Ninth Week of Spring Season
Our Online Marketplace opens this morning, April 24th, and closes at 5pm Sunday, April 26th for a Tuesday April 28th delivery.
What’s Up at Market
We’re finding more and more of our veggies at the market now and have one more week to go before Victory Garden and Wandering Roots and maybe Patrick join the market. Oregon has been dry and having cold nights enough to frost some crops, like Runnymede’s asparagus. A nice young couple had a small pop up and table with just asparagus and leaf lettuce so we lucked out. I saw some bunches of smaller spears so there are backups and Fry usually first, might be last if waiting for regrowth after frost. Wandering Roots has a whole field devoted to asparagus so the sources will continue. Runnymede was first with snap peas but there will be competition soon. The greens are especially nice this years on all the tables.
The co-op has re-arranged a few areas of the store. They are making more items in the dips, salsa department, and have expanded the first produce section with more specialty ingredients, including by-the-pound and packaged Medjool dates, turmeric, and an expanded berry department.
At Jessie’s Cosmic Garden
Here, the cabbage plants are in the ground and today I hope to plant all of the kales. They are good-sized plant so I should be offering some soon. I think I have 8 varieties to offer, kale bouquets, and mixed kale leaf bags besides bunches of individual. I’ll finish pruning the grapes today and clean up the huge mess of trimmings, then have to get to work on the beds for the summer crops, which are all carpeted in weeds or ground cover. Ugh.
The greenhouse crops look really good. Everything I seeded came up strong but, hey, the peas are only about 4″ long at this point. I continue to seed baby lettuces inside and outside will plant more leeks, cilantro etc. The periodic rains are perfect for the planting season so hoping for more with sunshine in between. Egg production remains steady and I’m conflicted about getting more chicks. If you plan to keep ordering eggs, or intend starting to order them more often, it would be really nice to know so I can make this decision by May 8th.
I put my cottage on Craig’s List this morning and heard from someone 5 minutes after I posted it. She’s coming for a congenial visit this afternoon but I can’t show the cottage until May 1. We shall see.
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.