farm & garden roughdraftfarmstead farm & garden roughdraftfarmstead

SPRING (!?) IS IN THE AIR.

broccoli plants.The weather, as I am sure you are aware, has been crazy lately. Spring (and SUMMER) like temperatures, trees and flowers blooming, everything growing much faster than we would perhaps like! We spent yesterday outside, setting out broccoli and cabbage transplants to make room in our crowded greenhouse. It is hard not to get ahead of ourselves when it is this warm - hard to remember that we could still have winter weather around the corner. Luckily, brassicas are pretty hardy, and just in case, we covered them up with row cover to protect them from cold and the inevitable cabbage moths.While we worked, I couldn't help but reflect on some of the words we had heard over the weekend from Wendell Berry, at the Organic Association of Kentucky conference. He had spoken about the "human" element in farming. How farming cannot become just an industry, or technology will replace farmers. If farming is first and foremost an art, then there must be humanity in it. Good farming is aesthetically pleasing and beautiful - a place where there is a balance between the product you are creating and the homeplace. As I kneeled beside my husband with my hands in the dirt, as Further played on top of the compost pile a few feet away, as we let the sun and cool air refresh our overwintered skin - I felt the truth of those words. Yes, we are creating a product. We are making money, trying to become more efficient and knowledgeable so we can do better always. But we are also building a family and a home and a life. And we are ready for another season, even if spring seems to have come a little earlier than we might have hoped!-Hannah.transplants.bcs.setting out transplants.further.

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COOKING CLASSES WITH YOUR FARMER.

radish.CSA shareholders, we have a treat for you!This year, Hannah and I are experimenting with something we would like to add to the CSA experience: cooking classes!These events are only open to CSA members, but they are free. How it works is this: starting in late May, every month throughout the season we will host people out at the farm here in Lawrenceburg for a few hours. We are thinking there will be either four, possibly five events, depending on how they go and they will all be mid-week in the evenings (if we have a substantial amount of interest in a weekend event, we could consider one at the end of the season). And although we are calling them "Cooking Classes" they are more like "Delcious Farm Food Preparation Classes". The goal is to show you everything that will be coming up in your CSA baskets, demonstrate some ways in which you can prepare these items, and give you a chance to see your food growing in the fields. We will also all snack heartily as the night goes along. Our hope is that this will help connect you to your farmers and farm a little more and give you plenty of good ideas for how to manage your vegetables.These events will serve as a sort of "prototype" for genuine cooking classes when we eventually have a commercial kitchen. But anyone who signs up for the CSA, will always get a significant discount on any events we hold. This year, that discount for CSA shareholders is 100% off!We will be announcing the official dates soon. Let us know your thoughts, inputs, questions. And we do still have CSA shares available, so please tell your friends!It will be a kid-friendly event, and a good chance to meet like-minded folks and to get to know your farmers!We hope to see you, well, here!-Jesse + Hannah.

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FRANKFORT CSA UPDATE: WE HAVE A DROP SPOT!

As we mentioned last week, we received enough inquiries from the good residents of Frankfort to decide to extend our CSA to the area! And we now have the delivery location!We will be taking our CSA shares to the Kentucky Coffee Tree (which we love dearly) on Friday evenings and dropping them there for you to pick up. Let us know if you have any questions and of course you can click HERE to learn more about how the CSA works.-Hannah + Jesse.KY Coffeetree 

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FRANKFORT CSA.

Hey friends!We we have decided to expand our CSA to Frankfort with one catch: at least for the moment, we cannot provide home delivery in Frankfort as we can in Lawrenceburg and Versailles. So we need your help with finding a central location where we can drop the CSA shares on Friday evenings somewhere in town. This can be a store, a house, wherever you think! Email us if you're interested or if you have suggestions for a delivery spot. Also, go here for more info on our CSA!-Jesse and Hannahtomatoes.  

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