Our first CSA Harvest
We will be up with the sunrise tomorrow morning harvesting your fresh produce. David (330-608-5010) will be responsible for home deliveries and city pick ups and Erin (937-623-1608) will be your contact for farm pick ups.
David will send a text to home delivery shareholders shortly before delivery so that you’ll know when to expect the arrival of your share and can get your produce into cool storage as quickly as possible.
Sunday city pick ups will be between the hours of 3PM and 7PM at one of our shareholder’s house at 45 Tibet Rd. in Clintonville. This week’s Wednesday city pick ups will be at the Franklin Park Conservatory parking lot until the market begins in June, at which time you can pick up your box from our market booth.
Farm pick ups can send Erin a text when you’re headed out to the farm (9037 North St. NW) and she can have your box ready to go or you can help assemble it and/or stay for a bit to walk around and meet the sheep or check out the gardens!
Every shareholder will receive a dozen of our colorful non-GMO, pastured, free range eggs this week. If you find that you have enough left over for next week, please let us know so that we can be economical with our distribution. We hope you love their color variety (and taste!) as much as we do.
In addition to the dozen eggs, this week’s share is most likely to include the following: fat spring onion foliage, deep green Italian parsley, aromatic sprigs of thyme, broad-leafed kale of three varieties, giant Romaine lettuce, Chinese cabbage (Pac Choi), mild radishes, & diverse micro greens - as well as some fresh wildflowers picked from our woods and meadows.
We are keeping an eye on spinach and a kale spring salad mix which may or may not be ready for this week as well. We’re going to give our colorful spring mix lettuce another week and many of our carrots are roughly pinky-sized. Cabbage and broccoli are starting to form heads, right on time, and honey snap peas are climbing their trellises.
You’ll likely find proof of our reluctance to use any pesticide peppering our aesthetically imperfect Pac Choi and other brassicas. Regardless of their bug bites, they are still the biggest, most bountiful heads we’ve ever grown. We pulled one and sautéed it (not for long) with some butter, salt, and pepper in a cast iron skillet making a delicious meal with a surprising and nourishing amount of plant protein. The greens melted in our mouths and the stems maintained an appropriate crunch. With the current heat wave, we’ve been keeping the Pac Choi, along with our monster romaine lettuce heads, under some shade to prevent them from bolting past their prime. It seems to be working. We are happy with this week’s centerpiece and we hope you’ll be too.
Your shares will be delivered in an overflowing cardboard box branded with the Morckel Meadows logo. In addition to your egg cartons, please hold onto this packaging so that we can trade you for a new one next week!
We’re still transplanting summer nightshades out to the field, growing healthy cucumber starts ready for a bed & trellis of their own, and getting a third field block prepared for squashes and melons. Hundreds of tomato and pepper plants of multiple varieties large and small, sweet and spicy, are graduating to their forever beds out in the fields. We’ve sowed over 4,000 sweet corn seeds and beautiful bush bean varieties green, purple, and “dragon tongue.” We’re continuing succession crops of salad greens including Rainbow Swiss chard, more lettuce mixes, and spinach.
The drought we’re currently experiencing is bittersweet. We needed dry weather to get into our fields, but now we’re finding irrigation to be tying us up more than anticipated. We told ourselves we wouldn’t be the stereotypical farmers always complaining about the weather yet, here we are. After a few years of rotational grazing of our livestock, our pastures are thriving. We have more forage than our sheep can eat which meant it was time to bring out the scythe and try to make some hay. We’ve never had the surplus, the tools, or the opportunity to cut it ourselves and it has been a valuable workout and learning experience.
Thank you again for your support. Please let us know if your scheduled day/time doesn’t work or if you have any additional questions for us as we get our season started this weekend! Be sure to follow along on our instagram accounts @morckelmeadows & @morckelrecordiculture to get a look behind the scenes and tag us if you want to share how your family is enjoying your first box!
Erin & David