It was a rainy, sleety, snowy, windy kind of day. The greens, reds, browns of the greens were stunning in the dull grey light of the day. I hauled in 10 lbs of wonderful greens and almost as much spinach. The Kale  – like I said  – had been enjoyed by another.  It was muddy and wet and beautiful. I was grateful for all the garden gave to us and thankful this would be the last time I would be getting muddy, wet, and cold harvesting anything for a while. Plus the mountains were getting whiter by the minute.  Needless to day the single digits low never came and the greens are growing still. I think the spinach has had it though. Its been snowing the past three days and the greens seem to be loving it.  Think I’ll be harvesting them again in a couple of days. Hopefully on a crisp clear sunfilled day.

I’ve also was able to get one last compost pile built and innoculated with the Biodynamics Preps a couple of days ago. Went out today while the snow was falling and the cold cut through  my light fleece and stuck my hand into the pile. Just 6″ in it was hot and cooking. Can’t wait till the snow melts off of it in March and the sun starts to warm it and dry it and we get to dig into its blessings and spread them on the beds prior to seeding. That will be a good day.

The Chantung purple garlic I planted a few weeks ago poked up through the ground and was sticking bravely up above the mulch 3-4″.  All the other varieties kept their heads low and covered.

We have only a few beds to fork, amend, and cover. The hoses are rolled up and stashed for the winter in the old chicken coop. The irrigation system is drained. The lawn is covered with leaves – perhaps I could get in one more compost pile….. The Great horn Owls arrived back a few days ago. They nest in a Blue Spruce next to the Farmhouse.

So Winter is here and the greens still grow. The compost is cooking under  its blanket of hay. The garlic cloves break their dormancy and begin to swell and grow. The chickens scratch the still warm ground for bugs. The green tomatoes in the basement ripen into beautiful fruit of all colors. The light fades early. Tonight snow is falling in the moutains and I am digging out my ski equipment dreaming of floating through powder. Its a beautiful abundant life we have on this small farm. We are blessed indeed. Thank all of you for helping us do what we are doing. Thank you.

Here is the way I am seeing it. I just spent 10 hours on a great meal, which is a little exorbitant and the only way I can rationalize being tied down to the stove that long is the payback of knowing if I make enough leftovers I may not have to do any serious pot-welding for at least a week after the big Holiday. Here’s to excess! May it pay off grandly for you in the week to come.

Re-Fixin’s

Here are some ideas for you. No recipes, just ideas. You will have to hum a few bars and guess at the rest. I am already starting my week off from cooking!

Turkey, Brie, Cheddar or Blue Cheese and Cranberry Quesadillas

Pan-fried Stuffing w/ Poached Eggs & Bacon

Turkey, Sweet Potato & Green Bean Curry

Potato Cakes w/ Smoked Salmon and Chevre

Cranberry, Turkey, Bacon, Lettuce and Tomato Sandwich

Pasta w/ Turkey, Gravy, Braised Greens, Sun-dried Tomatoes, Parmesan and Garlic

Turkey Chili & Cornbread

Cobb Salad w/ Turkey, Bacon, Hard Boiled Egg and Avocado

Turkey Bone Broth w/ Pumpkin, Wild Rice and Kale

Cream of Mashed Potato & Leek Soup

All right, do you get the idea? Bon Appetit!

“People say to me, ‘wow, summer must be really busy for you guys,’” said the farmer,as he climbed back behind the wheel. “But in the summer, there’s a rhythm. You know what each day is for. This time of year, running around like a madman getting things ready–Spring, now this is crazy.”

And it is. For those of us mad enough to yoke our working lives to the turbulent and sometimes vengeful tides of the Colorado seasons, this time of year is for doing, basically, what the plants outside are doing too. We wake up from endless winter, stretch our legs, gather sap and strength for the bonanza to come in the summer months ahead. We remember where everything is, where we left it to lie last fall as we hurried to be done, and to rest. We remember how a shovel works.

