Hey hey readers, today is another day where I'm going to let the pictures do most of the talking.  All I really have to say is that we have been crushing it on the farm stand this week.  All the roofs have been sheeted with plywood (and boy is there a lot more to sheeting a roof than just throwing plywood up there, let me tell you).  Dylan and Oscar teamed up to cut and apply the actual plywood to the outside, while I drove a scissor lift around inside the atrium installing metal hardware and fitting ventilation blocking between the rafters.  Isaac was busy being the go-to man, doing anything and everything else that needed to get done so he was all over the place.  In the end (well, not really the end, there is still soo much to do) it all turned out great, and for some reason now the inside of the building feels even bigger to me.  But, I'll let you be the judge of that, have a look...

Being up in the scissor lift also gave me a great view of Karen's circle of flowers which lies directly behind the farm stand.  Bulbs and things having been starting to come up for weeks now, but it's still too early for anything to be in bloom.  It is going to look totally amazing when it all starts to pop.  Karen has been working super hard on it and I can't wait to see it all pay off for her!  Here it is...

Beauty, ain't she.  I hope you all enjoy a nice warm and sunny weekend!!

Til' next time,
Louis

The vegetables continue to grow this time of year, despite holidays, so we're harvesting today and for most folks we'll still be delivering to the usual pick up sites (there are a few special exceptions for office closures which will make our deliveries first thing Tuesday morning, but if you haven't already heard, it's probably not you). Today's share is a solid share of the standard spring fare: lettuce, radishes, turnips with greens and green garlic. The lettuce is Kweik, a lovely green butter head. We're starting to rotate through some of the more interesting lettuces at this point. The garlic is one of the two varieties we're growing, and is technically a hard neck, although the neck has yet to form and it is all tender at this point. Radishes are our standby, Pink Beauty, mild and sweet right now and the greens are good eating as well. The same goes for the turnips, Hakurei, which I'm sure you're all very familiar with by this point.

I'm looking longingly at a few new crops which might just make it into the shares soon. I'm keeping my lips sealed because I never know until the crop is actually harvested if it's actually going to make it into the shares. I'm just saying, there's a little more variety coming up soon. 

Meanwhile we're super busy in the fields getting all of the summer plantings into the ground. We're also setting up a brand new irrigation system which at some point will save us a lot of work, although it's a lot of work setting it up right now. 

Hope you're all having a great holiday!

Josh Volk
Vegetable Valet

Happy end of the week to everyone out there! Today's post is going to be short on words and big on pictures just like I promised last week, so this will be my short introduction and then I'll let the photos take it away. This week we got the trusses craned up just like we planned and then were able to start framing the roof around them, so here are some snapshots into the sequence of events that got those things up in the air.

And there is it.  These photos obviously don't cover every step so if anybody has any questions feel free to ask (or request more photos)!  Enjoy your weekend!

Til' next time,
Louis

Hey CSAers, it's Louis here filling in for Josh while he is nursing himself back to health at home for the day. In today's share we have familiar bunches of Hakurei turnips and Pink Beauty radishes alongside some lettuces of the Oak and Nevada varieties. A teeny bit of spring raab makes an appearance as well as something new for the season: Prize pac choi! It has been munched on in the field a little bit, but the farmers are very particular and only grabbed the best of the best for you CSAers, so I hope you enjoy! This here heat needs to take a chill pill so we can all keep cashing in on these spring time treats!

Til' next time,
Louis

Hello hot and sweaty blog readers, is everyone staying hydrated this week?  This heat made for good timing for us to be working inside (relatively speaking) on the cool concrete floor of the farm stand while we let the hand-crank crane do all of the heavy lifting for us.  As you can see the timber frame sentinels are now standing watch over the farm after four days of assembling, tweaking, and reassembling.  Once we got a system in place we started throwing beams up there left and right, but it was crazy like a beehive in there for a while as plumbers, HVAC, excavators, concrete pourers, and other sub-contractors were all buzzing around below us.  It made for a good week of hard hat wearing and teamwork making sure those things made it up there safely, but now we're ready for the real crane to show up on Monday or Tuesday and make some trusses fly.   We need to get the trusses out of the shop and up to the building site, which will be a job on its own, but then they'll get picked up by the crane one by one and carefully dropped into the brackets on top of the columns so they can be bolted into place and have a roof framed around them. 

Here is an action shot of Dylan and Oscar nailing some temporary metal straps around the column so it won't go anywhere we don't want it to in the next few days.  We have beautiful, black, powder-coated connecting brackets that will join all the beams and columns together eventually, but for now we just secured everything in place with boards and metal straps until we can drill out all the required holes for the giant bolts.  Oscar by the way is the newest addition to our motley crew, and boy does Isaac know how to pick them.  It's like the four of us have been working together since day one.  He's a great worker, a super friendly guy...It's becoming harder and harder thinking about leaving the framing crew and returning to working with that other wonderful group of people out in the fields.  How did I get stuck in the middle of so many great people?  Anyways, I'm anticipating some awesome pictures next week as we fly the trusses in so make sure to stick around so you don't miss em'.  Here's wishing for a nice and cool weekend!

