Now at the beginning of the season we have a wide variety of seasonal offerings, including tasty salad and cooking greens, kale, chard, spring mix, head lettuce, sunflower shoots, spring onions, and radishes. These vegetables are Nature’s gift to us after a winter of foods from the root cellar and canning jars and grocery stores; the sweet and bitter Spring vegetables are the perfect medicine to cleanse our systems and satisfy our palates with endless possibilities for new recipes and old favorites.
When you bring your CSA share home and arrange the contents beautifully on your counter for a look-see, then the vibrant colors and intricate textures, scents and feel of the leaf and root will begin to speak to you in the ancient language of well being.
What you may not know is that this perfection before you is the result of a season of seeding, soil preparation, planting, covering, protecting, harvesting, washing, and packing. These vegetables are brought to your hands by the gentle and loving care of our farmers, apprentices and volunteers. During the time of Covid19, when personal contact was limited, we were nonetheless thinking of you, planning for you, and growing for you in fond expectation--remembering back to vegetables most called for, the ones that gave most pleasure and remembering it all even down to your favorite varieties!
In the coming weeks and months we will present here a variety of viewpoints of life on the farm in hopes of bringing you closer to the divine origins of the foods you eat from our soil. Remember that when your vegetables arrive, they are still living, still imbued with the forces they received from earth and air and sky and clouds and rain and sun and moon and all the planets in all their living wonder dancing across the star-filled heights. All of these made your vegetables alive.
Here at Against the Grain, we keep our agriculture in the realm of the living: the living grass that feeds the cow, the lovely living manure she gifts to the compost which grows warm with caring for the millions of teeming tiny lives living within through the course of a year; still living, it meets the living Earth where the seed falls and sprouts alive and grows its way into your hands. How beautiful this delicate balancing act, keeping life in all our work. Because once food dies, the energy of life recedes and our bodies must work to enliven it again for our use. And that is hard work for the body to perform! But living food carries you along in the stream of the living, letting you know that you are connected to all living beings in mutual recognition. Gee, who would think the food we eat could be so amazing! Well, we do...