Native berries, native bees.

We’ve been fretting over the share this week. It seems we are stuck in a quiet space between harvests. Spinach and mustard greens, that we had planned on including in these early baskets, have long since gone either to seed or to flea beetles. And the juicy, fruity, summer fun things – green beans, tomatoes, summer squash – aren’t quite here yet. And why are the carrots taking so long?  In our winter seed ordering and calendar planning, we had glorious visions of each weekly basket being evenly stocked with an allium, a fresh root vegetable, a cooking root, fresh greens, and braising greens. Yes, well. We are working on it still and we’ve since learned some things.

One thing we’ve learned is how to make sunshine out of flea beetles in the mustard greens: collect chokecherries instead. Over the past couple days, we harvested 17 pounds of chokecherries from trees on the farm. Neither of us had ever done anything with chokecherries, so we did some quick internet searches and sat down with the native plants and foraging books. Turns out chokecherries are a mega antioxidant and they make for fantastic sorbet. The recipe we used is in this week’s CSA newsletter.

And Cycle Farm CSA has new, lovingly handcrafted, produce bags. Hooray!  One of our wonderful CSA members and my mother volunteered to make these for us – THANK YOU. These are fantastic. We’ve been working hard on minimizing our off-farm inputs. Being able to use and reuse these cloth bags instead of plastic bags will make a big difference.

On a side note. We’ve been seeing LOTS of these little metallic green bees (Agapostemon) around recently. They dig the chicory. Native pollinators. Totally rad.