Here on the farm we have been prepping beds, running the rototiller through the hardpan clay and ginning up the dirt with a mix of manure and organic fertilizer that we hope will prove its worth come summer harvest. Like the surrounding landscape, we started slow, pulling a few greens from the hoop-house once a week.  But before long the rest of what we’ve put in will start to show: more greens, of course, and peas. Beets, carrots, turnips, onions, raab chard and kale.

Until then we continue to run around like headless chickens, thinning and transplanting and prepping and hoping that, someday soon, a rhythm will set in. Then again, in a state where the weather changes every 10 minutes, will the rhythm ever come? I’m not holding my breath.

With the start up of Friday night dinners we have gotten the chance to start playing and cooking with springs early offerings. Not only do the surrounding farms have an abundance of sweet tender vegetables, our very own garden is pumping out some delicious salad greens.

Of all the greens so far- spinach is the winner. There is enough to go around for everyone- and then once more. We have incorporated in soups, quiches, salads and tamale pies. It’s too early in the season to start getting tired of such a nutrient rich leaf… and so we continue to rack our brains for spinach recipes. One in particular that I have become fond of is Spanakopita. When mentioning the dish to my mother the other day, she shuddered across the phone line. “Spanakopita? For forty? That sounds intensive and a bit awful..” My thoughts exactly, before I got a down a nice system and got over the fear of working with that fickle phyllo dough. The filling is easy and delicious- don’t let that flaky dough throw you off. Below, I will post a recipe for the filling. Now, my advice to you, is get everything set up. Create a station for yourself. Melt your butter with a pastry brush ready beside it, lay out the phyllo and cover with a damp rag (use throughout the whole process to keep the dough from getting brittle and impossible to work with), and have your filling ready to go. The following recipe is just a basic spinach filling- as summer goes on, add fun herbs popping up everywhere, incorporate green onions, or add a crunch with a handful or walnuts or pine nuts- above all, be glad spinach season is upon us… because that means berries and peaches aren’t too far behind!

Spanakopita

1 package      Phyllo dough

8 cups             Spinach Leaves

1 tsp                 dried oregano

1/2 cup           butter, melted

1/3 cup           cheese (I chose Avalanche Chevre)

1/4 cup            feta, crumbled

1 each               egg

5 Tbsp              heavy cream

1 clove            garlic, finely chopped

Salt and pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Start by heating a skillet or large pan with olive oil (just to coat the bottom). Once the oil is heated through add chopped garlic and stir until just golden brown.

Add all of the spinach and stir to incorporate garlic. Add oregano, salt and pepper to spinach. Stir until spinach is just cooked (wilted) and remove from heat.

Add the egg, cream, and cheese to the spinach mixture and stir until fully incorporated. On a half sheet tray (or casserole dish) layer three pieces of dough, while brushing each layer with the melted butter, to create the bottom crust of the Spanakopita. Place the filling evenly across the first layers of phyllo dough and repeat first step by placing three more pieces (butter in between) on top.

Brush the top layer with remaining butter and add crumbled feta on top. Place in the oven for about 15 minutes or until top is gold brown.

Cut into triangles and serve while hot!

If I told you that a bunch of recovering drug and alcohol-addicts had spent the last two weeks occupying our farmhouse, you’d probably picture a driveway littered with broken bottles, cigarette burns on the upholstered chairs, perhaps a syringe or two rolling about on the linoleum floor, abandoned after a missed toss into the wastebasket.

You wouldn’t expect to see a freshly-primed fence, a few just-planted strawberry beds, or a mowed, manicured lawn with a newly built path snaking through it. You wouldn’t expect to see young leeks and onions in the ground, or well-thinned spinach and broccoli raab growing. Probably most surprising on your walk across the grounds would be the quarter-acre of just-tilled land in the back pasture, shaped into fertilized, composted planting beds.

And yet, as I sit here typing from my post at the farmhouse window, I look out and see all of this. This past weekend marked the close of the inaugural “Fresh and Wyld Recovery” program, a two week intensive rehabilitation session that brought seven recovering addicts over from the Roaring Fork Valley for a fortnight of 12-step study, garden work, reflection and good food. And rather than indulge their old habits (aside from nicotine and coffee, of course), the participants gave us their labor for two weeks, helping to complete several projects that would have otherwise taken hundreds of paid man-hours to finish. They weren’t always enthusiastic–indeed, I’ve never seen a crew so eager for a cigarette and water break–but however slow and intermittent their labor may have been, the fact remains that they paid to come work for us.

