Peas, Asparagus, Potatoes!

Hello everyone, the season is rolling up quickly to speed! Everything is happening in a rush and way earlier than any of us could have predicted. The air is filled with bird song, the weather is warm, and we welcome the intermittent rainstorms and thunder that signifies that Spring is here.

Asparagus shoots are poking out of the ground, our planted sugar snap peas are climbing up toward the sky, and our babies we planted (it seemed only yesterday!) are large and harvestable any day now! Fresh pac choi, lettuce, and cilantro is on the way to Spring CSA shares and Grant Wood Farmer's Market. We walk through our fields of garlic and remove mulch so their green spears can reach the sun. Sizeable crops of beets and kale are on the way, and our new spinach seeds are sprouting for yet another round of delicious greens. Our tomatoes have been re-potted, they are getting large! Peppers and parsley have sprouted from their flats. Broccoli, basil, and eggplant have been recently seeded. Just today, we got an entire field of potatoes planted! We have a lot on the way!

Spring CSA begins soon! We will have that up and running on our Small Farm Central page. It will be announced in an upcoming newsletter when that happens, which will be soon. For now, visit our CSA Info page for details on that. We do have some CSA boxes available right now. Contact Derek Roller for a share!

Summer CSA season is still open for sign-up as well! Visit our CSA Sign-Up page.

Along with our veggie products, we have a few other projects well on the way. One small chicken tractor has been mostly completed, and a larger one for higher egg production on it's way to be done soon (hopefully! The frame is coming along.) Tomorrow, our future hog farmer Will is heading in to buy the hog panels we'll be using to keep our pigs. A first round of mushrooms has been inoculated! You can look forward to getting your hands on some of those!

We've had a lot of people out to visit, work, and volunteer! This week we have had Stella from Cornell College stay and help us work, she is staying with us until this Friday. She is an exchange student from China who is wanting to major in Environmental Studies. We're glad she wants to dig her hands in the soil with us! We hope she's having fun, and learning a lot. We have also had Lisa over from the quaint hamlet of Cedar Bluff along the river join our team to help us out on our big order days! We surely appreciate her help too!

Oh, and by the way....barn cat Macy is pregnant again. We can look forward to more kittens!

Hope you are all doing well! We've got a lot of juicy food to look forward to: fresh veggies, gourmet mushrooms, farm fresh chicken eggs....and pork! (Um, actually, we meat eating farmers here will be enjoying it...no meat CSA's. Sorry!)

Keep enjoying Spring while it's here!
foreign exchange students visiting farms mushroom inoculation pregnant cats
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CSA Signup: Deadline This Weekend

If you still want to be a part of our 2012 Summer CSA Season, better do it now!  Our signup deadline is this weekend, ending midnight on Sunday.  After that, we will apply a $30 late fee to your share cost.

Our mini Spring CSA will begin this April!  We are beginning to offer transitional CSA's for reduced costs.  For more info, visit our CSA Info page.  A box of veggies, including spring greens, green garlic and potatoes, will be delivered to you each week for $20 a week for couples, and only $10 more per week for families.  Please contact Derek Roller directly to sign up!

It sure does seem like spring has hit us with a bang, although the temperatures are suspiciously summer-like.  The weather has been weird.  The jet stream is looping down to create a very intense, stormy cold front thru Kansas, Texas and Oklahoma, which is following directly after this previous heat wave heading for the east coast...however, Iowa so far has been spared, nestled right between the two systems, experiencing a little bit of the storms and the heat separately, but never directly.  How nice!  Warm weather to encourage the plant babies, and a little bit of rain to water them.

We can now boast to have plenty of our sprouts in the ground!  Pac choi, lettuce, and cilantro have been transplanted, more on the way.  Radishes, arugula, peas, and more spinach have been direct seeded and growing quick.  Still awaiting a new life in their flats are beets, kale and sorrel, a hardy perennial herb that tastes kinda like rhubarb, with some good medicinal properties...it makes a great tonic and diuretic, but it also just tastes really good.  Rosemary and even tomatoes have sprung up in their flats, along with a wide array of Alliums: leeks, shallots and onions, enough flats to fill up half of one of our greenhouses!  Today I just planted some peppers and parsley.  Yep, we're getting everything going!  On top of that, garlic is beginning to peek up out of its mulch bed, and we're beginning to harvest some of it for shares as green garlic.  A few of us recently burnt down all the bushy asparagus plants out in the field, so we will be expecting our first tasty asparagus shoots!

