Billy King has had more time to share his music online - no aerial shots yet but they're probably coming!

Here is one of Billy's latest songs, with his musical pal, Emily Slomovits, playing violin and singing backup. It's a challenge these days to create duets across the distance, but brother Kenny King worked the dials to integrate the files and this beautiful collaboration resulted. "Resist", by Billy King.

 Billy is playing banjo on the balcony of our barn and playing piano back in our stone cabin in the woods. Emily is at her parent's home in Ann Arbor. 

And here is another new collaboration just released. Billy puts these up on his Facebook page and you can go there for more music and some Facebook Live short presentations. Here's what Billy wrote on his page for this song:

Hi friends, please enjoy this recording of an "anti war" song written by my late father, Ken. While he was very outspoken with his political views he rarely expressed it in his music. I can only imagine what he would make of the current climate. Thank you Emily Slomovits and Cathy King for helping with the project. You'll notice some extra studio tracks, I recommend ear buds for the best sonic experience. Thanks for listening.  "Miss That Kind of Love", by Ken King

Again, we're back at the stone cabin; Emily in Ann Arbor. Kenny King on the dials.

We hope you have had opportunities to enjoy Autumn in our beautiful state of Michigan, despite the current "state of affairs". We wish you a safe winter, finding health in your home and peace in your pod.  We'll be hunkered down, taking care of farm critters, ordering seeds, keeping in virtual touch with friends and family, and trusting in Mother Nature to bring rest to the earth this Winter and renewal this Spring. Be well everyone!

Freya, Fall and Frog Holler 

CSA Newsletter - Oct. 10, 2020 - Week 18

Fall is here!

But your share hasn't given up summer yet! In your last box is a combo of the seasons:

LETTUCE

RADISHES 

CARROTS

GREEN PEPPERS

TOMATOES

KOHLRABI

RED ONION - SWEET POTATOES

GARLIC

RUTABAGA - POTATOES

Rutabaga in left lower corner, next to garlic and red onion, behind sweet potatoes, below potatoes
 - all in your share!

Most of these photos were taken at our market stall last Saturday. We hope you will come visit us at our stall (#19-20) for the remainder of the season. Online orders will also continue as long as we have produce - pickup at the stall, curbside at the market, or at the farm.

All market photos by Donya (pictured above)

RECIPE TIPS

We had radish sandwiches this week - so simple but uniquely satisfying. Quick too! Start with some good dense bread; we had a hearty rye loaf. Spread with good butter. Place slices of radishes on bread. Eat!

We also added radish greens to a stir-fry. When the greens are young and tender like the ones in your share, they are very edible AND nutritious!

We had a classic fall dinner with roasted potatoes, roasted brussels sprouts, and roasted sweet potatoes and carrots. We topped it all off with a vegan gravy, from a recipe provided by one of our members, Jude. 

Basic Vegan Gravy: 2 T butter or plant-based butter; 2 T flour - roast briefly in pan. 1 T. cornstarch; 1 and 1/2 c. veggie broth - stir into flour/butter. 2 T soy sauce; 1 T. nutritional yeast - add last. Stir over medium heat until thickened. 

CSA member Jude was getting ready to make pasties and they are a perfect fall dish. Use your garlic, onion, sweet potatoes, potatoes - some combination thereof, but most important, add the rutabaga for the classic pasty flavor. This recipe from Jamie Oliver for My Veggie Pasties, adds a British twist, calling the rutabaga a "swede". You'll find that name for rutabagas in many old gardening books.

SCENES FROM THE FARM

For this last official CSA newsletter, we'll give a bit of a recap on farm crew and doin's. But First...ta dah..or should we say cock-a-doodle-doo!? The winner of the Feathered Fun Crossword Puzzle contest is Jackie Creager! Jackie is a long-time Frog Holler friend and CSA member and she will pick up her prized dozen eggs at our market stall. Thanks to all of you who had fun with the puzzle!

Thelma says Congratulations Jackie!

As we wind down the season, there are many tasks geared toward cleaning up the fields from this year and preparing for the next. At this time of year, when we are finished harvesting a field, we plant cover crops to replenish the soil, add organic matter, and provide a setting resistant to soil erosion.

Here Billy King spreads buckwheat cover crop using the hand crank spreader.

Here is the young buckwheat sprouting. No more rows!

We squeaked through a couple of frosty nights and protected the vulnerable crops through a combination of covering and running the sprinklers all night. So far so good! But remember those tiny lettuce seedlings we crossed our fingers and set a few weeks back?

Well we thought those babies needed some longterm protection so we covered the entire patch one afternoon. 

It takes a lot of digging and scooping, but hopefully we'll have salad mix in November!

All tucked in

Emily and next-door neighbor Sandy have started keeping bees this year, trading sessions with each other's hive. As you may have heard, bee populations are under challenge due to loss of habitat and invasive pests. Even if you can't have a hive in your backyard, you can plant and encourage pollinators to provide the bees with nectar and nourishment. 

Happy because they won't get stung in this gear!

And here is our honeybee hive haven:

We won't take honey this first year so the bees get strong and fat through the winter!

The flower garden is right by the bee hive so the bees have lots of yummy flowers to visit:

Fall is a time to forage for mushrooms and we recently found this humongous puff ball:

The knife shows the relative size.

Well, the puffball was a tad too mature for good eating but it did make a perfect turban!

Hail Cale, King of the Mushrooms!

Cale and Ashleh, who have made it through a second season on the Frog Holler crew, and in fine spirits to boot, will be moving soon to a place that will give them a lot more room to practice their respective arts. And as the farm season winds down, they will have more a lot more time as well as room. 

Ashleh is a silversmith, and we highlighted some of her beautiful jewelry in a previous newsletter. One example:

The stone on this pendant is a Cherry Creek Jasper

.
Cale carves unique wooden spoons, such as:

All from foraged wood - some from Frog Holler!

You can see more of Asleh's beautiful creations, as well as Cale's exquisite hand-carved spoons, at their Etsy shop, accessed by Caveandcanopy.com. If you are thinking of holiday gifts, consider supporting these fine artisan farmers!

Crew member Keegen is also moving - actually he took possession of his new house this week! Many of you know that the housing market has become very competitive. It wasn't easy and Keegen had some disappointments in his search, but he persevered and and now gets to deep clean, make repairs, and do all those good homeowner chores!

Keegen will be smelling the roses in his own backyard!

Crew member Milan has been living in town for a month and is loving her tutoring job.  Here is a science experiment she put together with a stalk of celery and some food coloring.

Look at that osmosis/transpiration go!

And here is Milan in her new apt. with a really big chair!

Om sweet home

Well, time moves on, the seasons change, the leaves turn. In this tree-filled area of the state it is almost dizzying to see the latest color splash surprises:

And while the crew is moving on, they have made a connection to the farm through the soil and their toil, and through friendships forged in shared experiences, shared dedication. The fruits of their labor have landed in your share boxes and our hope is that the newsletter has given you a peek into the stories behind the box. We couldn't have done it without crew; we couldn't have done it without you! We're grateful to live on this beautiful piece of land that has allowed us to coax some crops from the soil while learning to be good stewards. We're sorry we couldn't share the land with the community this year, but look forward to a time when gathering at the farm will feel comfortable, normal, and healing! Until then, thank you to all who joined us in the adventure of CSA 2020 - be well, stay safe, and we'll be in touch!

Freya says have a great Fall everyone!