by Megan Winfrey

I just returned from an absolutely amazing long weekend in West Texas with one of my very best friends. Four days of camping, hiking, swimming, driving, and letting this amazing state completely take our breath away. Hiking Guadalupe Peak, the tallest summit in Texas, was a huge accomplishment for me - and I couldn't have done it without the following recipe. This zucchini bread was tasty, filling, and easy to pack for an overnight hiking and camping excursion. I even made an extra loaf, wrapped it in foil, put it in a large ziploc bag, and froze it for when I got home!

Zucchini Bread

• 3 cups flour
• 1 tsp. salt
• 1 tsp. baking soda
• 1 tsp. baking powder
• 3 tsp. cinnamon
• 3 eggs
• 3/4 cup olive oil
• 1 1/2 cups sugar
• 3 tsp. vanilla extract
• 1 cup walnuts, chopped
• 2 cups grated zucchini

Preheat oven to 325ºF

Oil and flour two 8x4 inch bread pans. Sift flour, salt, baking soda, baking powder, and cinnamon together in a medium bowl. In a large bowl, beat the eggs, oil, vanilla, and sugar together. Add the dry ingredients and beat well. Fold in the zucchini and walnuts, then pour the batter into the bread pans. The batter will be quite thick, which will lend to a dense, moist bread.

Bake for 50-60 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. Cool for 20 minutes, remove from the pans, then let cool completely before slicing or freezing. This bread will stay fresh at room temperature for over a week.

CSA Box Contents Week of May 3rd

Over the past couple of weeks, we've caught two swarms of honeybees out at the farm. These bees have been seriously busy all spring - collecting pollen and nectar, building out comb, growing their colonies, and dividing the new, larger colonies by swarming - we're starting to feel just as busy! JBG has felt like a frenzy of activity this week as well. Our farm is full of the spring crops you've been seeing, AND now the summer crops are starting to come in too. This means lots and lots of hard work, but also lots and lots of great food coming your way.

The next month or so is going to be even busier than normal as we juggle two seasons at the same time. So this week, we wanted to give you a forecast. What's here to stay, what will be gone soon, and what you can expect to see in your CSA shares and at farmer's markets in the coming weeks. Texas has a unique seasonality in comparison with the rest of the country, and this is one of our favorite times of year to eat local!



The overlapping seasons of spring and summer are some of the biggest bounties of the year, and the best way to enjoy the food and take advantage of the bounty is by joining out CSA. Sign up for a membership today and see what we're talking about! We promise you won't regret it.

Want to join the hive? We're currently hiring for a Daytime Wholesale Crew, Tomato Crew and crew leaders, CSA Packing Crew. Must love loud music, organic veggies, hard work, and ice pops during those hot summer months. Check out our jobs page for more details.

Harvesting Now:

We're harvesting loads and loads of Onions right now - yellows, reds and whites. Enjoy onions with the greens still on, cut and put right on the grill for a spring treat. Larger onions will be around into the summer season.



Zucchini and Yellow Squash are really hitting their stride this week as our first field planting starts setting fruit. Anyone who has grown summer squash in a home garden knows that once these plants start fruiting, it's time to bust out the zucchini breads, fritters, and any other recipes you can think up to use up the bounty.

New Potatoes are eaten soon after being pulled from the ground, before their skin has "cured," or thickened up to withstand storage. Their thin, smooth skin is tender and delicious, and perfect for an early summer potato salad.

Nothing says summer like the smell of fresh Basil. We've begun harvesting our first round of basil this week!

• Grilled Yellow Squash with Feta and Cilantro from Eating Made Easy
• Garlicky Smashed Potatoes from Damn Delicious
• Cebollitas Asadas (grilled spring onions) from Muy Bueno Cookbook

New potatoes.

Get em While You Can:

As the weather heats up, and quickly, our winter and spring greens and herbs will slowly halt their growth and will bolt - farmer speak for going to seed. Make sure you get your fill on these before they are gone!

Spring greens won't be around for too much longer!

