• Beets
• Carrots
• Braising Mix - the bagged mix of baby Asian greens, great in salads or steamed/sauteed/stir-fried
• Kohlrabi
• Head Lettuce
• Zucchini
• Hakurei Turnips

On Rotation:

• Broccoli
• Broccolini

Rain, Sweet Rain!

Never in my whole entire life have I been more grateful for water falling from the sky as I was this weekend. Almost 4"!!! And such a sweet, warm, steady, succulent rain, preceded by a day so sultry and tropical I experienced some geographic disorientation: Am I on the east coast? The tropics? My t-shirt is sticking to my back two miles from the beach on the Oregon coast. Has that ever happened before? Then, by Saturday afternoon the unusual sound of fat, heavy raindrops hitting soft green leaves - a sound we're not as attuned to in Oregon, where most of our rain falls on conifers and bare-branched deciduous trees during our rainy winters. It was glorious. Wondrous. It lasted all night and all day. The creek rose, moss turned neon green, the dry knobs on the hills softened, temporarily unparched. Some latent pagan instinct made me want to throw my face skyward and let it soak me to the bone, then make some offering to the rain gods.

The sacrificial lamb - and well worth the sacrifice - was the strawberry patch. A half inch of rain is enough to do some damage, so 3.7 inches pretty much sealed the deal for a sloppy clean-up harvest yesterday. We fed the compost pile well with 150+ pounds of mush-ball, rotting berries, but we got the patch back in order which means we should be back on our berry feet by next week. It means no strawbs in your Harvest Basket this week, but I hope you'll agree that forfeiting a pint of strawberries is a small price to pay for desperately-needed precip.

We're anticipating a week of explosive growth on the farm - on the heels of so much rain, with fifteen+ hours of sun a day as we near the summer solstice. It's a good week to be a plant. And not such a bad week to be a human who eats plants...

Beets this week! Try loving them! They are not the canned beets of your childhood nightmares, or the sicky-corn syrup pickled beets from the Sizzler salad bar. They are earthy and sweet. Roast them! Grate them raw onto a pile of salad. Steam them and toss them with a little salt, pepper, vinegar and olive oil. Fancy it up even more by throwing some fresh herbs and goat cheese on top. Get down with beets this week. They want to get down with you.