Our final delivery day for our main season Farm Share is November 12th. Our first day for a Winter Farm Share delivery is December 3rd. We still have room in our Winter Farm Share if you’re interested! Reach out and we’ll get you signed up.

Farm News

In exciting news, after 11 months of waiting, we received a rinse conveyor this week! This rinse conveyor was part of a grant, with the purpose of ensuring vegetables are clean and bins could be sanitized. And it’s quite the machine. Conceptually, it’s like a car wash for vegetables, though it has a lot of pumps and tubes and buttons that I don’t really understand (good thing Dirk has a mind for that). Dirk has been figuring it out the past day or so and so far we are very impressed! It seems to wash vegetables efficiently and well while using less water than we would in our previous methods of washing. We hope this allows us to get our vegetables cleaner in less time for our customers!

We pulled our last batch of sweet potatoes out of the “curing chamber” only to realize that we were seeing a lot of degradation in the sweet potatoes. After doing some sleuthing, we realized our sweet potatoes are infected with black rot, probably due to sitting in wet soil in September. We’ve mentioned black rot before this year, specifically with broccoli or cauliflower, but unfortunately this is a different disease by the same name.

Just like humans, plants get sick too. There are beneficial microbes in our ecosystem, but there are fungi and bacteria that like to eat our food before we can. We categorize those fungi and bacteria as pathogens. Black rot in broccoli, cauliflower, or cabbage (all in the same plant family) is caused by a bacteria called Xanthomonas campestris. Xanthomonas bacteria spread rapidly in humid, wet conditions and is difficult to control because it live free in the soil, without plant tissue, for up to 40 days in the winter and on plant tissue in the soil for longer. Black rot in sweet potatoes is caused by a fungus called Ceratocystis fimbriata. And after doing some reading on “the enemy”, I learned this fungus likes to overwinter on the roots of wild morning glory, a weed that we have in abundance, and typically sweet potatoes won’t show any signs of the disease until the tubers are in storage.

Most of farming is about reacting to elements outside of our control. We have nasty pathogens in our soil, which often wreck havoc after very rainy periods. We can’t - and don’t want to - poison our soil with fungicides or pesticides. We can’t stop the rain when it comes. So in the short term, yesterday we washed all of the sweet potatoes with our new rinse conveyor. This doesn’t stop the disease but allows us to see the damage better. On the sweet potatoes that show sign of black rot, we’re going use our other grant-funded equipment to chop and freeze. This will allow us to preserve some of this harvest.

In the long term, we’re thinking about how we grow healthier plants that can fight off diseases. Plant immune systems is a burgeoning area of research. The few studies out on plant immune systems show that, much like human immune systems, plants can fight off pathogens if they have strong immune systems. We’ve already done a bit of experimenting with plant immune systems with a liquid form of elemental silica. Applying silica (or gardeners may know silica in a different form as diatomaceous earth) helps alleviate stress in plants and increases their cellular strength. We’ve seen improved plants after applying silica so as we plan for our 2027 growing season now, we’re planning on using immune boosters like silica for our vegetables. Healthy food begins with healthy plants.

Veggie Spotlight: Sweet Potatoes

Sweet potatoes are typically included in fall and winter holiday meals, though their historical and botanical origins have little to do with the upper Midwest. Like the potato, sweet potatoes are thought to originate in Peru, however they’ve been common in Polynesia and southeast Asia for a long time, leaving scientists to wonder if they floated across the Pacific ocean or were exchanged in trade by humans who sailed across the ocean (I find the second theory more believable). Whatever the case, sweet potatoes are now common in North America, however sweet potatoes are NOT yams. Yams and sweet potatoes, though often used as interchangeable names for the orange, sweet tuber, are in different plant families and taste very different.

Today, sweet potatoes have been adapted to warm, tropical climates so in order to grow them in South Dakota, we need to grow them on black plastic mulch so they can absorb as many heat units as possible. Sweet potatoes start as little plant cuttings, known as slips, that grow into a vast vine of edible leaves (maybe you were brave enough to try sweet potato greens this summer?). Sweet potatoes must be harvested before frost as cold temperatures will cause damage in the tubers even if the ground is not frozen yet. Then sweet potatoes need to be cured at high humidity (90-100%) and high temps (80-85 degrees F) before they are able to last in storage.

Sweet potatoes are versatile in the kitchen. They can be roasted, mashed, sauted, fried, and even used in a smoothie. Personally, I’m NOT a fan of the “typical” way of eating sweet potatoes with marshmallows as I find sweet potatoes so much more appetizing on their own. Our family most often eats sweet potatoes roasted or cubed and mixed with black beans in tacos or breakfast scrambles. I also like using them in curries or even mashing them as the base of the curry. Sweet potatoes are softer than typical potatoes so you have to watch them more carefully if roasting or sauteing.

Eat Like a Farmer

Salt-Roasted Sweet Potatoes
This salt-roasting recipe doesn’t involve making a full salt crust like other, more involved recipes require, but it does yield soft, moist roasted sweet potatoes! We’ve also tried this with carrots and it’s equally delicious with carrots.

Sausage Stuffed Squash Rings
Dirk and I had a “date night in” and made these and they were fantastic! I saw them first on a social media video, but I think they lived up to the hype.

Butternut squash and Brussel Sprouts
We’ve been eating a lot of brussel sprouts lately. The butternut squash in this recipe sweetens up the earthiness of the brussel sprouts.

Colcannon or Stamppot
Because Dirk has Dutch heritage, we typically make stamppot with onions, carrots, and potatoes but I wanted to switch it up a little bit and made the Irish version this week with potatoes and cabbage. While the carrots definitely add some sweetness (which our older kids like), the colcannon with cabbage was still enjoyed by all - especially our 10 month old!

1. Now that we are back in green season, remember that keeping a paper towel in the bag with your greens will help prolong their life in the fridge.

2. We are taking orders for BSVC t-shirts! Please reserve your shirt this weekend! Shirts are $20/shirt and will be printed by a local, Sioux Falls company.

3. The final share of the main season will be November 12th!

Farm News

We’re standing on the edge of the “natural” farming season: the final day before a frost. If you’re a gardener or plant enthusiast, you’re probably very aware of our average frost dates. Our corner of South Dakota has the average frost-free dates of May 6 to September 30th. Of course, this is just the average as this fall has been warmer than typical (it was 90 degrees six days ago).

With the frost looming this whole week, we’ve been racing around trying to finish up harvesting sensitive crops. Not every crop is sensitive to frosts, some crops, like kale and collards and Brussel sprouts can withstand hard frosts, and actually taste better after frost. But all fruiting crops will die when the temps dip below 32 degrees. So we’ve been pulling out all the winter squash, stripping the peppers, and clear cut all the celery to keep in storage.

The first frost is like a sigh of relief. We made it. The season is on the downturn. By the first frost, the major harvests are (mostly) done and the fields can be put to rest. After a busy summer, a frost is a chance to slow down a bit. It doesn’t mean the end of our work, after all we still have root crops in the field (beets, carrots, and turnips are all fine in a light frost and taste sweeter after a frost). And the actual work of putting fields to rest is by no means effortless. But the end is nearer.

Farming is all about cycles - the water cycle, the nutrient cycle, ecosystem cycles, and seasons. The first frost is a reminder that we live and work within boundaries we have no control over. We are merely participants, reacting and dancing along with nature rather than controlling it. It’s humbling.

We have tools to help us react to nature like high tunnels or frost cloth. These help us work within the system and the seasons, but eventually in South Dakota it will get too cold and too dark, even in the tunnels and the lettuce and the kale and the bok choy and the parsley will slow down and just wait. They’ll wait for the daylight to lengthen to continue their growth. And so will we. When winter comes in full force, we’ll pause and wait, thinking and dreaming of the spring but enjoying the reprieve that comes from the frost.

Also, a big thanks to a group of Farm Share members who helped us clip all the remaining winter squash and dig up the remaining sweet potatoes earlier this week! It was a lived of experience of many hands make light work!

Veggie Insight: Potatoes

Potatoes really need little introduction. They are, perhaps following lettuce and tomatoes, the most popular crop we grow. Granted, we live in a “meat and potato” food culture in South Dakota! If there was any vegetable everyone knew how to eat, it would be potatoes.

But there is more than meets the “eye” of potatoes (because they sprout from eyes, a little horticultural joke)! I find the potato one of the most fascinating crops historically. Potatoes have caused famines and mass immigrations, trade wars and seizing islands to control bird guano supplies. They’ve risen from being grown in a thin section of the Andes mountain region in South America to be one of the staple crops all around the world. And yet, they’re considered one of the more plain foods. But give the humble potato some credit!

We grew four varieties of potatoes this year (a far cry from the nearly 2,000 different varieties grown traditionally in the Andes). The varieties we grew are: Huckleberry Gold, Red Norland, Arizona Gold, and Russets.

The Huckleberry Golds are purple skinned with golden flesh. They have one of the lowest glycemic index for potatoes so are excellent for those trying to watch their blood sugar.

Red Norland is a classic red potato with white flesh. Red potatoes are more “moist” so great for roasting and boiling, but they do have the shortest storage life.

Arizona Golds are a larger, yellow skinned and yellow flesh potato. We love this potato. It tastes buttery, sizes up well, and is a beautiful potato.

Russet potatoes are honestly my least favorite potato. In the world of potatoes, I think the russet is fairly dry and boring, though we thought we’d try a russet this year for fun. On the pro side, they are great for baking or making oven fries.

Potatoes need to be stored in a cool, dark area. Do not store potatoes next to onions or apples.

Eat Like a Farmer

Butternut Bisque
Now that the weather is finally cooling down, it can be soup season in earnest! I always like to kick off soup season with a squash soup. It is the taste of fall!

Spaghetti Squash Tater Tots
If you’re on the fence with spaghetti squash, you NEED to try these. They are delicious. My kids started out thinking they wouldn’t like them and proceeded to eat the entire pan of them without realizing it.

Salt Baked Sweet Potatoes
This is a very simple way to cook sweet potatoes. We’ve found that salt roasting sweet potatoes leads to delicious and creamy sweet potatoes!

_{Thanks for reading our weekly Farm Newsletter! Blue Sky Vegetable Co. exists to grow nutrient-dense, trustworthy vegetables that can feed our community. We offer custom-choice Farm Shares from June to November (and are trying December to March this year). You can always join our veggie-loving community!}

It’s October and my heart is happy! In October, the crispness of the air, the shorter path of the sun, and the changing colors of the landscape all feel like a celebration. An added bonus of October arriving this year was that the sun FINALLY returned. Dirk always jokes that he’s a “solar powered farmer”, but I think it’s true for both of us. We’re just like our plants, fueled and motivated by the sun!

In light of October arriving, I have several mini “wins” on the farm for the week.

