Full Share:  Salad Mix, Mesclun, Chard, Spring Onions, Kohlrabi, Broccolini, and Head Lettuce

Partial Share: Beets, Kohrabi, Salad Mix, Spring Onions, and Kale

Hello CSA Members!

They say a picture is worth a thousand words….I sure wish I took a good picture today 🙂  I won’t lie, I’m feeling a bit tired.

It’s 8pm, and we just came in from the fields.  The list of things to get done each day exceeds the time and personnel we have to get it done, so we’ve been burning the midnight oil in hopes of catching up.  Most of the early crops, such as cauliflower, broccoli, potatoes, onions, etc. have all been planted already. The high tunnels have been cleared of spring crops, and the tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers are planted.

Prepping raised beds before rolling the “Rolling Thunder” high tunnel to it’s summer location.

The sweet corn was transplanted out in the field today, and we’re prepping beds for a huge push to get summer and winter squash planted this week.     In some parts of the country, that process is just a matter of putting some seeds in the ground, but not here in Whitefish, Montana!   Here, we have to do the bed prep (180 foot long raised beds), then we plant the crop, then we put metal hoops every 10 feet down the bed (19 hoops ), haul a sandbag to every hoop on both sides (38 sandbags), and then we cover the crop with a fabric row cover….usually just as the wind picks up.   It’s a lot of work to protect crops from bugs and cold and to speed their growth, and we do this on most of the beds we plant….which at the moment is somewhere over 220 beds.   Yep, that’s a lot of sand bag hauling alright, but it’s what it takes to grow high quality food in this climate.

We don’t want to start a new trend, but we had a CSA member last year request that we grow Kohlrabi…which is a crop we have never grown in our 11 year history.  Because we like her (the CSA member), we decided we’d give it a shot.  And lo’ and behold, we have a beautiful crop of kohlrabi that is ready, so you’ll be getting it for the first time ever in a Two Bear Farm share.   If you like it, let us know.  If you don’t, send all complaints to Molly Elliot.  To help you out with this one, here’s a link to Dishing Up the Dirt cookbook, which provides you with a plethora of tasty ideas!   Me, at the moment I think I’d go for the BLK sanwhich.  After a few weeks of radishes and bok choy, we are making a shift to some  crops that take more time to grow.  Full shares will be getting broccolini this week, while partial shares will be getting beets.

Which reminds me….I still need to  figure out how to fit the beet bunches into the partial share boxes?!  Hopefully a solution will come to me in my sleep.   We hope you are enjoying this wonderfully mild spring in Montana, and here’s hoping the mosquito pressure for those of us living near rivers starts to drop off in the near future.   Thanks again for eating healthy and local…..we’ll see you at CSA distribution.