Our 2015 farming season began yesterday. We seeded our first flats of onions and lettuce, and should be working in the fields in just five or six weeks. That feels crazy, doesn’t it? It’s tight quarters inside the barn. We tuck the seeding work amongst our root-washing machinery. We have enough stored carrots and celeriac for one more month of sales. By then, we’ll be fully engaged with the new season and ready to be done with carrots for a while.
Time to sign up for CSA
Start looking forward to another vibrant season of local produce.
Returning Tipi CSA members, you can re-enroll here: tipiproduce.csasignup.com/members/returning
New CSA members can enroll here: tipiproduce.csasignup.com/members/types
Refer a friend. Tipi members, refer a friend to our CSA, and we’ll give you a $20 discount on your share. Just ask your friend to mention your name when they register for their CSA share. One discount per new membership.
New CSA site in Fitchburg
We’ve added a new CSA pick-up site in Fitchburg, at 3050 Cahill Main. Pickup hours are Thursdays, 1 – 7 pm. Longterm Tipi members Laura Rozumalski and Tyler Kapta have offered to host a site at their new Chimmies sandwich shop. They are excited to run their own business. The location is close to Fish Hatchery Road. If you have already signed up at another site but want to move to the new site, just let us know.
Here are the other new sites we’ve added in the past year:
Madison/N. Marquette Street, Thurs 4:00 – 7:00 pm, at 102 North Marquette Street, Madison
McFarland, Thurs 4:30 – 7:00 pm, at 5216 Rustling Oaks Lane, McFarland.
Mequon, Friday 1:00 – 8:45 pm, 7590 W. Mequon Road, Mequon, at Outpost Natural Foods
Fresh, farm-raised electricity!
After a year of deliberations, we have a new photovoltaic solar array generating electricity on our farm. The system has been up and running for one week. The guys from H&H Solar faced intense cold weather while constructing the array but they got the job done. It took about a month to complete, including all the wiring. In winter, the array will produce all the electricity we need. In summer, it will produce about half the electricity the farm consumes. Our usage goes up in summer when the coolers and irrigation well are running. We estimate that the array will save burning 30,000 lb of coal each year. This is a big step toward reducing our carbon footprint.
Improvements at Local Thyme
Pat Mulvey of Local Thyme will provide tasty recipes for us again this year. We read your surveys last fall and have made two substantial changes in response.
♦ First, you commented that logging into the Local Thyme website was burdensome. This year, we will link directly to the weekly recipes from my Wednesday night email. We will still have Local Thyme memberships to navigate her recipe database, but we will be able to access the weekly recipes without logging in. That should make things easier.
♦ Pat has redesigned her service this year to provide more recipes to suit a wider range of cooking styles. Many members loved Pat’s recipes. However, for members who did not use the recipes, feelings were split between “I prefer very simple meals” to “Give me recipes for unusual ethnic dishes.” We are a diverse crowd! Each week, we will give Pat a list of four to six vegetables from the CSA box. She will craft an easy ‘comfort food’ recipe and a ‘challenging’ recipe for each vegetable, backed with vegetarian and gluten-free options, plus easy recipes for quick weeknight meals.
We are support the direction Pat is taking her small business. It is a change from the menus she’s prepared for us in the past, but we think everyone will appreciate her efforts to serve a wider range of home cooks. To wrap up, let me quote a few members who enjoyed the Local Thyme menus.
“Local Thyme was a big deciding factor for us to go with this CSA. We’ve been CSA members in another city in the past; we knew what to do with a lot of the produce, but sometimes you run out of ideas. We didn’t use Local Thyme every week, but we used it enough to either use the recipes or be inspired to try something new. It was a fantastic resource.”
“This service definitely helped our family utilize everything in our box. Since you began offering this as a perk of the membership, we have been able to have far more home-cooked meals and far less waste. We love it!”
Our goal is to make our CSA boxes easy to eat. The Local Thyme recipes can help.