1. The pigs have a new mobile home. About two weeks ago, our two pigs, Hippo and 6-7, escaped from their mobile pig tractor. They didn’t cause any damage, thankfully. Instead they ended up going on a little jaunt and followed a neighbor down the road to his house where he put them in his backyard fence with minimal exertion, further proof that Hippo and 6-7 are very genial and “Some Pig[s]”. With the Mobile Pig Tractor 1.0 proven to be too small and not pig-proof enough, our pigs were kept in our old chicken coop for 10 days. But this was not a happy place for them to be as there was no access to fresh pasture. But this week, Dirk built a stronger, bigger Mobile Pig Tractor 2.0 and the pigs are back out, enjoying our lush cover crop.

   

2. We really like our customization software, Farmigo, however we have struggled with one aspect: allowing our members to use a balance to add extra items to their share if they miss a week. The process is a bit clunky and it has caused frustration for both members and myself. Finally this week, I decided to reach out to Farmigo and ask if they could fix something about the process and they did. They added some code in the storefront so members can see how much balance they actually have. It was a moment where I was grateful to be using a software that caters and listens to farmers’ needs. And hopefully it will help members too!

3. We got two more rows of potatoes dug this week! Honestly, it was still a bit too wet, but we’ve been antsy to get them out of the ground. That leaves one row of russet potatoes and two rows of sweet potatoes remaining. See the red potato that our worker shares thought looked like a grumpy old man!

4. Our farm has had so many monarch butterfly visitors this year! Our kids have had a great time chasing them around and watching them drink nectar from various flowers. I can’t remember a season where we’ve had so many monarchs fly by, which I hope means good things for the monarch population!

5. We’re ordering BSVC shirts! And from a local company that is able to print the shirts for a better price than I’ve previously purchased from an online company! This is really like a triple win - merch (win), good price (win), and supporting another local company (win)! Shirts will be $20/shirt. We’d like to get the order in soon so if you’re interested, please fill out this Google Form

   

   Order a BSVC Shirt!

Veggie Insight: Kale

Kale really had it’s moment a few years ago. Then it was considered a “super food” and, honestly, we saw a sales increase in kale. But then it lost it’s moment in the sun and was relegated to one of “ugh” vegetables, a position it most definitely does not deserve. Kale may be fibrous and strong-tasting, but I actually think this is what serves it well. It can withstand cooking without wilting into nothingness, hold a heavy dressing, and balance sweeter flavors with its earthiness.

I do encourage you, whether you’re cooking kale down or eating it in a salad, to remove it from its midrib (the stalk in the center). To do this, you hold the stem in one hand, wrap your hand around the midrib below the leaf and tear up. Removing the midrib helps keep your kale in a more uniform texture.

We grow two varieties of kale: dino/lacinato kale (above left) and curly kale (above right). I use dino kale mostly in cooked dishes, especially soups, whereas I use curly kale more for salads. I used to encourage people to “massage” kale to make it more tender and break down the fibers by rubbing the leaves between your hands. However, I recently came across a new technique that I think works better and is less labor. America’s Test Kitchen suggests soaking kale for ten minutes in 110 - 115 degrees to help it tenderize and it works! No more rubbing or green hands!

Don’t malign kale, you might find out it’s earthy-taste and tougher leaves are just what you need for a fall salad or soup!

Eat Like a Farmer

Kale, Squash, and Apple Panzanella

I’ve been on a mission to find all the ways I can incorporate apples with vegetables this week. Here’s a yummy way! Plus you can try out the soaking kale method :)

Chicken Salad with Apples and Celery

Rather than using chicken in this salad, I used white beans, which was actually very good!

Kale Salad with Red Pepper Dressing

Enjoy those peppers while we still have them! This is one of my favorite dressings for a kale salad.

_{Thanks for reading our weekly Farm Newsletter! Blue Sky Vegetable Co. exists to grow nutrient-dense, trustworthy vegetables that can feed our community. We offer custom-choice Farm Shares from June to November (and are trying December to March this year). You can always join our veggie-loving community!}

Step 1: Planting

The majority of vegetables we grow on our farm are transplanted as seedlings. However, baby green and root crops like radishes are “direct seeded”, which just means the seed is planted directly in the field. For this round of radishes, we began with our tractor-planting setup of two yellow seeders. We knew the field we were planting in was going to be weedy so we only wanted to plant two rows of seed per bed so we could have the space to weed better (turns out three weeks or rain made it impossible for us to cultivate anyways).

Dirk planted this bed of radishes on August 25th. Radishes are the quickest crop to grow on a vegetable farm. Every vegetable has it’s own “days to maturity” (DTM), which is the number of days it takes from germination to mature and ready to harvest. The variety we grew had a DTM of 26 days.

Steps 2 & 3: Irrigation and cultivation

While I don’t have pictures of our irrigation setup, with direct seeded crops, we use overhead irrigation - we use sprinklers. While this type of irrigation is pretty inefficient in South Dakota wind, it’s the best way to reliably germinate seeds.

Radishes take about 4-6 days to germinate. In order for seeds to germinate, the soil around them has to be moist enough to break down the seed coat.

Once radishes seedlings are about one week old, we can do our first cultivation. Our intention with these radishes was to use our tractor weeding setup to be more efficient. But the rains came and sticky, wet soil is not ideal for weeding.

Because radishes are such a quick crop, they don’t need much more than irrigation and one or two rounds of weeding.

Step 4: Harvest

As you can tell from the picture, the weeds have gone CRAZY in this field. We knew it was a weedy field but weren’t expecting 8 inches of rain so never actually were able to weed the radishes. Fortunately, radishes are such a quick crop that it didn’t matter too much.

When we harvest most of our root crops, we remove the top in the field. This is called “topping”. We do this because topped roots store longer in the cooler and we have the setup to wash them easily, if they don’t have tops. Tops on roots will continue to pull moisture out of the root after harvest so will cause the roots to shrivel quickly.

Radish harvest is done all by hand, both on our farm and every other farm. There is no radish digger, just hands plucking them out of the soil.

Topped radishes look like the picture below. You can tell the field was muddy by all the mud that clung to the radishes during harvest. In an ideal world, we wouldn’t want to harvest when the soil is this wet. Mud on produce can cause rot. But because these radishes were destined to go to customers this week, we had to harvest mud or not.

Step 5: Washing

Vegetable washing equipment is not that high-tech. It mostly involves hoses in different setups. Our root washing equipment is called a barrel washer. A barrel washer is a barrel at a slight angle with a hose running across the top. The barrel turns and as it does, the roots tumble against each other and get sprayed from above.

After several minutes of tumbling and being sprayed, the dirt is sprayed off and the radishes are ready to package. For our farm, we bag radishes in 8 oz bags for our Farm Share member customers. We keep them in plastic bags to prolong their storage life and to make it easier to grab one bag, rather than a handful of radishes, while packing our custom Farm Shares.

Step 6: Getting the radishes to our customers

Every Wednesday morning, we wash vegetables and pack Farm Shares. Because our Farm Shares are custom choice, only our members who select radishes will get them in their share. For example, this week we’re packing 24 8 oz bags of radishes for our 130 member Farm Share. Over the years, I’ve found radishes are more popular in the spring than the fall, in part probably because we have a lot of them and fewer options in the spring.

And I’ll let you in on a secret, I can’t actually share any recipes that I love for eating radishes. I love vegetables - except radishes. Radishes are the one vegetable that I don’t really like…. But I find these radishes, French Breakfast radishes, absolutely gorgeous. And our members, who do like radishes, say they are the right balance of crunch and zip!

From seed to harvest, radishes are one of the easier crops. They’re quick, they’re low maintenance, and they’re easy to grow. We hope the next time you see radishes in your farm share, or at a farmers market, or the grocery store, you can appreciate the work that goes into these small, but beautiful veggies!

Last week, I wrote about rain and how wet it is and that remains the case this week. Our rain gauge for the month of September has recorded 8.9 inches of rain. To put that in perspective, it says we’ve had 22.9 inches of precipitation for the whole year - that’s 38% of our annual precipitation in the past three weeks.

This has been a year that has been so dry that we blew out our irrigation pump in July from a drought and so wet that we’ve been effectively kicked out of the fields for the past three weeks.

I say this all while knowing full well that the land in general needs rain. We have been in a drought all year and precipitation is good. However, this much over this prolonged period is a challenge. Our fall root crops likes beets, carrots, and turnips are stalled out. Crops don’t like to grow when they have “wet feet”. And it’s not just a challenge for us. Our neighbors across the road grow conventional soybeans and the field has been ready to harvest for probably two weeks now, but they can’t get into the field. With this moisture, the soybeans could rot in their shells making the whole crop a loss for the farmers. We’ve seen that on our broccoli, unfortunately. We had a final planting of broccoli but the heads started rotting in the field to the rain so we were unable to harvest any.

This is unfortunately the risk that farmers live with. Not just smaller farms like us and not just vegetable farms, but all farms. We can put time, energy, and money into a crop and never see a harvest.

I love farming, but sometimes it’s hard and sometimes the rain gets me down.

But I don’t want to dwell in that place for too long.

We also had our Member Potluck last Saturday! It was a great time! We had familiar faces and some new folks come out! My favorite part was seeing how many connections we all have to one another without realizing it! For example, people knew each other through friends or had gone to the same college without knowing.

In the same way that plants, soil, weather, and bugs are all connected in a system, our human communities are similarly connected by people and places and common interests like vegetables! Building a human community is as important to us as building a healthy farm ecosystem and our Member Potluck was a great way to see that human community grow. Thanks to all of our members who showed up! It was a fantastic time!

Finally, the forecast is looking like we may see the sun next week. When it dries out, we may need a lot of labor in a short amount of time to get potatoes or sweet potatoes or peppers harvested before frost. Keep an eye out to your email and/or social media. I may be calling for helpers with that!

Winter Farm Share

I mentioned a few weeks ago that we’ll be offering a Winter Farm Share and that we’re taking sign ups! I’ve since then found that our customization/storefront software is making it a bit challenging for folks to sign up.

If you’re not a member currently and want to sign up for the Winter Share you can click this button to purchase a share:

Join the Winter Share

But if you’re already a member, the best way for you to go to your member dashboard and click “ADD” by Subscription. Then you can add a Winter Farm Share.

A few details about the Winter Farm Share, there will be 7 bi-weekly deliveries from December to March. These will include storage crops, cold hardy greens, microgreens, canned goods, frozen vegetables, and maybe even some sourdough bread from Dirk.

Our intention is to feed our community as close to all year long as we can. We have the infrastructure (Pack Shed, tunnels, and freezing equipment) so we’re trying to make use of all of those to keep feeding folks, even in the coldest months!

There is one size of share and it is seven credits per delivery with each credit being $5 rather than $3 as it is during the main season share. The total cost is $245, which can be purchased in full or in installments. If you have questions, let me know!

Veggie Spotlight: Spaghetti Squash

Of all the squash, spaghetti squash seems to be one of the stranger ones. Most squashes are creamy or have soft flesh. Spaghetti squash is stringy… But that’s how it’s supposed to be! And actually, it’s become one of my favorite squashes.

This year we grew a spaghetti squash variety called “Angel Hair”. It’s a smaller squash that is more “individual sized”. We did this in part because most spaghetti squashes are large and we struggle to fit them in our boxes without squishing other produce. Also, we have a fair amount of people in our share who are single or a couple that have told us it’s easier to have a smaller squash for portion.

