CSA Week 1

Our CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) started this week right on schedule; the last few weeks have finally gotten warm enough and dry enough for the veggies to grow very quickly since a week or so ago it appeared that the start of the CSA would be a week or two late. This first week included lots of green: kale, garlic scapes, chives, pac choi, mizuna, and lettuce (I got the red leafed variety just to break the green monopoly). The strawberries also added a nice color contrast. I like everything in the share this week – but the garlic scapes are probably the most ‘special’ because they are not generally available in grocery stores and they are only available for a few weeks; I’m already thinking about how I want to use all 8 of them in the next week!

I used a bin left from some greens bought at the grocery store (and already eaten) to store the veggies I washed right ways: chives, lettuce, and mizuna. The other veggies went into the crisper in the same form I picked them up from the bin at the CSA.

Then I enjoyed a serving of strawberries with coconut milk – my summer afternoon snack.

Learning Log – May 2016

Most of the learning I logged in May was experiential or in conversations with other people. I went to a lecture on wildflowers – the closest I came to a class. The speaker included a segment on buzz pollination, reinforcing what I already knew about it from my son-in-law about the topic. He also pointed out that the jack-in-the-pulpit flowers look the same from the outside but the male and female flowers are quite different inside – but one has to cut away the outer part of the flower to see the structures. Not something I would do!

One area of experiential learning in May was picking strawberries. Years ago when I picked strawberries, I did so on my knees so I was pleasantly surprised that the mounds of my CSA’s strawberry patch made it easier to just bend over to gather the fruit. I’m still enjoying the strawberries I picked.

The other big experience of the month was using the scanner – primarily for old slides, pictures and Zentangle tiles. I learned to use a can of compressed air to clean the dust off periodically and how to scan multiple items at a time (into separate images). I also raised the scanner on a stand so that I didn’t have to bend over slightly each time I loaded it.

There were a lot of factoids I picked up in conversations with other naturalists before field trip hikes:

• Carolina wrens build multiple nests and then the female chooses one (from a birder),
• Earthworms come to the surface during rains not because they are drowning but because they are migrating (from another naturalist that had been reading about it),
• How the ‘points’ of antlers are counted (from a chaperone of a hiking group),
• Inexpensive wire mesh kitchen strainers work great to capture macro-invertebrates in rivers and streams (from a leader of a field trip to the Patapsco River).

Strawberries

It has been a wet, cool spring here in Maryland and the Gorman Farms Community Support Agriculture is going to get a late start…sliding from June 1^st into the 2^nd or 3^rd week of June depending on what happens in the next week or so. But ---- the strawberry season is going strong. CSA medium share members get a pint of strawberries free each day the farm is open for picking!

I’ve been twice so far. The picking is easy from the mounds although that means the path between the plants is lower and very muddy right after a rain….which was definitely the case the first time I went. The good news was that there were plenty of berries to pick and more left to ripen.

On both days I ate half the pint right after I got home! And then the rest the next day.

Aside from just eating strawberries just as they are – I love them in salads. My favorite salad so far has been arugula, quinoa, almond slivers, and strawberries….with an orange marmalade dressing (a little oil combined with orange marmalade). This is salad as dessert (but actually eaten as lunch)!

Next time I go – I plan to pick a bucket of strawberries and pay for the amount over the pint. As a CSA member we get a discount. I’m going to load up the freezer with strawberries to start of the summer.