There is so much going on.  Spring is an exciting time!  Not only are our vegetables coming to life, but many new farm projects are budding.  Soon we're not only going to be caring for plants...we will be introducing some animals into our farm practices!  A few of us here are working on a handful of chicken tractors: two small ones to house a few chickens, perhaps Bantam chickens, and a big one to house at least sixteen hens and a couple roosters, get some serious egg production, field fertilization, and pest reduction going!  Not sure when those will be finished.  I will have to tell you how this works soon.  We will also be getting....pigs!  We will be buying piglets, penning them over our beds to remove stubborn weeds (especially thistle!) and using their poop as compost to the highest advantage.

Along with plants and animals, we will also be introducing fungus!  Mushroom growing has already begun, and the construction of a mushroom structure is to be finished by the end of next month.  This will probably mean a separate mushroom CSA will be available!  Oysters, shiitakes, and lion's mane are among a few of the varieties we have discussed.

Today we just finished our first delivery to the Iowa Valley Food Co-op!  A lot of folks bought our greens and potatoes.  Quite successful!  We were a little bit late for our delivery, but we'll make sure not to be next time.  We will be selling again next month, with a whole lot more stuff available too!  If you live in the Cedar Rapids area and crave some local organic food, go check out their website, www.iowavalleyfood.com.  It's on our page!

My land, there is so much going on that it takes a squeezing aside of time and chores and things to even write what is happening out here.  It sure is exciting to see it all condensed into a few paragraphs.

The farmers at Echollective hope you are doing well, eating healthy, and enjoying the wonderful weather.  Happy Spring!
animals that help you farm asparagus burning chicken tractors
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Spring is Almost Here!

....and Mother Nature has made her timely decision to wait 'til this part of the year to give us the biggest dumping of snow we've had yet? Hmmmm. Mama Nature, are you doing ok? I'm a little concerned.

Many of our seedlings we started a week or so ago are big enough to transplant! We've got lettuces, beets, spinach, cilantro, pak choi, sorrel and kale all ready to go. Our alliums (onions, leeks, shallots etc.) are all being seeded, and I'm sure the garlic will be sproutin' up soon. Perhaps that's what makes this newly-laid blanket of snow so inconvenient! However, with the way this winter has gone, we'll just have to wait a few days for that upcoming, bizarre, rainy 60 degree day, and everything will melt. Seriously, Mama Nature....you ok? I've sometimes wondered whether the people running the weather websites are just going nuts and banging on their keyboards randomly instead of trying to make serious predictions anymore.

Good news, Echollective Farm has just joined the new Iowa Valley Food Co-op (IVFC)! If you're not close to Iowa City, or more specifically, if you live in Cedar Rapids, it's a good way to get your hands on our produce. Click on this link, Iowa Valley Food Co-op, to check it out and order some of our stuff, or even products from other local farmers. We'll put a permanent link in somewhere on our website. It looks like they have a lot of stuff available you can order monthly! Especially ethical, local meat cuts, which is more than awesome to have that available.

We've had a lot of WWOOFer and Internship inquiries recently, which is very exciting! We'll be more than happy to be hosting at least one intern this year, and perhaps a few WWOOFers here and there.

GrantWood Farmers Market is still open! So if you're in the area, and fiendin' for some local greens, potatoes, garlic or onions, we've got all that available. We've had a considerable inundation of spinach and braising mix from our winter plants, and we've begun selling our stuff to Iowa City restaurants, as well as New Pioneer Co-ops. If you wanna taste of our delicious chef-cooked greens on a special dinner night, by all means, head out to the Motley Cow or Devotay to try some! Or you can get some for home on your usual grocery run to the Co-op!
Link
We are more than willing to be flexible if for some reason you can't access these outlets, so if you have a problem, please contact us!

