2009 Week 1 - Welcome CSA Members: It’s finally here! We are so excited to offer this year’s premiere harvest. All produce was picked just yesterday, washed and packaged for your initial taste of La Boca. We recommend that you give veggies a quick rinse before eating to get any residual dirt off.   Take advantage of this weekly newsletter as a guide to enjoying your bag of seasonal produce. Each newsletter will include a list of the week's produce, what to expect next week, updates and pictures from the garden, additional farm products available, and recipes and info for the week’s veggies.  Enjoy!   In the Garden with Kelle & Keith   First of all, we would like to express our heart-felt thanks to all of you for helping get our market garden project off of the ground and supporting La Boca. Your CSA funds helped us purchase the seeds and plant starts we needed this spring and implemented the installation of a new drip irrigation system for all of the garden beds. In return, we plan on filling your cupboards and refrigerators with plenty of tasty, healthy, nutritious produce.   Although our garden is not “certified organic”, we use sustainable farming practices and only add organic compost tea to our veggies in the field. We limit the amount of petro-chemicals in the soils by using draft horses to do the majority of the field work and all our compost is compliments of the pigs and chickens on-site. We are working very hard to fulfill our promise to you and we hope you can come down to the farm sometime to see what we are up to.   This spring has blessed our garden with many cloudy days which ease the stress on our transplants and lots of rainy afternoons which give the plants a boost. The weather has also provided warm, frost-free evenings, enabling us to plant many warm weather crops (like cucumbers and corn) early. Some of the trials and tribulations this spring include a struggle with flea beetles in our arugula beds, which resulted in many holes on the spicy greens. Likewise, typical early spring crops, spinach and peas, struggled with weather and inconsistent water, leaving us with a skinny harvest. Fortunately, the drip irrigation system has remedied our need for even watering and mid-season crops are looking good.   For those of you who haven’t seen the likes of kohlrabi before, you shall be pleasantly surprised by this member of the Brassica family which also includes broccoli, kale, cabbage, and the like.  We found a recipe that unites kohlrabi with goat cheese, which is also in your first bag.