Afternoon, y’all!  79° and breezy and a long lunchtime nap — we’ll take it!  We hope the eatin’ has been good where you’re at.  Here at the farm, we’ve been eating lots of salad, lots of homemade pizza, and lots of tomato sandwiches.  Those three things could keep us fed and happy for a very long time!  But sometimes we manage something new.

Down below the photos, we’ve listed a few recipes we’ve been loving lately.  Some CSA members have also been sharing recipes via email, the comments sections here on the blog, and over at our Facebook page.  We’ll try to highlight some of those soon as well.  And plans are still afoot for adding forums to this website, so you can share your recipes and cooking adventures directly; we’ll keep you posted!

Here are some tasty ideas for working through these early summer CSA shares and farmers market finds.  Most of them would be fantastic fare for your Fourth of July BBQ!  Lots of these posts link to other great recipes too.

Ginger Scallion Sauce at Chocolate & Zucchini

Red, White & Blue Roast Potatoes and Firecracker Potato Salad (two recipes) at Babble

Fondant Fennel from Edward Schneider at Mark Bittman

Raw Beet Salad at Just Braise

Quick Sauté of Zucchini with Toasted Almonds at Smitten Kitchen

Chard, Onion, and Gruyère Panade at Orangette

101 Fast Recipes for Grilling at The Minimalist

Soon, it should be easier to search recipes we’ve posted or linked to here on the farm blog.  In the meantime, you might enjoy just browsing the posts with recipes.

Enjoy your holiday weekend!  What will you be eating?

It started out like any other Monday — squash pick, chicken feeding.  Then some onion trimming, as you see above.  Then the day turned wild.  Stay tuned.

It’s a quiet, pleasant early evening out in the greenhouse.  There’s the snip of scissors, the rustle of dry onion stems, and off-camera, the satisfying sound of weeds being torn up out of the gravel.  A good bit of laughter, too, helps pass the time.

Wednesday photos may appear on Thursday mornings!  Wednesdays find me in Richmond well into the evening, delivering vegetables for our CSA and talking about squash varieties, irrigation, summers in Richmond, and babies with folks at our pick-up in Church Hill.

We do market-style CSA pick-ups, which means all the items in each week’s share are displayed in bins or baskets on tables, with signs indicating how much to take.  Some veggies are by the item or by the bunch, and others — like these gorgeous Candy onions — need to be weighed.

Mmmm … sweet yellow onions, curing in the greenhouse.  We’ve grown this variety, called Candy, for several years.  It stores surprisingly well for a sweet onion — a few weeks at least, sometimes a couple months.  You’ll start seeing them in your CSA shares this week.

This hasn’t been our best summer for onions, perhaps because the ground was so cool and wet this spring when we planted them.  So enjoy their extra-short season this year!