There’s your intrepid Farmer Ali, and there’s our greens field all covered in snow.  It’s really something to behold!  We took a walk through the fields yesterday and crossed our fingers that it would begin to melt in time for this week’s CSA harvest.

But when Ali headed out to the fields early this morning, he discovered that this foot of snow makes for nigh-impossible picking.  Root vegetables like rutabagas and turnips are stuck firmly in the ground under compacted snow, and our greens and cabbages are almost completely invisible.

We’ve made the decision to postpone this final pick-up by one week, until next Wednesday, December 30.  So that means there will be no vegetable delivery this week at all, and we’ll bring everything next week instead — same place, same time.

We hope this will work out for everyone, and we really appreciate your understanding and patience.

People, we have been remiss.

We’ve been sending you home with bags full to bursting with collards, kale, mustard greens, turnip greens, chard, rape, and more every week for ages now … but when it comes to helping you scale those mountains of green — when it comes to telling you what you can do with them — our advice has been meager.

And that’s really too bad; we’re actually quite fanatical about the stuff, and it would be a shame to reach the end of a CSA season knowing we might have converted many a greens skeptic if only we’d provided recipes!

Greens are as good for you as you’ve always heard, chock full of iron and calcium and vitamin C and beta carotene.  They’re a great boost for your immune system as it fights everything from the common cold to, studies suggest, cancer.

But don’t force them down just because you should!  Greens are delicious and quite easy to prepare.  Although they span the flavor spectrum, from mustard’s potent spiciness to Red Russian kale’s surprising sweetness, they all take to the same basic preparation with ease.

We eat greens several nights a week this time of year.  Most of the time we chop them coarsely (with or without the stems, depending on our mood and our patience) and sauté them in olive oil with onion and garlic.  We usually eat them like that, or sometimes we add a couple glugs of balsamic vinegar or soy sauce, or a squeeze of lemon.  You can add almost any other vegetables to the sauté as well — in the early autumn, we thought two or three diced tomatoes added to the mix was particularly good.  Canned tomatoes would work just fine this time of year.

If you’ve got Red Russian kale (that’s the stuff with the purple veins and ruffled edges, at the very right edge of the photo above) here is what you must do: melt some butter in a wide skillet or a pot, and toss in a couple diced apples and a hearty amount of that kale.  A pound is not too much.   Cook until tender, stirring occasionally.  That’s it!  Unbelievably good.

Another idea is kale chips!  These win over lots of skeptics, but you’ll find yourself making them time and time again because they’re so fast and wonderful.  Arrange kale on a baking sheet in a single (or so) layer, toss with a little olive oil and salt, and bake at 375° for 10 minutes or so, giving the cookie sheet a shake or two if you remember, until the edges get crispy.  We usually do a double batch.

Two other greens recipes we love, both from the wonderful food blog Orangette:

Braised Winter Greens with Chickpeas, Onions, and Garlic Fast, and great with any greens.  Especially good with a poached or fried egg on top.

Chard, Onion, and Gruyère Panade This isn’t complicated but it does take some time to come together — not a quick weeknight supper, but a great simple meal for a chilly weekend lunch or supper.  This is comfort food of the highest order, rendered from the simplest ingredients: greens, onions, garlic, bread, cheese, and broth.

We’ve got another favorite recipe on deck for tomorrow the first moment we can stop gazing at the baby.  In the meantime, what are your favorite ways to prepare greens?

Nearly everywhere we look these days, we see that the earth is preparing to rest.  Our frost-hardy crops are green and gorgeous still, but bare trees sway sleepily against a crisp early December sky.  The summer crops are all gone, either already plowed under or standing shriveled and forlorn after so many cold nights.  The chickens are molting and their egg production has dropped to almost nothing.  The goat is still giving lots of milk, but her coat is thick now, and every morning she gives a loud “MAAAAA!” as if to say, “Hey now!  What’s with all this rain and mud?  Give me August!”  Saddest of all, our crew have all gone home, to Rhode Island and DC and Oklahoma, where they’ve traded their rainboots for fireside slippers and are planning their next adventures.

But we know it’s all part of the cycle of a farm year.  We know it because the garlic told us so.

Remember this?

Now it looks like the picture above.  We’ll let it do its work underground all winter and early spring, while we huddle close by the wood stove with seed catalogs and hot cocoa and tax forms and our gorgeous, gorgeous new baby.

Goodness!  Between preparing for the Winter CSA and preparing for this new baby, posting has been a bit light around here!  Here then are a few recent scenes from the farm to tide you over till we get back on track with the daily photos.

Our days are full and lovely, and we cannot thank y’all enough for making this life possible for us.

Autumn’s temperatures bring with them a host of cool-weather crops we look forward to all summer long: kabocha squash, broccoli, Red Russian kale, Honeycrisp apples…

(Speaking of apples, this mama-to-be is seriously craving some pie.)