As someone who is paid–however modestly–to do the daily work that comes with maintaing a farm, it has always fascinated me that this very work is often perscribed as therapy to people who are struggling. Fighting depression? Build a fence. Recovering alcoholic? Plant some flowers. Three years for manslaughter? Trellis a row of tomatoes. What’s particularly ironic is that a long bout of farmwork so often sends me scurrying to the yellow pages in search of therapy–a chiropractor, a masseuse, anyone to get this kink out of my spine.

What is it that farmwork–on its face repetitious and tiring, often dirty–can give to those who are sad, jilted, angry and abused? Obviously it never hurts to be outside, to get a bit of exercise and wind in your face. But it seems to me that the most valuable commodity that farmwork provides–indeed perhaps the very base of its popularity as a form of new-age therapy–is a basic sense of usefulness.

As humans, most of us will do most anything to be useful. We’ll start families, farms, and other money-and-time-suckers, all of which limit our freedom and make us accountable to hordes of other people. Tell us we’re useless–that, in modern parlance, “our services are no longer needed,” and very soon we’ll be driven to the same alcohol, drugs, and other junk that the recovering addicts were trying to purge from their systems when they rolled in two weeks ago.

To a sense of uselessness, farming provides a nice antidote. “You built this fence,” it tells you at the end of a long day. “You weeded these peas, you harvested this lettuce, you tilled this field.” If there were ever any doubt that humans are simple creatures, there is to me no proof more convincing than this fact: at the end of many days, these words are all we need.

The group arrived weary, and wary of what was to come in the packed days ahead of them. Their apprehension and fears reflected our own. When they got here, on a Sunday night, they seemed a bit resistant, and as luck would have it I was in charge of their first meal. It had been a long weekend for us in the kitchen with a Friday Night Dinner, Farmer Appreciation Dinner, and two back-to-back Sunday brunches, and to be honest, I wanted nothing to do with the kitchen that night. So I did what most tired cooks do: I reheated left overs. And delicious leftovers they were. We had tri-tip from Saturday, mashed potatoes from Friday, braised greens from Sunday, and apple crisp with gingered whipped cream from Friday as well. Sitting down with the group, ready to make forced small talk and take a quick nap with my eyes open, I watched as these tired and self-abused individuals plunged into their plates and barely looked up from start to finish. They went back for seconds and thirds, and their cheek began to regain some color. People started talking, and eating, and eating some more. For me, these were just leftovers from the weekend meals. For them, this was some of the most nutritious stuff their bodies had received in a long time.

The next two weeks brought more of the same. Appetites grew. The group started asking questions about cooking methods, organic products, and different types of grains and how they could be used. They also worked in the garden in addition to painting murals, making journals, and attending group therapy sessions. For many, the concept of planting, growing, harvesting, and cooking their own food was not an attainable or realistic one. As a cook, it was heart-warming to watch malnourished individuals harvest their own greens and then see them prepared. For me, it was a firm reminder of why I do what I do. By the end of the week, it was plain to see that participants’ moods had been lifted from their previous state by a simple change in their diet.

I have always been fairly in tune with my body and how food affects it, although I may tune out those effects from time to time. For the past five years in particular I have been conscious of using organic and local products, steering away from refined sugars, and packing my meals full of delicious and complex grains. I also tend to surround myself with people who do the same. For me, to see the effect of this food on individuals who have not been as vigilant as me (or have hardly been feeding themselves!) opened my eyes. Eating this way helped them regain their energy, cured depression, and got them excited about cooking at home on their own.

Having The Right Door program was just as therapeutic for me as it was for the participants. Although some days were stressful and others downright tiring, feeding a different demographic was good for my soul. To see people appreciate your food the way these people did–the smiles, the “thank yous”, and above all the physical and mental change­–brings me back to the heart of cooking: to nourish and love our bodies.