To enjoy a spaghetti squash, you’ll want to cut it lengthwise in half and scoop out the seeds. Then cover it in an oil - I like a higher smoke point oil like avocado - and place it face down on a cookie sheet. Poke the outside with a fork a couple of times and roast the squash for 20-30 minutes at 400 degrees. Once it’s done roasting, use a fork and shred the inside into noodles.

We’ve found that adding spaghetti squash to a pasta sauce can cause the dish to become more watery so you’ll want to keep any sauce you use with the spaghetti squash thicker and don’t add extra liquid. You can also use spaghetti squash to make great fritters, similar to using shredded zucchini. My big question for the winter: can I use spaghetti squash like shredded zucchini in a bread or cake? I’ll get back to you on that!

Eat like a Farmer

I don’t have a standardized, written down recipe for this, but you should absolutely use kabocha squash as a base for pizza instead of tomato sauce. I roasted a kabocha squash, let it cool and added some minced garlic, salt, pepper, nutmeg, a splash of olive oil and a little bit of heavy cream and blended it up. Then we spread it on a pizza with caramelized red onions and kale and it was perfection! It’s 9:00 in the morning but I’m counting down the hours until I can have a leftover slice of that pizza for lunch!

Stuffed Acorn Squash

If you’re thinking about stuffed squash, using acorn squash is the way to go. It’s got a drier texture but still has that nutty sweetness that is the right balance to a savory filling. If you can wait until next week to include apples from the Country Apple Orchard, I love adding apples to stuffed squash. Also, we’ve found doing a deconstructed stuffed squash is often easier for kids to eat.

Pasta with Squash and Tomatoes

I’m really trying to find ways to have my cake and eat it too with enjoying fall flavors like squash, but squeezing the last enjoyment out of tomatoes. So if you’re like me, here’s a pasta recipe that was kid approved and met my squash and tomato-loving needs!

Green Shakshuka

Typically shakshuka is a tomato dish but I found this green version that calls for chard, but can be used with kale too. Plus, the greens cook down a lot so you could use that bunch of kale that you’re not sure what to do with in one meal.

_{Thanks for reading our weekly Farm Newsletter! Blue Sky Vegetable Co. exists to grow nutrient-dense, trustworthy vegetables that can feed our community. We offer custom-choice Farm Shares from June to November (and are trying December to March this year). You can always join our veggie-loving community!}

The farm is wet. We seem to be making up for a dry summer within the last two weeks. Unfortunately, it’s come at a rather frustrating time. Wet weather means wet soil, which means we can’t dig potatoes or prep fields for their winter cover crops. Alas, I sound like a true farmer, never happy with the rain when it comes even though we desperately need rain after a drought!

In other none-weather related news, we only have 8 Farm Share deliveries left in our main season (the final delivery being November 12th)! We sent out a survey to our members this past week asking for feedback about the Farm Share experience and several people noted they would like to know a longer term view of our crop plantings and when to expect certain vegetables. So as we look at our final eight weeks, I thought I’d give an overview of how some of the storage crops are looking.

Alliums: Onions/Shallots/Leeks

We’ll start with the good news. Our shallots and leeks were bountiful this year! The shallots are finishing their curing so they’ll be able to last awhile but we’ll start sending those out in October. Leeks are fairly frost hardy so I’m stretching out our planting of leeks so we should have them throughout October and maybe into November! The bad news is we had a bad year for onions. Our white onions were beautiful, plentiful, and delicious. However, we lost more than half of our yellow, red, and blush (my personal favorite) onions in the field to a root rot. It was a very disappointing yield of onions so we’ll be stretching these out over the next few weeks.

Potatoes: Yellow, Reds, Russets, Purple/Yellow, and Sweet

We have been able to find a couple of dry days here and there to begin the potato harvest. We have been able to harvest all three rows of our yellow potatoes and had a fantastic yield this year! We began with the yellows because we were worried about them greening from sunlight in the field. Once we get a few more dry days, we’ll continue to harvest the remainder of the potatoes. But that is why we’ve been having lots of yellow potatoes lately.

Winter Squash: Butternuts, Honeynuts, Acorn, Spaghetti, Delicata, Kabocha, Black Futsu, Autumn Frost

Our squash is also looking plentiful and beautiful. Our butternuts, though we haven’t harvested them, are large! We have lots of spaghetti, delicata, and butternuts and we’ll have a fair amount of acorn squash and some of our specialty varieties like Black Futsu, Autumn Frost, and Honeynut.

Roots: Carrots, Beets, Turnips, Radishes

Where have the carrots been this year? I agree. It’s been a disappointing year for carrots. Our spring carrots didn’t size up, our summer carrots didn’t germinate because pump decided to need replacement so didn’t have dependable irrigation, and now all our hope rests on the fall carrots, which are still growing. Our beets have followed a similar pattern, though they are quicker to size up and should be ready come the beginning of October. We should have some scarlet turnips and radishes throughout the last few weeks too. Overall, it’s been a struggle for roots this year. Some years certain crops work and some years they don’t.

Greens: Lettuce, Kale, Cabbage

We have two tunnels fully planted with our cold weather greens: lettuce, kale, and baby greens. We plan continuing to plant the remaining two tunnels with greens after we pull our tomatoes out. As for cabbage, I have one more planting that is sizing up in the field, though I may wait until after a slight frost (though hopefully we have a few more weeks before that) to harvest them so they are sweeter.

Brassicas: Brussel Sprouts, Broccoli, Cauliflower

We’ll be starting to harvest brussel sprouts in October. We planted the most brussels we ever have, so hopefully the harvest should be decent. I still haven’t cracked the secret on how to grow large sprouts, despite good fertility and consistent watering. We have a fall planting of yellow cauliflower that I hope will come to fruition, though cauliflower is still a bit of a mystery vegetable to me - supposedly it grows better in the fall, but it’s a finicky vegetable. We’ll be planting sprouting broccoli in our high tunnel within a week or two so should have late season sprouting broccoli.

Despite the few disappointments (looking at you onions and carrots), our fall and winter options are shaping up to be lovely!

Winter Farm Share

I mentioned a few weeks ago that we’ll be offering a Winter Farm Share and that we’re taking sign ups! I’ve since then found that our customization/storefront software is making it a bit challenging for folks to sign up.

If you’re not a member currently and want to sign up for the Winter Share you can click this button to purchase a share:

Join the Winter Share

But if you’re already a member, the best way for you to go to your member dashboard and click “ADD” by Subscription. Then you can add a Winter Farm Share.

A few details about the Winter Farm Share, there will be 7 bi-weekly deliveries from December to March. These will include storage crops, cold hardy greens, microgreens, canned goods, frozen vegetables, and maybe even some sourdough bread from Dirk.

Our intention is to feed our community as close to all year long as we can. We have the infrastructure (Pack Shed, tunnels, and freezing equipment) so we’re trying to make use of all of those to keep feeding folks, even in the coldest months!

There is one size of share and it is seven credits per delivery with each credit being $5 rather than $3 as it is during the main season share. The total cost is $245, which can be purchased in full or in installments. If you have questions, let me know!

Veggie Spotlight: Celery

I’ve never liked celery, until I grew it myself. Our celery is so flavorful though, that I had to change my mind on celery. I find that I don’t have to add as much celery to any dish as recipes typically call for because of the strength of flavor.

Celery is a VERY water-heavy crop. This year, we kept our irrigation for our celery on a timer so it would water it daily and I think we see the positive outcomes because our celery stalks are fairly thick and large this year.

We harvest celery by the stalk, rather than the whole plant because it will continue putting on more stalks and we can prolong the harvest from the same number of plants. We also send our celery with the leaves. I chop these leaves off and freeze them so when I make broth I can take the leaves out of the freezer and add them to the broth for the celery flavor. We’ve also had members dehydrate celery leaves and make a celery salt - which sounds fantastic!

Celery forms the foundation of the classic mirepoix mixture of onions, carrots, and celery that is the base for most dishes that have their origin in French cuisine. It is also part of the “holy trinity” mixture common to Cajun cuisine that includes onion, celery, and bell pepper. Plus, you can freeze celery to add to winter soups later on!

The downside of celery, as I and our friend/employee found out this year, is that if you get the “juice” on you and then stay in the sunlight, it causes burns. We both came down with celery burns on our wrists and arms after harvesting celery on a hot August morning. But fortunately, we’re alright and I still have mostly good feelings about celery.

Eat Like a Farmer

Every Season Minestrone: It’s finally soup season! Here’s a plug-and-play recipe for using whatever you have on hand. I checked The Vegetable Butcher out from the library and am really enjoying her recipes and tips, so here’s my little plug for that cookbook (that you’ll have to get after I return to the library).

Stuffed Pepper Soup: Here’s a favorite of our family. It uses the plentiful peppers and tomatoes we have now in a cozy soup.

Leek Vinaigrette: I admit, I have not made this yet. But it is on my dream list. But sometimes with young kids I can’t quite get them to eat everything I want to make. But that doesn’t mean you can’t make this! If you do, tell me how it is so I can keep dreaming about it.

Kabocha Curry: I love a squash curry. The sunshine kabocha squash are particularly wonderful for squash curry because you can eat the skin and they have a great nutty flavor and texture. You could also use butternut squash for a curry base as well, when we start sending them.

Final Headlines

Our Farm Share Member Potluck is TOMORROW! It will probably be damp so dress accordingly! We’ll have some indoor seating available but if you’re able to bring a camp chair, that would be helpful! We look forward to seeing people tomorrow at 5 pm at our farm!

If you’ve made it this far, well done! I missed celebrating a very special person’s bday last week. Dirk had a momentous birthday! Happy belated birthday to my favorite person in the whole world!

Recently, Dirk was asked “What is something most people don’t know about your way of farming?”. His response? How much work we do by hand.

If you’ve followed us for awhile, or are aware of other vegetable farms, this answer probably doesn’t surprise you. While we do have two tractors and use them to prepare the soil, make raised beds, do some weeding, and lay plastic mulch; everything else is done by hand. When we plant, every transplant (which we start on our farm) is pushed into the soil by me. When we harvest, our hands touch every vegetable.

And this is not abnormal or special. We don’t harvest all of our vegetables by hand because we’re a smaller farm or are trying to be careful (though, both of those things are true). Vegetables are rarely harvested by anything but people’s hands. There are just a few vegetable crops that even have mechanical harvesters - salad mix, carrots, potatoes, pickling cucumbers, green beans, and processing tomatoes. Every other vegetable is dependent on a person in the field.

I think about this around this time of the year when combine harvesters start rumbling down our road. Harvest season means something very different for us and our corn or soybean growing neighbors.

If you want to understand this for yourself, I invite you out to our farm this weekend to help dig potatoes. While potatoes may not be the best choice for instilling this message, as they are one of the vegetables that has mechanical harvest, our farm does not grow enough potatoes to justify a potato digger so we use what we have - hands!

