We will have the following veggies this week:
lettuce, spinach, chard, kale, beets, turnips, carrots, broccoli, cabbage, beans, peppers, cucumber, zucchini, onions.
On the farm this week:
This week is our 9th csa pick up, which means we’re already half way through our 18 week season! Though we may offer a 2 week extension like we often do depending on how many bananas we’ve eaten and how much energy we have left. I can’t believe how fast the time is going!
Today I planted our last planting of spinach for the year. On Friday we’ll hopefully plant the rest of the head lettuce and then celebrate the end of planting. Though I’ll probably get nervous and plant more next week, and then the same thing will happen again the next week. But at least in theory we’re done!
Last weekend I picked up a carrot undercutter bar. I borrowed one from Jean Guy last year to dig all the winter csa carrots and I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting lazy or old, but after trying that I never wanted to dig carrots by hand again. Unfortunately we couldn’t get it to work today and ended up digging them all by hand again. 🙁 But it’s going to be a good day when we get it working!
And now for an amazing poem from Ariel Gordon, a csa member who’s doing a project where people give her words and she writes a poem with those words in exchange for something. So I supplied the words: Nicole, bearded-monkey, rhinoceros, electric, hot-wings. and in exchange for a bag of zucchini flowers she wrote this poem! ( I hope it’s correctly copied here, it did something weird when I pasted it in.)
For a bag full of zucchini flowers By Ariel Gordon For Jonathan Stevens After-dinner walk by the side of the road. Mostly ditchflowers & soda cans— vigorous seed drift & rusted-out litter. Sugar & sugar & gas & walking head-on into traffic, all big trucks streaming by. You could say they were electric rhinoceroses, all snorting grays & browns, that I’m a bearded-monkey, playing on the highway, the river to one side, waterweeded lake to the other. A flock of pelicans moves whitely between them, between us, filtering water out of their throat pouches like it was nothing. And then, a thin patch of escaped dill, already gone to seed. Between its fronds, a dead crow, bones laid out neatly, like a suit for a wedding: shirt, tie, jacket, pants. The skull beak are light & porous, like driftwood. Its feet are recognizable but its long pointed wings, the inky darkness in its primaries & secondaries, its coverts & alula, are reduced to rows of white-tipped quills in the gravel, to the teeth of a novelty comb. They look nothing like hot-wings in a sports bar, ranch dressing slopped out of a no-name jug or even frog’s legs in a bistro, served with seasonal veg. Male zucchini flowers, maybe, stuffed with cheese. Or candy cane beets served in thin slices, tasting of earth. That night, the full moon falls in strips across the bed where the curtains don’t quite meet: Thunder Moon. Hay Moon. Hungry Ghost Moon. My phone buzzes from the bedside table, telling me there’s a Drowzee in the room. And then it’s perched on my feet, rocking back & forth, waggling its fingers. Sleep & sleep & my toes, reaching for the end of the bed. The last thing I remember as I laid there, trying to make constellations out of the Glow-in- the-Dark stars glued to the stucco, was thinking that I should name the Pokémon Nicole. Everything—everything—should have the luxury of a name. Supplied words: Nicole, bearded-monkey, rhinoceros, electric, hot-wings. Edibles: soda, rhinoceros, bearded-monkeys, pelicans, dill, crows, chicken, frog, zucchini flowers, cheese, beets, Drowzee, Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer. Her second collection of poetry, Stowaways, won the 2015 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry. When not being bookish, Ariel likes tromping through the woods and taking macro photographs of mushrooms.
That’s it for this week.
See you soon,
Jonathan, Nicole, Shenggang, Irina, Lance