Ours were neither straight nor deep. And for that, as is so often true in farming, you could blame the weather. It was early June, but spring had come a month behind schedule. The tomatoes, awaiting transplant, shivered when the slightest spring breeze swept through the hoophouse. To thrive, tomato seedlings prefer a soil temperature of at least 60° when planted. Down a few inches in our garden, things were much cooler than that.

The only match for spiteful weather is a resourceful farmer, and ours, resourceful as he was, devised a plan that Dr. Suess would surely have enjoyed. We would plant our tomatoes sideways, he decided, burying them just enough for the roots to take hold, but not so much as to subject them to the chilly soil below. The stem would curve artfully up toward the sun, its strange angle barely detectable to the untrained eye. (Thanks to the steady stream of B&B guests who wander over to admire the garden, our property is replete with eyes like these).  Most importantly, we would get our huge tomato seedlings in the ground before they simply burst from their current pots, an event that–to the remotely trained eye–did not seem too farfetched.

And so we did it. We finished the job, heaping an inch or two of soil atop our tomato roots, convinced that such scant cover would keep them warm, and we didn’t consider the issue for the rest of the week. Certainly, we thought, that was the last time we’d see the roots of our tomatoes.

It wasn’t. On Saturday evening, as we were lounging around in the yurt enjoying a post-work beverage, the boss poked her head in the door. “Uh, I’m gonna ask you guys to give us a quick hand here…” she paused, ominously. “We have to replant all those tomatoes you guys put in.” We stared at her. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “They were too shallow,” she said. “They’re drying out, and we don’t want to lose them.” “Shit!” I said. We have tickets to a concert tonight that starts in a half-hour!” Whatever was wrong, I thought,  could be resolved in the morning, right? “Can you give us 15 minutes?” she asked. This was serious. Exchanging a wide-eyed glance, we rose to head out to the field.

We were stooped in the garden, shoving the tomatoes deeper into the soil, when our friends arrived to pick us up for the concert that night. They were well dressed, with the beers they had brought clinking in their jackets, but their faces grew confused when they saw that we were still in the garden. “Just go,” said the farmer, as our friends approached. “We’ve got this.” Feeling a surge of guilt, I looked around. They were more than halfway done. And returning to work had been a rather rude shock–it was Saturday night, a time to unwind. We had already worked a hard day.

So we went. But driving off I couldn’t shake a nagging thought­: If we had owned the place, if those were our tomatoes, if we didn’t just work here…there would have been no concert tonight. I recalled the words that a particularly cranky boss had yelled to me the year before, as I stood watering his plants. “Farming isn’t like college!” he had yelled. “You can’t just phone it in!” If I ever own a farm, the farm won’t extend me the courtesy of holding all its urgent needs until the morning hours, when I’m rested, coffeed up, and ready to tackle them anew. It’ll throw things at me in rainstorms, the dead of winter, the middle of the night. Right when all my friends, as it happens, are at a concert, enjoying themselves. And what will I get in return? All I can really hope for, I suppose, is some goddamn tomatoes that don’t die.

I woke up this morning with a question in my head, one that has probably occurred lately to many of you in the habit growing or eating local produce on the Western Slope: Has mid-June become the new spring? Maybe I’m waxing nostalgic, but when I think back on my childhood in the Roaring Fork Valley, I could swear I remember things blooming in April and May, instead of laying dormant under cloud cover for two months, making seed germination an impossible dream anywhere but a greenhouse.

However cold and peculiar the spring so far has been, the last few weeks here in the North Fork Valley have brought little but sunshine, and at last, things are starting to grow! A glance into this produce box is ample evidence of that, and this week we bring you a smattering of spring’s finest offerings from across the valley. Your box today includes a mix of the following:

• Turnips and radishes from Paonia’s Rain Crow Farm
• Garlic scapes from Cobblestone Farm in Hotchkiss
• Arugula from Jeff and Kaylee at Abundant Life
• Eggs from The Living Farm in Paonia
• Salad Mix from Scott at Small Potatoes Farm
• Chevre from Basalt’s own Avalanche Cheese Company
• Spinach from our own garden here at Fresh and Wyld
• Asparagus from Nikos Garden in Montrose

In case you’re at a loss for what to do with these ingredients, below you’ll find three great recipes from our new chef, Caroline Glover.

