Happy New Year!  My favorite way to spend New Year's Day is to sift through the stack of seed catalogs that have flooded my mailbox for the past month, and get the bulk of the year's seed order placed.  About 75% of what I grow every year are tried-and-true favorite varieties, but I always love to try a few new things, too.  And it's selecting those new items that always takes me the longest.  It's really easy to get caught up in the shiny photos and slick descriptions of new or unusual varieties.  But whether or not a new crop or variety makes the cut always boils down to just three questions...Is it likely to grow well here?  Can I physically fit it in somewhere on this little farm?  And most importantly, will anyone buy it?  As soon as the seed orders are in, it's time to start planting again.  Before the end of the week, I'll start filling endless flats with seeds that will eventually grow into your spring and summer vegetables.  My little winter lull is just about over.  Let the farming begin again!

It is also time to start getting your memberships in for the 2013 CSA.  There are plenty of shares available this year for new members!  Subscriptions are available on a first-come, first-served basis until we are full.  Please note that we always fill up very quickly!    You'll find details about our CSA here.  You'll find a link to download the current membership form at the bottom of the page. 

Current CSA members: if you have not already renewed for 2013, and intend to do so, there's no need to rush a check into the mailbox this afternoon.  We will reserve a spot for you if you let me know that you plan to sign on again.

If the CSA is not for you, that's fine!  We appreciate all our customers' business, no matter how you choose to buy.  This year we will also continue to offer produce through the Raleigh Downtown Farmers Market (Wednesdays, April - October).  And the Midtown Farmers Market (Saturdays, April - October.  Yes, they've shortened the season for 2013, but we plan to be available to you year-round by participating in the off-season pick-up next winter.  You are also more than welcome to purchase here at the farm year-round should you live in the area or ever find yourself visiting nearby.

Brussels sprouts.  It's an awkward name for a vegetable that for me conjures up ideas of stinky slimy little cabbage-like things that belong to that unclassified class of "strange" vegetables that ordinary people don't eat unless they're disguised under a quart of heavy sauce. 

Brussel sprouts aren't really geared for this climate.  But the best way to get me to attempt anything new is to tell me that it can't be done.  So I had to try it.  I've unsuccessfully planted brussel sprouts the past few years; this year I've actually managed to produce a crop.  Maybe it was the cool/wet weather we had in late summer, instead of dry 100+ blasting heat.  Maybe I just got lucky.  But after four months of pampering these picky plants, there's finally sprouts out there!

I've thoroughly enjoyed watching these things grow.  It's like some sort of alien brassica plant from another galaxy.  The plants just look odd.  They start off looking like a cabbage.  I grew my rows of brussel sprouts next to the cabbages, and for a good long while, I couldn't tell the difference.  Then one day, while the cabbages where starting to head up, the brussel sprout plants did something else.  They took their little half-formed cabbage-ey looking heads, and shot up towards the sky.  By the next week, I had a few hundred mini-cabbage-looking things sitting on top of foot-tall stalks.  Weird.  I did a little research, and learned that I am supposed to remove most of the lower leaves from these stalks, so that the sprouts are encouraged to form up.  OK.  I did that.

Then I had what looked like a few hundred miniature tropical palm trees, with little tufts of mullet-like hair-do's up top and itty-bitty cabbage-y coconuts hanging on the stalks.  A grove of pint-sized tropical trees mis-planted into 40-degree weather & Jimmy Buffet songs were cruising though my head after turning the 100th cabbage plant into yet another psychedelic-looking date palm.  After helping me strip what seemed like thousands of leaves off of perfectly healthy plants, my husband asked if it was not easier to just grow a regular-sized cabbage, instead of thousands of tiny cabbages. 

"Agriculture is an art form," I said.  I do believe he rolled his eyes at me.

So now we have brussels sprouts.  Aaaannnd I have no idea what to do with them.  I'll confess - I've never eaten fresh brussel sprouts before, well, yesterday.  I know, that's pretty pathetic for a vegetable farmer.  I surfed the internet for recipes, and followed the recipe over to the right.  We're newly converted brussels sprout fanatics.

Let me hear from you sprout fans, how do you like to cook these things?!?

Last weekend we were fighting row covers on over the hoops in the wind (an operation that always leaves me feeling like Snoopy fighting the lawn chair) in preparation for 20-degree temps; this weekend we were peeling them all off again and basking in 70-degree sunshine!  You'll never hear me complain about having to work outside in sunny 70s, but I do hope it won't last for too long.  Plants don't tend to grow too much through the short days and chilly temperatures in the winter.  Your winter crops are almost all planted in late summer, grow up through the fall, aiming to have most of it close to full-grown by December.  Then we hope it stays relatively chilly, because we're banking on the cold to keep all those crops "refrigerated" right where they grew until you want to eat it.

I've been cutting the chard and broccoli back pretty hard the last few weeks.  Neither one will be gone forever; they just need a week or two to regrow a bit, which shouldn't take long in this spring-like weather.  But bulb fennel is back, and the first crop of spinach is finally ready!  I usually have spinach now through about May, but you may notice that it seems to change a bit over the course of the next five to six months.  I use several different varieties to get through that whole harvest period, some is planted outdoors, some in the greenhouse, some under row covers.  Some of those varieties are a baby smooth-leafed spinach, others are larger crinkly-leaved varieties.  The baby spinach seems to be more popular and grows better through the winter months, and depending on what sort of winter we're in for, eventually we switch over to the savoyed spinach for spring.