Greens: Kale, Collards, Chard, Lettuce will be around this month, but will phase out with the heat. Once cucumbers start coming in (soon!), enjoy a brief window of time when homemade, local green juices are the best way to beat the heat. Until then, there are plenty of great ways to enjoy your dark, leafy greens.

• Rainbow Chard and Carrot Hash from Cooking with Dana
• Thai Chicken Lettuce Wraps from William-Sonoma
• Kale Carbonara from Primavera Kitchen

Herbs: Dill, Mint, Parsley, and Cilantro grow great in springtime, but don't like hot temperatures. We hope to have these crops through the month of May, but they won't be around for much longer. Check out these recipes:

• Fresh Herb Chimichurri from Cafe Sucre Farine (season extension tip: freeze this chimichurri in ice cube trays for use all summer long!)
• Double Dill Carrot and Parsnip Chips from The Chalkboard Mag

Mint growing at the farm.

Brassicas: We're harvesting lots and lots of Cabbage (red, green and savoy!), Broccoli, and Cauliflower of all colors this week! Our spring brassica crop has a window of just about a month or two, so enjoy these favorites right now.

• The Greenest Salad from 101 Cookbooks (use up that broccoli and romaine!)
• Cauliflower Fritters from 12 Tomatoes

Coming Soon:

We are just weeks away from an influx of early summer crops. Now is a great time to join our CSA - take advantage of the bounty of both spring and summer in the coming weeks! We're highlighting a few recipes to enjoy the fringe season when spring and summer crops both fill your CSA shares.

Cucumbers, Peppers, Okra and Eggplant have started flowering and will be here before you know it. A great mix of rain and sunshine over the past few weeks is making for a very promising season ahead.

Coming soon!

Tomatoes have started to set and we are seeing the first green fruits on our plants this week. The first few weeks of tomato season are some of our absolute favorite CSA boxes - an extremely brief, 1-2 week window where you can make entirely local pico de gallo before the Cilantro season is over.

• Minty Green Juice from Austin Skinny Limits (use your cucumbers, greens and herbs all together while you can!)
• Shredded Kale, Tomato, and Avocado Salad from Dorie Greenspan

Freshly bunched beets are in full swing at our farm. Photo by Scott David Gordon

Thanks to Scott David Gordon for coming out to the farm these week to capture these photos! With highs near 90 degrees and a little bit of rain, Week 17 brought us our first push of early summer crops along with an abundance of the veggies we've been harvesting all spring. Enjoy these images from the week!

 

Look at all those beets!

Up close harvest. Photo by Scott David Gordon

Part of our field crew gets ready to transplant a second round of peppers. Photo by Scott David Gordon

Filling trailers with tomato cages. Photo by Scott David Gordon

We staked loads of tomatoes this week! Photo by Scott David Gordon

Tomato flowers. Photo by Scott David Gordon

Coming soon! Photo by Scott David Gordon

Rows of freshly staked tomatoes. Photo by Scott David Gordon

One of our newly-built harvest trailers - read last week's blog for more on these great tools! Photo by Scott David Gordon

Our grapes are really taking off! Photo by Scott David Gordon

Kale harvest. Photo by Scott David Gordon

A little squash coming along. Photo by Scott David Gordon

Winter squash starting to set fruit

The next succession of green beans is up and growing strong. Photo by Scott David Gordon

Sweet potatoes growing nicely. Photo by Scott David Gordon

Radishes - a springtime favorite. Photo by Scott David Gordon

We're just starting to harvest new potatoes this week

Potato field. Photo by Scott David Gordon

CSA Box Contents Week of Apr 25th

Photo by Scott David Gordon

Happy Earth Day to everyone in the JBG community! Today, April 22nd, we're celebrating this great planet that sustains us all. Whether you buy organic and local for your health, the health of your community, or the health of the planet, today we're commending you! Let's continue to inspire and challenge each other to do everything we can to make this a healthier place to live.

