It’s spring in the mountains. Pale buds dot the apple trees. Our quince is in full, blushing flower. Sap seeps from just-pruned grapevines.
The growing season is about to begin.
In a few weeks, we’ll transition from our winter CSA into our main season CSA. It’s a larger share than our winter box, with more diversity and the option to upgrade to our Rundle: a combination veggie box and festive beverage. The Rundle is our favorite part of the CSA. It puts our geeky wine obsessions to good use.
We’ve been retrofitting our website with new upgrades: better photos, more recipes, and streamlined add-on marketplace navigation: all in the name of making agriculture more digestible.
Like everyone else in this consumerist schema, we don’t sell things. We sell experiences. Local veggies in their rarified form are too raw for a TikTok population. There must be aesthetics, ethos, and of course, built-in freebies.
Sustainability takes some cultural rigging. It’s amazing how much coding a farmer can learn.
On the Farm
We’re heavily tailoring this year’s crops to our microclimate. Humid summers and dry Augusts make for tricky planting. Couple that with intense insect pressures courtesy of our neighbor’s cattle pasture and…we have to be choosy about what we grow.
Our plan leans both tropical and Mediterranean: early-harvested green frying tomatoes, heirloom Iraqi eggplant, sweet peppers, tomatillos, bitter melon, rhubarb, basils, edible thistles, thyme, oregano, and more mint than we’ll ever need.
We’re trying a few new botanicals this season: yellow gentian, centaury, and common dandelion. We use all of these in our botanical wines. Dandelion, in particular, is especially essential. We make good use of wildcrafted plants, but our sparkling dandelion wine, Lion’s Tooth, calls for more blossoms than our speck of earth can offer.
If you have any spare dandelion blossoms at the time of this writing, please let us know. We’re serious!
In The Vineyard
As the farm wakes up, so does the vineyard. Nearly an hour east in Atoka, our vines are starting to bud. This is an old vineyard in deep disrepair. We’ve done our best to rehabilitate it, but last year, its brittle fencing did little to keep out the deer. Our vines suffered a great deal of damage.
We’ve done everything we can this winter to repair the breaches. Now, it’s time to see if our work holds. A little compost and some good old fashioned love should help, too.
In the Winery
In the winery, our cellar season is just beginning. We start the year by straining off our walnut-infused brandy. This becomes the base for our Nocino Americano. We’ll soon send our now fortified wines through a series of herbal infusions, staggering production into the summer. We’ll finish each batch with an herbal-infused syrup or caramelized sugar. Then, a good rest in tank before bottling.
It’s a fluid, seasonal art.
This will be our third vintage. It’s hard to believe that we’ve been making wine in this small, converted garage for years now. Every season feels like revisiting an old friend. Like no time passed at all.
Life’s like that. Time always moves faster than we realize. Working the land, one feels the circular nature of time. We’re just passersbys in this life. One moment we’re here, the next, well…life carries on.
Everything has its season. We’re hoping that ours is just beginning.
In the Kitchen
We’re really loving our new, recipe-centric approach to the CSA. One of the most common struggles our CSA members face is knowing how to cook the vegetables in their shares. We get it. It takes time to get to know a plant in the kitchen. Who has time anymore?
Our share of the harvest is generally whatever doesn’t make it into the CSA. That makes for a lot of unplanned, super-seasonal cooking. We’re getting pretty good at creative cookery on our end. The photography’s not bad, either.
The fringe benefits end up in our CSA members’ inboxes: recipes for the drab winter harvest, perked up with pops of color and flavor. Eating local, made a little less boring. A virtuous cycle, indeed.
Our Ramadan and Holi recipes were especially great. Give them a try and see for yourself. Let us know what you think.
Feedback
Community is built when we are in conversation with each other. Was there something you loved in this month’s newsletter? Or hated? Do you have a question about something we said, or a response to us?
We want to hear from you! Comment using the button below or email us at contact@artemisia.farm.