market here tomorrow morning, before it gets windy

Greetings shareholders and friends of Abbe Hills Farm,

The hoophouse just keeps making really beautiful food!  So, tomorrow, Saturday, May 11, we'll have another small market here at the farm, 10:00 until noon.  We'll have lettuce, plus loads of very nice spinach, eggs, and mild and tasty radishes.  There is a small bit of arugula left.  We'll have some chard for the first time, and broccoli raab for the only time.  Broccoli raab is a pretty special green, sweet and a little bitter, only available when the spring is cool (no problem there!), and gets overmature in only a week.  It would be great melted onto a pizza or sauteed with eggs or mushrooms.  So come out and get your mom some lovely greens and eggs for her Mother's Day gift!

There are also kitties who need to be held, so bring some helpers with you.  Kitties do so well on Saturdays when people play with them, but they get an attitude by the next Friday and have to be reminded again to be nice.  If you need a kitty, there are plenty from which to choose.

My able assistant, Andrea, has been working on getting the farm mailing list updated.  Hopefully, there are many of you who find yourself on this list for the first time, either because you've just joined the CSA or else you like keeping up with what's going on at the farm.  You should get a weekly newsletter from now on.  Some of you may be getting this note twice.  If so, please let me know so we can fix it.   The harder thing is figuring out if we missed anybody.   If you know of somebody who should be on this list but isn't, please zap them this newsletter and they can let me know.  

I post the newsletters every week to the farm website, www.abbehills.com, and also to a national website called www.localharvest.org.   Localharvest.org is a great site.  You can type in any zip code and find all the local food places, including farms and restaurants, within a few miles of that zip.  Great way for your relatives to find a CSA where they live.

We had a productive week in the field, considering we had only a little more than two days when the soil was fit to plant.  About half of the potatoes are planted (one month late, but still OK), about two thirds of the onions (more problematic), tons of kale and lettuce.  Finally, the peas, radishes, and turnips came up - nearly three weeks after we planted them - an agonizingly long delay.   The soil is still surprisingly cold, so things are taking their time.  We're looking forward to a warmer and drier week ahead.

Here's something that's probably not on your radar.  An environmental chemist at Coe College has been keeping me updated on the water quality conditions in the Cedar River this spring.  As of Wednesday night, because the river is running high and because lots of nitrogen is leaking out of farm fields in the watershed, there are more than 1,000,000 pounds of nitrogen flowing down the Cedar River at Cedar Rapids - EACH DAY!!!.  That's 1 million pounds of nitrogen heading for the hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico each day.  And nearly $2,000,000 in loss each day to the farmers who bought the nitrogen and applied it to their cornfields either last year or this.  Additionally, the concentration of nitrate nitrogen in the water is over 16 parts per million, 60% higher than what is allowed in drinking water.  So those towns who process river water for drinking are faced with a big problem over which they have absolutely no control.  Pretty big mess, don't you think!  It happens every spring, but the numbers this year are astonishing because of the drought last year leaving so much soil nitrogen unused by the corn crop, and the surprisingly generous rain this spring washing it away.

You can register for the CSA any time now.  We're still not full, so if you've got friends who are interested, please encourage them to join.

I post to Facebook as frequently as I can.  You can see pictures from the farm at our account, called Abbe Hills Farm.

Hope to see you tomorrow,
Laura