Earth Day is landing after an extremely rainy and muddy week out at the farm. It's been so muddy, getting anything done outside has been very difficult -- I've even been taking time this week to reply to a ton of unanswered of emails, which, as many of the JBG staff can attest to, I rarely find the time to do. I'll admit, the rain had me feeling nervous about flooding. It was not even a year ago that huge May rainfall after a historic drought came ripping through our farm, and that was not even the only 2015 flood we endured. This week we decided to prepare and rent a pump, in case our loading dock or a particularly low area of our fields filled with water. Luckily, neither was the case this week.

The farm was a mudpit after all the rain this week. Photo by Scott David Gordon

Earth Day has got me thinking about the wild weather we've experienced since I started farming - historic droughts followed by the wettest year on record since 1919. What's next? How do we prepare for an era of huge weather swings and climate change, when our jobs are directly related to the weather and climate? Agriculture depends on a stable weather pattern - we plant what we plant, when we plant it, because we think we know what kind of temperature, precipitation, and weather to expect.

The lesson for us at the farm is not to count on any one assumption about weather. We can do this by diversifying the farm. A great book for anyone interested in gardening during an uncertain period of climatic events is The Resilient Gardener, by Carol Lappe. Something she mentions over and over, is that "monoculture works best in periods of climatic stability. In periods of more erratic weather, monoculture will be riskier." As a CSA farm, we diversify by growing over 200 varieties of fruits and vegetables, not only to ensure that you get to eat a diversity of nutritious foods, but also to ensure that we'll have lots of variety for your CSA shares, despite what weather might come.

Our onions did great in this wet spring! Photo by Scott David Gordon

Last year, for example, the massive flooding took a toll on many of our summer crops. While we certainly still harvested tomatoes and peppers, we did not receive the abundance of a normal year due to some wild weather. Luckily, diversity provided us with a backup, and we filled CSA boxes with potatoes, purslane, onions, and storage crops we try to provide year round, like carrots and beets. Your plates were colorful and full, and we were able to make it through a tough year due to the fact that we were growing so many different crops.

So this week, as soon as these rains clear up, we're continuing to plant for summer. New Zealand and Malabar spinach , more basil and eggplants, lemongrass, and hopefully some sweet potato slips too. We're harvesting our spring crop of cabbage for markets this weekend, along with all of the greens, herbs, roots, and fruits you've been seeing over the past few weeks.

Thanks for supporting us in growing diversely and organically in Austin! Photo by Scott David Gordon

So on this Earth Day, I vow as your farmer to continue to diversify. JBG will continue to plant new varieties of vegetables every year. JBG will continue to try new growing techniques and new methods to ensure our pollinators and beneficial insects can thrive. We promise to grow organically, without using harmful chemicals that can damage the larger ecosystems which help to regulate our local and global weather patterns. We promise our farm will do what we can to keep our land productive and our waterways and communities clean.

What are you doing this Earth Day? Check out our second blog post this week for farm and food related events happening around Austin - we hope to see you around!

Photo from Farmshare Austin's upcoming Gardening for Beekeepers event.

April might be more than halfway through, but that doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of great events in the food community happening! Here's our roundup of farmer and foodie events for the rest of April. Celebrate Earth Month by filling your bellies with local foods!

April 23rd: Our Global Kitchen, Bob Bullock Museum, 1800 Congress Ave, Austin, TX 78701 (exhibit runs through July 24th, but stop by Saturday to chat with Tatiana from JBG at our table!)

April 23rd: ArtFest at the Sunset Valley Farmers Market, 3200 Jones Rd, Sunset Valley, TX 78745

April 23: Austin EarthDay Festival, Mueller Lake Park, 4550 Mueller Blvd, Austin, Texas 78723

April 24: Afternoon in the Garden, Zilker Botanical Garden, 2220 Barton Springs Rd, Austin, Texas 78746

April 30: Small Equipment Field Day, hosted by Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service & Sustainable Farm Supply -- Sand Creek Farm, 1552 CR 267, Cameron, TX 76520

April 30: Gardening for Beekeepers with TwoHives Honey, hosted by Farmshare Austin -- 3608 River Road Cedar Creek, Texas 78612