Welcome to your first harvest as a share  holder in the Cedarville Farm Community Garden.  This will be the first of 23 harvests with your final box arriving on October 29th.  In between now and then we will present to you an abundance of vegetables of considerable variety.  Today’s box compared to those to come is fairly light on both variety and tonnage.  It has been a cool and, oddly enough, dry spring and the garden is a bit slow off the mark.  We expect with more heat and some irrigation that more crops will begin maturing in the next few weeks and the variety of your share will improve.  In your box today you will find:

- Lettuce: 3 petite heads, a mix of green & red types

- Bunched Spinach      - Green Onions

-Sauté Mix: A mix of several tender greens: red & gold frills, mizuna, tatsoi, beets, w/ the nascent root attached, swiss chard, & spinach. Tender enough to use raw as a spicy salad, or mixed with milder greens for a less assertive salad, or lightly sautéed.

Bok Choi:  Dark green leaves with pale white, crisp stalk.  Try the white stalks raw: they are nicely crisp & mild and when sliced into salad add a welcome bit of crunch.

Garlic Greens: Young garlic plants.

Use the whole plant, bulb, shank, & leaves anywhere you’d normally use the bulb form. Garlic butter or oil made with young plants like these has a sweet, light garlic

flavor and lovely green hue.

Radishes: Bright red roots, an old favorite named “Cherry Belle”.  Small bunches thanks to a long, slow spring.  Next week we should have a larger harvest for you.  Try these sliced thin into green salad or added for the last 20 seconds of cooking in a sauté mix.

Pea Greens: Much as garlic greens were an initially surprising offering that many shares hadn’t heard of, but now adore, we thing pea shoots have a bright future.  Tender and tasting of the inimitable sweet greenness of the pod that arrives a few weeks later, pea greens add something special to salad and when very lightly sautéed are wonderful over rice or noodles.

Notes, General:

We  hope you have had time to consider the several dates shown of the Farm  Calendar you received with your confirmation packet.  After one too many rained upon Open Houses we decided to move our first farm event back in the calendar into a statistically warmer part of the season and to alter it’s theme a bit to highlight a part of the season we hadn’t before.

So, we hope you will join us and fellow shareholders for our first Summer Salad Celebration on July 6th in the garden.  Many of you, those with children especially,  have asked for a chance to dig in the dirt of the garden - so please consider our three Work Party dates in June, July, & August.  On these days we’ll plant, water, and otherwise care for the garden, while also keeping our senses open to the greater biotic community it’s a part of (we’ll check out the bugs, birds, & other critters of the farm).

BOXES - The bane of our existence as share farmers!  Please make every effort to return these to your pick up site EVERY week.  We cannot bring you the harvest if we don’t have a container to bring it to you in!  It is getting more difficult for us to find these used (and free) boxes - so we really depend upon you  good shareholders to bring them back to us.

In fact, some of the boxes we are using we’ve bought new at some expense - to help us hold down this expense, you do us a great  favor by returning your box each week.

Shared Shares: Quite a few of you are splitting a share with another family, a

sensible approach to the ample flow of vegetable nourishment coming your way.  We do ask that the parties involved communicate very clearly with each other as to whose responsibility it is to pick up the box each week.  If, by accident, you do pick up two boxes, PLEASE rush the second one back to the pick up site where its rightful share holder can claim it.

Payments  - If you still owe the farm for your share, your June installment would be much appreciated.  The corn may not be ripe yet, but payroll is due on Friday!

Please call us if you have questions about your share or anything else.  And thank you for linking yourself to this small farm.

- Mike, Kim, Kids, and Crew

Szechuan Vinaigrette

We publish this recipe nearly every year, and love it as much today as when we first savored it during a delicious visit to the Rhododendron Cafe many years past.

- 1/4 cup red wine vinegar

- 1-1/3 tablespoons soy sauce

- 1-1/2 cloves garlic

- 2-1/4 teaspoons sugar

- 1-1/8 teaspoons ginger, grated

- 1 dash salt and pepper

- 3/8 teaspoon chile oil

- 1/3 cup canola oil

- 1 tablespoon sesame oil

Mix all ingredients well. Refrigerate after using.

