Adrienne’s Salad Dressing
1/3 c. olive oil
2/3 c. rice wine vinegar
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 Tbsp stone ground mustard
2 Tbsp chopped fresh herbs (sage, thyme, marjoram, cilantro, etc)
Add all ingredients to a jar, shake up, and serve over fresh greens of all kinds. Delicious over arugula, spinach, baby lettuce heads, and our salad mix!
Spring at the farm. Portland CSA sign up time is here.The season is upon us. Green blades of grass seem to multiply every day as I look out across the spring pastures here at New Beat. A brilliant emerald Winter Rye covercrop blankets the veggies fields protecting them from spring rains. The potential of this coming growing season is teaming with energy in our already overflowing greenhouse, packed with veggie seedlings. Our bodies crave spring greens and dream of the fresh tomatoes to come. There is a lot of work to do between now and our first harvests out of the fields, but before we know it we’ll be back at market and harvesting for our weekly Portland CSA delivery.
Want to make sure your get to enjoy fresh, organic produce all season long? Want to support a collective of sustainably minded, organic, horse-powered farmers? Looking for an affordable way to help your family eat more nutritious foods? Sign up for our CSA today! You can either sign up here on our website or mail in a 2016 CSA Sign up Form with deposit. We deliver to two locations in Portland on Munjoy Hill and at Woodford’s Church. You can also sign up for our Market Share, good at our farmstead in Know and the Belfast Farmer’s Market. We look forward to having you be a part of our CSA community.
THANKSGIVING PORTLAND DELIVERY SHARE
Pick up on Tuesday Nov. 24th at 70 Merrill St. Munjoy Hill 4:30 to 6pm
Thanksgiving Share Contents
1/2 lb. Salad Mix
1 lb. Kale
1.5 Lb. Brussels Sprouts
1 Red Cabbage
1 Butternut Squash
1 Winter Luxury Pie Pumpkin
5 lbs. Potatoes
3 lbs. Orange and Purple Carrot Mix
2 lbs. Rainbow Beets
1 lb. Parsnips
3 lbs. Rutabaga
4 heads Garlic
1.5 lbs. Yellow Onions
The peepers were in chorus this morning at sunrise walking up to the barn to do chores. Their cheerful chirps welcoming the day and night this time of year. More than a warm sunny day they signal the shift in the season to me. It’s hard to believe that the weather is finally turning and we are starting to get our hands in the soil after a very long winter. Fresh blades of green grass are poking through the remnants of last years growth and bright red robins stick their beaks into the just thawed ground in hunt for earthworms. The phoebes are mating and our horses are sassy with spring fever. Soon our new lambs will be out on fresh grass for the first time after a few months on mothers milk and second cut hay. Our first lettuces, herbs and salad turnips got seeded in our greenhouse last week and are already germinating. Our greenhouse is bursting at the seams with seedlings bound for your shares and market baskets this season.
We broke ground last Wednesday (hooray!) and have gotten a half acre plowed, disced and ready for planting. Check out this video of Ken plowing. Beets, peas, chard, cabbage, broccoli, and lettuces will all go in this week. We are excited to welcome Alexis Zimba-Kirby to our farm crew this summer. She started a few weeks ago and has been a huge help getting the season going. Check out her bio here.
It all starts now, the intention in the seed, the energy of the earth and hands to plant them. If you haven’t signed up yet for our delivery CSA or market share nows the time to secure your share of the harvest! Spread the word about how great it is to support horse powered farms and to be a part of the New Beat Farm community. This month we are going to have a big push to fill our shares for the summer and we can use all your help. If you have a workplace or community space that you want to post our flyers or brochures at please let us know and we’ll mail them to you. First Summer Share this year will be June 23rd, looking forward to seeing you all then!
Happy May! Adrienne and Ken
Want to hear more about what’s happening on other participating farm in our CSA? Check out a few of our Facebook pages.
Wow! What a start to March we have had. It is certainly nice to start seeing all this snow melt, and go outside without a jacket and hat today. You can feel the maple sap coursing through the trees, and the sun on my face is doing wonders to shed off some mid-winter stress.The 2015 season has started with 24 lambs being born in the past couple of weeks (and more to come). They have been an healthy and vigorous bunch despite the sub-zero weather some of them were born in a few weeks ago. Lots of female (ewe) lambs who are going to help our flock grow in number over the course of the coming years. Along with these new arrivals our onions and early flower seeds are germinating and the of the potential of the season is growing within us.
Now’s a great time to sign up for your share this season, especially now that we’ve made it easier for you by signing up and paying online! Hope you’ve taken the time to check out our new website format. It’s still a bit of a work in progress and we welcome your feedback. Now all our weekly shareholder newsletters will flow from our blog post through Mail Chimp directly to your inbox. (No more awkward attachments!)This is also helping to facilitate a better searchable recipe database. You can search by vegetable on the side bar of our blog page. Also on our web page, under Portland Summer Delivery Share you’ll see bio’s for the other horse-powered farms that are participating in our multi-farm summer share. We are really excite to welcome these farms into our CSA community. They will be contributing to our newsletters over the course of the season so you will get to know them individually as well. Check out their pages here:
Terranian Farm * Wild Miller Gardens * Sandy River Farm
Hope you have a great start to your spring and we look forward to seeing you this coming season!
Best, Adrienne & Ken
HAPPY NEW YEAR SHAREHOLDERS!
Hope you are enjoying the quietness of the season and are starting to contemplate your dreams for the summer ahead. We are grateful for this time of rest and reflection on the farm. It is a time when we get to come back to center after a busy season and look back on what worked well, what we’d like to improve on, and set our own dreams of how we hope next summer will go. Usually our conversations all revolve around sustainability whether is be working towards making our farm as self-sustaining as possible from a farm input standpoint, to making sure our bodies and minds can sustain the rigors of our profession, to the ever looming need for economic sustainability.
These reflections coupled with a desire to collaborate more with like-minded farms has led us on a path to starting a horse-powered multi-farm CSA this year with other horse-powered farms in our area. We will be collaborating with 4 other horse-powered farms in Waldo County to bring you a season of vegetables that more than your belly can feel good about. In signing up for our horse powered CSA you should feel good about supporting a model of farming that is helping us all slow down to a more sustainable pace that can keep our society thriving generation after generation.
SUPPORTING DRAFT POWERED FARMS YOU ARE:
~Helping to reduce the carbon footprint of the food you consume
~Supporting family scale farm enterprises and helping to keep your dollars in the local economy.
~Truly supporting a movement to help Maine feed itself –from the food in your share to the fuel it takes to produce it.
Our horses are fed hay that they make themselves right here on our farm, and eat grain that is grown right here in Waldo county. Compare that to a gallon of diesel being shipped across the world to run a tractor
More could be said, b
ut as current shareholders I’m sure you all have your own reasons for being members of our farm community, and we hope the number one reason is that your love the high quality organic food we produce and the fair price we sell it to you for. The farms we have invited to join us have a proven track record of growing quality organic produce, so with the start of our multi-farm CSA you can be sure we will keep the same high standards as before. You share will look much like the shares in the past in quantity and quality, it will just come from a handful of farms instead of just us. You also will get updates from all participating farms so you will broaden the farm community you are a part of!
As the days grow longer we are already beginning to get our greenhouse ready or the first seedlings to start in a month! Supplies are being ordered and seeds are in the mail! Your support this winter is our “seed money” for germinating great crops and helps ensure we have the best season possible. Having shareholders signed up early allows us to focus our efforts on getting the season started and provides us with the security of knowing who will be enjoying our delicious produce in the months to come. Hope you sign up today!
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