SM26 (WK13): Fall CSA Begins Next Week!
Dear Farm Community,
Next week the sun’s gonna be just as hot, we’re gonna have just as many peppers and okra comin’ out of the fields, and we’re gonna be just as sweaty at the end of the workday. But one itty bitty thing will change: our CSA gets to call itself “Fall”!!!
This week wraps up our official Summer season, and next week we’re trucking right on into the FALL CSA!
If you’re a weekly pay member and want to stay that way… you don’t need to do a thing to roll over!
If you’re a weekly pay member and would like to commit for the full fall season… you’ll get a little discount and help us boost up the farm going into the cooler seasons. You can cancel your weekly pay and sign up for a Full Fall Season share anytime before Sunday. This lump sum is discounted and helps us make some immediate investments that we’re aiming for going into the fall.
If you’re a Full Summer season member… you’ll need to either sign up for the Full Fall Season OR the weekly pay option by Sunday.
Get it? Got it? GOOD!!
ALSO OF NOTE! Our Tuesday CSA Pickup is changing locations starting September 1st. After that date we will be set up for CSA pickup on Tuesdays just a few hundred feet away from Athens Montessori, in the parking lot of St. Gregory’s. There are 2 parking lots, and CSA members should come to the parking lot that is further away from Athens Montessori. Again, this week we will still be at Athens Montessori. Next week will be the first pickup at St. Gregory’s. There will be a handy map in your CSA pickup reminder email the next few weeks :-)
Now for the fun stuff! What the heck have we been doin’ out here under the hot hot sun?? We had a little experiment this year in our spent strawberry field. Usually we arduously pull up the entire field - plants, mulch, and all, before working the soil back over and planting it out with new crops. This year, once our strawberries stopped producing we decided to throw a big ol’ silage tarp on the field and wait for everything underneath to be killed off, in hopes we could skip over the arduous turnover. Just last week we pulled off the tarp to hundreds of gloriously dead plants with pristine plastic mulch underneath, and planted some melons directly into those “prepped” beds. While this process took some passive time to let the plant material die off underneath the tarp, it saved us a ton of labor in the hottest part of the year and these melons should grow well with the weed protection provided by the plastic mulch.
We’re looking forward to seeing all them melons growing in a glorious, low-weed-pressure paradise! Bindweed, pigweed, and grasses have been giving our other melon fields a run for their money this year, so we’ve got our fingers crossed for a beautiful crop here with a little less competition for all that good sunlight, water, and soil.
And one more little bit of fun from the fields before we head onto CSA shares…. check out who we peeped on our milkweed: Monarch caterpillars! We’re so stoked that our farm is a native pollinator hotspot and cant wait to see these babies flapping around in their full butterfly glory. If you don’t know much about monarchs, they are kind of incredible (like mysteriously migrate 3,000 miles with nothing but a butterfly brain, the wind, and ancient wisdom incredible) and their numbers have been declining in kind of super depressing ways over the last 40 or so years. We love growing milkweed because it is a lovely flower ~ a beautiful orange whimsical pop in bouquets ~ but equally so, we love knowing and seeing that our farm can be a safe haven for the incredible creatures of the world <3
In your CSA shares, it’s a basil week, y’all! We’ve been harvesting the most glorious basil from our hoop houses lately . I mean LOOK AT THIS BEAUTY!!
The smell ~ so fragrant, so divine! It’s begging for a caprese salad with juicy tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, olive oil, and flaky salt, or whizzed up into a bright, garlicky pesto. It would delight to swim in a coconutty, herbaceous brothy Thai curry with silken tofu and lime. A blistery Margherita pizza with tomato and milky mozzarella? Forget about it! Or dare we even say it... a basil-forward pasta?? This lemon basil pasta is buttery, lemony, cheesy, and absolutely loaded with the good stuff.
You can also try what 364 people on Reddit call “the Best Basil Cocktail of All Time” ~ The Gin Basil SMASH:
2 oz Gin
3/4 oz Lemon juice
1/4 oz Simple syrup
10-12 Basil leaves
Basil leaf for garnish
Muddle the basil in a cocktail shaker well to express the oils, then add the remaining ingredients with ice. Shake well and double strain with a fine mesh strainer (to avoid the basil bits) into a chilled rocks glass over “T H I C C” ice. Serve!
364 people cant be wrong! (right??)
Smells like Summer
Diamond Hill Farmers
P.S. If you haven’t, been on our instagram lately…. well, we had our first viral video Who would have guessed! It has nothing to do with vegetables! Watch it here :-)
FALL SESSION BEGINS NEXT WEEK!
standard share: okra, shishito peppers, fairytale eggplant, squash, basil, onions OR sweet potato peppers
large share: okra, shishito peppers, fairytale eggplant, squash, basil, onions OR sweet potato peppers, lettuce mix, asian long beans