One of the benefits of receiving a Farm Share is also receiving a weekly email from us! This isn’t just a friendly, catch-up email though, this is an email that tells you 1. what you’ll receive in your share each week, 2. two to three recipes that can include the vegetables in the share, 3. a veggie spotlight featuring nutrition and cooking tips, and 4. a short farm update. We hope that by providing you with some of this information, that the Farm Share is less daunting and can be used to fit your family’s needs. To give you an idea of what this looks like, we’re sharing a what a weekly email may look like.

June Share:

This week you'll receive

• 1 lb of asparagus

• 2 heads of romaine lettuce

• 1 bunch of red beets

• 1 bunch of green onions 

• 1 bunch of kale

• 1 lb of spinach 

• 2 heads of broccoli

Recipe:

Veggie Burrito Bake (from Simply in Season)

Ingredients:

1 large clove garlic

• 5 green onions

• 3/4 cup uncooked rice

• 3/4 tsp ground turmeric

• 1 1/2 cup chicken or vegetable broth

• 4 cups fresh spinach

• salt and pepper to taste

• 2 cups cooked black beans

• 1 TBSP chili powder

• 1 cup cheese

Preparation Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 375. Saute green onion, garlic in 1 TBSP of oil until onions are tender.  Add broth and rice until liquid is absorbed.  While rice cooks, heat 1 TBSP of oil and add spinach, one handful at a time as it wilts.  Add a splash of water to prevent clumping.  
Layer ingredients in casserole pan in order: half spinach, all of the rice, all of beans, remaining spinach.  Sprinkle cheese on top.  Cover and bake for 45 minutes. 

Optional: serve with tortillas, salsa, guacamole, avocado, sour cream, lime, cilantro.  

Serves 4. 

Veggie Spotlight: Kale

Through no fault of its own, kale gets a bad rap. Unfortunately for the consumer, kale is widely grown by farmers because it's so easy to grow.  Kale gets its strong and bitter taste because it can withstand both frost and heat, though it does get sweeter after frost.  

Kale is dense in nutrients such as A, C, and B vitamins and calcium.  It also has a substantial amount of protein.

Baby kale can be added to salads while with mature kale it's best to strip the kale leaves off the stalk.  It can be sauteed and added to scrambled eggs casseroles or cooked down in soup/stew.  

Massaged Kale Salad

Eating kale raw can seem unappealing, but with some time and massaging, kale can be transformed into a tender salad.  

Wash and cut kale leaves. For three minutes, massage kale leaves between leaves until softened.  Toss with 1 TBSP olive oil, 1 TBSP lemon juice, 1/2 tsp salt.  Optional: serve with feta or parmesan cheese, cranberries, and sunflower seeds. 

Obviously, we can’t tell the future so the June shares may look slightly different. We hope that this example of a weekly newsletter helps you out in the kitchen. The best vegetables are those used and enjoyed. If you want to receive weekly newsletters with recipe ideas and more insight into vegetables, sign up for a Farm Share now!

Buying a Farm Share can be a hard decision to make. We want to help you with the decision by asking you the six most important questions.

1. Is a relationship with a farm and it's farmers important to you? You have so many options of what to buy or who to buy from these days. How much does it matter that you’re supporting a local, family-operated farm? As a Farm Share member, you are an integral part of our farm.  You can celebrate with us when we have bumper crops and be disappointed with us when we experience a rough hand from nature.  When you buy a Farm Share, King’s Hill Farm becomes your farm and we become your farmers.  Do you want a relationship with a local farm?

2.  Does taste and quality of vegetables matter to you? Can you remember the first time you ate a farm-fresh tomato and realized all of the other tomatoes you had eaten before were watery and had no taste? To ensure fresh and delicious produce, we use special harvesting and handling techniques and are stewards of the soil.  When the soil is healthy, plants thrive and vegetables taste better. If you find yourself disappointed with produce at grocery stores or craving something better, our Farm Share may be for you.