The crazy spring weather has made bringing this box to you a bit of a trick for all of our farmers. Here in our garden, we’ve had to plant the tomatoes with their root ball angled sideways (!) to keep them out of the cold soil below, and have been battling an unusual profusion of flea beetles, along with the usual slate of other pests that all organic farmers contend with, like slugs and leaf-miner beetles. All of this has kept our farmer on his toes, scheming up organic ways to thwart the creatures, but his efforts seem to be paying off. In our garden, the chard and kale is growing taller by the day, the beets and turnips are plumping up, and, perhaps most exciting of all, the peas are beginning to form! All signs point to a productive summer season ahead.

We are still offering shares of our 16-week summer CSA! We’re looking for about 15 more members to join us for the summer season. Members get a heaping bag of local food delivered to their door weekly, from June 22nd until October 5^th. Summer shares are $800, but if you’ve been a customer of ours in the past, we will allow you to pay as you go, with a charge of $50 per week. All summer, we bring you the best food our region’s farmers can produce, at an affordable price. Along with a cornucopia of other spring produce, next week’s box will feature the first peas of the season! We hope you’ll join us.

And whether the season we’re in is spring, summer, or some blend of the two, we hope the food we bring you helps you enjoy it.

Regards,

CSA Manager Nelson Harvey and The Fresh and Wyld Crew

THIS WEEK’S RECIPES

1.) Spinach and Chevre Quiche

Serves 4

In your spring box this week, you have three of the main ingredients for this easy quiche.

6 cups spinach, washed

1 clove garlic, finely chopped

1/4 cup Avalanche chevre

6 each eggs, lightly beaten

2 cups, cream

1/2 cup yellow onion, diced small

Salt and Pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 350 degrees, lightly butter a 9 inch pie pan.

Heat oil in a non-stick saute pan and add onions, garlic and salt. Cook until tender.

Add washed spinach to saute pan and cook just until wilted.

Drain spinach mixture to rid of any excess water.

In a bowl combine chevre, eggs, cream, and spinach mixture- stir until fully mixed.

Pour mixture in pie pan and bake for 30 minutes. Let pie cool before serving.

* This is a crustless version, a homemade crust or store bought crust can be used as well. Just line the bottom of the pan with crust and bake in a 350 degree oven until golden brown. Then add spinach mixture and cook for 30 minutes.

2.) Rhubarb Vinaigrette

This is a nice tart vinaigrette that will serve well over mixed greens. We used it in our Friday night dinner this past week and finished the salad with candied curry sunflower seeds!

2 cups, rhubarb, chopped to 1/2 inch pieces

1 1/2 cups red wine vinegar

1/2 c water

1/2 c sugar

2 Tbsp mustard

3 cups grape seed oil

salt and pepper to taste

Place rhubarb, red wine vinegar, water, and sugar in a medium sized pot over medium heat. Let the liquid come to a boil and lower temperature to simmer for 10 minutes (rhubarb should be soft and sugar dissolved). Strain the liquid into a heat proof container, making sure to mash the rhubarb to get all of the flavor. Place the liquid in the fridge and allow to completely cool. Once the rhubarb vinegar has cooled, place vinegar and mustard in a bowl and slowly mix in grape seed oil. Once the dressing has emulsified, season with salt and pepper, and enjoy a summer salad!

3.) Arugula Pesto

A different way to incorporate arugula… can be frozen after being made or tossed on a cold pasta salad!

4 cups arugula, cleaned

2 cups Parmesan, grated

1 clove garlic

1/2 cup walnuts

2 cups olive oil

salt and pepper to taste

Place arugula, Parmesan, garlic, walnuts and a small amount of salt in a food processor, give a few pulses to combine the ingredients. Slowly drizzle olive oil while blending previous ingredients to create a paste. Season finished pesto with salt and pepper, and refrigerate or freeze. (If kept warm for too long- the pesto may turn a dark color).