Greenbrier Farms CSA: Week 5

Life has been busy, busy, busy, but here's a belated updated for this past week.

This week in our CSA we received carrots, greens, green onions, leeks, kale, two heads of cabbage and some tasty raisin bread. The bread was perfect toasted with a little butter, it is long gone. I finally took all our green onions and leeks and froze them for later. Carrots and greens for salads. And kale was blanched and frozen along with peas and beans from our garden. After two years, I finally went under the house and hooked up the ice maker on the fridge so no more going to gas station to buy ice!

Removing the stems, prepping to freeze

I wasn't too sure what to do with the cabbage, so I'm trying my hand at making sauerkraut. It sounds simple enough, we'll see how it turns out. Tiff won't eat it, but I'll find an evening when she has other plans and stink the whole house up with it.

Improvised weight to press the cabbage down

The freezer is slowly filling up with things for the rest of the year. I've frozen a lot of strawberries, kale, green onions and leeks, some broccoli, beans and peas. I boil and freeze batches of beans as we go through them. I'll keep adding as the growing season progresses. Our grocery budget is $400/month. We've been spending more than that, but will save later in the year. 

Trying to start two businesses and our neighborhood association, I haven't time to cook much new. I made some mediocre salmon the other day. And I improved on our saag paneer this week. My basil needed to be topped off and I had some left-over parmesan so I made pesto. Mixed with pasta, it makes a nice early summer meal. Or spread on some rye bread and made into a grilled cheese. I plan on making a bunch and freezing it before summer's over.

The garden is doing well, though we're having a serious lack of rain. My beans and tomatoes are both fighting some bacterial thing (early blight?), so I'm treating them with selectively placed fungicide. We have a perfectly good growing area along a fence, so I built 3 new 1 x 4 foot raised boxes and planted more peas and pole beans. I also had the opportunity to be a part of the community garden up the street so I planted a 4 x 12 foot section of corn and quinoa.