Last Saturday we welcomed 24 folks out to our farm for our second Farm to Table dinner. It was a lovely night with good food! An unknown reason behind us offering Farm to Table dinners is because we’re paying homage to where we met. Dirk and I met as interns on a training farm in Waco, Texas. Part of culture of this farm was that one person cooked lunch for all of the employees, interns, and volunteers every day, which might mean up to 25 people on a given day. We rotated this chore and grew to love it. Perhaps because of this, cooking for 24 folks isn’t that scary for us. But also, it’s a way of instilling some of the sense of community that we loved on the training farm on our own farm now. So thanks for being a part of our community!

Veggie Spotlight: Winter Share

Instead of a veggie spotlight as normal this week, I’m going to share about an opportunity to continue eating from our farm this winter. We’re going to offer a Winter Share this winter! The Winter Share will consist of seven deliveries from December to March.

What would you expect to get in a typical Winter Share delivery? Cold hardy greens grown in our tunnels, storage crops (like potatoes, squash, carrots, beets, other roots), prepared products (like pickles, salsa, hot sauce), frozen vegetables, microgreens, and maybe even some sourdough bread made by Dirk.

The Winter Share is priced at $245 for seven items in each delivery. Currently in our main Farm Share, items are $3/credit. But because we’re investing money into propane to heat a tunnel or electricity to keep storage crops good, items in the Winter Share are $5/credit.

We’d love to have you continue eating with us, even in the coldest months!

Join Us for a Winter Share!

Eat Like a Farmer

Panzanella Verde: I made a panzanella similar to this for our Farm to Table dinner, though I added roasted leeks, which I thought added a great flavor.

Stuffed Pepper Soup: It feels too hot to make soup right now, but you could always freeze peppers and make this when it cools off!

Roasted Kabocha: This very simple recipe gives an example of how to really bring out the sweetness in kabocha squash.

Final Reminder: Farm Share Member Potluck on September 19th at 5 pm at our farm! Bring a side dish or dessert to share! And a lawn chair!

These past two weeks have been a slight blur. Partially because I have a lot of sleep debt built up due to our 8-month-old. But he’s pretty cute so I can’t begrudge him, too much! To be honest, the past two weeks our family farm has had the “family” part much more prioritized. Our 8-month-old had a summer cold which kept him from sleeping much at night (hence the sleep debt) and our oldest started first grade this week (cue the open houses/meet your teacher/school pictures), and our middle child, with most of her childcare options unavailable this week, was my shadow and helped on the farm (when she wasn’t swinging or coloring or chasing butterflies). Focusing on the family rather than the farm can lead to a longer to do list on the farm, but we’ve found that the family is the more important part.

In other farm news, I am having a hard time believing we’re at the end of August. Starting school means fall is just around the corner! Which means a whole new lineup of vegetables and jobs around the farm. This will probably be the last week for zucchini, which with having it available for a farm record of nine weeks, hopefully you’ve had your fill of it! The first delivery in September will see the beginning of the transition into fall crops. I plan on having the first of the winter squash and some leeks available. September is my personal favorite month on the farm as the summer and fall veggies collide.

If you have a hankering to get your hands dirty this fall, we’ve got lots of fall vegetables to harvest - potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, and winter squash. The morning of September 5th, we are planning a potato dig. If you want to come out and join, we’d love for the extra hands! If you have space throughout the week, just let me know and we’ll take the help where we can!

Finally, a reminder for your calendar: September 19th is the Farm Share Potluck! We’ll provide the main dish if you bring a side or dessert to share. The evening will be casual but we’d love to get as many Farm Share members out to the farm for good food and community as possible!

Dirk and I were struck this week by the diversity of people we have in our Farm Share community. We know enough of our members to know that our members fall all over the spectrum on opinions and ideas. But we think the beautiful thing about that every single member we’ve talked to wants the same things: good food that they can trust and enjoy and a healthy, thriving community. And there’s power in that. Food is our most basic need so why shouldn’t it also unify us. So we hope that you come on September 19th to meet your fellow Farm Share members, enjoy some good food, and see the beauty in those simple, but powerful things.

Veggie Spotlight: Peppers

My favorite crop of all is peppers. Hot peppers, lunchbox peppers, bell peppers, roasting peppers, they’re all equally wonderful to me. I need to evangelize about roasting peppers because I think people underestimate their usefulness in favor of the ubiquitous bell pepper. True, bell peppers are a classic for a reason but roasting peppers should be a classic. They are called roasting peppers because if you do just that - roast in the oven at 400 degrees for 15-20 minutes - their skin will peel off leaving you with a lovely pepper to mix into a salad dressing, soup, tomato sauce, or chop up. Roasting peppers are also sweet, much sweeter than colored bell peppers. Plus this year we have had a much better yield of roasting peppers than bell peppers.

Our bell peppers this year have been mildly disappointing to me. The ones that make it to shares are beautiful, large, and tasty. But what you can’t see is that I’ve been sorting out about 50% of the bell peppers due to sunscald - basically a sunburn on peppers (see picture below). I think this is due our pepper plants being shorter and less bushy this year (probably lower nitrogen levels) so the foliage on the plants isn’t shielding the peppers from the sun.

Peppers can be stored in the fridge, preferably in a bag or container. They are super easy to freeze. I slice them and throw them in a freezer bag, skipping any blanching steps. Use peppers with celery and onions to make the “holy trinity” (see picture below), which replaces the carrots in a “mirepoix”, to make the base of Cajun or Creole cuisine.

Eat Like a Farmer

Zucchini Fritters: Dirk’s sister passed this recipe along this week and it is excellent! A great way to celebrate the final weeks of zucchini.

Sheet Pan Soup: I was missing soup this week so I made this, substituting kohlrabi for the cauliflower and it was great! It also made for a delicious pasta sauce over leftover noodles later on in the week.

Red Pepper Dressing: This dressing is great on lettuce salads, but I think it matches the earthiness of a kale salad really well.

Sukuma Wiki: I studied abroad in Kenya and Tanzania in college and this was a staple. I made it for my family this week and it brought back all the nostalgia! The recipe calls for collards, but I most often had it with cabbage and still make it with cabbage here.

Before we dive into what’s happening on the farm, we wanted to inform our local members about a few opportunities.

August 13th: Farm to Fork Tasting for Dakota Fresh. Our food hub is hosting an event at the Country Apple Orchard in Harrisburg where 4 local chefs use ingredients from the Dakota Fresh hub producers (us included) to make appetizers. It will hopefully be a great night of local food. Tickets can be found here!

August 29: Our farm will be offering our second Farm to Table dinner! This time it will be Italian themed as we make use of lots of tomatoes! Farm Share members can purchase a ticket by contacting me. Tickets for Farm Share members are $20/person and for non-share members are $30/person. The menu is below!

September 19: Our annual Farm Share member potluck! We want to invite all of our Farm Share members to our farm on September 19th at 5 pm. We will provide the main dish (I think Dirk is planning on smoking some meat) and we ask that our members bring a side dish or dessert to share. This is one of our favorite events where we get a chance to talk and enjoy the company of our farm community. And hopefully with it being in September it won’t be as hot as previous years!

As we head into August, it feels as if we’re almost in the downward slope of the farming season. Dirk and I have two more plantings of fall greens and roots, then planting will be done! My days whirl around harvesting. Right now we harvest zucchinis, cucumbers, and tomatoes several times a week. Our broccoli harvest just finished - I had intended for about eight weeks of steady broccoli but the plants conspired against that plan and became ready all at the same time so instead it was about six weeks of LOTS of broccoli. Pepper harvests have just begun in earnest - which is my favorite! Though, this year we’ve seen a lot of “sun scald” on the peppers, essentially a sunburn on the fruits.

We were excited to share a decent harvest of sweet corn with members this year. It was only our second year growing sweet corn so having an actual harvest this year was fun! Here’s hoping that next year we’ll have some staggered plantings so we can have more than two weeks of sweet corn. Unfortunately, that other classic summer crop, green beans, have not faired so well this year. We planted the green beans alongside our sweet corn in a section that we knew had a high population of bindweed and the bindweed overtook the green beans plants. I love eating green beans, though to let you in on a farmer secret, I’m not sad to not have to harvest them this year. It is my least favorite crop to harvest and I love harvesting so that’s saying something!

Veggie Spotlight: Tomatoes

The sweetness of a tomato, warm from the sunshine is joy itself. Tomatoes are so beloved they don’t need much of an introduction on how to enjoy. My favorite way - besides just eating one straight off the plant in the field - is a tomato sandwich with some of Dirk’s excellent homemade bread and some mayo.

We send our tomatoes at a stage of ripeness known as “mature pink”. At this stage, tomatoes have achieved 90-95% of their flavor potential while remaining firm enough to be undamaged during transport from our farm to your house. This stage is the best balance of total flavor and ease of transport and is only possible because our farm is only about 20 miles and one day away from our customers. Tomatoes at the grocery store from Florida or California are shipped at “breaker” stage, when only about 10% of the tomato has turned color. This is better for transport, but not for flavor.

For “heirloom” tomatoes, we’re growing what the vegetable world calls “Hyloom”. It means these are actually hybrid tomatoes that have been breed for flavor rather than uniformity and yields, to remain true to the heirloom flavor people want. We grow “hyloom” tomatoes because true heirloom varieties are hard to transport even a short distance, are more susceptible to cracking, and more susceptible to challenging growing conditions. We’re growing four varieties of “heirlooms”:

Gin Fizz (top left): a gorgeous yellow and pink stripped tomato, this one is very sweet

Cuba Libre (top right): this is considered a “black/purple” tomato, similar to Cherokee Purple. I find it has a meatier texture and richer flavor.

Bonbolya (bottom left): a pink tomato, this has the lowest acidity of the tomatoes we’re growing this year

Harvest Moon (bottom right): a mostly yellow tomato with some blush at the blossom end, this tomato is sweet and has low acidity

Since we send the tomatoes to you a little under mature, leave them on your counter for a day or two and they should be perfect!

Eat Like a Farmer

Panzanella Salad: Perhaps a more sophisticated way to enjoy tomatoes and bread, the panzanella salad is delicious and can use whatever summer veggies you have on hand. Plus, we’ll be making a Panzanella Verde for our next farm to table meal!

Ratatouille: This is a wonderful way to use the fresh ingredients we have right now in a way that lets them shine for themselves. Plus, ratatouille isn’t as difficult as it may seem.

7 ways to Pesto: We’ll have bulk basil available for all your pesto needs! If you want to freeze pesto, just don’t add the oil.

Gazpacho: This is a super easy recipe that won’t heat up your house!

We hope you’ll excuse our absent farm newsletter last week. We took a quick weekend away to celebrate a friend’s wedding in Indiana. As always, we have to give major credit where credit is due - we couldn’t have left the farm in July without some major help back home. Thanks to both of our families and our friend/employee, Katie, the plants were watered, the cucumbers and zucchini harvested, Sam the dog cared for, and the pigs fed.