Til' next time,
Louis

We're done with the raab from the over wintered brassicas but this week we have a bit of spring raab in the share. It's basically a mild mustard with a delicious stem and little flower buds like tiny broccoli. It's a bit immature so there aren't so many buds, bud the real treat is the leaves an stems so we harvested anyway thinking it might not make it through this week's predicted heat. It can be eaten raw but it typically quickly cooked in hot olive oil and sprinkled with salt.

Lettuce is doing well and we have a red variety, finally, and also a green. Some of the red is a variety called Samantha and some is a similar variety called New Red Fire. The green varieties we've been harvesting are Royal Oak and Emerald Oak the later having broad leaves and the former having deeply cut leaves.

Green onions make an appearance this week. These are a delicious addition to salad or if you prefer to mask the onion flavor a bit they can be cooked. Of course the greens and whites are equally tasty.

To round out the shares we have a new round of the Pink Beauty radishes. As always the roots are the star but the greens are also good eating. I prefer to chop them and eat them cooked but I know some folks eat them raw in salads or on sandwiches.

Hey, hello, and a happy gloomy Thursday to everyone!  I apologize for the seemingly sporadic posting recently, I was sick last week and took a blog sabbatical two weeks before that so I'm feeling a little rusty on the blogging front.  But, anyways I'm back now, I plan to be back indefinitely, and I shall now get on with the post!

So, today I wanted to give a brief introduction into the nifty governance model that we've chosen to use to operate as a group of people working together in a cooperative.  It serves as a set of rules and protocols that tells us things like how to run our meetings, how conflicts are resolved, how the review process works, and pretty much anything else that involves communicating with fellow cooperators.  It has many different names depending on where in the world it's being used, but here in Sherwood it is known to us as "dynamic governance" and the main principles are laid out in the colorful photo above.  I won't go through each item on the list, but the main idea is that it allows for a set of goals to be established for the organization as a whole (by the members), and then members act by "steering" the cooperative's actions/decisions/policies towards reaching those goals.  Everyone has a say, and any single member can veto or change a proposal if they have what's known as a "paramount objection", or an objection that is based on the overall goals that have been set for the cooperative at large.  This also helps with what's often called the "tyranny of the 51 percent".  In all democratic systems, if a vote is taken and 51 percent of the voters say one thing then that thing goes.  But, in dynamic governance, we value members consenting to a decision (but not necessarily agreeing to it) over a general consensus from the group as a whole.  This allows members to express their thoughts and suggest changes to proposals/policies/etc. that can then be tried out (maybe for a few weeks or months) and then returned to in the future to be reevaluated instead of just making a proposal law by voting on it.  This makes us more resilient and adaptive to change (hey, two words from the list), and creates a culture of good listening, trust building, and empowering (hey another word) individuals which only brings us closer together as a cooperative family.  I could go on and really get into the nitty gritty details (and maybe I will someday because I've been learning a lot from serving on the board and it is actually really interesting once you get past some of the jargon and protocol), but if I've taken anything away from learning about DG (as I like to call it) it's that everyone gets a voice and the goals of the cooperative are king...that is until a goal becomes irrelevant based on the direction the members of the cooperative decide to take in which case a proposal is formed and... oops here I go, getting into the nitty gritty like I said I wouldn't.  Let's just say that for now everyone getting a say is the big thing, and we'll save the other stuff for a more detailed post at a later date. :)

As we've been trying out and refining the DG procedures in our monthly all-farm meetings and now weekly "CoOp Love" Fridays where we have trainings specifically on being apart of the cooperative, my inspiration for this post has been building.  The more we meet and the more and more efficient we get at using this method I honestly feel a growing closeness and openness coming from the regular sharing of thoughts and ideas that occurs within our meetings.  Not only are the ideas shared, but they're actually heard and talked through by any members who have something to add.  When you get down to it, if there is anything I think a family should be good for it's supporting each other in exactly this way: promoting individual growth and group interconnectedness at the same time, which is easier said than done for any family, genetic or professional.  Overall I think family is what we're trying to cultivate at Our Table: between all future co-op members and within the local community in general.  I think I can speak for everyone when I say that creating family is one goal that won't become irrelevant any time soon.  Oh! and, what do you do when you start a new family that's going to grow and grow?  You mark your heights on a door jamb of course so you can chart your growth over time, which is exactly what we did after our meeting last week!  We are officially a family in my book now!

How much do you think we'll grow?  We'll check back again in a few months and see.  Maybe we'll make a contest out of it and you'll get to guess how big we'll all get after a seasons' worth of Our Table fixin's, we're all still growing boys and girls after all!

Til' next time,
Louis

Another very green share this week, full of salad fixings. The lettuce is still small but we have extra so two heads per share this week, as well as a few new varieties in some of the shares. Green garlic is back, a different variety this week, but it should be very similar. Hakurei turnips continue to come out of the hoop house. These are definitely the last from the hoop house but we'll have more from the field at some point in the future. There's a bunch of golden frill mustard in the mix and just a few sprigs of oregano which is really lovely right now.

The rain this weekend was perfect. Now I'm hoping we can get the irrigation set up so it can stop raining. We have lots of little plants to put in the ground this week and the shallots, onions, herbs and lettuce we planted last week are looking good.