Carrots, carrots, carrots, sometimes even in my sleep, I am dreaming of carrots. One night I dreamed that I had a pet wolf and that was cool, another night I dreamed that we were all bunching carrots right up next to the deer fence, boring. Well, not so boring, but not as cool as a pet wolf. Anyway, I think my carrot dream was your basic garden variety anxiety dream, because up next to the fence is the end of the line for carrots for this year, and I don’t expect to be there for many more months. In fact, we have so many carrots that we are putting two bunches in the boxes this week. When carrots are the right size, five of them is the perfect bunch, and we usually put in a few extras.
We put in extra carrots because when carrots come up dirty it is hard to tell if there is a blemish. Later when washing them with a hose, if a blemish presents itself, the washer simply breaks off the offending carrot from the bunch and carries on with the washing, lickety split. So if you sometimes notice that you got an extra top with no bottom in your carrot bunch, that might be the reason why. Also, sometimes they just get broken in transit, or some carrot is feeling lively and makes a break for it. All those blemished carrots that get broken off go to feed our friend Mike’s sheep and bunnies. Sometimes we cut off the bad spots and eat them ourselves. This happens with potatoes also, we wash them and then roll them along a mesh table to see if they pass the beauty test. We pull off two sorts, ones that are icky (for the sheep) and ones that are still good to eat (for the food bank). A very nice man from the Olympia Kiwanis comes every week to pick up all of our less attractive produce and delivers it to the food bank for us, and we are very grateful to him.

I really wanted to put the romanesco cauliflower in your boxes this week, but they are still just almost ready. Next week, I bet they will be perfect. Crazy special green cauliflower time is near!

Last week I mentioned a root roast idea for dinner, and this week I want to tell you how to make it even better. Steam some kale or chard and serve on the side. Each person can take a leaf or part of leaf and roll up a chunk of roasted goodness inside and enjoy. It’s sort of like lettuce wraps, but cooked and bite sized. Sometimes a little pile of cooked greens can be a hard sell, but with a golden potato bite inside, it’s a sweet little package.

Thanks to everyone who came to visit and share a picnic with us on Saturday, we had a great time. It was especially nice to have so many young CSA members on the farm tour to pull up carrots and respond with an appropriate level of childhood enthusiasm and amazement. “Holy carrots, I got a big one!” was not actually uttered but sums up the feeling.

Some of you at the picnic noticed our fancy new official Kirsop Farm logo T shirts, now available to CSA members who sign up for 2010 before March. This is a blatant attempt to bribe you into early sign up to save us from worrying about it later. These are the most eco groovy organic cotton soft beautiful shirts printed by our local guys at Casual Tees here in Olympia.

No more chickens for sale until 2010!

Thank you so much to all of you who bought our chickens this time around. You not only get delicious meat, but you also get the great feeling of helping support our farms efforts towards self sustaining fertility and diversity. We love having poultry on the farm. We love chicken dinners, and chicken soups. This is the second year we have grown chickens professionally, and the first year that we planted a special cover crop pasture section of the farm just for them. Well, it’s just for them this year, and now that they have fertilized it perfectly for us, it will be just for lettuce or celery next year. I’ll let you know when our field map is finalized for the season, which crops exactly will be the ones grown with no imported chicken fertilizers. This was our best chicken harvest so far, we are gaining experience and skill and speed, so that we even had time for a nice long lunch break this time. Someone asked how long had we been doing this? I think maybe the person was worried about our lack of experience, but really our experience level is just right. We are young enough in our chicken business to be very very careful, not at all casual about the responsibility to provide good clean food for all of us, my family and yours. We get a special permit from the WSDA to sell chickens directly and the inspector came by to visit us Friday and Monday and he gave us the 100% rating. He also said “It seems like you folks know what you’re doing.” It’s true. We have a new skill.