We made it through the first heat wave last weekend and are girding ourselves for the upcoming heat wave and forecasted 100 degree temps this weekend. Plants are like humans, they like more even temperatures rather than spikes from 68 degrees to 100 degrees. Spikes like the forecast may cause some plants to slow their development down as they put more energy into maintaining equilibrium. Fruiting crops like peppers, cucumbers, and tomatoes are also likely to abort their blossoms as a way of reserving energy so we may see a gap in production in a few weeks in those crops. But whatever happens, we keep watering and caring for the plants and trust that plants are resilient.

In the wake of the outbreak of Cyclospora we know many people are concerned about eating lettuce or other crops. Cyclospora comes from irrigation or washing water that is contaminated with animal manure, most often because the irrigation water is surface water - like in irrigation canals or ditches. Fortunately for us, we irrigate and wash with well water. Our well is 640 feet under the surface! We also do regular water testing to ensure our water is safe and free of contaminates.

Speaking of lettuce however, we will have our last week of salad mix for a few weeks. The heat is not lettuce’s friend. Growing lettuce in August has always proven to be a struggle for us, even as we experiment with different methods such as using white plastic mulch that keeps the lettuce cooler than black plastic mulch. We have more salad mix and romaine planted, but it will be a few weeks until they are ready. And unfortunately, most of our romaine has “bolted” or put on seed heads and become bitter with the heat. This is to be expected with summer lettuce and often coincides with abundance from other crops - like peppers and tomatoes.

Veggie Insights: Shishitos

Shishito Peppers are my favorite pepper. As I smell them while harvesting them, my mouth waters! They are somewhat unfamiliar as they originate and are more popular in Japan, but try these and I guarantee you won’t regret it!

Shishito peppers have a thin skin and are best when charred or blistered for a short amount of time over high heat. Blistering shishito peppers bring out a smoky flavor to them. I like to add a squeeze of lime juice and sea salt over the top of blistered shishitos. Then enjoy eating them! They say 1 in 20 is spicy, though with this season’s batch I haven’t found a spicy one yet and I’ve eaten over 20 :)

Eat like a Farmer

Cucumber Mint Mocktail

With the heat wave this weekend, you may need to cool off. Here’s a great option. I made this, minus the sugar, for our farm to table dinner.

Blistered Shishito Dip

If you want to use shishitos for something more, here’s a fantastic dip!

Kale and Basil Pesto

Here is another recipe I used for the farm to table dinner, minus the pine nuts. I like the combo of kale and basil for a tasty pesto.

Summer Squash Pizza

I haven’t actually made this recipe yet, but it’s on my list for a pizza night - which is every Friday night for us!

Additional News

If you’re around Sioux Falls and want to enjoy a night of farm-fresh produce from our farm and others, the food hub we’re members of - Dakota Fresh - is hosting a Tasting event on Thursday, August 13. Our produce will be a part of the event! You can buy tickets on the Dakota Fresh website on Mondays and Tuesdays.

If you’ve ever read a children’s book about a farm (and we have read a lot) you’ll see a common portrayal of a farm with every type of farm animal imaginable, all living on the same farm. While this makes for a lovely book and teaches kids about different types of farm animals, in reality I can’t think of any farm today that actually has the diversity of animals and crops pictured in such books. But animals and growing crops are synergistic.

The role of animals on farms has become evident in the past two weeks as we welcomed two kunekune pigs to our farm. These pigs will spend the rest of their days eating grass and discarded vegetables on our farm. They perform one of the most useful roles for farm animals: making use of waste. Not every vegetable comes out of the field perfect. In fact, there is actually quite a bit of vegetables that we don’t send to people because they have animal bites (deer and ground squirrels), are bug eaten, or are not the right size (such as giant zucchinis). Fortunately, our pigs take care of all of those vegetables. We don’t have to feel bad about this type of food waste because the vegetables we don’t send you are getting turned into sausage!

Two years ago, we had chickens on the farm. The chickens also ate waste (though without as much gusto as a pig) and when we allowed them to free range, they ate bugs. Eating bugs is another “farm service” most poultry do for free. However, we didn’t like the chickens so they didn’t last more than a year on our farm, despite the services.

One of our growing methods actually attempts to mimic the actions of animals. We grow cover crops, which are crops that just feed the soil. Once the cover crops are at a certain vegetative stage, we mow them down and incorporate them into the soil. Ideally, we would also add some beneficial microbial sprays at this time to for the microbe population to increase, however we haven’t done that – yet. Mechanically chopping the grass mimics a cow eating and tearing up plants and turning the plants into the soil mimics the rooting abilities of pigs. In a fully synergistic system, someone could grow cover crops and run animals over them before planting the field the following year.

Unfortunately, that’s a lot of moving parts for our own farm at this point. And like Dirk says, with the benefit of experience chasing down escaped pigs, vegetables don’t run away! So while animals could be very beneficial to our farm and to the land, we settle right now for imitations of the services they provide. And for some sausage once the pigs are big enough.

Farm book recommendation: If you have kids in your life that like farm books, we heartily recommend the Tractor Mac series by Billy Steers. They follow a talking tractor and his farm animal friends in an idyllic farm setting in the past. The pictures are great and they teach good lessons. Or for something more in the comedy vein, our kids love Duck on a Tractor by David Shannon.

Other Farm News:

It was an act of providence that we were on a pause with our Farm Share last week. We irrigate via a drilled well on the farm and last week, the pump on the well died. We would have been unable to wash any vegetables as our Pack Shed’s water comes from this well. It led us to scramble around and string out long sections of hoses from our house to the fields to water plants like tomatoes and cucumbers which are inside a high tunnel. Fortunately, for the outdoor crops, we received about two inches of rain last week, so our outdoor crops were alright. Sometimes farming means things run smoothly and sometimes it means putting out a bunch of little fires! But we’re fortunate that nothing too bad happened to plants and that we were able to get the pump replaced this week.

Veggie Spotlight: New Potatoes

The potatoes we sent this week were a bit bigger than the typical “new potato” stage. Last year, we visited Dirk’s cousins in Alberta who grow Russet potatoes on a much larger scale than us and learned all sorts of things about potatoes from them. We’ve been taking their lessons to heart and I think our very regular doses of water and nutrients led to the potatoes sizing up much more than we expected! But even if some of the potatoes were bigger than most “new” potatoes, we think they’re fantastic!

What is a “new” potato anyway? A new potato is a potato harvested early in the season before they’ve had a chance to cure. As you might notice, we send our new potatoes unwashed. This is because if we did wash them, they would come peeled to you. Peeled potatoes don’t store! So we hope you don’t mind that these potatoes are a bit dusty. New potatoes haven’t set the starch yet so they are much more moist and sweeter than storage potatoes. Any potato variety could be a new potato, but we find we like red potatoes the best for new potatoes. We’ll also have storage red potatoes in the fall.

We encourage folks to eat new potatoes soon after receiving them! We only dig new potatoes right before packing up shares so they come super fresh to our members.

As for eating new potatoes, most of the time we boil them and eat them with just butter, salt, and pepper. Though, this week, Dirk did make “smashed” potatoes with new potatoes and some paprika and garlic salt and they were fantastic!

Eat Like a Farmer

Quiche

We threw a lot of vegetables we had in our fridge, scallions, broccoli, zucchini, and chard, into a quiche this week. If you use a refrigerated crust, a quiche is a quick and easy way to use up a lot of remaining vegetables!

Eggplant Parmesan

I’m on a mission to get people to reconsider the eggplant. While this is a classic eggplant dish, it’s a classic for a reason. If you make eggplant parmesan, it’s important not to skip the salting step. Getting excess water out of the eggplant is crucial!

Roasted Cabbage Wedge Salad

You may have noticed the cabbage variety we send is conical. We love this early spring cabbage variety. We find it is sweeter than round cabbage and the pointed shape is fun. This variety also does really well when grilled or roasted.

Save the Date: July 11th will be our inaugural Blue Sky Vegetable Co Farm-to-Table dinner! More details will come in the next week. We’ll have limited seating available and tickets for sale. All produce will come from our farm!

Plastic Recycling: Beginning next week, we’ll have black bins at drop sites for you to return either the plastic bags your vegetables came in or plastic pint clamshells. If you return the clamshells, we would ask that you would wash them for us. Plastic bags do not need to be washed. We will recycle the plastic bags for you with a neighbor who turns plastic into molded posts! After sanitizing the clamshells, we’ll continue to use them - hopefully soon for cherry tomatoes!

Tales of the Farm

I’ve been thinking about the mystery of plants this week. I have a background in biology – I was an environmental science major in college – and have been farming for nearly a decade and still it feels like there is so much to plants that I don’t understand. I have several examples to showcase the mystery of plants that will also show little highlights from around our farm.

Sweet potatoes: This year is the first year we have grown sweet potatoes. Sweet potatoes are a tropical crop (native to southeast Asia) so growing them in the upper Midwest can be a challenge. You have to grow them on black plastic mulch so there is more heat in the soil. Seed potatoes don’t start from seeds, they start from a fragment of a living plant called a “slip”. We ordered slips and they were just stalks that resembled green sticks. The instructions said to stick the slip in “root side down” and keep them well watered. It felt like an exercise in futility planting what looked like sticks – but now nearly two weeks later they have leaves and presumably have sprouted roots! I know there are biological mechanisms that cause plants to root, but it still feels like a mystery. How does a plant know it’s planted? What in the soil spurs it to put on roots?

Tomatoes: We’re growing heirloom tomatoes in our high tunnel and finished trellising them this week. Trellising tomatoes in a high tunnel involves pruning very intensely. In our world of small-scale vegetable farming, there are TONS of resources/podcasts/opinions on how to trellis tomatoes. It is probably the most discussed topic. But essentially it means cutting the leaves of tomatoes off so the plant looks like a little tree to encourage the plant to put the majority of it’s energy into the fruits and not extra leaves – as only certain leaves actually aid the fruit development It feels counterintuitive to cut so much off a plant and yet, it works! While trellising tomatoes could be reduced into a simple (or ok, maybe not that simple) calculation of the flow of energy and nutrients, the fact that we could remove so much from a plant and it could actually thrive is fascinating.

Romaine Lettuce: I planted two rounds of romaine lettuce a week apart. One was outside on white plastic mulch and one was inside a high tunnel. But the difference in these two rounds of lettuce has been stark. The lettuce inside the tunnel “bolted” before they were ready to be harvested. When a plant “bolts” it means they begin changing from the vegetative stage to the reproductive stage – in even more simple language, they put on a stalk to make seeds, which makes the vegetable unpleasant and bitter. Often this means the plant is stressed and wants to reproduce as quickly as possible. These two rounds of lettuce are an example in how vegetables have different preferences of temperatures. I know enough about lettuce to understand that it doesn’t like to be hot. But to see how the temperature inside a tunnel vs outside a tunnel affects lettuce has been a good lesson.

Plants are incredible. They have their own preferences, their own defense mechanisms, even their own “wills” (think about how aggressive weeds are). One of the fun parts of my job is that I can continually learn more about plants!

