In Your Box
Lettuce                

Fresh Garlic
Mustard               

Sunflower Sprouts    
Chard                  

Squash
Basil                    

Beets        

Turnips

Featured Vegetable
Our garlic is nearly ready to harvest but will need a number of weeks to cure. Try using fresh garlic for now – use it as you would regular garlic. The taste is a bit milder but still quite pungent.
Garlic’s healing benefits are many. It promotes circulation, inhibits the common cold and other viruses, promotes the growth of healthy intestinal flora, and eliminates toxins. Eat garlic once a day to ward off mosquitoes. Try garlic tea to relieve poison ivy, poison oak, and stinging nettles (simmer four cloves of chopped garlic in one cup of water for twenty minutes). Drink the tea or apply it cool with a cloth to the affected area. One of our apprentices is using this for his poison oak (watch out for the stuff on those wilderness trails after this year’s wet weather!)

Recipe

Tasty Cooked Greens

Farm News
Hello CSA Members,
Thank you so much for joining the Soil Born Farm CSA for the 2006 season.  We are excited to get started.

The weather was very unusual this winter and spring. It seems like I say this every year, but I am sure everyone recognizes how much rain we had in Northern California in March and April.  All the local farmers are having a very tough year already.  It is literally unheard of for rain to continue as long as it did this spring.  I asked some farmer friends of mine who have been doing this for 25 years if they had ever experienced similar weather patterns and none of them had.  So what are the consequences of late excessive rains?  None of us could get our crops in the saturated soils so all the crops are  very late this year.  We are in uncharted territory.  No one seems to know exactly what is going to happen when the spring crops peter out with the heat and the summer crops are late.  This transitional period could prove to be tricky.  We will have to get creative to make sure the boxes are as good as ever.

Although we expected to start the CSA about three weeks late, it turns out we are only four days later then last years start date.  We could not get in the ground at the Hurley Farm so we took advantage of the sandy soil and exceptional drainage at our new American River Farm.  We broke ground on April 7th and planted some spring crops.  So the chard, basil, beets and sunflowers in your boxes are coming from the American River Farm.  Fortunately we were able to recruit Kay Panek, our project coordinator for the American River Farm, to create and manage the spring garden. She has done an amazing job growing healthy vigorous plants.  Other items such as potatoes, chipolini miniature onions, carrots, cabbage, and tomatoes will be coming from that site as well as in the near future.  

We were finally able to plant at the Hurley Farm the last week of April.  It is taking off and things are growing well.  This year’s farm staff, Sean Hagan, Randy Stannard, and the newly recruited Zack Kahn has already proved to be the best ever.  We feel very lucky to have them all.

Welcome everyone, and enjoy the boxes.

Marco Franciosa             Farm Director