Hello friends and members!
Greetings from the farm!
We’ve been fortunate to have great weather over the past few weeks. It’s allowed us to start our field work and keep close to being on schedule (spring weather is usually a wild card to plan around). On top of that we’ve been able to take some great walks in the area, and have discovered several mysterious burrows:
Perhaps they belong to a fisher or a badger? Heather and Maybelle spotted two different brownish furry animals recently, and they’re definitely not weasels! There has been an incredible explosion of gophers over the past two seasons, so we’re not surprised that someone higher up the food chain is taking an interest. That’s ok with us, too-gophers can cause quite a bit of damage to our crops.
Critters are not the only busy ones around the farm. We’ve seeded 5 beds of peas and a bunch of cilantro. Napa Cabbage and the first three successions of broccoli were transplanted yesterday, and the first round of the lettuce, kale and collards will go in tomorrow. Here’s some cool photos of the transplanting process and results:
How exciting! The first transplanting day really feels like the official start of the season.
We’d also like to welcome our employees to the farm and introduce them to you. We’ve got four fantastic people this year: Michele (who saved our hides last season when we suddenly lost our main employee) Maria (a super sharp high school student who lives on a farm down the street from us) her sister Elizabeth (who will join us as soon as college is done for the year), and our friend Erin who will spend two days a week with us and the rest of the time working other jobs in St. Paul where she lives. It looks like a fabulous crew this year!
Have you signed up for your CSA share this year? If you are a returning member, welcome back and thank you for letting us grow your food! Continued support from year to year not only provides stability for our farm but also helps to build this community which we value so highly. Nothing is more rewarding to us than relationships with members that last for years and years. We love hearing about births, job changes, new degrees, and everything else that comes with having an adopted family of local-food-loving vegetable enthusiasts! We’d really love to get about 40 more members, so if you would like to join us and haven’t, it’s not too late. If you would like to tell your friends and co-workers about why they’d enjoy being a member of Sleepy Root Farm, we encourage you to do so!
In other exciting news, we’ve added two new sites for picking up boxes: Mother Earth Gardens in south Minneapolis, which fills a really big gap in our delivery area, and the Norman Pointe II office building in Bloomington. Many thanks to both host sites! Help us spread the word that the freshest, cleanest, tastiest local produce is now available in two new areas of the Twin Cities.
One of the coolest improvements to our farm this season is on our website! Heather has put her 15 years of culinary experience to work and has created a great recipe section that includes her own recipes, submissions from members, and a collection of favorites from some of her most-loved sources. We will still continue to include recipes in every newsletter. Check out this new feature and tell us what you think!
We’ll keep in touch, and are so excited that the first CSA box goes out in about a month and a half!
All the best from all of us,
Heather, Brandon, Maybelle and Frank
sleepy root farm 