How to Be a Farm Share Member 101

Is coming up with meals a challenge? We understand. Sometimes, especially in the summer when Dirk and I are more busy, we fall into a rut of meal ideas. We end up making the same meals on repeat, just with different vegetables. However, we’ve been trying several different ways to challenge ourselves in the kitchen and maybe what we’ve found will be helpful to you too!

Strategy #1: Focus on a vegetable a day. We’ve tried a strategy where we assign a fresh vegetable to each day of the week and we build the meal around that one vegetable. We still can use other vegetables or ingredients in the meal but we want that vegetable to be in the spotlight. For example, this week we assigned fennel to Monday and made a delicious chicken and fennel braise that I’ll share below.

Strategy #2: Assign different cuisines to days. Along the same vein as assigning a vegetable to a day, this is assigning a type of cuisine to a day and using the vegetables in those meals! Our categories typically fall along international cuisines so our categories might be: Tex Mex, Indian, Italian, and Thai. I see this strategy almost as the second iteration to our first strategy. Once you know how to use a certain vegetable, you can plug it into different cuisines – sometimes in new and surprising combinations! For example, we assigned Korean cuisine to a day and made Beef and bok choy bulgogi, a new recipe for us!

Strategy #3: Formula meals. A formula meal is a protein + grain + vegetable + sauce/seasoning. This can fit easily within either of the other strategies above. For example, you could do a formula meal that is chick peas + orzo + cucumbers and romaine + tzatziki sauce for an easy formula meal that is also Mediterranean.

Another mini strategy is to check out a new cookbook from the library and try to cook from it several times in one week. Do you have any ways you challenge yourself in the kitchen? If so, let us know!

Veggie Spotlight: Fennel

Fennel is a strange vegetable. It is technically an herb that is in the same plant family as carrots. It has a anise flavor in both the bulb and the fronds. The stalks, leaves, and bulb are all edible. The bulb is crunchy, almost like celery. Anise is a polarizing flavor, however when fennel is cooked it sweetens and the anise-flavor is subdued. When cooking fennel, it’s best to cut the bulb in half or in quarters and then use a mandolin or sharp knife to cut it thinly. This will help the fennel to caramelize. If you receive fennel in your share, remove the bulb from the fronds as the fronds will remove moisture from the bulb and store them both in a bag in the fridge.

Eating Like a Farmer

Fennel Roast Chicken

We made this on Monday and it was fantastic! Don’t discount eating the braised fennel, it was softened and sweet and really added to the dish.

Bacon-braised Kale

This recipe was shared with us by Katie, a Farm Share member/employee on our farm. She said she added some sorrel in the mix and the lemony flavor of the sorrel really made this dish pop!

Swiss Chard Salad

You may feel ambivalent or unsure about chard, but this salad really helps it shine.

Dirk is many things – a great dad, excellent husband, the best friend – but he’s also got a serious knack for creating and building things. This year he built our farm something wonderful – a weed killer (right picture below). Weeds are our perennial enemies. After struggling to control our heavy weed population, last winter we decided something needed to change and we needed a new tool. But Dirk didn’t just buy one, he made one. He made a cultivator using steel tubing and pieces of weeding equipment we’ve gathered over the years to make an all-in-one cultivator for behind our Ford tractor. His farm-made cultivator is specifically geared for cleaning up the aisles between beds of vegetables. The weeds in the aisles, while they don’t always directly influence the crops, can still steal nutrients for crops and if left too long can put out seed that will lead to more weeds in the future. Dirk’s cultivator has done a fantastic job keeping our aisles less weedy and in record time (left picture below). It’s one of our “wins” so far this farming season!

Other “wins” in the war against weeds so far this season:

Cover crop (middle picture): we planted a barley, pea, and lentil cover crop in a field with particularly noxious weeds, and the cover crop is outpacing the weeds, so far. A cover crop is a crop that is not intended for food but instead feeds the soil. Barley will create a lot of plant matter that we can incorporate into the soil and peas and lentils are leguminous, meaning they add nitrogen to the soil. We’re also trying teff, a drought-resistant grain, between rows of plants to keep weeds down.

People: With the help of Worker Shares, we’ve had several great weeks of weeding places that tools or tractors can’t reach (like inside tunnels or in the beds of vegetables). A huge thanks to Libby, Dave, and Kim!

How to Be a Farm Share Member 101: Freezing

Especially in the first few weeks when we have LOTS of greens, it can feel overwhelming. Salads are fantastic, but maybe you need a different option to make use of the greens in your share. One of the easiest options is to freeze greens! Kale, chard, spinach, arugula, baby kale, and sorrel can all be frozen with minimal issues. Basically any green that you cook with, you can freeze. After washing and drying, I suggest chopping up the greens and simply put them in a freezer-safe bag and put them in the freezer. If you prefer, you can spread the chopped out greens on a tray in the freezer to allow the greens to freeze in pieces. Freezing greens is a great option to use what is fresh now and make sure you can use it later!

Other things that can be frozen: rhubarb, scallions, zucchini, bok choy.

Veggie Spotlight: Scallions

Scallions, also known as green onions, are immature onions. Rather than the big bulb we’ve come to expect as our standard onion, scallions are just a small stalk and a green “leaf” (I’m always a bit amazed that onions can photosynthesize with the hollow top). They are typically a bit more mild than bulb onions – though I think our scallions are much more fragrant and potent than what you might find at a store. I store scallions in a plastic bag in my fridge, though I often chop up all the greens and keep it in a glass container in the fridge for adding to recipes throughout the week. If stored not in a bag in the fridge, the scallions will go limp – though you can definitely still use them! I use the tops and bottoms separately. I see the green tops as a garnish or way to add a bit more onion flavor, as they aren’t as flavorful as the bottoms. The bottoms, I will use like an onion and sauté them.

Or for something that highlights scallions, try scallion pancakes!

Eating Like a Farmer

Kale Caesar Pasta Salad

I love a good caesar salad and I think our romaine lettuce would be fantastic for a Caesar salad, but the kale also adds a nice earthy flavor to a Caesar salad. The addition of pasta makes this a full meal, in my mind!

Sorrel Soup

One of our members sent me a picture of her soup and this recipe that she made with her sorrel. If you’re at a loss of what to do with your sorrel, this comes highly recommended from a fellow Farm Share member!

Fennel Salad

Next week we’ll be sending fennel. Fennel is a lesser known veggie, but it’s got great potential. My absolute favorite is using shaved fennel (I use a mandolin to get small pieces off the bulb) and making a salad with lettuce, oranges, and olives and a vinaigrette. The fennel balances well with salty olives and bright citrus.

These past two weeks, in addition to cultivating weeds and prepping for the first CSA delivery, we’ve been working on the process of finishing the inside of our packing shed. We’ve installed steel paneling on the walls and the ceiling, installed extra lights and more power outlets, insulated the walls, and started installing the processing equipment we purchased over the winter. All of these changes have been planned for a while. When we farmed in Wisconsin, the previous farmers had built a really nice packing shed, so we knew what it should look like when we were finished with ours here. Our goal is to create a facility that prioritizes food safety, worker comfort, and functionality

All three of these priorities (safety, comfort, and functionality), arise from our commitment to putting people first. We want our customers to have safe, clean food, and we know that while our food has always been clean and safe, we need to continue to strive for continuing excellence in this area. We want our workers to be comfortable, both during the heat of the summer and the cold of the fall and winter. We want the people who come to work at our farm, whether for a day or a season, to feel valued and respected. And we want our facility to be functional, both for ourselves and our workers, but also for the future. Every time we build a piece of infrastructure, we try to design it in such a way that whoever stewards this farm in the future will be grateful for how we built it, rather than frustrated with things we did that won’t make sense to a future farmer.

Putting people first is a deep commitment for us on our farm. It drives our decisions and our farming practices. And now, thanks to that commitment, we have a clean, well-lit, comfortable packing shed that should last for a long time. We look forward to enjoying this facility this season, and we look forward to sharing its benefits with all of you in our community.

Being a Farm Share Member 101: Forgetting Shares

With one week under your belt as a 2026 Farm Share member, we hope you’re feeling good and are excited about your vegetables. But we know there will most likely come a week when you may forget your box or need to put it on hold, so what happens then? If you forget your share, your site host will reach out to you. We’ve given the site hosts your email or phone number for this reason. They can work with you to find a time for you to get your share. Our site hosts are an integral part of our Farm Share - they open their businesses or front porches to host shares.

If you will be out of town for a week, you can go onto your account dashboard to the “Delivery Hold” tab and input the dates you’ll be gone. We’ve set up our Farm Share so that if you’re gone, you don’t lose out on vegetables. The credits you would have used the week you were gone will convert to an “Account Balance” for you to use at your discretion throughout the season (the balance does not roll over from season to season though). To use your account balance, you’ll put in an extra item (or however many extras) in your share. The software will ask you to confirm an extra payment option, but this is just to ensure if you don’t have enough balance to cover the extras. The software will always pull from your balance first.

So if you’re gone or you forget, we can still get you sorted out!

Veggie Spotlight: Sorrel

We’re trying a new-to-us vegetable crop this spring/early summer: sorrel. Sorrel is technically a perennial herb but can be grown like an annual green in vegetable settings. We’re growing it like an annual green this year. Since this is our first time growing sorrel, we don’t have too much experience with it - we'll all learn together!

It has a lemony, zingy flavor though, we can tell that much at least! From what I’ve read, it is best used in moderation. If using it in a salad, don’t use just sorrel, mix it with other greens.

Like other greens, we’ll be washing the sorrel leaves and bagging them. Store them in your fridge with a paper towel in the bag.

And, if you add them to your share (though we have a limited quantity because this is a new item for us), please reach out to us and let us know what you think about them!

Sorrel Salad Idea

What Farmers Eat

Bok Choy Stir Fry and Noodles

We’ve been eating a lot of bok choy this week - either in eggs for breakfast, mixed with tingly chili noodles for a quick lunch, or with chicken from Mayborn Acres and over rice for supper. When we eat bok choy, I always separate the stalks from the leaves as the stalks take more time to cook than the leaves.

Salads with creamy dressing

We made this salad dressing from Six Seasons cookbook with chive blossom vinegar instead of lemon juice and it was divine. Atop a chopped romaine and spinach salad, it tasted like ranch (kid approved) but even better.

Normally, in this section of our weekly newsletters, I want to tell you tales from the farm. This week, because it’s the beginning of our season I want to introduce you to us – the farmers! One of the benefits we see as offering a Farm Share is the direct connection to our members. We hope our members benefit by knowing the farm where their food is grown and knowing us as their farmers. We love knowing the people we feed! One of my favorite things is packing shares each week and thinking about the family or person while I’m packing their share.

Blue Sky Vegetable Co is owned by us – Dirk and Kjersten Oudman. We’ve been married nine years and have three kids: Reuben, Marja, and Elias. We’ve lived in South Dakota and farmed on this farm for five years – though I (Kjersten) grew up in Sioux Falls. Neither Dirk nor I grew up on farms, and we found our interest in agriculture through unique paths. We met eleven years ago on a farm in Texas after college when we were both attempting to learn more about farming. Our love for each other and for farming have been hand in hand ever since. After Texas, we lived and farmed in Michigan and Wisconsin before moving to South Dakota.

