Sixth Week of Spring Season
Our Online Marketplace opens this morning, April 3rd, and closes at 5pm Sunday, April 5th for a Tuesday April 7th delivery.
Have a lovely Easter, if you celebrate it.
What’s Up at Market
For the first time ever, our order last week had nothing available at the market, so I skipped that part of the journey and left home an hour later and avoided the “get to work in Yreka” traffic on I-5. For that reason, I am not sure what will be new at market but hope to be surprised with more lettuces, other greens like spinach and sooner or later, asparagus and snap peas, which I will put on a wish list. It is early for both but the weather has been too. We might see some new small growers to add to the produce from Runnymede, Barking Moon and Whistling Duck.
The Co-op had a bin full of hams, all shapes and sizes and flavor variety and might have leftovers on sale this week. My mother would have cooked a spring leg of lamb, mashed potatoes, peas etc. for Easter Sunday. It didn’t used to be so expensive as it is now, but remains my favorite meat. So we will be post-Easter but need to stock up because I would like to skip the next Tuesday (4/14) to test a one week off a month to save on gas, and increase efficiency. Without the online and bookkeeping part of my weekly contribution to the CSA, I will have a week to devote fully to the garden. I will send a notice out that I will gladly bring around local orders from my garden and from Hoa as I did over winter.
At Jessie’s Cosmic Garden
The major work of seeding veggies starts for the greenhouse and garden is done. We have 4 lettuce mix crops on 2-week successions, almost 50 gorgeous kale plants, near 20 cabbages, tomatoes for early greenhouse and June 1 garden planting, cucumbers, summer squash, and herbs. In the greenhouse, I’ve already planted snap peas, carrots (more to come) beets and rainbow chard plant doing well. In the garden, rows of cilantro, arugula, dill and mache continue. I will start the green beans in trays for a good start in the greenhouse and the same plan with sweet corn for good roots when going into the garden. If I can pull all this off, I should have an array of your favorite veggies that grow around here and will supplement from our farmers.
I’m looking forward to Victory Gardens crates of potatoes and recommend jumping on them early for amazing flavor. I love the earthy smell when they first come to market and would grow them here if we didn’t have gophers. I’ll have some of the baby lettuces that we’ve getting from them. The butter crunch seeds didn’t germinate (not uncommon for Annie’s Seeds) but the baby romaines and baby gems are looking good. The girls are doing way better with the egg laying (the Easter bell just rang) though I might still have to carry later orders on a list.
I bought a new grape variety yesterday (Flame table grape) and will plant it this week. It will take a couple years to bear a first crop. I have a wild fence full of concord grape branches to prune and they are budding out a good 2 months early so need to get on it soon. I also spent a few hours going to all possible purveyors of garden seeds here looking for curly parsley (my seed got wet and ruined) and found them from Siskiyou Seed at the Native Grounds florist. Good local seeds are the best!
Link to order form:
https://www.heartofthesun.com/csamarketplace.html
Cheers!
Jessie
Important Information (leaving this up for awhile)
I don’t like rules but prefer to suggest some guidelines for the successful running of our CSA. Anyone joining in the last few years has probably not received or been reminded of them. The Old-Timers are quite good about them but we had reminders on the old website that I didn’t include on this one so here goes (and I will leave this up here for a few weeks to catch everyone as well as including it in the link notice email).
Please…
- Watch your statements and leave a payment in your box for pickup when you are not going to cover the cost of what’s being delivered – or make a paypal payment, or stop by with it. Especially during Winter and early Spring Season, our bank balance can get pretty low if we don’t keep accounts topped up. If I use the debit card (often) the transaction is immediate.
- If you are not going to order, tell me well ahead – earlier in the week if its a recent decision and at least two weeks ahead if you are going on a trip or are going to be out for a week or more. I shouldn’t find this out when reminding you to order mid-day Sunday. This is especially desired if you are a regular microgreen customer as I seed them around 12-10 days ahead of harvest. The seed is expensive – making needless chicken treats something to avoid. With a heads up in time, I can plan to grow less.
- Put your boxes out ahead of delivery (will often be later in winter when we drive to Grants Pass). Leave payments taped in them or with a rock on top of them. And please return all my canning jars so I have something to put the next batch of whatever it is in them. Thank You, Very Very Much. I love you all and so do our farmers!
- Microgreens I’ve been thinking about microgreen parameters for some time since it’s heartbreaking to feed them to the chickens who like garbage with equal gusto. Most of my microgreen members have the same order every time they order. I would like to call these subscriptions that I can always fill. When folks order every once in a while I never know its coming and may or may not have seeded enough to cover their orders, though always have some for small orders. I’m trying not to waste pretty expensive seed. So here’s the new rulIf any ‘subscriber’ is going to be gone, give me a heads up 10 days ahead, when you get your Sunday order to check the week before your absence. I will tag all the order emails with a reminder. If you are planning to place a special order or you don’t order very often and want them when you’re planning to order, give me a heads up the same 10 days ahead so I can seed more. You’ll notice I am now using a different sunflower seed (the striped ones from the big sunflowers) so if you’ve drifted away from them in the past, please try again.
- Minimum Orders: ‘Back in the Day’ when we started the CSA, we had structured box prices and an 8-week period in which to spend your box value. Now we are all over the place and it only works well when an X number of people order and a Y number of people have orders over $100. In the old days the minimum order was $35 for the small box if ordering every week. I’m going to make that the minimum order for doorstep delivery. You can place smaller orders to pick up here on order day between 3:30 and 6:00.