Basic Stir-fry with Peanut Oil and Garlic

from Choi to the World, by Terra Brockman

This type of preparation will work with a variety of greens, both Asian and other (spinach, chard, kale).  The Chinese first used Bok Choi in the 5th century; something like 20 varieties are now in use by chefs in Hong Kong.

- 1 pound bok choi (or a mixture of   different chois)

- 2 Tb peanut oil

- 1 tsp sugar

- 1 tsp minced garlic

- salt or soy sauce to taste

1. Cut stems into 1-inch pieces and slice leaves coarsely.

2. Heat wok or heavy frying pan. Pour oil in. Add stems and toss over moderately high heat until somewhat softened, about 2 minutes.

3. Add sugar, garlic, salt and soy sauce. Add reserved leaves. Toss another 2 minutes. Serve. (Yield: 2 servings)

Sautéed Greens with Garlic and Lemon

from, Compassionate Cooks, LLC.

Green leafy vegetables are concentrated sources of minerals like calcium.

Serves 4

- 2 bunches greens, pulled from the stem and chopped into bite-size pieces

- 5 cloves garlic, minced

- 1 tablespoon olive oil

- Juice from 1 small lemon

- 1-2 teaspoons tamari soy sauce 

You can't go wrong whether you choose dinosaur kale, curly kale, chard, beet greens, collard greens, or even spinach. Any of these makes a good side dish or bed for an entrée of a contrasting color, such as grilled polenta.

Using a steamer basket in a medium-sized pot, steam the greens for 5-7 minutes, until tender. Meanwhile, in a large sauté pan, heat the oil and add the garlic, stirring occasionally until golden brown.

Add the steamed greens, and sauté for a few minutes. Squeeze the lemon, and sprinkle the tamari onto the greens, and stir again until the greens are thoroughly coated with the lemon and tamari. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Serving Suggestions and Variations

•  After you steam the greens, you can just toss them in a large bowl with some agave nectar, rice vinegar, and lemon juice for a fantastic salad. You can also add raw or blanched cauliflower or chickpeas.

Sautéed Pea Greens

adapted from a recipe posted on athinkingstomach.blogspot.com

- A generous handful of 6" pea vine trimmings

- 2 green garlic shoots

- 1/2 a fresh lemon

- Olive oil

- Coarse salt to taste

To make the dish:

Wash and dry the greens and garlic. Cut off the roots from the garlic, cut each garlic shoot into 4" lengths, slice them 4" pieces lengthwise in half, then in quarters. The slender pieces of garlic will curl, imitating the pea vine tendrils.

Place a large frying pan or wok over medium-high heat and pour in a generous slick of olive oil. When the oil is hot, toss in the greens and garlic shoots, quickly stirring the greens around the pan so they don't burn. Cook the greens in this manner for 2 minutes or so, or until the greens, even the inner reaches of them, have turned bright green. Squeeze the half lemon over the cooked greens, briefly stir. Sprinkle with coarse salt to taste, and serve.

Garden Notes:

I have to chuckle at the welcoming paragraph of this first newsletter - it’s the identical same copy as we wrote for last season, 2007.  So, I’m reminded by myself that we’ve had two consecutive dry and cool springs, a condition that ten years ago I never would have imagined could occur. Wet and cool springs we know quite well in this land of moss and slugs, but cold and dry is something we’d only read about before these past two years.  The dry part is actually not so good, even considering the frustration that over abundant moisture can cause a farmer.

Plants, young ones especially, need moisture and if denied, even given cooler temperatures, their growth will be delayed.  Thus part of this season’s tepid start is due to modest moisture as much as insufficient heat.

This considered, we are still pleased with the way the garden looks.  Many crops are in, though growing with less gusto than we’d like, and we expect an abundant harvest once things settle on a warmer plain.  Peas should begin within two weeks, more greens of course are coming along, beets are showing some root, and the broccoli raab is beginning to form shoots.  Regular broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, and other “solid” (meaning non-greens) vegetables are still setting up shop, but should begin maturing by mid to late June.

We hope you enjoy the first harvests.  We include the recipes and serving tips to make it easier for you to utilize your share - let us know if their are other ways we can improve your experience with our CSA.

Thanks for joining the farm in 2008.

We are excited and grateful to be your personal farmers.

~ Mike, Kim, Kids, & Crew

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