We like to think our personalities and skills compliment each other on the farm. Kjersten is the strategist, setting priorities for what needs to be done, while Dirk is the tactician, figuring out how we can accomplish our strategy. Dirk manages much of the field work, construction, projects, and weeding. Kjersten handles the seed starting, planting, harvesting, and most of the communication.

We love farming together. Farming with my best friend is part of the fun of farming. And raising kids on a farm – while offering some challenges in terms of work/life balance – is mostly rewarding. Our kids take pride in our vegetable farm and will emphatically tell people, “We’re vegetable farmers”.

As the season continues, we hope to get to know you all! Feel free to comment below about your own farm experiences or what you’re most excited for in this season!

Being a Farm Share Member 101

Eating seasonally from a local farm is different from just getting your vegetables from the grocery store. For starters, our selection is seasonal. We don’t have options like eggplants, tomatoes, or peppers yet in June because while those vegetables are all planted in the field, they aren’t producing fruits yet. Also, vegetables from our farm don’t come in the same packaging as the grocery store. And this can affect vegetable storage.

Perhaps the most important first lesson of being a Farm Share member is how to properly store vegetables. I’ll touch back in about different crops as they’re ready but this week, I’ll discuss greens.

Keeping greens fresh is a balance of moisture. Too much moisture and the greens will get moldy and yucky, too little and they will wilt. We will be sending all of the cut greens in plastic bags. Prior to them getting bagged, we wash and spin dry our cut greens. While we wash greens, we encourage you to wash them again at your house. We try to be thorough in washing and sorting our greens but every now and then, a weed has crept into a bag. Also, a dunk in cold water can perk greens up. We encourage you to put a paper towel in the bag of greens. A paper towel will wick excess moisture. Make sure you store all greens in your fridge.

For greens such as head lettuce or bok choy, we encourage you to keep these in a plastic bag as well. In years past, we haven’t sent lettuce heads in their own plastic bags but we will be doing that this year so it’s easier for you to keep them fresher longer.

We have an A-Z Vegetable Storage Guide on our website that you can download, print out, and refer to throughout the season.

Veggie Insights

Bok choy is one of the vegetables we have available this week. Bok choy is a vegetable used normally in Asian cuisine. Both the stalks and leaves can be used. Typically, I remove the leaves from the stalks as they cook at different speeds. If I am making a stir fry, I will sauté the stalks earlier than I add in the leaves. Bok choy can also be sautéed on its own with olive oil, garlic, and a drizzle of sesame oil and soy sauce for a tasty, umami-filled side.

What Farmers Eat

Homemade Pizza

Using Mark Bittman’s pizza crust, we make homemade pizza just about every Friday using seasonal vegetables. With arugula we can make one of our favorite pizzas with an olive oil drizzled on the crust, chopped arugula, sausage, and ricotta cheese.

Palak Paneer

We have an abundance of spinach right now so we’ll be making this tomorrow for supper. We learned recently that our kids like Indian food, so we’re fully capitalizing on this by incorporating more Indian dishes in our weekly fare. Here’s the recipe I’ll be using.

Salad with vinaigrette (or ranch for the kids)

Making an easy vinaigrette is a great way to eat a salad. Vinaigrettes are 1 part vinegar to 3 parts oil. The type of vinegars or oil can be changed to reflect your own personal tastes. Use our chive blossom vinegar and olive oil for a springy, oniony salad!

Precipitation: 2.4 inches

Highest wind speed: 48 mph

Highest Temp: 89 F

Lowest Temp: 24 F

Plants planted: 9,873 (approximately)

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April is windy. April is chaotic. April smells like freshness. April is bustle. April is thousands of new plants. April is freezing. April is hot. April is sunny and April is not.

April is when we begin our battle anew with our two main antagonists: time and weather. And somehow, they always seem to pair up to be a stronger oppositional force.

April is when we feel like we’re already behind because the task list is longer than the days have hours. But I remind myself, the farming season is a marathon, not a sprint. April is only the first few miles in a marathon when the adrenaline of the starting line is coursing through your veins. We’re not behind, we’re just finding our pace.

April inevitably makes us question our decision to live in South Dakota though. I’ve found now, with four springs in South Dakota as a farmer, to expect some of the worst wind in April. The worst windy day this year was April 23^rd when the wind produced a dust storm that colored the sky brown. The previous week had produced warm and sunny weather, inviting all farmers to be in their fields, prepping the soil to plant(us included). But tilling the soil after a dry winter left topsoil loose and exposed. Paired with sustained 40 mph wind, much of that topsoil was picked up and moved around. We sat down for supper around 5:30 and it seemed as if it was already dusk with the amount of dust darkening the sky. It was an ominous and unnerving moment.

Topsoil is where many of the plant-available nutrients live so it was like watching our nutrients fly away. This event gives a lot of credence to the “no-till” movement in farming. Commodity farmers who grow soybean and corn, have been moving towards using planting drills that can seed through last year’s crop debris without tilling the soil. Proponents of this method say soil disturbance is obviously decreased, which helps decrease erosion and supports healthier soil ecosystems. However, every method has a flip side, and the flip side for us is that vegetables struggle in no-till systems. There are definitely vegetable farms that make no-till systems work for them, but it doesn’t work well for our context. So we’re left needing to loosen our soil each spring before we can plant. It’s an example of the constant struggle of managing what is feasible for us to do and what we can do that is best for our soil and ecosystem.

Beyond the wind and to-dos, April was a very productive month. We planted quite a bit already. In the fields went broccoli, kale, cauliflower, cabbage, lettuce, sorrel, and onions. In our high tunnels went cucumbers, bok choy, lettuce and spinach. We mentioned purchasing a new-to-us Kubota tractor in March and continue to be so grateful we did. The Kubota tractor has lots of speeds - 48 speeds, I’m told my by my tractor driving husband. I don’t understand the mechanics, all I know is that 48 speeds allows me to transplant our thousands of plants with an ease that I haven’t experienced before.

I’ll use our onions for example. We plant onions on a 300-foot-long bed. On this bed, we plant onions in three rows and in every row there is a plant (or clump of onions) every 12 inches. This is about 900 plants per bed. Our Deutz tractor that we had been using to transplant wouldn’t go slow enough for me to transplant all these plants by myself so we would always need an extra person for help. With our new-to-us Kubota tractor, I planted everything on my own because the tractor had such a precise speed that I could do two peoples work by myself.

Once again, this is a window into something we wrestle with on our farm: do we invest in mechanization or in hiring labor? We chose this year to invest in mechanization because our Deutz was so unreliable that last year it caused us extra labor. At this point in our farm business, because of our mechanization, we can farm with the majority of our labor from Dirk and I, while receiving help on critical days with volunteer labor from Worker Shares. I suspect this won’t always be the case for our farm. I hope there is a day where we need to hire steady labor because our farm is supplying more people with fresh vegetables. But for now, our tractor is a blessing and critical source of help.

As we look towards May, it’s the final breath before the plunge into our Farm Share season. There is a joy in being singularly focused on the plants and the ground in April and May. Though, boy am I ready for some fresh vegetables!

If you’ve wanted to join our Farm Share but haven’t signed up yet, this is your final call! Join today! Our first delivery will (hopefully, weather dependent) be June 4th!

Join Here!

Last week I watched the Artemis II launch with our kids and I got surprisingly emotional. It was surprising to me because I’m not a huge fan of space travel. I understand the arguments for the need for humans to explore the unknown and have enjoyed fiction set in space like The Expanse Series or Project Hail Mary (good movie, better book), but I still don’t see the point. Yet as that rocket ship launched off holding four astronauts, I had tears in my eyes.

I’ve been thinking about space travel all week and following the news of Artemis II – from their plumbing problems to their wake up soundtrack to the incredible pictures they’ve sent back. I’m taken by the human ingenuity to design a rocket ship, the bravery it takes to board that ship and fly away from the earth, and the desire to see the earth from afar. It’s undeniably incredible. But I keep coming back to the thought: “yeah, but so is earth”.

Some argue that the environmental movement began when the “Earthrise” picture of earth was taken in 1968 by the Apollo 8 crew. For the first time, humans could see our planet from another point of view. We could see the clouds swirling, the brilliant blue of the oceans, and just how small our tender planet is in the vastness of space.

I thought about this as I lay on the ground next to my three-month-old son.

We were in the Prop House this morning, I was filling flats with potting soil and he was laying on his back, partially underneath a table of plants to shield him from the sun. I looked over and saw him staring up at the table with an awestruck face. He looks at ceiling fans or the shadows on a wall with an awestruck face so I didn’t think much of it at first. Then he began fussing, alerting me that he was ready for a nap. I wanted to get a bit more work done so I laid down on the ground to try to console him so that I could squeeze a few more minutes out of him for work. Then I looked up too.

Between the slats of the bench, was an explosion of green and sunlight. The tiny tendrils of white roots searching for sustenance poked out of the bottom of the seed trays. Tiny droplets of water from my earlier watering regimen clung to the sides of the plastic tray as if they ignored the laws of gravity. A whole universe of sunlight, soil, plant, and water was above me. Was this what my son was marveling at? I’m not sure, maybe it was just the peekaboo of light between the green plants and black trays. But it was a marvel.

This earth is a marvel, a miracle, a wonder. And Victor Glover, pilot of the Artemis II, said it well.

“You guys are talking to us because we’re in a spaceship really far from earth. But you’re on a spaceship called Earth that was created to give us a place to live in the universe, in the cosmos. I think maybe the distance we are from you makes you think what we’re doing is special, but we’re the same distance from you. And I’m trying to tell you, just trust me, you are special. In all this emptiness – this is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call the universe – you have this oasis, this beautiful place that we all get to exist [in] together.”

That I can walk outside right now and plant a seed in the ground and watch it grow is a wonder. A wonder that we take for granted. I’m surrounded day after day with soil, plants, and seeds. I forget the beauty of those things. I put seeds in soil, water them, and expect them to grow. I count on this miracle and my manipulation of it for my livelihood. The rush, the stress, the need to ensure our farm is working properly and efficiently causes me to neglect the miracle I get to participate with daily. Until I’m forced to slow down by my baby - yet another miracle - and behold something beautiful.

So I rose with the renewed sense of calling to this earth, to the soil beneath my feet (and sometimes beneath my back). I farm, I tend, and I get soil underneath my fingernails because the earth is special. My three-month-old doesn’t know the moon from a tomato yet, but someday he will. And while I hope he cares about the moon, my hope is that he cares more about this earth and tending life on this oasis. Because it’s perfect for us and it is all we have.