3. Are you open to trying new foods? Are you adventurous? Are you open to finding out more about yourself and what vegetables you like and dislike?  If you are, our Farm Share may be the perfect way to discover more about yourself this year.  We’ll be sending you a box of veggies every week and you may not like everything we send you.  That’s ok.  We all have different tastes and preferences.  What’s important is that you're willing to try.  As long as you’re open, being part of our Farm Share will be an experience you won’t forget.  It may even change your life!

4. Are you flexible with meal planning? One of our favorite parts of the Farm Share is the seasonality.  When we eat seasonally, it makes every season feel like a celebration!  But eating seasonally requires us to be a bit spontaneous when it comes to meal planning.  We may have to adapt if the zucchini harvest is massive or if carrots aren’t quite ready.  While meal planning is definitely still possible with a Farm Share, it requires more flexibility since the veggies available to you change week-by-week.  To help you with meal planning, we’ll let you know what we plan on sending early in the week so you can have time to plan. We’ll also share recipes we’ve found and tested.  Another great way to get a meal planning boost is to encourage friends or co-workers to join the Farm Share so you can bounce ideas off one another!

5. Do you have patience to learn how to be a Farm Share member? The key word in this question is learn. Cooking with seasonal vegetables may take practice and require learning a new skill set, but it is a learning process.  You don’t need to be a master at the beginning, all you need is patience with yourself and a desire to learn and grow. As the season goes, we'll help you with providing tips and recipes, especially since we’ll be eating the exact same veggies as you!

6. Do you value food? We all love a good deal. I often wish I could bargain for goods and services.  However, since becoming a farmer, I’ve learned about the value of a product, specifically food.  I’ve learned when we undervalue food, it negatively affects many other parts of society.  A Farm Share is an investment for half of the year; an investment into your health, a local economy, food security, and a two-way relationship between farm and customer.  By buying a Farm Share, you’re saying that food has value and how the food is grown matters.  We hope you find our Farm Share both accessible for your finances and full of value.

You don’t have to be an ace in the kitchen the first day you pick up your box of veggies, all you have to do is learn, practice, and try! If you answered most of the questions with a “Yes” , then you would be the perfect Farm Share member! Say Yes to a Farm Share today!

A Farm Share is a strange ask.  We, the farmers, are asking you, our members, to pay us and trust us that we will deliver produce to you before you’ve even received one carrot or pepper.  So why do we run a Farm Share?  Surely there are different ways for vegetable farmers to market their produce, right?  Yes, but we believe a Farm Share has unique benefits that outweigh other marketing techniques.  Some of the top benefits (in no particular order) we see are:

1.     Food security.  For the duration of the Farm Share, you’re guaranteed fresh produce.  You can have security in the knowledge that you’ll have vegetables but also, you can be secure in knowing that the food is safe for you and your family to eat.  We produce our food using Certified Organic techniques and take great care when we’re harvesting and handling it to make sure your vegetables are clean.  

2.     Diversity.  A Farm Share encourages you to “eat the rainbow”.  Because we send a variety of vegetables, our members will be able to gain more nutrients and vitamins from their food than if their diets only contained one or two vegetables.  This diversity also encourages you to try and find new vegetable favorites. 

3.     Convenience. Buying a Farm Share means you can go to the grocery store less.  When we deliver the perishables in your diet, you can spend less time navigating the aisles at your local grocery store and more time at home actually enjoying your food. 

4.     Connection to a local farm. Food provides us with all of our energy and nutrition, so shouldn’t it be important to know how and where it’s grown?  As a Farm Share member, you’ll learn about the ins-and-outs of our farm.  You’re free to ask any questions about how we grow your food and you can even visit the farm to see where your food starts.   

5.     Support for a local economy. We love growing food and sharing it with people so much that we’ve decided to make our careers out of farming.  In order to keep doing what we love, we need to make the business side work. In the winter, there isn’t as much growing so a Farm Share helps out when money is tight.  When our Farm Share members pay before the season starts, they’re helping us with input costs like seeds and compost.  When we make farming work, we give back to our local community and the region becomes stronger. 

A Farm Share has so many positives for you and for us! If you’d like to take the jump into this strange but beneficial farmer-member relationship, sign up here. Can you think of any other benefits that aren’t mentioned here?  Comment below! We’d love to hear your thoughts!