You might not think of lettuce as a fall crop, but here in Virginia, it is way too hot to grow the stuff during the summer.  So it’s always such a delight when the temperatures turn and we can grow our lettuce mix again.  It’s sweet, tender, and gorgeous as all get-out — and it’s in your CSA shares this week.  Enjoy!

Yes, indeedy!  Garlic is one of our very favorite things to grow and to eat, but we didn’t grow it this year — we were still farming full-time up at our old place in Northern Virginia during garlic-planting time last year.

But Claire and Shannon spent the better part of this gorgeous, gorgeous autumn day putting 150 pounds of beautiful seed garlic in the ground.  We’ve tried out a few varieties over the years, and our very favorite is a hardneck variety called Music.  It’s the only kind we grow now.  It has beautiful purple-white cloves and a strong perfect garlic flavor, and keeps very well.

We’ll have lots more to share about garlic next spring and summer!  And it will start appearing in CSA shares sometime in July — if all goes well, it will be a weekly staple till the end of the season.

As someone who would sooner give up the air she breathes than give up garlic, this is a very good thing.

Seriously.  I do not know where we’d be without these two.  Shannon and Claire both arrived at Frog Bottom this spring, from locales and lifestyles far more cosmopolitan and sane, and took to life and work here at the farm like ducks to water.  They arrive every morning full of vim and vigor.  Their sweet humor and incredible work ethic make this a joyful place to live and work — and, quite concretely, make it possible for us to farm.

It’s impossible to imagine our first year here at Frog Bottom without these two wonderful women, and if it’s okay with everyone, I’m just going to stay in denial a bit longer that they’re leaving us in a few weeks.

It’s with gratitude that we’ve been enjoying some fine roast chicken on these recent chilly nights.  We eat this chicken and think of the good weather, the uninterested predators, our kind neighbors, our rockin’ farm crew, and this lifestyle which allows us to produce so much of the good food that nourishes us.

If you feel up for it, follow a bit of the journey these chickens made by clicking here.

Are you looking for some good folks to buy good meat from?  For now we’re only raising enough meat for our own little family and workers, but here in Pamplin we’re lucky to live near two great families who raise pastured animals on a small-scale commercial level.  Check out Ault’s Family Farm & Apiary and Consider the Lilies Farm.

And that means a big ole CSA harvest full of roots and greens!  Three cheers for Claire, please, who’s washing off these gorgeous Easter Egg radishes on a very chilly morning!

We got started in farming by first spending several years working for other farmers.  This is definitely the path we recommend.

(You can read a bit more about our thoughts on “good, on the ground, in-the-mud-and-the-muck training” over at the profile Serious Eats did on us last month. We were honored to participate in their Meet Your Farmers series and I can’t believe we’re only remembering to share this with y’all now!  Can I blame pregnancy brain? Winter CSA preparations? Learning how to milk a goat?)

After learning from some incredible folks who had figured out how to make farming a viable and sound career choice, we started our own farm in 2006, on land we leased from Susan and Chip Planck of Wheatland Vegetable Farms.

(Since we’re sending you all over creation today, why not read this Washingtonian article, which profiles the Plancks as well as some of our other good farm friends from Northern Virginia?)

We sold at DC area farmers markets for three years before buying Frog Bottom.  I suppose we thought we’d always make our living this way, by growing for market: working those fields in all kinds of weather, rising before dawn on weekend mornings, laughing and learning with our customers, packing up the truck again at the end of market, and heading back to the farm to do it all over again.

We love doing that, and thank goodness farmers markets are still a big part of our lives!

What we didn’t know back in our Northern Virginia days was how much we’d also come to love the CSA approach to growing vegetables and getting them to folks.  We decided to add a CSA to our farm when we moved because it seemed to make good business sense.  We were leaving a major metropolitan area for a region with smaller cities, and it seemed smart to offer different ways for folks to access our vegetables.  But we’d never actually run a CSA before.

Well: we love it.  We love being able to plan well in the winter and spring.  We love the security.  We love the sense of adventure and fun our CSA members bring to eating.  We love how connected we feel to y’all.

We love it so much that we decided to offer a Winter CSA this year, and a much bigger Summer CSA next year.  And that’s what Ali is up to in today’s Daily Farm Photo.  We’re going to be renting some extra land from some wonderful neighbors (and CSA members!) next year, and we’ve just started the process of preparing that ground.  We’ve plowed it and tilled it, and we’ll probably till it once more before putting in a winter cover crop of hairy vetch and rye.  This cover crop will do all kinds of good things to protect the soil and get it ready for vegetables next year: prevent erosion, maintain moisture, suppress weeds, and turn atmospheric nitrogen into nitrogen our crops can use.

Beyond the new field you can see one of our current fields, growing some of the delicious cooking greens that have already started showing up in your CSA shares.  The weather is turning, and those greens only get better after the frost — yum!