Speaking of the greenhouse, right now it is the nucleus of the farm. Everything else is beginning to stir and push out of the earth but the Prop House has been alive and warm and full of plants since the beginning of March. There are several crops we’re dramatically increasing this year, such as heirloom tomatoes, onions, and peppers. We were the recipients of a grant that allowed us to purchase processing equipment like blast freezers, a dicer/slicer, and a peeler. With increased amounts of produce and this equipment we’re planning on freezing vegetables for our regular Farm Share customers and hopefully some new customers. Over the winter we’ve been thinking up and trialing different frozen vegetables ideas such as a root blend, frozen tomatoes, or fajita mix (onions and peppers). Our idea being that by freezing vegetables when they’re fresh, we can offer folks a convenient way to eat fresh vegetables throughout the year. Do you have a frozen vegetable that you would eat?

This week we also received our seed potatoes! There’s a tradition that says you should plant potatoes on Good Friday. We’ve accomplished that in years past, but probably won’t make that deadline this year because we’ve been eagerly waiting a new tool to join our farm…

We’re the proud owners of a new-to-us Kubota tractor! Our main Deutz tractor was becoming less and less dependable to the point that we couldn’t use it from May - August last year due to mechanical issues. So we decided it was time to invest in something more dependable. Finding a tractor to fit our vegetable operation is much more difficult that one might think. Our main priority in a tractor is one that can go slow enough for us to transplant. Some tractors come with a “Creeper Gear” which allows them to go real slow. That’s what we need. But then we also need a tractor that is at least 65 horsepower to pull equipment like our plastic mulch layer and spader. These two needs made a pretty thin middle of the Venn diagram of possible tractors. But fortunately, this tractor seemed to match our needs!

Winter time is often a time for planning for us. But it’s also become a time for more community outreach. Dirk and I were presenters at Ag Day at our local science center with this giant spinning wheel he made! We had kids spin the wheel and answer a corresponding question about vegetable production. Dirk also was a part of a roundtable discussion of producers on the efficacy and implementation of high tunnels/greenhouses in South Dakota. And I joined a team working to encourage more farm-to-school connections and sales in South Dakota. The longer we’ve been farmers, the more we’ve begun to see our job including outreach, activism, and education.

As we near April, we’re staring down the first plantings of vegetables in the tunnels and the field and planning for our first harvests in May. I was asked about my favorite part of spring and I had a mixed answer. There is a bit of sadness when spring rolls around because the days of winter, of reading a book during the day, and slower work comes to an end. There is also the excitement of all things new and the first burst of energy from both plants and us. Every new season is a chance to grow a vegetable another time, to learn, to improve, and to enjoy.

Share

As we near April, we also near the closing of our Farm Share signups. We take signups until April 30th. We still have spots available for you if you want to join our farm community. Our Farm Share is 23 weeks of fresh, local vegetables. We don’t change prices mid-season. Once you buy in, your vegetables are secured from June to November.

And if you’re already a member of our Farm Share but didn’t know that we also offer mushroom shares and chicken shares from two local producers we know and trust, check those out. Mushroom and chicken shares are optional and just another way of getting great food to your dinner table.

Learn More!

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We may be the farmers growing your vegetables, but we’re also just people who are raising three small kids and eating the same vegetables week after week alongside our Farm Share members. We’ve been farming full time since 2019 and eating a very seasonal, local diet that whole time. So how has it affected us and our family?

Our vegetables have taught us to be better cooks, made us appreciate food more, and have impacted our kids in many positive ways.

Becoming Better Cooks

I didn’t learn how to do much in the kitchen until high school – nor did I have a huge natural interest in cooking. Cooking didn’t factor into my life until I lived on a farm in Texas where the employees took turns on a rotating basis to cook lunch for the whole crew. It was a sink-or-swim moment where I had to learn real fast how to use farm vegetables to make something edible and tasty for a group of twenty people. Also, I would work our farmers market booth and didn’t have many good ideas when people asked what to do with vegetables like kale (I used to say “kale chips” but kale is so much more versatile than this)! I sought out more unique recipes and tried them, finding some winners and some losers, but ultimately finding a love of cooking in the meantime.

In the decade since, I’ve come to look forward to my time in the kitchen. There is peace in narrowing my focus to figuring out how to combine individual ingredients into something more. And after trying lots of recipes from different types of cuisine, I’ve found better ways to create something new in the kitchen. It truly has been a living out of “practice makes [almost] perfect”.

Appreciating Food

I may be biased but I think our vegetables taste amazing. I’ve yet to have a carrot or tomato from the grocery store that has the complexity of flavor that our vegetables have. And that makes me want to eat them more. But I just don’t see the point of having amazing vegetables on my plate next to ho-hum meat or grains. Growing vegetables has made me into a bit of a “foodie”. I want my food to taste fantastic. Being a farmer has shown me how good vegetables – and other food – can taste. I’ll never forget the first time we grew watermelon on our farm. I’ve never enjoyed watermelon that much; I’ve always found it watery and plain. But eating that first farm-grown watermelon was life-changing. Our family sat down outside and ate the whole thing – I even have a picture of our oldest son burying his face into a slice to get all the fruit he could (see below). I’ve had that experience with just about every vegetable grow (except radishes…).

Food is meant to be enjoyable to eat. Our vegetables have caused us to seek out ingredients from other local farms that have the same passion for raising or growing nutritional and tasty food. When we buy from other farmers like us, we find that their food tastes better than anything we’ve found in grocery stores. We buy our beef from Svec Farm in Estelline, South Dakota and our chicken from Mayborn Acres in Parker, South Dakota, and raised our own pork this year because they genuinely taste better. Simple ingredients grown and raised well just taste better. And finding good food has become a pursuit in my life that is all due to farming and our vegetables.

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Kids and Vegetables

You may think that by mere virtue of growing up on a vegetable farm our kids eat vegetables all the time. Our kids are like any other kids their age – strong-willed and not necessarily drawn to vegetables. I read that kids need repeated exposure to food before they try them. And our kids get lots of repeated exposure to our vegetables. At four and six years old, they will eat beets or squash without finding it strange and eat salads on their own volition, but it’s because that’s what we serve on a consistent basis.

My kids don’t magically eat healthy food all the time, if given the choice, they’ll often go for a fruit snack or chocolate over a cucumber. But at least they know that vegetables can taste good. One of my proud moments as a mom and farmer was when our oldest son came home from kindergarten and reported that they had carrots for lunch and he ate them, but “they weren’t as good as our carrots”.

We talk about “real food” a lot as a family, teaching our kids that they get more energy and nutrition from “real food” (vegetables, fruits, proteins, homemade bread) rather than desserts or processed food. Our hope is that having these conversations early sets our kids up to eat better over the course of their lifetime.

I try to include our kids in cooking supper often. Our daughter especially loves to help me out. Both of our kids know how to peel vegetables and how to slowly chop vegetables. Their participation in the kitchen hasn’t been without accidental cuts from knives or peelers, but we feel that this low level of risk is worth it to teach our kids how to cook. Teaching kids that they can find delight in cooking and contribute in a meaningful way can set up a lifelong enjoyment of being in the kitchen. Our kids often think of new “recipes” for us to try – basil soup, carrot syrup – which shows me they are also thinking about how to combine vegetables and make something new.

Dirk and I talk about how our family life is defined a lot by food – by growing it, cooking it, and enjoying each other around the dinner table every day. When I felt the first seeds of desire to be a farmer, it was because of the outdoor work, the tangible act of service of growing someone’s food. However, I’m grateful that farming vegetables has also transformed the way I approach food. Food has become more than just something to check off the daily list, it is a joy to source, cook, and eat. Food is life-giving.

We still have spots in our Farm Share. If you live in Sioux Falls, Harrisburg, Tea, Worthing, and the surrounding areas, join us this year by purchasing a Farm Share and see how fresh vegetables can change your life!

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Read Part One Here

We all know that food contains nutrients that fuel our bodies. Every year, it seems a new “superfood” with certain nutrients that we “desperately need” pops onto the scene (this year is apparently the year of the cabbage, a vegetable I’ve long been saying deserves a place of honor). And while it’s true that different foods have different nutrients, where do these nutrients actually come from?

Plants generate their own food. By combining sunlight, carbon dioxide, water, and nutrients from the soil, plants are able to create their own food source. But they’re still using inputs from the system around them, such as nitrogen in the soil to push forward leaf growth or calcium to help them develop fruit. Since we cannot generate our own food from the natural environment, we must eat to access the nutrients we need.

To discuss nutrients further, stretch your mind back to high school science class and the laws of matter. One of the three fundamental laws of matter is that atoms cannot be created or destroyed. When plants take up nutrients, like nitrogen or calcium, they remain in the cells of the plants. Then we eat plants, our bodies breaking down the compounds and digesting them, again, not losing or gaining any nutrient available in the plant. What that means for us is that however many nutrients are in our food, that’s how many nutrients are available to our bodies. We can’t create vital minerals or chemical compounds out of other atoms. What we eat is what we get.

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Therefore, food needs to be as nutrient dense as possible. And our food can only have as many nutrients as were available to it from the system it was produced in. A head of lettuce grown in a hydroponic system (nutrient-infused water) can only contain the nutrients that were put in the water. A steer fed only in a feedlot setting will only have the nutrients that were in its feed. Our food cannot be more nutrient dense than the system it was created within.

This may not seem problematic at first blush. After all, scientists know an incredible amount about human health and nutrition, so they can certainly ensure that modern food has all the nutrients we need for health, right? Unfortunately, over the past century, scientists have observed massive declines in nutrient content in our foods. Key minerals and chemical nutrients have been reduced in our modern foods by up to eighty percent! This decline is directly related to the lack of nutrients in the soil where our food is grown. If the soil is devoid of nutrients, our diets are empty.

This is what our farm strives to do differently. Our goal is for soil that is alive and full of nutrients. When we were looking at this farm in hopes of purchasing it in 2021, we walked around the property with a shovel. Every so often, we pushed the shovel into the ground to reveal black, prairie soil. Then we smelled it. Rich, alive soil has a glorious smell unto itself. That humic, earthy smell told us that the soil was already alive and that our job was to continue to steward it.

We try to mimic a natural approach to soil health and fertility. Soil is a substrate that is chock full of microbes, insects, pieces of organic matter in various stages of decomposition, and chemical nutrients. We add compost to feed microbes and insects. When microbes and insects eat, their “waste” products are chemicals like nitrogen that plants need for growth. We add spent mushroom grains that are already infested with fungus because a fungal-dominate soil is best for further decomposition and holds the soil together with their long, hyphae strands. By adding naturally sourced inputs, allowing the soil to rest between cropping systems, and rotating our crops we’re trying to unlock the full availability of minerals and chemical compounds already found in the soil.

This helps to create more nutrient-dense food

Our goal is when our customers consume our produce, they’re getting a fuller value because of our soil. Part of the value of our vegetables are these unseen benefits from higher nutrient content, which can also be observed in the taste (more nutrients equals better taste in fruits and vegetables). We hope that our customers are benefiting from an incredible natural system that begins with microbes and continues all the way to their plates.

Human health starts with our food, but we can only be as healthy as our food. That’s why we farm thinking about the soil and how our food “eats”.

Our 2026 Farm Shares are open and available for purchase! If you want to learn more, you can email us or check out our website for more info. When you’re ready, you can select your drop site, share size, and any optional extras (including mushrooms or pasture-raised chicken) on our online store!

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