Herbal Workshops Announcement!

Come one, come all to my herbal workshops this summer! 

For a listing of workshops, visit my blog herbal-and-recipe blog, Radical Kitchen .

Yay!!

Join Radical Root’s CSA! Spots still available!

Huck learning the drive the tractor.

Our CSA starts the weekend after this one, and we still have room for people to join!  Tell your friends!  Your family!  Your co-workers!

CSA members and market customers:  We are excited to bring you our delicious, nutrient dense food!  For those interested in joining our CSA, please visit www.radicalrootfarm.com .  Click on the CSA sign up button for more info!

Don’t forget:  we will be selling and doing CSA drop-offs at both Green City Market and Logan Square Market this year, as well as an on-farm pick up at Prairie Crossing.

Thanks everyone!  See you at the market!

–Alison, Alex and Huckleberry

Our new hoophouses

Working with Huck on my back.

Our bee boxes! Get ready for Radical Root Honey this year!

Join Our CSA for 2011! ALSO: Work for Radical Root!

Hello again!

We are gearing up for the 2011 season….reading, planning, ordering.   On top of our new job: parenting!

Our website has been updated, so check it!: www.radicalrootfarm.com

Join our CSA for your boxes of health and deliciousness this season!

I am also updating Radical Kitchen, a blog of thoughts on food, cooking, herbs and healing and new home to Radical Root’s newsletters: radicalkitchen.wordpress.com.

 

We also have a couple of job openings still left for our farm this season.  Please email us if you are interested in working with us!

Thanks everyone.  Stay warm!  And see you soon!

–Alison and Alex

First Market This Sunday!!

This Sunday, June 6th, we will be at the Logan Square market!  We will have kale, spinach, salad mix, mesclun mix and green garlic, to name a few!  The market will be from 10-3.  Please come see us there!!

Will Work for Tomato Plants?

Want to work for tomato plants?  Well, we here at Radical Root Farm have the perfect opportunity for you!  This week we have started putting our tomato plants in and next week we’ll start putting in the peppers and eggplant.  We have a lot of them to put in, and could use some help!  The deal: Come volunteer any day, weather permitting, from the 26th of May to June 4th for four hours helping to plant.  Your reward: your choice of up to eight (certified organic, mostly heirloom) tomato plants.  Pick out whatever varieties you’d like to grow!

Please repost or forward to anyone who might be interested.  If coming to volunteer, please give us one day notice!

–Alex

Eight Hundred Tomato Plants…

800 tomato plants, most of them heirlooms.

As you can see,  Alex is about to use all of our tomato plants as a slip and slide!  So much for tomatoes this year.  At least it was worth it!   Oh relax, tomato lovers,  I’m kidding!  These are a few short weeks shy of the being put out into the fields.  I am so pumped for tomatoes this year.  We are trying many new tomatoes this season (Black Prince, Sunkist, Buffalo, and Garden Peach, to name a few) as well as our personal favorites (Cherokee Purple, Brandywine, Green Zebra, Sungold).  I can practically taste the pico de gallo!  And bruchetta!  And gazpacho and salsa!

For our climate, tomatoes traditionally go in the field around memorial day.  Until then, we keep them cozy and covered at night.

Alison on the tractor.

Before the rain, we also got a chance to till the cover crop under so it can break down in the soil, supplying it with more nutrients.  Here I am tilling our lower fields.

New Blog: Radical Kitchen!

Radical Root Farm has just started another blog!  In addition to this one, I have started Radical Kitchen .  It will be more of a cooking blog, and more aimed towards our CSA members.  The last blog entry I just wrote had a sort of herbal-minded slant, though, so I will be writing about lots of other different food-related things, too.

Check it out!: www.radicalkitchen.wordpress.com

Planting!

We have been transplanting and direct seeding like madmen.  In our fields, we have planted kale, broccoli, cabbage, onions, and leeks.  We have also seeded spinach, carrots, beets, salad mix, cilantro and dill.  And we have my herbal garden all planted!  For my herbs, we have the culinary favorites (thyme, sage, chives) and the medicinally charged (elecampange, wood betony,  nettles, borage, hyssop, valerian, calendula).  We feel very ahead things this year, which is great!  Our sprinkler has had to work a little harder this spring, however.  (If anyone knows any kind of rain dance, get on a train and get up here!  We need you.)  But otherwise, things are going swimmingly.  Here is us a few weeks ago with our wonderful Wisconsin farmer friends, Kevin and Joni, practically swimming in onions at our first planting of the season!:

The season's first planting....we look cold!

Hundreds of Precious Onion Babies, each planted with love!

Since we are trying to get more varieties of vegetables on our plate this year (literally!), what you see are five different kinds of onions!  They include New York Early, New York White, Chippolini Gold Coin (they look like disc-like, flattened golden onions, and are supposed to have exquisite flavor), Alissa Craig (a huge, more mild-tasting onion, not to mention Alex’s favorite), and Red Wing (a beautiful red variety).  Yes, they all look the same now, but just wait until they grow!

Stay tuned, more recent pics of the field will be coming!

Full Steam Ahead!

Onions and Herbs

Kale, Parsley and Broccoli

These pictures were taken a few days ago, and they have grown plenty since!  You can practically watch these babies grow!  We are getting super antsy with this beautiful weather to get our hands in the dirt.   We want to start gearing up to plant these little greens.  We’re hungry!

Our stocked up winter pantry is almost depleted.  Our frozen kale is almost gone.  We are ready to grow!  Luckily, our seedlings are looking vibrant and healthy and full of life.

Some seedlings are, of course, a little slower; celeriac, for instance, which we seed now and wait forever to harvest (mid-October!), takes a while to germinate.  They are just starting to get there.  Our stinging nettles are very tiny, so we will see how they turn out.  (We will hopefully get enough to make a few tinctures and dry some for tea.)  All in all, we are very happy with our seedlings’ healthy state of being!

In other news, we bought a hoop house!  This will help us immensely with season extension.  A long-term goal of ours as farmers is to  grow throughout the winter.  (Or at least most of it!).

What we (ok fine, Alex) disassembled and brought to our field to reconstruct.

And finally in Radical Root news, we built a rolling dibbler!  This was with the incredible help of our ultimate DIY farmer friends, Kim and Rachel from Sweet Home Organics.  For those of you who are not farmers, a rolling dibbler marks out the spots for transplants.  If you are not transplanting with a tractor and do most things by hand like we do, it is pretty useful to have!

Kim and I screwing on the dibbling scoops.

Alex showing how it will be done in the field.

Hours later, we are done!

Whew!  And that is us in a nutshell!  We have a lot planned for the next few weeks, so I will keep the updates coming.  Stay hungry, CSA members of the present and future!  Boxes of deliciousness are a’comin’!

Greenhouse Days

This picture was taken a couple of weeks ago.   Alex is watering our onions, and we have since seeded kale, broccoli, celery and celeriac.   (Is your mouth watering yet?  Or does only mine water for green vegetables?).  Most everything has sprouted from tiny seeds into little green things reaching for the sun.  It’s all so exciting!

We are also expanding our herbs this year, medicinal and culinary.  We have seeded thyme, sage and summer savory (a supermarket’s fallen herb, very old-fashioned, very hard-to-find and very delicious!).   We also seeded nettles, an extremely nutritional wild green that is difficult to cultivate, but we are trying it out.

In CSA news, we are starting to fill up!  If you are looking to join, please email us and we can hold your spot.  We are super excited this year for our boxes.  So let us know!