As always for this time of year, CSA Signup 2012 continues! We've got 15 members so far, and we've got room for lots more. So y'all know, the CSA Flyer Sign-Up is temporarily unavailable. It seems that the sign-up part of the flyer is missing! Don't worry, we are trying to look for it. If you want to sign up, please do so electronically, or contact us.

Well, that's all the news we got. See ya next week!
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2012 CSA Sign-up: We Still Need Members!

Yep, CSA Signup is still going on! It's great to see many of you return for the new season! Spring is on its way, and we're beginning our crop planning and seed-starting. We already have tons of little babies in flats, getting bigger by the day. We also need a good idea of how many members we're going to be growing for! So the sooner you sign up, the better. And the sooner YOU sign up, the more sure you'll be that you'll get your local-organic fix this summer. If you know anyone else who would be interested in signing up, spread the word. So bustle on over and stake your claim....our sign-up deadline looms....

Thank you to all of you who filled out our Member Feedback survey. Your input will be really helpful and has already given us insight!

From out of the sludgy hibernation of winter, we at Echollective are feeling the beginning of a new farming season start to wake up. Time to dust off our rusty cogs and grind our stiff joints a bit. Time to get back into motion! Work to do out here is beginning to pick up. In the wake of last week's mild days, we've been going through our cold frames of dormant vegetables and starting to roust 'em up, and get them clean for picking again. A lot of our stuff looks good! Some stuff needs dead or diseased foliage removed, and a good dose of water...and before you know it, we'll have a new set of delicious young leaves! It was a pleasant surprise to find a lot of enormous, bright green spinach, lookin' happy and perky in our cats. Kale and tat soi have recovered from when we've cut them back earlier, and they look fresh, big, and ready to sell. Our lettuces look like they've been hammered, but many of them have healthy growth points, and pretty juicy looking pink and green rosettes.

So, what I'm trying to say is: we are simply raking in the greens! Mostly spinach, but plenty of braising mixes and salads. Yeah, we want to eat it all here at the farm too (it's always great to have extra for ourselves!) but we have more than we know what to do with. We're able to sell some of it to New Pi and a few restaurants. Come check us out at Grant Wood Farmers Market, and help us take some of these greens off our hands!

We have been fortunate to obtain a rather large, new walk-in freezer and cooler. It took us an entire day, and then some, to set up in the barn. Pretty useful though! Our smaller one we have can get to overflowing during real busy times, it's nice to have more room to store produce. The roof and door haven't been officially attached and the contraption isn't running yet, so the barn cats pace around inside of it, sniffing, and probably thinking "Hey thanks! Ok, this is ours now."

This week is also the MOSES Organic Farming Conference (Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service) which a few of our farmers and farmer friends are attending. Certainly sounds like an awesome event! There will be loads of workshops and events. Derek will be gone to attend the conference until Sunday.

That's all, folks. Hope to see you during this upcoming season for market or CSA!
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Echollective CSA 2011 Season Member Feedback Survey!

Hey folks, we just created a survey geared toward those who participated in our CSA over the 2011 season. Scroll down and you'll see it in the window below! It shouldn't take long, and your thoughts and opinions on how we do out here are tantamount (a big word for very, very important!) to our work.
Do you have feedback? Hangups or praise? Here's your chance to get that to us. We value what our members think, and we want to bring the best products to your table, while making it fairly convenient for you to get them. If you have any feedback or comments that do not fit in with the survey somehow, please email us! echocsa@gmail.com, or echofarmers879@gmail.com If you participated in our Fall or Winter CSAs that occurred not that long ago, you may of course take the survey as well. If you were a 2010 member and would like to leave feedback a little late, that's ok, too.

A big reminder to you all that our 2012 Season Sign-Up is now open! Fill in a membership slot while you can! Just click on our CSA Sign-Up page at the top.

In the meantime, take care in the cold weather out there, and remember that Spring is coming soon!

 It may seem like the survey below doesn't want to scroll down.  I don't know how to fix this, but to make it scroll down, hover your cursor over the "down" arrow button, and eventually it will "highlight" or turn blue when placed in a very particular position on the box.  You have to keep the mouse from moving at all, but it will let you scroll down.  I apologize for the problem and not being able to fix it.


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